Now I’m talking without contractions. Must be contagious.
He looked surprised and stepped back. “Please help him,” he said. “Allard is very dear to me.”
“And to me,” I said and turned back to him.
I concentrated harder and imagined taking hold of the weapon and pulling it out. It started moving but so agonizingly slowly that I thought about just putting my actual hands on it. But I didn’t know what that would do to my half-fae self, and if I couldn’t get that dagger out, Allard was going to die.
Finally, with one last mental push, the blade came free with a gruesome sucking sound.
Allard groaned once more and then fainted.
The dagger had plugged the wound and now that it had been withdrawn, he was bleeding out.
My father knelt beside us. “Now you must get out of my way,” he said. “Healing is my talent.”
“Can I help?” I asked, but he was already deep into some kind of trance and did not reply.
He spoke words over Allard that were in a language older than the fae tongue that Hugh and I spoke.
The cadence was like a prayer or an invocation but nothing seemed to be happening except that little by little, the blood stopped flowing.
That alarmed me. “Is his heart still beating?” I asked.
“Yes, but it is fading.”
He leaned back and sighed. “I have done what I can for him.”
He let out a whistle-warble that sounded like a birdcall and suddenly the white stag with silver antlers appeared. The great animal knelt before him and the fairy lord spoke to him in that ancient language. Then he rose and picked up Allard as if he weighed no more than a baby and put him on the beast’s back.
“Take him home,” he whispered.
“I want to go with him,” I said.
“No,” he said. “We have more urgent business.”
I must have looked defiant because he added, “Allard is much beloved in my land, he will be well cared for until we return.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” I said and he smiled.
“You have a fierce spirit.” He said. “You inherited that from your mother.
My mother. I had a lot of questions about my mother.
As the stag disappeared into the forest, the fairy held out his hand to help me rise.
“I am Lyrus,” he said. “Your father.”
No shit, Captain Obvious.
“I’m Hilde,” I answered.
“You look like your mother,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he thought that was a good thing or a bad thing. After what Syla had told me, I did not know what to expect.
As if he could read my thoughts…
Could he read my thoughts?
…Lyrus said, “We have much to discuss, daughter, but first you need to tell me of Marus and Syla. Does the witch still live?”
“Yes,” I said. “And she had some stories to tell me. Like how my mother died.”
A look of incredible pain came over his face.
“I don’t know what Syla has told you but perhaps you would listen to my side of the story.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“There will be time for your questions,” he said. “But first we must go to the cottage and retrieve Syla’s Book of Secrets before she hides it.”
“Book of Secrets? That big leather-bound book she is always reading?”
He nodded. “It may contain the spell she used to curse Allard. It is the key to reversing the magic.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “We can talk on the way,” I added, because I really, really, really wanted some answers to my questions.
It was like pulling teeth to get the story out of Lyrus, possibly because the tale did not reflect well on him. As Syla had told me, both she and her sister had caught Lyrus’ eye on that mid-summer solstice twenty-some years ago. He’d had sex with both of them—he called it “dallying”
and apparently a good time had been had by all.
They might have happily lived as a ménage à trois if Alys had not fallen pregnant with Hugh and me, at which point Lyrus had cast Syla aside. Apparently neither he nor my mother had considered Syla’s feelings in the matter. Nor had they entertained the possibility that Syla might also be pregnant.
“Wait,” I said. “Marus is my brother?”
Eeuw.
“I don’t believe that he is,” Lyrus said, “though she certainly wanted everyone to think so. That’s why she gave him a name that only exists in my family.”
“So she never had another lover? You never sent her love to die in the Goblin Wars?”
“No. And no.”
I chewed on that for a moment and felt just a sliver of sympathy for my aunt, who’d been so desperate to “sell” me her version of the story that she’d created a “Canadian boyfriend.”
“When you born, Alys and I were very happy,” he said.
“Even though we have bi-colored eyes?” I said skeptically.
“Do mortals consider that a flaw?” he asked.
“I don’t,” I said, and there was an edge of anger in my voice that I couldn’t control. “But I’m told it is the reason you had us sent away, because we were not perfect in your eyes.”
“Syla lied,” he said. “Having double-colored eyes is considered quite lucky among my folk. And I never sent you away.”
A fresh spasm of pain twisted his perfect face. “You were stolen away,” he said. “I suspected Syla had something to do with it but short of torturing her to death to get the truth, there was little I could do but banish her to the Verge and close both borders against her.”
“And my mother?” I said.
“Your mother went mad when we lost you. I sent Allard to search the world for you. When he did not return immediately, Alys fell into deeper despair and while the balance of her mind was disturbed, she took her own life.”
There was genuine grief in his voice and I realized that for him it was a fresh grief. If time worked differently in the Verge, these events would have just happened weeks ago in his world and not years.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, thinking, poor woman. I felt a pang of grief of my own but mostly hearing this was like listening to a fairy tale, where all the mothers and fathers seem to die. I had never known my mother, nor ever would, and that was a pain I’d grown used to.
“How many years was Allard Syla’s captive?
“I’m twenty-three,” I said.
He made a sound that was almost a sob. “Syla will pay.”
We both fell silent as we approached the cottage.
I knew Marus would have warned Syla that Lyrus was in the Verge. I knew that she would be planning a nasty reception.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Lyrus,” Syla said. “You’re looking well.”
Lyrus didn’t bother to reply. I realized he was checking out the room. Syla was sitting on her bed, holding that leather-bound book. Marus was standing at the table. It was like the standoff in an old spaghetti western. Marus was practically vibrating with suppressed rage.
The tension was so thick I couldn’t stand it.
“Marus tried to kill Allard,” I said to Syla.
She glanced at her son. “Tried?” she asked, and he flinched as if the contempt in her voice had physically wounded him.
“He came,” Marus said, sounding like a sulky toddler as he pointed a bony shoulder in Lyrus’ direction.
Syla turned her attention back to my father.
“Where is Allard now?”
“Back in the land of light,” Lyrus snapped. “Where he belongs.”
Syla’s mask of cold contempt slipped a bit.
“It used to be my home too.”
She put aside the leather-bound book—her Book of Secrets—and rose to her feet. It might have been a trick of the light but it seemed that she was several feet taller than usual. “You made a mistake exiling me here, Lyrus. What you did was bottle up the Verge’s magic while letting fae and mortal magic leak in at the borders. I’ve been soaking it all up for almost a quarter of a century. I’m stronger than you are now.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, witch,” Lyrus responded. “You cursed Allard and you’ve held my daughter against her will. She’s coming with me now.”
I felt Syla’s malevolence as a physical force just as I became aware of a sudden heat in the pocket of my tunic. The stone Allard had given me was suddenly glowing so brightly I could see it through the fabric.