Page 7 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)
THREE
I FROZE WITH A crostini half-raised to my mouth, then slowly lowered it back to my plate.
“I’m going to need you to explain what you know to me,” I said, voice low and as level as I could possibly make it.
“Slowly. Assume the pregnancy has made my thoughts as clumsy as my feet, and use small words.”
Arden nodded. “All right. Titania didn’t get all the details of her spell right the first time.
The Library confirms it, and the Gwragen agree.
She was trying to craft her perfect Faerie, and every iteration was a little different than the ones before it.
I can’t remember any but the last of them—none of us can—but they were all recorded in the Library.
And before she realized that getting me and Nolan out of the way required booting us down the coast to the Golden Shore, she tried a few other approaches. ”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, first, she tried to let me stay Queen while she wiped my mind and made me her obedient little toy. But that apparently destabilized everything, since there was no way to make me Queen and let me be the one to kill Oleander. Nolan killed her in that timeline, and it all fell apart when I tracked him down and had him arrested for breaking the Law. Apparently making me try my own brother for murder caused me to rebel and everything went to shit. We didn’t even need to bother you to break her toys in that version.
” Arden smirked, looking obscurely pleased with herself.
“So she reset it all, and the second time, she brought back her shitty false Queen, and had me serving as her Chatelaine while Nolan was her Seneschal. I think it was supposed to teach us our place or something. Instead, the false Queen got a little murdery and knocked down the whole house of cards. It wasn’t pleasant, and I think I’m glad not to remember it.
The third go-round, we were on the Golden Shore, and Muir Woods was sealed. ”
“All right,” I said, wondering just how much of the four months I remembered were as implanted as the rest of Titania’s false memories.
May and I had discussed the fact that Titania had revised her enchantment several times, something which most people would never have to know.
I certainly hadn’t expected it to have actual consequences.
“But the knowe was open and in use during her first two tries; that must have been when whoever it was cleared out the vaults,” continued Arden. “They got away with essentially everything.”
“Including the hope chest,” I said. I was starting to think through the implications of that, and none of them were good.
Hope chests were created by Oberon as a means of turning the changeling children of his descendants fully fae; they were essentially an inanimate version of Amandine’s descendant line, with the same magical ability to change the balance of fae blood.
Anyone fae could use them—anyone. We even have stories of merlins successfully using hope chests, and merlins have so little fae blood that they age at almost the same rate as humans do.
In the wrong hands, a hope chest could be used to change someone against their will, making permanent alterations to their selves.
They could do that in the right hands, too, but at least when the hope chest was locked in Arden’s vaults, I didn’t have to worry that it was being used to torture people.
Faerie is a world made up of hundreds of different, loosely related species.
Children of Oberon, Titania, and Maeve, united only in that we’re all functionally immortal: if something doesn’t come along to kill us, we’ll live forever.
But we’re not human. That may be the most important thing about Faerie: none of its denizens are human.
And yet somehow, through some bizarre twist in an already bizarre biology, we can breed with them.
The offspring of fae-human unions are people like me, changelings, who straddle two worlds without fully belonging to either.
If changelings have children with pureblooded fae, their children are still changelings, until enough generations have passed that they breed the mortality back out again.
If they have children with humans, those children are still considered changelings for a generation or two.
But anyone with a quarter fae blood or less is considered a thin-blooded changeling, and is less likely to be able to perceive or interact with Faerie.
If it stopped there, it might be okay. The pureblooded fae might not hate us as much, and while we’d probably still exist, we’d have an easier time blending into the glorious chaos that is Faerie.
But thin-blooded changelings can live entirely in the mortal world, and many of them do, walking away from the rest of us in favor of living in a world that doesn’t pity and belittle them for the circumstances of their birth.
If they can adjust, they often do better than their more fae counterparts.
They’re usually a little prettier than the humans around them, a little more compelling, and they can turn that into a good life.
Their children will be more human still, and if those children have children, well.
That’s when you get merlins. Merlins are still changelings, technically.
But they have so little fae blood that they’re really just long-lived humans in most ways that matter.
Most… but not all. Because something about dumping that much humanity on top of a few drops of fae blood has a tendency to unlock power most fae can only dream about.
Not most changelings: most fae . Merlins have the potential to inherit all the magical strength of their fae ancestors with few, if any, of the limitations.
Iron doesn’t burn them. Rowan doesn’t bind them.
And sunrise doesn’t tear their towers down.
The first wars in Faerie were fought over the existence of merlins. Changelings were bad enough, but at least we mostly fit into the feudal structure our parents had so painstakingly created. Merlins, though… merlins broke things.
As a changeling, I could understand the impulse.
Faerie is often cruel to her part-human children.
We aren’t equal to our fully fae relations, we can’t hold lands or titles, and worst of all, we die.
There’s no point in investing in us as friends or allies, because we’re always here to go.
I tried not to think about that when I didn’t have to.
Since my return from the pond where Simon had left me, I’d made no new human friends, and very few changeling friends.
One day, I was going to die, and everyone I loved was going to have to mourn for me.
A large part of Titania’s enchantment had been geared toward making sure the changelings it ensnared knew our place, knew with absolute conviction that we were well below the station of even the lowliest pureblood.
We were a servant class in her perfect world.
It was a version of the existing system, taken to its absolute extreme, and given that, it wasn’t hard to understand why merlins, when they realized how much power they could wield, might decide to burn a corrupt and broken system to the ground.
But when merlins started smashing things, people got hurt, and that mobilized the rest of Faerie against them.
The first war against the merlins drew the Firstborn into the conflict.
People died, both during the war and after, when the changelings who hadn’t rebelled were executed to keep it from all happening again.
Did things need to change? Absolutely. And at the same time, I had too many kids and teenagers to take care of to want to see Faerie caught up in another cycle of violence.
“So there’s a hope chest somewhere out in the world, and we don’t know who has it, or what they’re going to do with it,” I said. “They could be planning to charge changelings to turn them fully fae. Or to turn them fully human and eject them from Faerie.”
“Or they could be planning to tinker with them until they get merlins,” said Arden.
“Either way, we need it back—and it’s not the only thing we’re missing.
Various pieces of tableware—there are a lot of enchanted knives and hampers out there.
The fount that treats iron poisoning. Arthur’s Mantle, Clydno’s Halter, lots of other things that probably shouldn’t have been on this continent to begin with.
Tudwal’s Whetstone, and the scabbard that can transform any metal into iron. ”
I had never heard of half those things, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. The last item on the list caught my attention above the rest. “Why would something that makes more iron even exist?” I asked sourly.
“Gremlins are immune to iron. Coblynau are resistant, and like the challenge of embedding magic into metal. Maybe someone needed a weapon they could count on to protect their holdings. Or maybe they were a serial killer. I don’t know why the thing exists—I don’t even know its name.
We found it in the treasury of the false Queen’s knowe, and we locked it away for safekeeping.
We locked a lot of things away for safekeeping. ”
“Not so safe if they’re out in the world now.”
“No, I guess not.” Arden sighed. “I’m sure you know what I’m about to ask.”
“Can it wait another few weeks?” It had already waited for months. Maybe this was just a warning of what was to come.
Arden shook her head, looking genuinely miserable. “I wanted to wait, please believe me, I wanted to. And when it looked like this might just have been a thief taking advantage of a great opportunity, I was able to keep pushing back calling for you. I hoped we could reach your due date.”
I frowned. “I need you to cut to the chase here.”