The thatched roof is sturdy enough to keep out most of the rain. The air inside is musty. A single hole in the corner of the stonework lets in enough rain that water and moss have spread along the walls.
My feet ache. Carefully, I lower my sore body to the cold stone floor and sit while Derrick rummages in a trunk on the far side of the room. The blankets he finds inside are moth-eaten and dirty, the old wool riddled with holes. With a contented sigh, he pulls a needle and thread from his coat pocket and starts stitching up the fabric.
“Derrick.” I test the weight of his name on my tongue, hoping to use it to conjure a memory. The sense of home returns, the comfort, but no memories. No images of my former life.
“Aileana.” I try my own name, reaching to the dark parts of my mind. I have to know why I came back. How I came back. I whisper my name over and over until it’s a breath on my lips. Until it’s no more than a sound. That feeling of immense burden rises again and I try to weather it. I let the storm build and see where it takes me, but beyond it, there’s still nothing.
Oh, confound it. I give up.
“I had another name,” I say, irritated by my inability to recall even the most basic things. “Didn’t I? It was shorter. One syllable.”
Derrick goes quiet, and his fingers are suddenly still. He’s avoiding my gaze. “You did.” He jabs the needle through the material and bites his lip. He’s thinking hard, that much is obvious.
I narrow my eyes. “I may not have my memories of you, but I know that look. You don’t want to be honest with me.”
“Fine.” He shrugs. “If you want honesty, I prefer Aileana. It’s distinctive, rolls off the tongue in a pleasant—”
“Tell me or I won’t let you sit on my shoulder.”
“Kam,” Derrick finally says in a short sigh. “He called you Kam, short for your surname, Kameron. There. Are you happy now?”
Kam. That’s the one. I recall the sound of it between wild kisses, as if he would never tire of saying it. Kam. I love that name. I can feel him whispering it against the pulse at my throat. It meant everything. It said everything.
But with those memories comes a reminder of the urgent message I came back to deliver. It’s to do with him. It’s why I’m here.
“Derrick,” I say softly. He looks over at me, cautious now. “Is he the Unseelie King?”
He’s quiet for the longest time. “Aye.”
“Did I love him?”
“More than anything.”
It hurts to swallow. “Did he love me?”
Rain taps against the roof. A breeze rattles the wooden door. When Derrick speaks, his voice is so soft, I strain to hear him. “He loved you so much that when you died, he might as well have died with you.”
The next morning, we continue our journey through the woods, with a pace just as grueling as before. The forest has grown so shadowed that I can barely see the ground in front of me. Beyond the far-reaching tops of the trees, the slate-gray clouds are heavy with rain, dark enough to appear shaded with ink.
I notice with some bewilderment that the sky is not the only part of the landscape that’s monochrome. The farther we travel, the more the forest seems entirely bled of color, like I’m walking through a charcoal drawing. The minimal traces of green among the trees are faded, as if coated with a layer of fine dust. The leaves are all withering, the branches brittle.
The entire forest is dying.
When I brush my fingertips against the trunks of the trees, the life force there quivers faintly beneath my touch—a slow, fading beat. The pulse of a living thing in its last days, as it struggles to take its final breaths. Just like the voice from my memory.
Accept the offer, child.
That small flash is enough to make my heart slam painfully against my chest. She had a voice of destruction. One I can still feel viscerally, a stroke of cold fingertips down my spine.
The only thing that works to lessen my unease is when Derrick tells me about my past. About how I grew up in Edinburgh as the daughter of a marquess. About how he and I met after my mother was murdered. He regales me with tales of the nights I spent killing faeries, until the day they rose up from the mounds beneath the city and raided Scotland. They destroyed every village and township—and then they continued their destruction elsewhere. All this while I had been captured and imprisoned in their realm.
Derrick talks and talks, but his account of my life is missing the details of the Unseelie King. Who he was, how he and I met, how I came to love him. The things he’s done since my death. Every time he almost comes up, Derrick changes the subject.
So I don’t mention him again. Derrick is content to sit on my shoulder and tell stories about our misadventures. He seems amused by the fact that my previous life summed up is basically death, destruction, and murder—in that order. What a miserable existence.
“So you thought I was dead once before, and then I did die?” I ask in disbelief. “This is something I do often? Die and come back?”
Now I’m not certain I want my memories. No wonder I’ve blocked it all out. Maybe my burden became too much and I decided to bid goodbye and good bloody riddance to Aileana Kameron. She was a girl who lived for vengeance and became blinded by it. By the time she realized that, it was too late to change anything.
Only she wasn’t a different girl. She was me, and I had the chance to save the world and failed.
Maybe I wanted to start over.
Derrick’s hands are in my hair again, plaiting, plaiting, always plaiting. He said he would only do one strand and now there are about fifteen braids lost in my curls. Later, when I take them out, my hair is going to look like a bird’s nest, I’m sure of it.
I wonder if it’s because Derrick enjoys the task, or if he touches me to remind himself that I’m not a figment of his imagination. Or if he’s deliberately trying to make my hair look ridiculous. The former, I hope.
“You know how a cat has nine lives?” he asks.
I sigh when I feel him start on another strand. “No.”
“Well, they have nine and you have . . . well, I don’t know how many at this point. At least twelve. More than any other human I’ve ever met, certainly.” His hands move deftly as he braids. “So I kept searching for you because I thought that maybe, like a cat, you’d just show up one day and start making demands.”
I step over the trunk of a felled tree as we cross a forest glen. “You thought I’d just show up? Even after you burned my body and buried my ashes?”
After he’d told me about fae funeral rites, the way I came back made more sense. No wonder it felt like my throat was lined with ash, my body was covered in soot, and I had to claw my way out of the ground. My body was burned on a pyre. My ashes were put into the ground. My death was final.
Bringing me back after all that must have required a great deal of power. I had to be rebuilt—bone, muscle, blood, heart, and mind. All of it.