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Her attention, deep cerulean waves that lapped at her inner sea, turned back to me, and she smiled a dazzling smile that crept into my very soul and wrapped it in a warm blanket. “Sóna is not so old a name, older than I am surely but not so old that it has fallen out of favor, I would think. It means many things, something precious and valued. Like gold or luck and prosperity. Your surname, Mac Raith. A young clan that I have blessed many times, one of the few clans of Human who knew how to properly welcome a Lady of the Fae let alone an Ascended Fae. The name they chose for themselves reflects that. A blessing. Cleena knew that if her magic worked too well, I would know you by the name she had given you. Clever, though not entirely creative.”

I frowned deep into my teacup and winced as a drip of black sludge fell from the spider leg and splashed into my cup of tea. Distaste screwed up my face, and I set it down. “This has been nice and all, my lady, but as you can see, I have a bit of a spider problem, and I had hoped that this would be a way out. As I’m not overly skilled at flying, I need to look for a way out.”

Her lashes lowered demurely, coyly, hiding a sly smirk. “You do not believe me.”

It was not a question but a simple statement of fact. As such, I did not deem it worthy of responding to as I pushed up from the stool with one arm and started making my slow shuffled way back to the archway.

“Her name was Maeveen, by the by, and she was there to protect you from the others.”

I spun on my heel, dizziness spinning my head four turns more than I had meant it to. “Who?”

“I believe she said you called her The Woman Who Walked The Paths?” She tilted her head, watching as that small bit of information slammed into me harder than the spider had.

I rocked back on my feet with its impact. I had told two other people in my entire life about what I had witnessed at that house. One of them was a stuffed rabbit named Clio that had gotten lost shortly after I first saw that shade. The other was Anne Harrison, and the last I had the heart to look her up, she had died four years after I had left her care, mauled by a bear. The needling suspicion and childhood fear of The Woman Who Walked The Paths had said that it was not a bear or a mountain lion that had killed her.

“Something else in those woods was stalking children and taking them. You, left as you had been due to circumstances here in Magh Meall, had no protection from them and were a bright beacon in the magical world. So, I sent her to watch over you when the coins whispered of the threat that lurked in those woods. She gave her life for you. She knew you were terrified of her. It was her job as a bean sidhe to be terrifying, after all. But she was there when that beast found you. She wounded it deep enough to send it back into hibernation, but she died here in that very stool you sat on, telling me of her bravery in battle. And when she returned to magic, it was with a kiss of gratitude.”

“Lady, you’re fucking nuts,” I whispered with no barb to it.

Her eyes skirted over to a small and simple rope bed that had a lump in the center of it. “She brought me Clio.”

Shock pulsed through me, and my fingers went numb as I stared into the warm light. I recognized the dirty green gingham I had torn from my own dress when Clio was kidnapped by an especially voracious squirrel hell-bent on eviscerating her for his bedding.

“H—Wh—Ho—”

My legs crumpled under me and folded into a crisscross. Tears pricked at my eyes, burning at the edges of my lashes and begging to be let free.

Airgetlám rose from her seat and drifted across the room to pluck the rabbit from the bed. I watched her, recognizing every smudge and bald spot on the old hare. She folded gracefully down next to me and pulled me into her lap, tucking Clio into mine. “It’s okay, Sóna. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to slowly pull this rothchreatlachros leg from you. It will fester.”

Her voice was the soft sunset out on the great lakes as it slipped into the water and devolved into gentle shhh-ing sounds as I shivered in her lap. I barely felt her hand wrap around the tough exoskeleton of a leg. Barely even felt the tug or slide of the leg being yanked free nor the tea towel that was stuffed into the wound. I kept staring at the toy I had lost so many years ago.

Clio had been the first of many abandonments that cut the deepest. I was sure I had been a bad girl, and that was why Clio ran away. I had wailed and bemoaned my wickedness for chasing away my only friend. The wound of this simple stuffed rabbit leaving me had remained open and festering all my life, unable to heal from the constant lacerations I visited upon myself. If I was extremely honest, many of those wounds had been pried open by force by my own hand. The pain of it was far more familiar and reliable than the comfort of its healing.

“There you go, mo stor.” Her arms wrapped tight around me and cradled me like a babe to her soft rocking as she rested her cheek on the top of my head. “I am so sorry I could not be there for you, mo mhuirnín. I wished every time I heard you cry, I could flee this place and come to you. Every day. Every single tear. I would have kissed them all from you. I would have battled the world and every creature large and small to keep you from sadness. I would have done anything to protect you from every ill that has come to you in Human if I could have.”

I turned drowning eyes up to her. “You’re . . . my mother?”

A soft hand pushed the dingy strands of my hair from my forehead, and she smiled down at me. “I am unfortunate to have that ignoble and unearned title. Yes, my darling girl. I am your mother.”

“And my . . . my father?”

My voice sounded so small, the hope and wonder blooming fragile as new crocus buds.

The wound was still as fresh as the day he had died, barely concealed. I knew he was dead, but the Bandrui had said that so was she and hope had fluttered in my chest for half a moment. “I am sorry, beloved. He has passed into the Well of Magic and awaits us there. I could not save him.”

I processed the death of a man I hadn’t even known with burning tears, a man I had lamented the loss of all my life, with a newfound misery. It was a dirge familiar to orphans of all walks, the grief of what could have been. The poetic plaint of what would never be. For some, the elegy of the arms that would never again hold them. For me? It was a requiem for what I had never known and the hope that I had held protected in a hidden part of my soul.

We sat in silence, the pair of us joined by an umbilical of grief, a twisted braid making up the rope that bound us.

“What . . . how? I don’t have any magic. I don’t look like a Fae. Well, now I do, but I didn’t when I came here. And I don’t look like you at all.”

Her face twisted with pain again, and she sighed, replacing her cheek on my head as the vise of her arms closed tighter as if to protect us both from the truth. “I sent you away to Human to be safe. You were born at the end of the War of Thorns, my dear girl. Your father was gone. The House of Magic under attack. Our forces and allies routed and destroyed. And then there was you. You represented so much hope for those who rallied their banners to our cause. I knew the moment that you were born that you would be taken by that beast at the gates. You were too powerful a symbol for our forces. So, I begged my sister to take you into Human, to bind your magic and remake you into the image of one of their own children and leave you where you would be cared for. In a place where the old magic was not so strong and would not make it so easy to find you. To give you a name that I could easily find you with and to keep that secret for all of time. And so she did, and that was the last time, until today, that I held you in my arms.”

I was shaking. Cold did not touch me, but every muscle in my body was on edge and clenching violently as if to try and force this information out. I fought it, trying to shove it into the light as a lie. I wanted it to be a lie. I needed it to be a lie. If it were true, if any of it were true, it meant that my whole life had been one fucked-up product of this fucked-up world. I didn’t have the ability to carry the weight of that hate in my heart. I was not strong enough.

She mistook my silence for license to carry on. “I did what I could for you, mo chroí. I cannot leave this place and few of my allies remained alive. Even fewer can come to this place and survive the ring of iron runes. Know that I did what I could, though. Always, even with what I thought was my dying breath, I did what I could.”

“Why can’t you leave? You’re a goddess.”