Page 247 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“I think of her every day. Every second. And you—” Her voice broke, and I realized she was crying too, though while my tears were ugly and graceless, hers were silent and delicate.

Then, through the haze of my sadness, reality slipped in. I pulled away from my mother’s arms. Relief so quickly changed to fury.

“Meajqa sent you. Why?”

“Because he thought you needed me.”

My heart hardened. “I do not need you.”

“Everyone needs someone.” She reached for me, but I avoided her touch.

“No. Once I did. When I was a child, and I needed my mother to protect me. That was when I needed you.” Grief and anger ran together like bloody paint. “Orscheidneeded you. She fought for me and died for it. But you did not.”

Pain wrenched across my mother’s face. “You never need to forgive me. He drugged me for decades, and my mind was weakened. He took more from me than I ever gave. But the only thing I’ll ever regret is allowing him to do it to my daughters, too.”

“And yet you are still here while Orscheid is dead. WhileIdied.”

My mother was still on the precipice of tears. Again, she reached for me, and again I pulled away.

“Come home with me,” she said. “Let us talk somewhere warmer and safer than this.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” I snapped. “There is nothing for us to talk about.”

I turned back to the wall.

Leave. Go away. It is easier without you here.

But she didn’t move.

“I am very afraid of what I see happening, my love,” she said quietly. “How long has it been since you left this place?”

I did not answer, both because I didn’t want to and because I didn’t know.

“Caduan is preparing to make an irreversible move, Aefe.”

I disliked anyone speaking of Caduan in such a disapproving tone. I turned abruptly. “He is eradicating the humans, just as he always said he would. Good. They deserve it.”

“It is a mistake.”

I hurled my scoff at her like a weapon. “Spoken like a stranger. You have no idea what they did to me. I endured five hundred years of torture at their hands.”

“Then tell me of it,” she pleaded. “Tell me, my love, what they did to you. Let me help you bear that weight.”

My fingernails bit into my palm hard enough to draw blood.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her. The idea of trying to condense all that pain into words… it was too big, too much. If I let those words free, I couldn’t control what other ones might come with it.

There was the torture, yes. The room of white and white and white. But there was also the matter of what I became. What I did, as Reshaye. The unwelcome image of a marble floor and the bodies of five children struck me, and I pushed it away, just as I always had.

“Humans and Fey are capable of living together peacefully,” she said, gently. “You are evidence of that. Do you remember that?”

I remembered a dark-haired man, so long ago, meeting me in the moonlight in Niraja.

“I went back to him, Aefe. Your father—your true father. He was half human. We lived together, after the wars subsided. Me, him. His brother, Ezra, who too had lost everything.” Tears pricked her eyes. “He loved you so deeply. Even if he never had the chance to know you.”

I remembered learning a truth I was not ready to hear. And I remembered the father who had raised me trying to kill me for it.

“This body is new,” I said. “Lineage does not matter.”

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