Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

“If that’s not the case, then someone saw an unprotected teenage girl and grabbed her. Human kidnappers, we’re risking exposure. Fae kidnappers, who knows what they want her for?” A lot of things can be done with young, inexperienced changelings. I managed to find people who would spare me from the worst of them—and that’s saying something, considering Devin. That doesn’t mean I escaped knowing what they were.

Etienne blanched. “If you’re trying to frighten me, you’re doing an excellent job.”

“That’s good. I want you to be frightened, because I want you to understand that this is going to be hard. Maybe we’ll find her tonight, maybe she just ditched her friends because she’s upset over a boy, and she’s camped out at the Denny’s on Market Street, too pissed to go home and too scared to go anywhere more interesting. Maybe this will all seem like a bad dream tomorrow.”

“Then why—”

“But even if Chelsea is found safe and sound, Oberon willing, you’ll have to deal with the fact that she exists, and her mother—her human mother—knows about Faerie. You broke cover, Etienne. I mean, that’s…that’s something even I’ve never managed to do.”

“You’ve certainly tried hard enough,” he muttered, but the growing horror in his tone told me I was getting through. He’d come to me because he knew I had a track record of dealing with lost kids and because an undocumented changeling was a political hot potato no one higher in the food chain would dare to touch. Sylvester couldn’t get involved without punishing Etienne for his carelessness. The Queen would love an excuse to punish a knight in Sylvester’s service and, by extension, Sylvester himself. That left me.

What Etienne hadn’t done was stop and really think about what was about to happen. Because everything in his life, absolutely everything, was going to change. “When I find Chelsea—if I find Chelsea—you know what has to happen.” He looked away. I raised my voice, saying, “Etienne, you need to tell me you know what has to happen. This is the last thing you have to agree to.”

“She has to be given her Choice,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly very soft.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “She does.”

The Changeling’s Choice was established by Oberon as one of the ways for Faerie to protect itself. It’s supposed to be the defining moment in a changeling’s life. It’s the day their fae parent sits down with them and asks them to decide where they belong: Faerie or the mortal world. If they choose Faerie, they’re whisked away to the Summerlands. Their human parent will never see them again, and they’ll be raised the way I was, always an outsider, always held apart, but still a part of Faerie. If they choose the mortal world…

Everything mortal dies. That’s the main difference between humans and the fae. If our changeling children choose to live as humans, we have to kill them. That’s the price of playing faerie bride. At least, that used to be the price—my own daughter, Gillian, was able to choose humanity and walk away, but only because of what I am.

Dóchas Sidhe can’t just read blood: we can change it. I turned my own daughter mortal, and the Luidaeg wiped her memory, making her forget she’d ever had anything to do with Faerie. But Gillian was only a quarter-blood, if that. Maybe more importantly, she’d been raised in the human world by her human father, with no influence from me. Making her forget Faerie was easy. Chelsea, on the other hand…

Bridget had raised her daughter knowing that she wasn’t wholly mortal. Chelsea would have her fae nature woven throughout her memories. It might be too closely tied to her identity for even the Luidaeg to remove, no matter how much I changed her blood. If Chelsea chose human, there was a good chance she’d have to die. And either way, there was the matter of Bridget, who was mortal and aware of Faerie. Something would have to be done.