IF I HADN’T BEEN to Acacia’s lands when they still belonged to her husband, they might have seemed utterly bleak, without any hint of life or recovery. But I had been there before. I had fled across them when they belonged to her husband, when they were nothing but thorn and stone and suffering. Now . . .
The ground was still hard, stony, and unforgiving. It was also dusted in a thin layer of delicate green, weeds and grasses starting to take root as they found a way to thrive in a place that had never welcomed them before. The thorn briars were still thick, almost impenetrable knots dotting the landscape, but now they were dotted with the occasional white flower the size of my hand, almost—not quite—like blackberries in bloom. Life was coming to Blind Michael’s kingdom, and once it fully arrived, it wasn’t going to agree to leave again. Life so rarely did.
Acacia walked beside me, watching as I reacted to everything around us. Smiling a small and secret smile, she asked, “What do you think?”
“I think it’s going to be amazing.”
“I think it already is.” She tilted her head back, until she was sending her smile to the three pale and distant moons that dotted the blackness of the sky. “They’ve come so much farther than you can see from a distance. I’ve sent so many of them back to their people, and the ones who have chosen to stay—it was a choice for most of them, not the only option they had remaining.”
There was a word there that said everything: “most.” What Blind Michael had done to the children he stole was more than just a crime. It was a monstrosity. It was no surprise that some of them hadn’t been able to recover, either because his magic had bent them too far from what they had been, or because they had no longer been able to imagine themselves as anything other than what they had become. This was their home now.
“How have the families of the ones who’ve gone back received them?”
Acacia grimaced. “Some well; some not. It had been centuries for some of the Riders. Their families had . . . moved on, I suppose. It can be hard to bring someone back to something they left so long before.”
I glanced toward Simon. He was walking beside Quentin, looking around with calm curiosity, seemingly unbothered by the strangeness of his surroundings. This place didn’t hold any deep-seated nightmares for him.
“I get that,” I said.
Quentin was a lot less relaxed than Simon. That wasn’t a surprise. He kept looking around, eyes wide and a little wild, like he expected to be attacked at any moment. The occasional blast of a hunting horn in the far distance probably wasn’t helping any.
The land was malleable before the wishes of its mistress, even as it had once been malleable before Blind Michael’s wishes. We walked toward the stable, and the plains bent themselves to suit us, reducing the distance without changing the shape of it, so that we walked over the crest of a shallow hill and were suddenly confronted with the low, boxy shape of the hall and its outbuildings, like a child’s toys left carelessly scattered across the yard.
Quentin stepped closer to me, pale and a little shaky. I reached over and took his hand. He glanced at me and laughed uneasily.
“This was the first place I was taller than you,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t really remember that,” I replied.
He swallowed hard.
“I lied,” he said.
I gave him a sidelong look. There were lines in the skin around his mouth and eyes, drawn deep and cruel by an unseen hand. He was terrified. That wasn’t so unreasonable. This was the first place that hadn’t cared who he was or what he wanted—only what it could do to him.
There are days when I honestly wish I could kill Blind Michael all over again. Murder is wrong, but what he spent centuries doing to children . . .
Acacia was still walking. We followed her, rapidly catching up with Simon, who still looked like he was taking a casual walk in the park.
“Fascinating,” he said, not looking at us. “Building an islet of this size while the deeper lands were sealed must have taken an incredible amount of power. Building it well, so that it would endure past the life of its creator—it’s almost unbelievable.”
“My husband was a clever one; he knew the power of ritual,” said Acacia. “There are so many bones buried here that the islet will never crumble. It’s been bought and paid for with the blood of the innocent, every inch of it. If you were considering the virtues of becoming a lord in your own land, I recommend you find a better way. Stronger men than you have been corrupted by the lure of empire.”
Her tone was mild, almost bored, like she was remarking on the weather or talking about what she was going to serve for dinner. I stared at the back of her head, so much suddenly making sense. Blind Michael had borrowed the eyes of his Riders, but there had always been elements in Faerie who would have been delighted, even honored to join his Ride. People for whom a few extra teeth and claws would have seemed like a gift instead of a punishment. Instead, he’d taken children, snatching them from their beds and twisting them to his own ends. Why?
Because there is power in blood, and there is power in suffering, and for centuries, Blind Michael’s lands had been a constant source of suffering. He had carved the islet with his own two hands, and stabilized and expanded it on the backs of the children he destroyed.
This was a graveyard that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other. No matter how far we walked, we would still be walking in the footprints of the dead.
Acacia looked over her shoulder, smiling sadly at the expression on my face. “Now you understand,” she said. “My mother set her children against us—against me, who had the audacity to love a son of Maeve. She would have killed us both for our crimes, slaughtered our children in their cradles, and all for the sin of loving. He Rode with the best intentions, once. What he took, he thought the world could spare.”
Simon turned his face away, but not fast enough to keep me from seeing the profound discomfort in his eyes. Good. He needed to remember that monsters were made from the best of intentions—and I needed to remember that Simon, despite being polite and friendly and beloved of pixies, was also the man who had taken me away from my family and Luna and Rayseline away from Sylvester. He claimed to have done it all with the best of intentions. Well, Blind Michael had claimed the same thing, and look what that had done. Some of his victims—most of his victims, when I counted the dead—were never going to recover.