Page 7 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

That stings more than it should. I ought to be used to such observations by now.

I’ve done nothing to change the world’s opinion of me and I don’t want to.

And yet, when this idiotic mermaid looks at me in disappointment I feel it from my muddy boots to my knotted hair.

My reputation has managed to cross realms, somehow.

I don’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud—I’m leaning toward proud.

“I don’t care,” I tell her blandly.

Morgen huffs. “I ended up in the stream behind your house five years ago, and I saw you both. Ceridwen was hanging up sheets and singing to herself, and you were busy arguing with your neighbor. Her hair was like coral. I knew I had to speak to her. I threw Dwp at her window that night, but both of you came, not her alone. You looked right at Dwp and didn’t see him, but Ceridwen did.

I popped my head up from the brook and waved.

You closed the curtains without noticing a thing.

“She’s special,” Morgen continues. “But you’re a child of man. Square in the shoulders and too practical by half.”

My cheeks heat. “Yes, I’m perfectly ordinary, I’ve been told.”

“Ceridwen has sight,” Morgen says. “She can see us wherever we are, and she can come and go as she pleases.”

“I’ve managed to make my way here,” I remind her. “Wherever here is.”

Morgen gives me a dubious look. “Any animal can fall into a cave, even if it doesn’t have the eyes to navigate it.

Humans stumble in all the time. The woods by your house are thin.

” She waves her webbed fingers ominously.

“You don’t have sight. Anything you see here wants you to see them…

” She trails off and glances around, then looks back at me with a notch between her brows.

“I’m glad you found me, but you must know, you weren’t supposed to come.

We’ve been planning this since Ceridwen was able to get out of bed.

I had a note to send to you downstream explaining everything once we were settled. ”

“What?”

The word is sharp as it leaves my mouth.

I think of Ceridwen last night, saying she would consider getting married to keep us afloat—to save us.

She lied. My sister had no intention of staying.

Dad was gone and soon she would be too, leaving Gran and me to struggle and scrape and starve, and she’d have some mermaid I’d never met be the one to tell me.

I swallow my rage. “So the moment Mam was cold in her grave and Ceridwen was well enough to walk into the woods, she began planning to leave us? I thought she was in danger!”

“Ceridwen is my love,” Morgen says as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “We want to be together.”

Her words bounce off me like rain on an umbrella and a thousand questions fill my mouth, but only the beginning of one makes it out.

“How does…” I trail off, staring at Morgen’s tail.

“I have legs when I come to land,” Morgen snaps. “It’s very rude to ask a mermaid about her tail.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because if I stay too long on land, I could lose it!”

“All right,” I mutter as an apology. “Where is my sister?”

Morgen gives an awkward laugh. “Well, that’s why I’m glad you happened upon me, Sabrina. We were happy—”

“If you’ve lost my sister in these woods, I’ll fillet you like the salmon you are.”

Morgen tuts. “I haven’t lost her! I know exactly where she is, I just can’t get to her. She’s too far away from water, I would lose my tail. ’Course, she knew that and went anyway—”

She breaks off mid-sentence, eyes trained on my hand. Cold rage comes down over her pretty features. I follow her gaze and quickly understand why.

“That’s her ring,” she says, breathless, her eyes bouncing between the band and my face. “You stole it.”

“I did not,” I say indignantly and far too fast. “This is my ring.”

She stutters. They can’t lie, these fairies of old; all the stories agree on that. So I’ve got a decided upper hand there.

“You’re lying!” she exclaims, utterly incredulous.

I pull an affronted face. “No, I’m not.”

“I was with Ceridwen when she got that ring,” Morgen practically spits at me.

Damn. Just because they can’t lie doesn’t mean they’re stupid enough not to realize when they’re being lied to. It seems I don’t know anything about my sister’s life.

“That ring is iron.” Morgen squeezes her eyes shut. “Duw, you’ve doomed her. Where she’s going she needs protection. She needs that ring!”

Cold dread blankets me like snowfall. I lift my hand, my heart stopping in my chest. The dull band, the dark metal. Of course it’s iron. Iron that burns fairies—iron that keeps humans safe.

I imagine Ceridwen rousing, ready to execute her perfect plan, and finding her protection gone.

Slipped from her finger in the night. Maybe she searched for it, thinking it had fallen off, terrified of waking me and getting caught.

How was she to know that her lifeline was wrapped around my finger, hidden purposefully beneath my pillow?

And I only took it out of spite.

I hold up my hands in surrender. “Where has Ceridwen gone?”

Morgen takes shuddering, furious breaths.

My guilt sits between us, though I refuse to acknowledge it aloud.

I think she’s deciding whether it’s worth asking me for my help after all—now that she knows I’m a liar and a thief.

I can’t blame her. You’d have to be an idiot to trust me, but I am the only person here.

“To Llys-y-Ellyllon, the Hollow Court of the Ellyllon,” she says finally.

Ellyllon, in the stories, are elves. Those beautiful high fairies who watch the world from afar without a care and play games with mortals who catch their interest.

“She’s gone deep into Gwlad y Tylwyth Teg to seek the king. Ceridwen wants to be his champion.”

My mouth fills with ash. Gwlad y Tylwyth Teg. The Land of the Fair Ones.

Morgen stares at me for a moment and complete silence cloaks us. Finally, she laughs and throws her arms wide.

“You may not have Ceridwen’s eyes but you haven’t been eaten yet”—she beams at me and adds, almost conspiratorially—“which is very impressive for someone like you. Most people get got by a pwca the moment they cross over. Pwcas—”

“I know what a pwca is,” I snap. “And my sister can… see it all?”

Morgen nods. “Which is why she can move between the worlds like the teg can. She’s been sneaking away to come here for years now—in the nights, and while the rest of you were at school or work.”

The next question cuts my lips like a knife. “And she didn’t tell me?”

Morgen doesn’t need to answer. We both know the truth.

My mouth dries up. Ceridwen never enjoyed fairy tales as much as I did—she doesn’t partake in the rituals I’ve formed over the years to force a bit of magic into our lives—and yet this gift was handed to her on a silver plate.

Just like everything else always has been.

“I must say I’m less glad you’re here now that I know you’re a lying sneak—which Ceridwen failed to mention—but it is still a relief.

You’re the only person who loves her as much as I do.

” Her smile is shockingly genuine. “But you’re in danger.

People fall into our world quite a bit. A few come with a purpose and true sight, and they’re usually fine, but people like you are at the whims of the teg.

Worse than that, if you want to leave, it’s…

hard to get out. Almost impossible to walk back into the moment you left.

You could wander into your world fifty years later and have every lost minute rush up to meet you at once. ”

I laugh. I can’t think of anything else to do. “You can’t be serious.”

“We can’t lie,” she says accusingly. “But if you help me, I’ll help you.”

Morgen takes my stunned silence as an opportunity to elaborate.

“I need you to go after Ceridwen. She’s taken the King’s Road to the Ellyllon court and I can’t follow because no river runs nearby. She’s trying her luck as the champion.”

“Champion of what?” I say, happy to focus on something other than my near-certain doom.

Morgen pauses again. She says she can’t lie, but she’s being very careful.

“Our king has put out a call to the humans that move among us,” Morgen says delicately. “We have a… problem only a human can solve. He asks for a champion to appeal to your fanciful natures, because of the stories you’ve all heard before.”

Ceridwen isn’t a fighter. She’s seldom able to leave the bed and she can’t walk for long without her chest paining her; there’s no chance she’ll be strong enough for whatever this task involves. She’ll get herself killed.

“She can’t! Ceridwen’s weak, she… Why?”

“The reward is a favor, promised by the king,” Morgen says. “A large favor. He’s given his word and now he’s bound to provide it. Whoever wins can ask for riches, power, anything, but the assumption is that the human who succeeds will want immortality.”

“Why is that the assumption?”

“Well, you’re human, aren’t you?”

I hold her gaze for a moment. I think of the thousands of ways we’ve devised to be remembered after death.

Marble statues, lengthy poems, street names.

Mausoleums like the Branshaws’, where generations of great men lie, plumped with embalming fluid, still trying to stay the forward march of time.

There truly is no greater prize for a people made of slow-rotting flesh and grave dirt.

“Ceridwen will ask for immortality so that we can stay together,” Morgen says.

I fix her with a hard stare. “And your king needs a champion because…?”

“Y Lle Tywyll.” Morgen balances her chin on her folded arms.

“The Dark Place?”

She nods, and rivulets of water splatter my shoes.

“No one knows what it is. It’s seeping into the land.

Fairies die when we go down there, so the king needs humans—and Duw, don’t ask me why, I can see your mouth moving already, I don’t know.

All I know is that one of the worst tricksters in the land sold Ceridwen some snake oil about becoming the champion and winning her immortality. ”

“A trickster?” I say. “Like a pwca?”

She opens her mouth, closes it again, like she’s wrestling with a lump stuck in her throat. It doesn’t make it out. She only winces and shrugs.

“Something like that.”

I’m again filled with a slow-boiling anger.

Ceridwen should know better than to involve herself in the games of our supposed betters; she’s warned me as much when I’ve tried to challenge John Branshaw.

I hesitate at the water’s edge, looking around at the endless forest. Going west has led me to Morgen, but whether the King’s Road is in the same direction, I have no idea.

“Which way?” I ask.

Morgen points across the river. North, then.

“I’m not swimming it.”

“I’m not asking you to. There’s a bridge a little over that way—I’ll swim alongside you until you reach it, but after that”—Morgen exhales through her nose—“I can’t follow.

The path is too far from water. But you have a sharp thing, stolen from your sister.

Ceridwen says you have another very sharp thing in your head, though I’m yet to see evidence. Use both.”

I turn over my hand and look at Ceridwen’s ring on my finger, drawing a tight breath.

It finally hits me: my sister has an entire secret life.

I expect my rage to simmer higher, but it’s sadness I find, deep in the pit of my stomach.

A seeping misery that grows at the knowledge that Ceridwen did not share herself with me when I offered up everything to her on a chipped and overused plate.

Morgen observes my silence with a tilted head. “You remind me of Ceridwen, but something in your face—”

“My nose is bigger,” I bite off. “I’ve been told.”

Morgen frowns. “I was going to say your mouth is crueler.”

I offer a smile that’s more like a grimace. “That’s been said about my tongue, too.”

Morgen pushes off from the bank and begins swimming with a slow elegance, then looks back. She expects me to follow her and I do, with a plan ticking away like a clock in my head—one that does not involve trusting my sister’s secret lover.