Page 43 of A Land So Wide

G reer’s fury rose as Finn smiled.

She’d never struck anyone before but now felt the urge to take her fist and hit him until his smile was bloody.

“You changed me!” she spat, tightening her hold on his shirt, and shaking him.

Part of her expected him to change now, turning into the fearsome creature she knew he was. She expected him to change and fight back, devouring her whole before she could even begin to defend herself.

But he didn’t.

He only lay there, looking at her with the most infuriating expression painted across his face. He was amused. He was…pleased.

She did hit him then, balling her hand into a fist and striking his shoulder with a growl of frustration.

“Oh!” It was like smacking a stone wall. Greer cradled her hand to her chest, wondering if she’d broken bones.

Finn propped himself up on his elbows, making Greer uncomfortably aware that she still straddled his lap.

Immediately she rolled off, settling back on her feet, ready to run even as she acknowledged there was no place to go.

Where could she run that he wouldn’t track her? How could she outrace a Bright-Eyed?

She couldn’t, so she stayed put.

“What did you do?”

Finn’s gaze was serious and searching. “I only strengthened what was already there.”

She felt her stomach lurched, suddenly nauseated. “Strengthened?”

He blinked. “Your mother.”

“What…what about her?” Greer felt compelled to ask even though she feared she already knew the answer.

Finn frowned, remorse coloring his expression. “Greer…”

“Say it.”

He sighed. “Your mother…Ailie,” he added tenderly, “was just like me.”

His words rang with truth, but Greer shook her head anyway, wanting to deny it, wanting to hold on to one more moment in which she could believe it wasn’t possible. “No. She couldn’t be. She grew up in Mistaken. Everyone would have known. Her friends, her…” She stopped, about to say family .

Ailie had had no family. Greer had guessed she’d been an only child and that her parents had died young. Neither Ailie nor Hessel ever spoke of them.

“We’re her family,” Finn said, following Greer’s unvoiced thoughts. “When she stepped out of that tree, all those years ago, she rewrote everything. She became part of Mistaken, as if she’d always been there. And the townspeople—all of them, even your father, especially your father—believed it.”

“How do you know about the tree?” It wasn’t the question she wanted to ask—it wasn’t the important point—but Greer fixated on the detail. If she could catch him in a mistake here, maybe, somehow, all of the other things he’d said could be wrong, too.

“I saw it.”

She shook her head again. “Impossible. That was nearly thirty years ago.”

Silently, he watched her.

In the quiet, Greer’s mind filled, piling up questions and accusations, protests and words, words, so many words. But when she finally spoke, only one fell out. “How?”

Finn tilted his head, trying to follow. “How did I—”

“How did she— how did she…” Greer let out a growl of frustration. “The Warding Stones keep the Bright-Eyeds away. She couldn’t have lived within them.”

“Not without being in a great deal of pain,” he agreed. “The stones do repel us, chafe us something fierce, but if we choose to set aside our skin, it’s bearable, for a time.”

Greer made a noise of disgusted horror. “Set aside your skin?”

Finn nodded. “She would have had some sort of clothing…it would have been precious to her. It held all her might, all her…” He made a gesture with his hand as if the word eluded him.

“Shedding away her power would have allowed her to live within the Stones. It would have allowed her to become like them.”

Like me, Greer wanted to say, but she no longer knew who—or what —she was.

A memory sparked. “There was a cloak. She kept it in her hope chest. I tried to put it on once…It was so beautiful…But she tore it from my hands before I could. She said it was too fragile for a little girl to play with. When I went poking through the trunk later on, it wasn’t there. ”

“She would have found a new place to hide it.”

“But it…it didn’t look like skin . It was so fine…covered in embroidered constellations and little stitched forests. It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.”

Finn looked wistful. “You’re one of the few who would have seen it that way. She’d enchanted it. No mortal eye would have thought it special. But you…” He tapped at her temple before sliding the pads of his fingers down her cheek to cup her face. “You have your mother’s eyes. Her ears, too.”

Belatedly, she shied from his touch, using the motion to feel at a lobe, even though she knew it wasn’t the shape Finn was referring to.

He offered her a sympathetic smile. “You hear things, yes? Things that, if you were a mortal woman, with mortal ears, you wouldn’t.”

She swallowed down her denial.

“See the frost?” he went on, easily, as if this were not upsetting everything Greer knew about herself or the world around her. “It’s cold out tonight.”

Faintly, she nodded.

“Yet here you are, bare-headed, without coat or mittens, socks wet and starting to freeze.” He pushed back the sleeve of her sweater and ran his fingers over the length of her forearm, coming to a stop at the delicate skin of her inner wrist. “There’s not so much a ripple of gooseflesh on you.”

Involuntarily, Greer shivered, then flushed, knowing her reaction had nothing to do with the temperature around them. “I am cold,” she insisted, hastily pulling down the sleeve. “If it wasn’t for the fire—”

“You’re not as cold as you think, Greer Mackenzie. You’re never as cold as you believe you are.”

“Say I believe you,” she began slowly, reluctantly, looking at the fire, the trees, the frost. Anywhere but him. “Say any of this is true…what does that make me?”

“Special,” Finn answered readily, without hesitation. “So very special.” A loud rumble came from her stomach, breaking the moment, and he laughed. “Let’s get these rabbits roasting.”

Greer watched him break down their bodies, pulling off skins, pulling out organs. There were so many things she wanted to ask him, she scarcely knew where to begin.

“My eyes,” she started. “I saw them in the river. They’ve never looked like…” She swallowed. “I’ve never seen them shine like that. What did you do?”

Finn kept his attention on the hares. “You were hurt.”

She waited for him to say more, but he remained resolutely focused on his task. “I was hurt. I was hurt and what?”

“I took care of it, took care of you. The only way I know how.” He glanced meaningfully at his hands. His fingers were stained with blood.

Greer recalled the strange taste of the water in the canteen. The canteen Finn had refilled. She focused on his hands, his bloody hands, and the kerchief she only now noticed was knotted round his wrist.

Ailie had told her so many eerie tales from their homeland across the sea, stories of selkies and each-uisges, caoineag and Ghillie Dhu, but the most nightmarish of them all were the Baobhan Sith.

Those fables raced through her mind now. The blood drinkers were beautiful and strong, able to shift their appearance and control the desires and temptations of their prey. They were wily and fierce, with little regard for the humans they went after.

Had Ailie been telling her stories of the Bright-Eyeds?

Of herself?

“Blood,” she guessed, and her throat flexed, fighting the urge to retch. “You fed me your blood.”

“And you feel better.” Finn ripped the hind legs off one of the hares, not bothering with a knife. He skewered the set, then handed Greer the stick so she could begin roasting. “Your vision has cleared. Your headache is gone.”

“Yes, but—”

“If you’d known, you wouldn’t have drunk.” It wasn’t a question.

“Of course not.”

“Well. Good, then. It worked.”

“Good?” she repeated. “Not good at all. You took away any choice I had!”

He dragged his attention from their meal, flashing eyes meeting hers. “There was never a choice to make. You’re one of us,” he said with long-suffering patience. “Your blood is our blood. Mostly. Ailie fed you hers for years without you being ever the wiser.”

Greer stared at the fire. It looked too bright now, and she shifted her gaze away, to the shadows of the forest. Only…they weren’t as shadowy anymore. She could see into them, see details that should have been impossible.

The etching of frost on a leaf half a mile away. Individual feathers on a screech owl perched high in the tree line. The subtle play of moonbeams too weak to have ever been noticed.

She now could see as well as she could hear, with alacrity and a keen edge.

And when she looked up to the stars…

Greer gasped.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Finn asked. His head tipped up and he smiled.

For a long moment, they watched the stars spin, radiating a luster too perfect to put to words. They danced and sparkled, surrounded by pulsing glows that seemed to chime like the tinkling of a bell.

“Why would my mother do that? Do any of this?” she asked softly, feeling the last of her resistance ebb away. She didn’t doubt that Ailie was exactly what Finn said, which meant that Greer, too, was exactly what Finn implied. “Why would she leave the Bright-Eyeds and live as a human?”

“For you.” His stare was long and solemn. “You’ve no idea all the things she planned for you. The things she wanted and dreamed.”

“But you do?”

“Mostly.”

Again, that word. She waited for him to go on.

He sighed. “Having children can be difficult for us.” He jabbed another stick through the second hare. “They’re born small, weak. Most don’t survive their first day. But if one of the parents is human…” He trailed off, gesturing toward Greer. “Ailie needed a strong bloodline.”

“Why?” Greer challenged. “It wasn’t as though…She never even told me what she truly was.”

“Who,” he corrected sharply. “Not what.” He clicked his tongue against his palate. “She was going to tell you. When you were old enough, strong enough. Ailie was going to start training you so that when you finally returned home you’d be ready.”

“Training?” Disbelief colored her echo. “As though I’m a soldier! Training for what?”

Finn let out a laugh of genuine surprise. “To kill her.”