Child of Light, page 17
We finish dinner, enjoy a crumble for dessert, and retire back to the living room for tea. After that, Ancrow sends the younger girls off to bed. When they both rush to hug me good night, she does not interfere.
But once they are gone, she tells Ronden she wants to speak to me alone. Ronden hesitates, glancing my way, but I nod my agreement. Better to get this out of the way. I can take care of myself. I am more confident of this than I was before I discovered my inish and my right to call myself a Sylvan.
Ronden gives her mother a hug and whispers just loudly enough for me to hear, “Manners, Mother. Auris is our guest.”
Her mother gives her a cold smile and turns her toward the door. In seconds Ronden is gone, and her mother and I are alone.
I am sitting in a chair by now rather than on the couch, and Ancrow sits in the chair closest to me, positioning it so we are facing. Looking at the door Ronden has just closed, she says, “You don’t appear to be someone who needs looking after. Am I that frightening?”
I smile as she turns back to face me. “Not this time. At our first meeting in the High Council chambers, you were.”
“I believe in speaking my mind.”
“I’ve had a taste of what that means. Am I to be lectured again?”
She makes a face. “So blunt. Having discovered your inish and put it to good use, you’ve gained a stronger backbone.” She pauses. “I want to thank you for saving Char from her reckless behavior last night. She is too quick to act and too slow to think. Still a child.”
“A wonderful child,” I venture.
“A mother would have to be churlish indeed to disagree with that. But her impetuous nature is going to get her into trouble one day. In any case, my thanks are overdue, so I am offering them now. You saved my daughter’s life. To have your inish appear as it did, so unexpectedly, was a gift. It must have surprised you, surfacing like that.”
Her hawk face is intense and her eyes penetrating. I cannot help but feel intimidated all over again, but I refuse to give in to it. “A surprise unlike any other I can remember. Are you still questioning my Fae origins?”
“I’m questioning everything. Wondering how someone like you is possible. That you have inish appears to be incontrovertible. It certainly suggests you have a Fae connection of some sort. But what is it exactly? You look in every way possible like a Human. You look nothing like a Sylvan. The contradiction is inexplicable. How can such a thing be?”
“Have you spoken to the Seers about what they found? They insist I am Fae. Have you asked them what was revealed in the memories they recovered?”
“I have spoken neither to them nor to Harrow. I was waiting to talk to you first. Would you be willing to tell me what they discovered? Maybe it would help me understand. Maybe it would even reveal something I could believe.”
Something I could believe? I am on my guard now. She still thinks I am a Human. Even with all that’s happened, she is still not convinced.
But I need her to be, so I will open up to her. I have to find a way to persuade her to accept me into the family. She has refrained from asking either the Seers or Harrow in order to ask me first, and if I decline it will suggest I have something to hide. But I have nothing to hide, and much I do not understand. And I want desperately to change her mind about me.
So I tell her everything the sisters saw in my recovered memories; I lay all of it bare for her to examine. I hesitate more than once in my telling, anxious not to make a mistake, but I leave nothing out. I hold nothing back. I think she might know if I did. I think she can sense such things.
When I am done, I ask anxiously, “What do you think? Can you help me with any of it?”
She is already shaking her head. “Not without thinking it all over first. You tell a complex, confusing story—and much of it unbelievable. If a Sylvan child went missing, we would know—even if it was taken by Humans. No child is ever lost that we do not account for. Yet your story suggests you were taken from here without anyone knowing, which is impossible. Even so, why do you not look like us? There is simply no reasonable explanation for any of this, Auris. It doesn’t make sense!”
“I know that!” I snap in reply, losing patience. “Benith said I was a Changeling. Is it not possible I was able to change how I looked? One vision was of my father giving me injections to tamp something down. There was talk of medications. Is it not possible these were meant to keep me from changing? Maybe under their influence I wasn’t able to look like a Fae. But now that the injections and medications are no longer being used on me, maybe one day I will.”
“You’re talking nonsense now. Changelings are a myth. There are no Sylvan Changelings! If you are one, why don’t you change yourself back right now? Go ahead, change!”
Her voice is rising, and I sense something quite clearly in its strident tone. She is afraid. But what is there for her to be afraid of?
“Why do you think you ended up in the Goblin prisons?” she asks suddenly. “Can you remember anything of why you were sent there—anything of what you or your parents might have done to deserve this? You wouldn’t have been sent there without a reason.”
But many were, of course. In a world where Human children are expendable, you don’t need a reason to imprison them. Children seized, parents killed, families destroyed because Humans and Goblins made an alliance of the darkest kind. I shake my head. “I don’t remember anything clearly from before I was sent there. Everything from before is shadowy or lost. I have my few recovered memories, and that is all.”
A shading of the truth, but on impulse I deem it necessary.
“And you remember no names? Not even those of your father and mother?”
“My mother called my father ‘Dennis’ in one of the memories.”
Although Ancrow tries to hide it, hearing the name startles her. I want to ask her why—if it is somehow familiar to her. Nevertheless, I decide to hold off on asking any more questions.
“I might have to go back there,” I say instead. “Back to the prisons or to my old world to find the answers I need. But I don’t want to do that until I know I have a place to come back to.”
Ancrow looks distraught. “What are you asking? No one can ever know if they will have a place to come back to once they leave. There is never any guarantee. In any case, leaving Viridian for any reason is a bad idea. Stay here with us. You belong here. I admit to some reservations about your origins and your identity, but I also know my family admires and likes you, and that counts for something. Why not give yourself time to find out more?”
What have I said that troubles her so? There it is again, in a sudden shifting of her eyes away from me as I attempt to look directly at her.
“That would be much easier to do if I didn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder for a Goblin or two waiting to haul me back to the prisons.”
She nods. “Understandable. I will put a watch on your cottage and have you shadowed as you move about the city. You will never see your shadow, but he or she will be there, watching over you. That way you can go about your business without worry.”
“Don’t do that to me,” I say at once. “I had that done to me in prison for five years—Goblin eyes on me all the time. I don’t want it done to me here.”
“But you won’t even know…”
“That is not the point, Ancrow! I don’t want to feel like I am back in prison! And you’re wrong about my not knowing. I will know. I always know. Don’t do it.”
She smiles a dark, challenging smile. “No one gets to tell me what to do, Auris.”
“Just do what I asked you to do. I will know if you don’t.”
“You didn’t know when those Goblins came to catch you.”
“They caught me off guard. But if you send your spies to shadow me, it will be different. Why can’t you understand? I don’t want eyes constantly watching me now that I am no longer in prison. Is that so difficult to understand?”
“I think you better go home and get some sleep,” she says, turning away. “We can discuss this later.”
“Discuss?” I call back, tromping off for the door. “You won’t listen anyway. Your mind is made up.”
“Then give me a reason to change it, Auris,” she calls after me. “You’re hiding something. I want to know what it is.”
I slam the door on my way out. She’s wrong about me. I’m not hiding anything. But I think she is.
The bedroom window in my cottage faces the foot of the bed so that when I go to sleep the last thing I see before drifting off are the huge trees that surround me on all sides and, through the screen of their leafy boughs, small glimpses of the stars. Sometimes night birds will fly past in quick flashes of wings and feathers. On occasion, one will alight on a branch that is within my view. Now and again an owl will peer in at me, its lantern eyes bright yellow in the darkness, and provide me with a small hoot or two.
On this night I lie in my bed and look out my window, but I do not drift off. I do not sleep at all. I am too wound up, too angry, and too disappointed. Nothing went the way I thought it would—even the part where Ancrow admitted I must be a member of the Fae nation and the Sylvan people. Although I did not show it, her rejection of my request not to be shadowed hurt me deeply. It was as if she was letting me know that it didn’t make any difference what I wanted; she would impose her will on me whenever she wished. She might as well have been saying that I belonged in Viridian Deep only if I did as she wanted.
So I bounce from feeling to feeling, from memory to memory, from one set of hurtful words to the next, replaying the evening and wondering what I can do besides lie here and seethe. I know I will not fall asleep—not for a while at least and maybe not at all if I don’t come up with a plan for how to handle my disappointment. I could ask Ronden for help, but that would be putting her on the spot and this isn’t her problem. If Harrow were here I could ask him, too, but it would be the same as asking his sister. The problem is not theirs to solve. It is mine. Whatever relationship I am ever going to have with Ancrow has to be worked out between the two of us. No third party is in a position to do more than complain, and complaining isn’t going to solve anything.
After I have gone through the whole conundrum three times, I finally manage to rid myself of my harsher feelings. Distancing myself from my initial reaction, I start to reexamine things more calmly and dispassionately. Ancrow accused me of hiding the truth, but what is she hiding? The first thing that pops into my mind is how startled she was to hear the name Dennis. She knew that name…and likely knew the man (a Human almost certainly) to whom it belonged. She also seemed alarmed by the idea of my going back to my old world to try to find out more about where I came from and how I ended up in the prisons. I can’t help wondering why, if she wants me gone, she didn’t just tell me to go, hoping I would never come back. Instead she tried to argue me out of going, insisting I should stay, trying to persuade me that she had changed her mind and believed Viridian should be my new home.
A complete reversal of what she had indicated in our previous meetings.
And then she became angry when she discovered I was not going to allow her to put a watch on me. Even though she insisted it was for my own protection, I can see clearly enough it is also a way to monitor everything I do. Why else would she be so determined to have me under constant surveillance? She has to know I can protect myself now that I am learning to channel my inish. She has to know I am almost always in the company of either Harrow or Ronden. But that isn’t enough, is it? No, she looks at it as a chance to keep me under her thumb and safely tucked away from any further investigations about my origins and her involvement in them.
I stop myself right there. Because she is somehow involved, isn’t she? I can sense it. She knows something about my past, and she is very determined to keep it a secret.
I have my way forward, I decide. I will find out what she is hiding. But I will have to learn something about the history of the Sylvan people first and how it is they have so little to do with Humans. There is so much about the Fae I still don’t know.
I will start there. I will ask Ronden in the morning to tell me more about the Fae history and how the Fae have managed to remain so isolated for so long.
I fall asleep quickly after that and do not wake until morning.
* * *
—
I am washed and dressed and have finished breakfast by the time Ronden comes knocking on my door. It is early still, but we are scheduled for another day of training and I know she will be anxious to hear about how things went the previous night with Ancrow.
Indeed, it is her first question as she steps inside, and I lead her to the couch where we sit facing each other. “It went badly,” I confess, searching for the least harmful words to describe to Ancrow’s daughter what has transpired. “It started out well enough, and I believed we were both seeking common ground. She even accepted that I did indeed have use of my inish. But matters deteriorated when she insisted on putting a watch on me and I objected and asked her not to.”
Ronden huffed irritably. “What is wrong with Mother? She isn’t usually so stubborn. What brought on this rejection?”
“What sparked it all was when I suggested I should go back to my old world and try to find out something more about my origins. She tried to dissuade me and then insisted on the shadow—even after I told her I did not want it, that it would be like I was in prison all over again. But honestly, it felt as if she wanted to be able to monitor me so she could know what I was doing at all times.”
“But why would she want to monitor you? How does she think that will help?”
“You know her better than I do. But I will tell you this, Ronden—she is afraid of something. Twice I saw her startled when I told her about my memories. She asked me to tell her what I remembered, and so I did. I thought it would help settle things between us, but I was badly mistaken. When I mentioned the name Dennis, which I think might have been my father’s name, and again when I mentioned the possibility of going back to my old home, she was visibly upset. I think she knows something about both, and I want to find out what it is.”
“I will ask her,” Ronden volunteers. “I will demand she tell me the truth.”
“Which I don’t think for one minute would persuade her,” I answer quickly. “Do you?”
Ronden shakes her head. “No, you’re right, it wouldn’t. Not her.”
“Is there someone else we might talk to, someone who would know the Sylvan history and how it matches up with that of Humans? Someone who might know your mother well enough to at least guess at what she is trying to hide?”
“You ask a lot of me. I cannot do anything that would make me feel I had betrayed her.”
“I don’t seek a betrayal. I only seek enlightenment. I know so little of Sylvans or even of myself. If there were someone who could speak to both—even in general terms—I might discover something that would help explain what is happening. But I would never ask you or anyone else in your family to bring harm to your mother.”
A long silence hangs between us. “I think she hides secrets from all of us, Auris. And I’m not sure I want to discover any of them. I’m not sure I have that right.”
“Can you tell me more about Sylvan history then, or introduce me to someone who can? Can you at least do that?”
Her fierce expression softens. “I would never deny you a chance to discover the history of our people. You should talk to the Seers.”
“But don’t I need permission for that?”
“Not if the only purpose for your visit is to just take tea and converse. You can’t ask them to use their magic without permission, but you wouldn’t be asking for that.”
“I wouldn’t. But would you accompany me to make sure I don’t overstep? That way, you can stop me if it feels like I am betraying our bargain.”
“I think you should do this alone,” she says quietly. “If you wish, come back and tell me about it after and we can talk further.” She sighs. “I expect you want to do this right away?”
“If possible. I don’t think I can focus on anything else until I know the truth.”
She nods and stands. “I will arrange things.” She moves toward the door. “Wait here for me.”
When she is gone, I go outside and sit on the bench to enjoy the sunshine. I am worn down from lack of sleep and the trauma of last night’s visit with Ancrow. I imagine there will be no more dinners at her house—at least, not until I have found a way to show her how wrong she is about me. It’s funny, but I thought the worst was over once Harrow brought me out of the wastelands to Viridian Deep. Now I am beginning to wonder if one nightmare hasn’t replaced another.
I am alone for maybe five minutes before both Char and Ramey appear, crossing the tree lanes to reach my cottage. When they arrive, looking very uncomfortable, I motion for them to sit next to me. They do so, one on either side. Ramey is as solemn as usual, but Char is thoroughly distraught.
“Mother yelled at me!” she snaps. She is almost in tears. “I hate her.”
“No, you don’t,” I reply quickly, taking her hands in mine. “No matter how mad we get, we never hate our mothers.”
“But it isn’t right,” Ramey says calmly, shaking her head slowly. “She got angry when we asked about you. I think she is afraid of you. She thinks I can’t see it, but I can.”
