I nodded, biting back my many questions.
“The Verge is just an entryway, an airlock, if you will, a place between the world of the mortal and the world of the fae. To gain passage to the land of light, you must be invited. And we were. For we were beautiful and we caught the attention of Lyrus.”
We?
She answered my unspoken thought. “Yes, both of us. For the fae are a greedy race and they take what they want and never mind the consequences.”
There was emotion behind those words, emotion and…pain.
“Lyrus seduced Alys while I found love with Marus’ father.”
Here she paused as if inviting me to ask a question. “So Marus is…part fairy?”
“A halfling,” she said, “like you and your brother.”
And there it was.
I sat back in the chair, trying to wrap my head around her revelation.
But crazy as it seems, this information came as something of a relief. It would explain why Hugh and I had always felt a little different, like we’d never quite belonged anywhere. It would explain why we had always been able to do odd little things that other children couldn’t, like understand what animals were saying and make our toys move by themselves.
Syla began talking again and I had to tell myself to focus on her words.
“Lyrus was thrilled when he found out Alys was pregnant for most fairy women are barren. He was even more delighted when he discovered she was carrying twins.”
Syla’s voice took on a dreamy cast, as if she were half-asleep. It was as if this were a story she had told many times, so often that the details had become a little soft around the edges, like the pages of a book that has been read too many times.
“When the twins were born, they were beautiful,” she said, “but they were not perfect. Each of them had one blue eye and one hazel eye.”
I winced. Growing up I’d hated having bi-colored eyes, no matter how many times my adoptive mother had tried to convince me that they marked me as special. No one really wants to be “special” when she’s a teenager because “special” means “different” and teenagers don’t really do different. Syla seemed to smile at my internal monologue and continued, “Lyrus blamed that flaw on Alys, blamed her mortal blood.”
That rang true to me. The fairy tales I read as a child always suggested that the fae guarded their bloodlines more zealously than a white supremacist.
“As time went on, his distaste for his imperfect children grew until at last, in fear that Lyrus would do violence to them, Alys asked me to help her hide her children in the world of mortal men.”
“How?” I asked.
“Our mother had been a maternity nurse,” she said, “so we knew our way around the hospital. It was easy enough to find a woman who had miscarried a child and was willing to accept two babies no questions asked.”
Syla looked at me. “Her husband loved her very much and was willing to handle the…complications.”
She paused in her story. “I’m curious. What did they tell you about your origins?”
“Private adoption,” I said. “They told us they found us in a Ukrainian orphanage while my father was on a sabbatical doing research on medieval Russian folklore.”
Something about that story had never felt quite right to me, and when Hugh and I started looking for our birth mother and found a complete blank, it had seemed even more unlikely.
“What happened to Alys?” I said, because I couldn’t call a woman I’d never known my mother.
Syla gave an odd little grimace that almost looked like a smirk.
“Lyrus was enraged when he found that she had spirited you away and would not tell him where. Distraught, Alys took her own life, stabbing herself in the heart with an iron dagger.”
“No,” I said aloud, horrified.
“Yes,” she said. “I found her body and removed the dagger myself, for iron is death to fairykind and no one else would touch it.
“I kept it, though, and one day will use it to kill Lyrus.”
She fell silent then and I thought her story was over. “Is that why you stayed in the Verge? Why you didn’t go home?”
“Home?” she laughed. “My home was in the land of light with the father of my child but Lyrus realized that someone had helped Alys kidnap his children and he assumed it was me. So he sent my love to die in the Goblin Wars and exiled me and Marus to the Verge.”
Syla was starting to breathe hard, freshly enraged by the wrong that had been done to her.
“And he cursed me to look like this,” she hissed, pointing to her face. “I was beautiful,” she said. “He would have restored my youth and beauty if I had just told him where you were. But I owed my sister my silence and so I kept her confidence.”
She looked at me with something close to hatred. “So thanks to you and your brother, my son and I have been prisoners for twenty-three years.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I was, but I still wondered why she simply hadn’t taken Marus and left the Verge.
“I cannot leave without his permission,” she said.
She waved her hand dismissively.
“But you’re here now,” she said, “and that is all that matters.”
I did not like the sound of that and I still didn’t know exactly how I’d come to be in this odd place.
“It was the solstice,” she said. “On the solstice anyone can enter the Verge. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And once again, she started to laugh maniacally.
“So I can’t leave?”
“Not unless Lyrus says you can.”
Okay then. Sounded like it was time to meet my dad.
“How do I contact him?”
“I’m sure he already knows you’re here. But this time of year, he holds the Seelie Court, and will be occupied for a while. You’ll simply have to wait here with us until he deigns to give you audience.”
I’m not good at waiting.
“You can’t always get what you want,” she said. “Do they still play that on the radio?”
“What?” I said, not following her.
“The Rolling Stones,” she said. “Are they still alive?”
“Yes,” I said, and then realized there was still one player unaccounted for. I looked around for the beast/man. “Who’s Allard?”
“A mistake of nature,” she said. “A goblin I took in out of the kindness of my heart, only to be repaid in pain and sorrow.” She looked at me keenly. “Goblins are not to be trusted. You should keep your distance from him.”
No worries, I thought and then, I felt ashamed, thinking of the beating he had taken at Marus’ hands.
“It’s late,” she said, “and you are tired. You can sleep in Marus’ bed tonight.”
“Um,” I began, because I did not like that idea at all.
“He’ll sleep in the woods,” she said. “You won’t be bothered. And besides,” she added, “I’ll be right over there.”
Somehow that didn’t reassure me at all but I was tired. Exhausted, actually, so I reluctantly tucked myself into one of the beds pushed against the walls of the multipurpose living space.
It was very comfortable and I fell asleep much sooner than I would have thought.
Only to find myself being shaken awake by Allard. “Wake up, girl,” he said.
I sat up. “You can talk?”
“Listen to me,” he said. “Syla can’t read your thoughts in dreams.”
I’m dreaming?
“She’s not telling you the truth,” he said.
I must have made a noise then for the next thing I knew—
“Hildegard?” Syla’s voice cut through the dark and woke me up.
“What?” I said drowsily.
“Are you having a nightmare?”
My stomach clenched. “The crash,” I lied. “I must have been dreaming about the crash.”
“I can give you a sleeping potion if you like.”
“No,” I said, “I’m good.”
It took every ounce of self-control I had not to think about Allard. But, there was no getting back to sleep after that.
CHAPTER FIVE