Page 90 of A Land So Wide
His words rang with truth, but Greer shook her head anyway, wanting to deny it, wanting to hold on to one more moment in which she could believe it wasn’t possible. “No. She couldn’t be. She grew up in Mistaken. Everyone would have known. Her friends, her…” She stopped, about to sayfamily.
Ailie had had no family. Greer had guessed she’d been an only child and that her parents had died young. Neither Ailie nor Hessel ever spoke of them.
“We’re her family,” Finn said, following Greer’s unvoiced thoughts. “When she stepped out of that tree, all those years ago, she rewrote everything. She became part of Mistaken, as if she’d always been there. And the townspeople—all of them, even your father,especiallyyour father—believed it.”
“How do you know about the tree?” It wasn’t the question she wanted to ask—it wasn’t the important point—but Greer fixated on the detail. If she could catch him in a mistake here, maybe, somehow, all of the other things he’d said could be wrong, too.
“I saw it.”
She shook her head again. “Impossible. That was nearly thirty years ago.”
Silently, he watched her.
In the quiet, Greer’s mind filled, piling up questions and accusations, protests and words, words, so many words. But when she finally spoke, only one fell out. “How?”
Finn tilted his head, trying to follow. “How did I—”
“How didshe—how did she…” Greer let out a growl of frustration. “The Warding Stones keep the Bright-Eyeds away. She couldn’t have lived within them.”
“Not without being in a great deal of pain,” he agreed. “The stones do repel us, chafe us something fierce, but if we choose to set aside our skin, it’s bearable, for a time.”
Greer made a noise of disgusted horror. “Set aside your skin?”
Finn nodded. “She would have had some sort of clothing…it would have been precious to her. It held all her might, all her…” He made a gesture with his hand as if the word eluded him. “Shedding away her power would have allowed her to live within the Stones. It would have allowed her to become like them.”
Like me,Greer wanted to say, but she no longer knew who—orwhat—she was. A memory sparked. “Therewasa cloak. She kept it in her hope chest. I tried to put it on once…It was so beautiful…But she tore it from my hands before I could. She said it was too fragile for a little girl to play with. When I went poking through the trunk later on, it wasn’t there.”
“She would have found a new place to hide it.”
“But it…it didn’t look likeskin. It was so fine…covered in embroidered constellations and little stitched forests. It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.”
Finn looked wistful. “You’re one of the few who would have seen it that way. She’d enchanted it. No mortal eye would have thought it special. But you…” He tapped at her temple before sliding the pads of his fingers down her cheek to cup her face. “You have your mother’s eyes. Her ears, too.”
Belatedly, she shied from his touch, using the motion to feel at a lobe, even though she knew it wasn’t the shape Finn was referring to.
He offered her a sympathetic smile. “You hear things, yes? Things that, if you were a mortal woman, with mortal ears, you wouldn’t.”
She swallowed down her denial.
“See the frost?” he went on, easily, as if this were not upsetting everything Greer knew about herself or the world around her. “It’s cold out tonight.”
Faintly, she nodded.
“Yet here you are, bare-headed, without coat or mittens, socks wet and starting to freeze.” He pushed back the sleeve of her sweater and ran his fingers over the length of her forearm, coming to a stop at the delicate skin of her inner wrist. “There’s not so much a ripple of gooseflesh on you.”
Involuntarily, Greer shivered, then flushed, knowing her reaction had nothing to do with the temperature around them. “Iamcold,” she insisted, hastily pulling down the sleeve. “If it wasn’t for the fire—”
“You’re not as cold as you think, Greer Mackenzie. You’re never as cold as you believe you are.”
“Say I believe you,” she began slowly, reluctantly, looking at the fire, the trees, the frost. Anywhere but him. “Say any of this is true…what does that make me?”
“Special,” Finn answered readily, without hesitation. “So very special.” A loud rumble came from her stomach, breaking the moment, and he laughed. “Let’s get these rabbits roasting.”
Greer watched him break down their bodies, pulling off skins, pulling out organs. There were so many things she wanted to ask him, she scarcely knew where to begin.
“My eyes,” she started. “I saw them in the river. They’ve never looked like…” She swallowed. “I’ve never seen them shine like that. What did you do?”
Finn kept his attention on the hares. “You were hurt.”
