Page 7

She braced herself for anger, but instead he canted his head and considered her, every inch a self-contained gentleman.

Well, aside from the blood-splattered mess of his shirt and waistcoat.

His gold-and-blue eyes were disconcerting, too bright, too penetrating, as if he could see beneath her thin armour of bravado to the snake-nest of uncertainty beneath.

“My side,” he mused. “Very well.” Everything about him tightened, like a horse steeling itself to jump a stone wall.

“I did not bargain for a firstborn. I bargained for your mother to keep my true name safe for a year before returning it to me. Only if she failed would I claim her firstborn. That was the threat , to make her keep her side of the bargain.”

“Because you tricked her!” This part of the story Gisele knew well. “You never gave her your name for safekeeping, so she had a year to guess it, and of course she couldn’t!”

His eyes flashed. “You are very confident in your truths, for someone who wasn’t there !”

And he had been, she thought, disoriented. He didn’t appear nearly old enough, but then, he was a fairy. Who knew how they aged—or if time even worked the same way here at all, if he’d lost track of decades.

“I’m confident my mother didn’t lie to me,” she said, even though a traitorous part of her thought, am I? She squashed it.

His tail lashed. “Your mother misunderstood.”

“So different from being tricked! ”

He flashed his teeth at her, half smile, half warning. “Remember you’ve already poisoned me, if it helps. Do you want me to tell you the rest or not?”

Guilt shot through her at the reminder, and she crossed her arms to keep it contained. She would not feel guilty for finally taking charge of her own destiny. “Fine. Tell me then. How exactly did my mother misunderstand, and why bring her firstborn into it at all? Why that threat specifically?”

He fiddled with his rings. “It had to be something of equal value. A life for a life. Firstborn bargains are powerful, and in all the mortal tales, mortals are always highly motivated to find a way out of them.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, are they?” she growled.

A wisp of a smile crossed his mouth, and he touched his bandages again. “It would seem so.”

She absolutely refused to share in the joke, glaring to emphasise her non-participation. “Why were you looking to bargain with a mortal in the first place, whether for names or firstborns?”

His amusement faded, and his gaze went faraway again, that echo of fear flaring.

“I needed to disappear for a while. Even in Mortal, I knew I couldn’t hide for long enough, well enough.

Not from the powerful spellcaster hunting me.

I needed more time to escape, time to prepare my defence.

But the only sure way to disappear so thoroughly was to lose my true name. Temporarily, of course.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “If you lose your name, you lose the greater part of your power, and that would do me no good at all in the long-term. But short-term —oh, that had possibilities. So I composed a plan: I would give my name to someone who would be greatly incentivised to return it, in exchange for something of equal value.”

“But you didn’t give your name to my mother,” she objected. “That’s what caused this entire problem.”

“Your mother misunderstood what I meant when I asked her to keep my name safe in the heart for a year. I did not give my name to her . That would be too great a risk. I told her to meet me at the walnut tree at the heart of the palace after a year and a day to return my name to me.” At her blank look, he sighed and added, a touch defensively. “I gave my name to the tree .”

“You gave your name to a tree,” she repeated, sure she couldn’t have heard him correctly.

His ears twitched, suggesting, yes, she very much had.

“Yes. I gave my name to a tree and spun her straw into gold. I used my newfound untraceability to retreat to an isolated part of Faerie, where I woke Skymallow. Here, I built the beginnings of this house and its wards.” He gave his armchair an absentminded pat.

“But when I returned, after a year and a day, the tree didn’t have my name; your mother didn’t have my name. It was simply… gone.”

“You gave your name to a tree,” she repeated because that was too amazingly stupid and terrible a thing to let him gloss over.

“Yes.” He kept a smooth expression, but his ears gave him away. He knew exactly how ridiculous this sounded.

“Why was there any need for a fae bargain at all , in that case? Why not just put your name in a tree without involving my mother?”

He was already shaking his head. “The act of separating myself from my name, my innate magic, required an immense amount of power—a bargain for something of equivalent value. And it would have been reckless to leave my name without a guardian committed to keeping its hiding place safe.”

“Reckless,” she repeated flatly. “Unlike putting your name in a tree.”

His chin tilted. “Trees are less reckless than humans. It was a logical choice.”

“What an interesting definition of logic.” There were several large walnut trees on the palace grounds, and she wasn’t exactly sure where the heart of the palace complex lay. “Which walnut tree was this, exactly?”

“The one in the queen’s private garden.”

But there wasn’t a walnut tree in that garden— Oh no.

Her garden. He was talking about Gisele’s garden, which she’d been told had been her mother’s private garden before she’d been born.

Before the tower had been built. “That tree was storm-damaged before I was even born. They eventually chopped it down when I was a girl. I have a desk made from the wood.”

She’d delighted in the gift then, but now a new, horrible suspicion filled her. Was this why her tower had been built in that walled garden? Had that wood made it to her tower furnishings because of this tale? Her mother had never mentioned anything special about the walnut tree.

Following her thoughts easily enough, he grimaced. “You didn’t hear it whispering my name?”

She narrowed her eyes, trying to work out whether he was joking or not. “No. The wood was unusual, with gold flecks. It made a pretty desk, but it never attempted communication in all the years I knew it. You’re saying the storm damaged the tree and broke the bargain to keep your name safe?”

“Yes. I tried to find it myself, of course, without success. Lacking my name, I am left without the greater part of my power, but more relevantly to you, I can’t undo bargains made in my own name. Which means you may poison me all you like, but I still cannot help you.”

She set aside the issue of giving-one’s-name-to-trees-like-a-storybook-idiot for now. “What about all the people who knew your name before?”

“They no longer know it.”

“Even your parents?”

A definite ear twitch. “I don’t know my parents. But they wouldn’t remember it now in any case.”

The answer made her curious despite herself. “You must have people who raised you.”

“I do. None of whom know my name any longer.” There was a hard note in his voice that declared the subject of his family closed.

She frowned. “You must have written it down somewhere, surely? What about old schoolbooks and suchlike?” Did fairies have old schoolbooks?

But he was already shaking his head. “The separation of my true name was absolute. Any such impressions would have been erased. I made an excellent job on that spell.” He gave an ironic smile. “My name might as well never have existed.”