She worked in lightning and information and ideas: she believed we could all be equal, pureblood, mixed-blood, changeling, and merlin, if she could only create us a new Faerie, one suspended in eternal alchemical crystal. She wanted to render our differences irrelevant, still present, but no longer of sufficient importance to dictate our society. Who cared about castles and territory when the land was limitless? Who cared about the risk of human discovery when we could move outside the tiny slice of home that Oberon had left to us and into an infinite paradise, where everything was tailored to fulfill our every need?
She was going to change the world. She was going to save us. But something went wrong with the equipment that was supposed to allow everyone access to her paradise. It would copy the data that comprised a person’s soul. It would allow her to upload that data to the system she had constructed. It wouldn’t bring that data to life. The information was frozen, as useless as a history book: a snapshot, rather than a living thing. She had wanted to give all of Faerie the chance to be like me. Instead, she had given all of Faerie the chance to paint their portraits in glittering light before they faded away forever.
That might have been where her dream died. That wouldn’t have been the worst thing. She was brilliant and she was talented and she wanted to make her mark; she would have found another dream. Given time, she would have found another dream. But I had been so young, and so desperately eager to prove myself worthy of her love. When one of her apprentices had come to me and said, “I know how to make this better,” I had believed her. I had been more na?ve then. I had been so easy to fool.
The apprentice’s name had been Gordan, and right up until she killed my mother, I had believed she was my friend. That is what the death of innocence looks like: like a friend with blood on her hands and a scream in her throat, breaking that which cannot be repaired.
I can make excuses for myself, have made excuses for myself. When the time to determine guilt had come, my mother’s uncle, Duke Torquill of Shadowed Hills, had been willing to speak in my defense, saying that Gordan had done all of the actual killing. He spoke truly—I had never broken Oberon’s Law. I had never murdered anyone.
But I was the one who told Gordan when the current flowed correctly. I was the one who accessed Mother’s private notes and gave her the pieces she was missing. I was even the one who strapped Peter into the machine, who helped her stalk her prey, who helped her catch them unawares. Without me, she would still have killed—I am sure of that; I am not so fond of blame that I would assume its full burden without cause—but she would not have killed so many.
And she would not have killed my mother.
Gordan chose most of her targets based on how easy they would be to isolate, whether because they were natural loners or because they were in a good position to be lured away from their peers. She chose my mother because January was smart and kind, and she knew the technology. January would have caught her eventually. Gordan thought that, with my mother gone, she could get away with what she had done. She might have, had October not come, had October not stayed, had October not seen. I was so innocent then. I was so young, and Li Qin was so far away, and without my mothers to help me, I had nowhere else to turn.
When Gordan killed the others—when she killed Barbara and Yui and Peter and Colin and Terrie—she had used the machine the way it was intended to be used, uploading echoes of the dead to Mother’s private server. When she killed my mother, she used the machine to drain her dry, rendering her unappealing to the night-haunts, and then she used an ax, she used her anger, she used everything but the kindest tool she had.
The others were prisoned in the crystal, sleeping, unmoving, unchanging, but there. My mother, the first woman I ever loved, the first woman to have ever loved me, was not. She, alone in all of Faerie, had been deleted before any form of immortality could be offered to her. I may not have put the ax to her flesh, but I was complicit. Without me, she could not have been killed.
This was all my fault . . . and now Li Qin came to me speaking of resurrections, of bringing the disconnected back online. Didn’t she realize that her wife, my mother, the love of both our lives, was not among the files available to be restored? Even if we could somehow accomplish the impossible, could somehow restore what had been broken, January would be lost. January would never be coming home.
“Li Qin said I might find you here.”
I lifted my head, only now realizing how indecorous my position was. It was not meet for a Countess to be kneeling in the grass, clutching at the soil like a common shrub. I flickered and disappeared, rematerializing on my feet, some distance from my original position.
Elliot, who had watched the whole thing, didn’t bat an eye. If anything, he looked almost amused, like he was accustomed to me zapping myself around the landscape. I hesitated, reviewing our last several interactions. Perhaps he was. I had never seen the point in going through the motions of traveling between points A and B, not when we all knew what the outcome would be.
“Has she informed you of her plan?” I asked.
“You mean, did she ask me whether I would agree to let her try?” He looked at me levelly. “What do you think?”
I opened my mouth. Then I stopped.
Barbara, the first victim, had been an accident. She had been a Queen of Cats, and Gordan’s best friend, and when they had tested the “improved” system on her, neither of them had been expecting it to kill her. So far as I was aware, she had no family to either claim her body or speak to its use.
Yui, on the other hand, had been the second victim . . . and when she died, she had been engaged to be married. To Elliot. So far as I knew, she still was, in the most technical of senses. He had never ceased to refer to her as his fiancée, and without her to contradict him, the title still applied.
Slowly, I said, “I believe she raised the matter with you prior to approaching me.”
“Good guess,” he said. He tilted his head to the side, a softer, more organic version of my own mannerism. He is not my family, but he might as well be: he has been there for as long as I have been what I am. “What do you think?”
I said nothing. I looked at him, and I tried to find my voice, which seemed to have inexplicably deserted me.