The bruising grip of Dermot’s hand on my arm was unyielding, hauling me from the cellar’s suffocating darkness into the night. My legs, still trembling from shock, stumbled on the worn steps. The coppery scent of Fia’s blood clung to my clothes, all the more pungent exposed to the crisp Porth Sêr air.
Dermot didn’t pause for my weakness. He dragged me past the stables, past the inn’s kitchen vents, beyond the last of the town’s flickering lampposts, and through the open gate. The human guard had either hidden or run away. The wind, unimpeded by buildings, bit at my exposed skin, stinging the raw bruise on my cheek.
Just outside the town walls, hidden in a shallow dip of the land that made them invisible to human eyes until one was nearly upon them, three carriages waited. They were unlike anything I had ever seen. Instead of wood or metal, they were crafted from what appeared to be colossal, perfectly preserved gourds—each one a shimmering, impossibly smooth emerald green, as if plucked fresh from a giant’s garden. Their surfaces hummed with magic, catching the moonlight in an unnerving sheen.
Around the gourd carriages stood five other guards, their forms tall and elegant, cloaks of deep blue bearing the mountain-and-merlin crest of House Edris. Their fae eyes, more shades of deep blue, glowed in the dimness, watched our approach with detached, silent efficiency. No greetings, no questions. Only the cold, watchful assessment of predators.
The human townspeople of Porth Sêr watched. I could feel them—a massive, collective weight of fear—though I couldn’t see them clearly, hidden behind the false safety of their darkened windows and ajar doors. They were statues trapped in their own homes, terrified of the so-called guardians of the Veil, letting them come and go as they pleased, accepting abduction on their very doorstep. Where were their old gods now?
Dermot, his bruising grip on my arm, shoved me towards the nearest gourd-carriage. A polished, glowing door of what felt like hardened, warm sap sprang open with a soft sigh. The interior was oddly spacious, lined with cushions of shimmering, iridescent fabric that subtly shifted from cobalt to emerald in the shifting light. The air inside was warm, smelling sweet yet sterile.
But it was not empty.
Seated gracefully on one of the opulent cushions was a fae woman. Her features were a cruel mirror: strikingly similar to Fia’s—the same delicate nose, the high cheekbones, the lush auburn hair that spilled in waves over her shoulders. The sight of that familiar coloring in the service of my captors was a fresh, sickening stab of pain. But where Fia’s eyes were deep pools of warmth, this woman’s were an unfeeling, deep blue, holding an unsettling, almost vacuous beauty. Her gaze, when it flicked to me, was devoid of any true warmth. She wore the deep blue livery of House Edris, the mountain-and-merlin crest pinned elegantly to her dress.
And in her arms, bundled in soft, ivory linen, was a human infant.
The tiny baby, no more than a few days old, its face a soft, rosy peach, began to fuss, disturbed by the chill night air spilling in. The fae woman cooed softly, a sound that should have been soothing but carried an underlying tone of sterile fascination, not affection. Her long, delicate fingers stroked the baby’s cheek with an almost practiced detachment.
My breath caught in my throat, choked by a fresh wave of horror. And then I saw the second bundle: tucked neatly into a finely woven basket, resting on the cushion beside her, was another human infant, swaddled under a blanket of House Edris blue. This one was fast asleep, its little chest rising and falling in oblivious peace.
Despair, black and suffocating, mixed with a furious, burning anger. They hadn’t just murdered Fia—my protector, my sister, my world—they were still snatching human babies. The sheer, audacious cruelty of it ripped through my already shattered composure.
This is what they do. This is what they always do. The memory of my lost friends, the boy face down in the courtyard, of all the disappeared children, was a renewed, raw wound. I stared at the fae woman, then at the innocent, stolen babies. My heart, already aching for Fia and her terrible, bleeding absence, splintered into a thousand jagged pieces.
“Mind your keeper, Líadan,” Dermot stated, his hand still resting on the carriage door. “As you always did.” His thin smile was heavy with icy triumph. He shoved me deeper in and shut the door firmly.
Instead of darkness, tiny specks of light, dim so as not to stir the babies, flared into existence. It was like someone had blown the fluffy seeds of a dandelion into the carriage, each mote floating in the air and emitting a soft, warm yellow illumination.
“Say nothing until we get to our destination,” the fae woman warned, her murmur soft and quiet, carefully modulated to avoid disturbing the infants in her care. Her eyes dropped instantly, focusing with fastidious disdain on the drenched hem of my skirt—the fabric now a heavy, black stain from Fia’s blood. Her blue eyes tightened, her delicate nostrils flaring, and her nose wrinkling in a visible, sharp shudder of disgust. It was a fleeting, but total, expression of revulsion.
She pushed a sharp, controlled burst of air out of her nose, clearly bottling her profound displeasure for the sake of the shared journey and the babies’ comfort. “We’ll be a few hours. You can change there.” Her voice shifted, flat and dismissive, as if addressing a piece of spoiled luggage. “Sleep if you want.”
The urge to defy her—to scream, to rail, to point out the blood of her cousin staining my dress—burned to a hot, painful point, and then snapped. Get angry, and disappear. The memory was a switch. Obedience was survival. Disobedience was death.
A familiar, unfeeling mask instantly slipped into place, settling over my features and detaching my mind from the devastation. The familiarity of it—how easy it was to find the cold, silent shell of the girl I used to be—sickened me. The ultimate horror was that the training still worked.
I said nothing. I moved to the cushion opposite the woman and sat down stiffly, arranging my limbs. Like the people cowering in their homes, I simply watched.
*
The journey was a pressured silence. Every second balancing on pins, every second a minute, every minute and hour. I did not sleep. Even when the absence of adrenaline made my body heavy and dry eyes begged to close, a nudge of panic pinched in my chest. I was afraid of what waited for me when I closed my eyes.
The gourd-carriage swayed and jolted with unnatural smoothness, an illusion of motion without the familiar bumps of a road. Whenever I caught the fae woman’s eyes on me, my mind replayed the image of Fia’s lifeless eyes. So I watched the innocent, slow, steady breaths of the babes. Seeing them stoked coals of rage, of a desire to survive, so I could pretend to be numb and detached.
The fae woman remained a picture of serene, detached beauty, occasionally stroking the cheek of the infant in her arms, feeding them with a thick, yellowed substance that smelled of milk when they stirred.
Then, the gourd-carriage shuddered gently, a soft tremor that signaled a halt. The subtle glow of the internal dandelion-lights dimmed slightly.
A moment later, the door hissed open.
Dermot stood framed in the opening, his tall, broad figure silhouetted against an entirely unfamiliar landscape. Gone were the distant lights of Porth Sêr and the mundane darkness of the human world.
We had arrived at a fairy circle.
An arch of mushrooms, their white caps bright under the high waning mood overhead, marked the entrance to a patch of ancient woodland. The grass within the circle was an impossible, vibrant emerald green, so lush it almost throbbed with life, a stark, breathtaking contrast to the dead, yellowed grass and sparse undergrowth that lay just beyond its boundary. The air here was alive, thick with the scent of wet earth, blooming night-flowers, and something else—something sharp and electric that prickled my skin.
Dermot spoke, his voice low and formal. “We’re ready to enter the Veil now, Bethan.” He made no eye contact with me, his gaze sweeping over the fae woman and the sleeping infants. I was simply part of the cargo, beneath his notice.
Then, with a soft thump, he closed the door.
The message was clear: I was invisible again. Only worth seeing if I earned a reward or a punishment. The bitter familiarity of it twisted in my gut.
Bethan, the fae woman, turned her attention to the infants. From a small, intricately carved wooden box bundled with dried leaves and string, she carefully extracted tiny, glistening seeds—oblong, ruby-toned fruit with a dark pit. They smelled faintly of musk and ripe berries. With unhurried precision, she squeezed one over the mouth of the baby in her arms, letting a single, ruby-red drop of juice fall onto its soft tongue. The baby gurgled, its tiny mouth instinctively sucking. She repeated the process with the infant in the woven basket, the blue blanket shifting as the baby stirred, then settled.
Then, her deep blue eyes met mine, holding out one of the tiny red seeds.
“Swallow this,” she ordered, her voice flat, unbothered, as if dispensing medicine to a captive animal.
My heartbeat sputtered. The seed was unnervingly beautiful, vibrant against her gold-touched skin. A thousand questions, a thousand warnings, screamed in my mind. Was it poison? A truth serum? A charm to bind me?
Bethan’s lips curved down, an annoyed tightening around her eyes as she noticed my hesitation. “Líadan,” she said, using my old name like a command, a chain rattling in the dark. Her voice remained soft, but the underlying threat was unmistakable: Stop wasting my time.
Obedience was survival. I took the seed.
It felt strangely soft, almost alive, in my palm. I brought it to my lips and, with a painful effort of will, swallowed it whole.
The moment it passed my throat, a burst of tart, fruity sweetness exploded on my tongue, the taste like concentrated sunlight and wild berries. It was immediately followed by a strange, exhilarating tingling that spread rapidly through my entire mouth, down my throat, and into my chest. It felt familiar—likely the same ritual from my own infancy. The air around me seemed to sharpen, colors deepened, and the distant rustling of the forest became incredibly clear. I hadn’t realized how dull the world had been until now.
But the clarity was not just sensory.
It awoke something else. A trickle, a downpour, a violent flood—an intense, deafening rush of thoughts drawn to my mind, reaching me without the need for touch.
The dulled boredom of the fae guard outside: The last gathering of spring. At least we’ve got a feast to look forward to.
Bethan’s cold assessment of me: What a waste recovering a human so plain. She’s pretty enough, but nothing special. And now she smells of blood—
Dermot assessed a dried stain on his dark leather boot. Will it be one day locked in the hole or two? They’ll get over it. She’s replaceable.
And then, piercing the terror, the last hum of a human mother’s voice, a lullaby that was never meant to be goodbye, echoing from the innocent infant in Bethan’s arms: Cysgwch, fy mabi, mae mam y mamau yn eich amddiffyn. [Sleep, my baby, may the mother of mothers protect you.]
The burst of thoughts—the cold contempt, the sickening dismissal of Fia’s death, the raw grief of a stolen mother—trickled to a painful halt. My mind was mine again. Yet, the world was still infinitely brighter, dangerously more connected.
I looked at Bethan, the tingling sweetness still vibrant on my tongue, the world now blazing with new, terrifying clarity. If she’d noticed my sudden, agonizing sensory overload or suspected anything unusual about me, it wasn’t evident on her calm, unbothered expression.
Dermot gave an unseen signal outside. The gourd-carriage gave a deeper, sustained shudder, a low thrum resonating through the hardened sap walls.
The shift was a physical snap—sharp and immediate, like a taut string breaking inside my chest. One instant, the air was cold, damp, and scented with human earth; the next, it was impossibly rich, warm, and heavy with the dense perfume of unbound magic and blooming night-flowers. We were crossing into the Veil.
The magic hummed against my newly sensitized skin, a dizzying pressure.
I don’t belong here, I thought desperately, fear twitching the emotionless line of my mouth. But a voice—a raw, aching voice that sounded too much like my own—whispered back, I never belonged there either.
The realization was a biting panic. Fia’s body, cold and alone, forgotten in the dark, cellar smelling of rot and wine. Our dusty, mismatched wagon was rotting or hauled away with the inn’s trash. Beady, abandoned in the warmth of the inn’s stable, waiting for a master who would never return. They were anchors, and I had been violently ripped away. The agony of the loss was unbearable, threatening to shatter the old, fragile mask of composure built to fit a child. Maybe it didn’t fit me anymore; maybe I had changed too much, transformed by Fia’s influence.
My fingers gripped the edge of the iridescent seat cushion with agonizing, white-knuckled force. The silk was slippery, cold beneath my fingers, the surface barely denting under my desperate pressure.
Across from me, Bethan’s blue eyes flicked down, assessing, noticing the tremor that ran through my body and the desperate clutch of my hand. She saw the fear, the grief, the panic. But she said nothing, her silence a potent form of contempt, acknowledging my distress only as a minor, manageable flaw—a flaw soon to be corrected.
You are clever, Líadan. And brave. You can save yourself.
The voice was back, quiet and firm, layered over the hum of the Veil crossing. Not my thought, but the memory, perfectly recreated in the gentle timbre of the purple-eyed boy. It was the only tether I had left to a time I felt safe, to a self that felt real.
A deep, silent breath forced the heat of panic down into a shallow reservoir of determination. My spine straightened. The trembling ceased. The muscles in my face tightened, smoothing out every readable sign of sorrow and fear. The mask—that cold, numb, unfeeling detachment—slid back into place, settling over my features.
I have to make it fit.
Líadan, the compliant captive, was my only path to survival now. It was a self-betrayal, a final, necessary sacrifice of the girl Fia had saved.
But beneath the surface, where the tart sweetness of the fae seed still tingled, I knew there was a crack. And into that crack, a tiny, dangerous seed of hope and resistance had already been planted.
We stopped again, so soon, the brief but chaotic leap into the Veil ending with a gentle, resonant thud.
The gourd-carriage shuddered one last time, and Bethan’s shoulder relaxed, the tension leaching out of her posture—an indication that we had finally made it to our destination, deep within the Veil.
“Dermot will take you where you need to be,” Bethan stated simply. She wasn’t a guard, and she wasn’t responsible for me past the confines of the carriage. She was a rearer, a teacher, a minder. I knew her role intimately, sickeningly. She would stay with these stolen infants as they grew, building a coerced connection, a false love designed to bind loyalty to House Edris.
I had witnessed it. Felt it. When Fia had snuck in to save me ten years ago, there were only two faces that made me hesitate—blurry, half-forgotten faces now. One was the boy with the purple eyes, and the other was my minder. It was the fae’s cruelest manipulation: teaching a child to love the hand that held the leash.
Bethan deboarded the carriage with inhumanly steady steps, the woven basket looped over her arm, carrying both soft infants with the same effortless grace. Dermot was waiting for me outside the carriage door. No glance, no acknowledgment of my existence—just standing rigidly, waiting. We both knew what our roles were.
The moment my boot touched the ground—the strange, tingling sensation of connecting with a realm saturated with magic—he moved. His stride was long and soundless. I was expected to follow without comment or complaint, so I did.
In front of me was a vast courtyard, a space wide enough for a small army, let alone the three gourd-carriages. The carriages had parked far enough from the main building that I had to crane my neck to see the manor—a deliberate choice, I was sure, designed to remind me of my smallness, my insignificance.
The grand manor of House Edris was a spectacle of symmetry. The first sign of their desire for rigid order. It was built from rustic, pale grey stone, but its beauty was derived from perfect geometry. Rounded archways repeated with flawless precision across the facade, each one supported by a pair of narrow, towering Ionic columns, their fluting catching the lazy first light of the approaching dawn. The stone was old, yet the structure felt startlingly new, vibrant with the controlled natural growth that was woven into its design. Thick, ancient vines crawled up every column, adding deep emerald greens and delicate, unfamiliar sapphire blooms that seemed to obey the strict lines of the stonework, ever straying, never wild.
The main entrance was a foreboding tableau of carved uniformity, framed by soaring twin columns. That was for guests, for fae nobility, for those worthy of a grand welcome. Not for me. Humans and servants used the side entrance—a narrow, discreet archway tucked between the building’s massive, imposing wings.
I was being led back to the shadows, back to my cage. But as I followed Dermot, my gaze drifted back to the gourd-carriages, now rolling on their own, smooth and silent, as if pulled by invisible horses towards a hidden stable. The tart tingling of the fae seed—the frail connection it preserved to my own will—was one small, meaningful difference. I was wearing the mask of Líadan again, the compliant captive, but I wasn’t the same underneath.
Fia saved me. She made me something new. The thought, sharp and fierce, cut through the numb despair. And the seed…it amplified something that was already mine.
I would survive. And maybe, just maybe, with my gift boosted by fae magic, there was some small, dangerous way I could change the story this time. I was Wren. Clever. Brave. Stubborn. And I could save myself.
Dermot moved with unnerving, fluid silence through the side archway, and I had to skip quickly to keep up. The air immediately warmed, the heavy pressure of stepping into my cage. The familiar, subtle scents of aged rose incense and beeswax-polished oak wood were a shock, instantly dredging up forgotten routines. Distant notes of voices were the only hint of life in the empty stillness of the secondary hall.
We moved swiftly, and the geometric architecture around me began to awaken ghosts.
We passed the music room, its large double doors closed, muffling all sound but the faint vibration of tuning instruments within. The room was imprinted on my mind like footprints pressed in snow: the cold gleam of silver harps, the hard, too-tall chairs I’d struggled to climb until I was seven. I could almost feel the rough, cool silver of a small flute hidden inside my tunic, and the terror of sneaking it out to our special spot, those precious, stolen evenings I risked to break the rule against unassigned play.
Next was the reading room. The rich, woody scent of the stored paper and leather bindings hit me, sharp and clean. Líadan, that was perfect. A soft, feminine fae voice, belonging to my childhood minder, echoed in my mind. She was congratulating me on the flawless recitation of a complex, rhyming fae poem, for delivering the text with such deep feeling—a poem I had hated. I remembered the artificial warmth of her hand on my shoulder, and the desperate, shameful need to earn that praise. It wasn’t love; it was performance.
Further on, the dining hall lay silent and immense, the long, dark mahogany table reflecting the faint, cold external light like a sheet of dark glass. I saw myself, younger, barely taller than the chair rail, hunched beneath that massive table with Elara, the girl who vanished. We were playing with simple straw dolls we’d fashioned in secret, our whispered giggles swallowed by the massive room. The pleasure of that small rebellion was now tainted by the adult knowledge of the surveillance that must have constantly watched us.
Dermot did not glance left or right. His path was precise, designed to skirt the grand, central areas of fae life. These were the training spaces, the only rooms the stolen children had been permitted to enter—the places where we learned how to observe our fae betters in order to appease, obey, and entertain them.
Finally, Dermot veered sharply away from the main wing. We crossed a threshold where the grand, polished marble gave way to simple, rough flagstone, the change loud beneath my boots. The temperature dropped, a gradual plunge, and the scent changed: less incense and polish, more harsh lye soap, stale starch, and the pervasive odor of burnt coal and simple, grinding exhaustion.
This was farther than I’d ever been. As children, we’d whispered about this place—where humans were banished when they got too old or weren’t talented or pretty enough to be worthy of being claimed by another fae house. We’d thought fourteen was old. We’d thought it was shameful to lack talent or fail to live up to their impossible beauty standards. How small and contained our world had been.
This was the human servant quarters. It was a world of its own—a utilitarian cage, all rough plaster and low ceilings, built into the sumptuous flank of the fae manor. As a child, it had felt like the most horrifying, forbidden space—somehow scarier than twenty lashes across our knuckles. It was a line I’d never crossed.
Dermot paused at the entrance to a cramped, dimly lit corridor. He finally looked at me, his blue eyes indifferent.
“Your duties begin now, Líadan,” he said. “Welcome home.”
*
Dermot didn’t linger. He left me with the human housekeeper, having banged open the door to her narrow bedroom without bothering to knock. The thin, slightly starved woman had stirred with a visible fright, scrambling from her thin, lumpy cot, clutching her worn blankets to her chest. She stumbled when she bowed to him, her joints audible. Dermot had left her with simple, cutting instructions: “Líadan is rejoining the household. She’s on probation, but you can work her the same as the rest.”
His choice of words was curious. It implied the servants’ quarters might not be my final placement. Maybe my childhood minder had convinced him I was talented enough at something to be traded to another house—but first, a punishment for running away. Or, the probation was meant to help them decide if I should be allowed to live.
Neither was a good option. Neither would make it easier to plot.
Dermot left without a goodbye, his silent retreat marked only by the thud of the exterior door closing in the main corridor. Fine by me. I hoped we’d never meet again. Or if we did, maybe it’d be his blood on my dress.
“At least you hide it well,” the thin housekeeper said, her voice dry and low, eyeing me with weary comprehension. “But he knows. Dermot can always tell which ones hate him.” She sighed and muttered under her breath, a gust of warm air: “Which is most of us.”
She moved past me to close the door. It jerked violently, warped from the abuse of Dermot’s hard shove. She heaved with her shoulder to close it, muttering a few foul, sharp words in a cadence I didn’t recognize. The door finally groaned, settling into alignment with a soft thunk.
I had heard human curses before, in the human realm, but never here. It had been a confusing lesson, but Fia had explained what those words of frustration or color meant. Still, I was surprised a human living under House Edris knew how to curse at all.
“Take that off,” she said, her voice sharp and practical, waving a hand at my grimy clothes, focusing particularly on my skirt. She waddled tiredly to a narrow, scarred dresser, yawning widely. “The day of a feast, and I have to get you ready.” She yanked open a drawer that fought her with a loud screech of dried wood. She picked through the tightly folded, coarse clothes. “We’re not exactly the same size, but you can’t go anywhere like that.”
I knew what she wanted. I wasn’t uncomfortable with the act of undressing. It was the sickening, paralyzing realization that this was another goodbye. It was stupid. It was Fia’s blood. But I couldn’t take it off. My trembling hands reached for the lining of my skirt, searching for the tied cords hidden under the waist. But my fingers froze, shaking violently. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. The fabric felt like the last piece of Fia’s presence, the last physical connection to the moment I lost her.
The housekeeper pulled out a fresh set of thin, old clothes and stacked them, stopping when she looked up and saw my breakdown. Hitched breath. Brimming tears. A fresh stinging pressure in my cheek, reigniting the pain in the partially healed bruise. Fear, stark and raw, widened the housekeeper’s eyes.
“None of that now,” she warned, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “Do that outside this room, and you’ll be dead before the sun touches the marble, you hear me? You cry later.”
Clumsy fingers fumbled on the cords, lacking the strength or coordination to undo the tight knots. It was an old, thinning wool dress, a boring brown. Nothing worth keeping. Except Fia’s death had touched this dress. I couldn’t let go.
The housekeeper left the stacked clothes pile on the narrow dresser and, slowly, approached me. “I don’t know what you’ve been through,” she said, her voice low and surprisingly gentle, the harshness gone. “But I can help. If you’ll let me.”
My chin jerked down and up. It was the only confirmation my paralyzed body could give. She accepted the stiff gesture. She went around my back, found the knotted cords, and with deft, practiced fingers, undid the knots. The slip of the heavy, soaked skirt down my legs was a suffocating punch that stole the air from my lungs. The smells of copper, cellar-damp, and old sacks of grain—the scent of Fia’s final moments—wafted up. I quickly stepped out of the discarded skirt, abandoning the ruin to the cold flagstone floor.
Fia saved me so I could live. The thought was a lash of cold resolve. The mask snapped back into place. I will live. I will get out. I owe her that.
The housekeeper bundled my sweat-drenched, bloodied clothes and tossed them into a corner heap with a dismissive nudge of her foot. I watched them land with a sickening finality.
“The skirt can be burned. Now, quickly,” she urged, handing me a thin, coarse chemise made of unbleached linen.
I dressed mechanically. The linen was rough against my skin, still sensitized from the fae seed. It smelled faintly of dry dust and lye, a clean, simple scent that chased away the lingering scent of copper and damp cellar. Next came a simple brown woolen under-dress and a shapeless, dark grey apron.
The housekeeper, whose name was Nia, let out a short, surprised breath. “Well. It fits.” A sliver of genuine relief creased her tired face. “I wasn’t sure your figure would… well, it doesn’t matter now.”
Nia was thin to the point of appearing skeletal, her cheeks hollowed, and her joints too prominent for her age. I immediately processed the comparison. My figure was healthy, even robust, due to ten years of Fia’s meticulous care—I’d always been fed, clothed, and protected from the draining overwork of a servant’s life. Nia’s starvation was obvious, a stark contrast to my own unexpected fitness.
Was it stress? Or did the fae simply not feed their human servants well?
I quickly found out the answer: both.
Every human I saw was a ghost. They moved with a hurried, silent efficiency through the cramped, dimly lit passages, their faces grey and drawn, eyes sunken and ringed with exhaustion. Their clothing hung loose, and their hands were calloused and red from constant scrubbing in freezing water. They looked less like staff and more like starved wraiths haunting the magnificent halls of their captors.
The work started before sunrise and never stopped. I mirrored Nia’s movements perfectly, my mask of numb obedience locked into place. I swept floors, carried heavy, rattling buckets of ash from the grates, and scrubbed the marble floors until they gleamed. Every physical task was a dull weight, pulling my mind away from the agonizing memory of Fia.
The most crushing revelation came during the servants’ meager midday meal. We were led to a cramped, low-ceilinged hall where a thin, watery stew was ladled out with precise, measured economy. It was tasteless, utterly lacking the richness or fat needed for sustenance. It reminded me of the same thin and tasteless stews Fia and I had forced ourselves to consume on the road when supplies ran desperately low—food meant only to stave off collapse, not to nourish. Here, it was deliberate.
My plot to survive and escape would need to overcome more challenges than I’d anticipated. At least the fae minders fed the children changelings generously. I doubted a well-cleaned floor would earn a second helping or a sweet treat. No rewards for good behavior here.
After the midday meal, the mood in the servant wing changed abruptly. I’d heard murmured mentions of a great Feast of Crossing, of high-ranking guests, but the work I’d participated in had felt ordinary. It wasn’t until Nia and a fae butler went room by room, organizing the human staff into rigid lines, that I realized the true nature of the evening’s event.
The fae butler, a tall, elegantly dressed male with sharp, colder-than-ice blue eyes and hair bound in silver cording, immediately dismissed anyone who didn’t meet the standard—too skinny (a cruel irony), too many scars, a fresh bruise, or simply unattractive by fae standards. The dismissed workers returned to their chores, relieved they weren’t worthy of notice. The young, pretty youths were observed longer, their skin smoother, their features sharper. The butler selected the clear favorites—servants who hadn’t looked nervous like the rest, just resigned to being chosen.
The selection process was sickening. A few he examined more closely, asking them to turn, to roll up their sleeves, and to lift their skirts or trousers so he could inspect their limbs. He asked Nia murmured questions about their capabilities and talents—and Nia would approve or recommend someone else. The need for many presentable humans strongly implied that the evening’s entertainment went beyond simple serving. The fae liked their human trophies beautiful, compliant, and available.
When the fae butler finally made it to me, I expected my probation status to eliminate me immediately. Instead, his piercing blue gaze swept over my face, lingering on my full cheeks and healthy figure. He turned to Elspeth and spoke one questioning word, his voice smooth and cutting:
“Líadan?”
My breath caught, my muscles seized. Panic. I was singled out. No. There were only ever two types of people whom the fae remembered: the ones they wanted to claim and the ones they wanted dead.
Nia affirmed I was her—Líadan—and the mask made it true. She quickly reminded the fae butler that it was only my first day back.
“A bit pale, but a pleasant enough face,” the fae butler said, his assessment impersonal. The bruise had completely faded, the swelling gone thanks to the healer’s unique medicine. “Interesting eyes,” he said, his own azure blue meeting mine with unnerving intensity. “Do you remember your schooling, girl?” he asked, the question laced with expectation.
The prickle of panic gentled into a sharp, thrilling hope. My hunch about Dermot’s wording had to be right. My probation wasn’t linked to a literal death sentence; it was testing if I was still the obedient, well-trained little human they remembered. They wanted to trade me—to earn coin or favor from another house. And my memory, my training, my past self, might be my first weapon.
“A Mháistir onórach, beannaím go maith duit,” I recited, the archaic Seelie greeting slipping from my tongue in the flawless, rhythmic cadence I’d been drilled on as a child: Worshipful Master, I greet you well. I executed a deep, swift bow. The movement didn’t have the effortlessly graceful mastery I’d had at age ten, but I could feel that it impressed. I felt it in the eyes of the servants on either side of me—a line of surprise, jealousy, and confusion. Líadan might not have been the best or the prettiest of the changelings her age, but she was never short on praise. I’d made her that way.
“Good,” the butler said, the slightest, almost imperceptible brightening of his icy eyes. His comment was simple, giving nothing away. Yet I recognized the proud, proprietary pleasure in that gaze.
“She’ll be the last,” the butler said, pivoting sharply, a final dismissal that sliced through the air.
Nia quickly shouted at everyone to get back to their duties, reminding a few of the human men that the kitchen would need them promptly in two hours to help with the heavy lifting. Then Nia gently grabbed my arm above the elbow and muttered, “You’re too clever for your own good, girl. You never should have answered that well.”
The servants chosen to be face-to-face with the high-ranking guests were corralled into two preparation rooms—the young men to one, the young women to another. Inside our room, the air was warmer, scented with almond oil and crushed petals. Fae women waited to ready us—to make us presentable enough to satisfy the honorable visitors.
Our plain, practical dresses were traded for slightly finer, more revealing dresses in House Edris colors—a shimmering, deep blue trimmed with verdant green piping. It was my first time wearing clothing that exposed the skin between my neck and shoulders. At least it was fitted tight enough not to shift or droop.
A fae woman tapped a powdery, crystalline substance onto a puff and dabbed it onto our faces. Looking at the others, it seemed the powder erased the appearance of tiredness—like we’d all had a full night of deep sleep in seconds. Strangely, I felt intensely more awake and rested. Whatever magic was sprinkled in that powder, it made up for the entire sleepless carriage ride.
The fae gave everyone a firm, cold reminder: “Whatever they want, you give.” The implication was not only for service—it was for companionship, for dancing, for the darker, more intimate desires fae reserved for their beautiful human trophies at large, boisterous feasts. The air was thick with unspoken violation.
A few of the human women muttered a despairing, “May we meet again,” to each other—a goodbye weighted with the understanding that they might not survive the night without some form of irreparable damage.
Cold determination hardened my resolve. I had survived twenty years here as a child. I had survived Fia’s death. I could survive a party.
But as my eyes scanned the ornate room, a terrifying thought surfaced: I knew how to serve a proper fae tea ceremony, and I knew how to recite poetry. I had absolutely no idea how to survive a room full of powerful, intoxicated fae lords, and I had no time to learn.