Chapter Nine: Survive
For the next moon’s cycle, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Life went on, and though I tried to put the thoughts from my mind, tried to focus on what was expected of us children, I found the question of my parentage returning to me over and over again. I would manage to force it away for most of a night, but then it would come back as we lay down to sleep and keep me awake for hours. When finally I would manage to drown it out again with random thoughts of what we might be expected to do the following night, I would sleep only to wake realizing I’d thought about it in my dreams. Night after night passed that way as the moon grew smaller in the sky, coming down from its full ripeness to a thick wedge, then to a thin sliver, then disappearing entirely. The night of the new moon, when the howling and screaming returned, with so little time spent working and no moonlight to distract me, was by far the worst.
I was driving myself insane, and all because there was nothing to know.
I knew barely anything about my parents. The question of their identity had crossed my mind growing up, but orphans were not uncommon among those I lived and worked with, and, as such, the thoughts sealed themselves in the back of my mind, leaving only a thin scar to mark their place. But the night of the Calling had broken that scar open, and the wound was fresh and bloody again, refusing to scab over.
I remembered the old woman who’d cared for me telling me about my mother, saying my mother had died alone in childbirth, and that made sense to me. It was a story that had been told many times throughout the corner of the world from which I’d come: a woman taken by a man, either through force or cunning, and then abandoned the next day with a baby in her belly, a bastard that made her not fit for family or compassion.
Had I been that unwanted girl?
I wanted it to be the case that for however long they’d been together my parents had loved each other, but I had seen too much of reality to truly believe it. For every happy family, I’d seen ten ruined ones, and happy families did not lose their children and allow their daughters to wander the streets unloved and uncared for.
Had my father forced himself on my mother?
Had an Ilyn forced himself on my mother?
Or had the old woman lied? Had she told me my mother was dead to save me from the knowledge that I truly had been abandoned like others I’d known? Abandoned by a mother who couldn’t be saddled with another mouth to feed…
I’d seen it once. I’d hidden at the end of an alleyway, cloaked in shadows thrown by the tall wooden walls of the town inn and mayor’s house standing side-by-side, the only two-story buildings in the whole place. I’d run there looking for shelter, chased by wild dogs – that happened sometimes in bigger towns – and seen a woman, dirty and haggard, the lower half of her rags drenched with fluids I didn’t want to think about, placing a bundle of some kind on the ground. Tears were running down her face, and she was sobbing and shaking, but when the bundle was down she ran away, limping in pain but never looking back. The bundle had started to cry, and I’d run forward, but then the dogs had been after me and so I had kept running, and the baby was left but the dogs stopped chasing me and I couldn’t think about what had happened after I’d left the alley, couldn’t think about why the dogs had stopped –
“Mol!”
My name, hissed by Faolan as he passed me with a pile of silken bed sheets, brought me back to reality. We’d been transferred to another Paecsie with the advent of the new lunar month – a Paecsie named Tilar, who was, to my surprise, male.
I quickened my pace, holding the pile of sheets that I was supposed to carry out into the corridor to where a waiting basket had been placed to hold the soiled silk. I dropped them in, hearing them rustle against themselves and feeling them slide easily off my well-calloused hands, the sensation momentarily warming my fingers. I felt the thoughts start to come back, gnawing at the edge of my mind, worrying away at my sanity like a dog with a bone.
I turned back to the room and was stopped at the door-less entryway by Tilar. He had the same pigmentation as all the other Paecsies: olive-yellowed skin and dark eyes, but with wings that were larger and thicker, and form-fitting clothing that showed the wider shoulders and slimmer waist that made him seem male.
“Stop,” he said, his sharp teeth clacking at me as he held out a hand. He looked up over my shoulder and nodded. “They’re ready.”
I didn’t need to turn around to know it was Ai’Ilyn who’d arrived. She’d begun to disappear when we were in the care of other Fae, though none of us could figure out where she went. The injunction against talking still held true, and the other Fae knew it: we were often watched over by other Ilyn or even one of the Urden, who didn’t hesitate to enforce the rules Ai’Ilyn had left with them.
“Good,” Ai’Ilyn said, her voice calm and controlled.
The others filed out to join me in the corridor, and soon we were walking through the maze. I thought I could recognize every other corridor, but I was soon lost all over again. The long wooden corridors and the passing Fae blurred and ran as my eyes unfocused and turned relentlessly inward again.
Which one of my parents had been a Fae?
When we arrived in the refectory and were placed into our side room for food, the others began to talk. I didn’t join in – I rarely did. Faolan sat across from me as he always did, both of us at the end of the table closest to the door, and together we attacked our bowls of food. It was the same as every other day – roots and leaves, berries and fruit, honey and nuts. Some of the others complained about it, saying they wanted meat like the Ilyn got – something we’d all noticed by now – or a piece of fresh bread, warm and buttery.
I don’t know how they expected me to join in with that. I’d never had a fresh loaf of bread in my life, and the stale ones had never come with butter. Mold sometimes, but that could really only count as a bad kind of cheese, which, while related to butter, really didn’t fit into the same –
“MOL!”
Shocked, I looked up.
Sitting next to Faolan today was Gwenel. Her long, mousy brown hair was puffed up around the sides of her face, and though she’d pulled it back behind her head as much as she could with a stray piece of silk she’d been allowed to keep, it was too wily to be kept contained for long. Some of the thinner strands had already broken their confines and were laced about her head like fine spider weaving, and some of the bulkier ones hung boldly down before her eyes, boldly exhibiting their haughty protestation against their imprisonment. Her brown eyes were intent on me, her brow was furrowed, and her mouth open: clearly she was the one who’d just called my name.
A split second after I looked up and caught her eye, she swallowed and seemed to draw back, and I realized that I must be staring at her quite intensely. I tried to unknit my brow and moderate my frown, but I don’t think I did very well. She still looked like a wary deer, ready to run at the first sign of sudden movement.
The room had gone quiet as everyone looked down the table at the two of us, but, when neither of us spoke again, they laughed, led in the chorus by Tristan, who did a passable impression of Gwenel’s shriek followed by a heavy scowl that brought gales of laughter from Celin in particular, whom the others turned to and laughed at in turn.
The attention off of us, I turned back to Gwenel and continued to watch her, unsure why she’d yelled my name.
“She was trying to get your attention,” said a voice to my right.
I tilted my head just far enough that I could see past the thick black curtain of my hair. Brandel was sitting there beside me, food once again squirreled into the pouch of his cheek as he earnestly observed the scene. I have never met anyone else, before or since, with such an open face or lesser capacity for guile.
He looked between Gwenel and me with frank curiosity, his uneven blonde hair swaying back and forth as he jerked his head between the two of us.
“Why?” I managed to ask. My voice still came out as a croak, and I immediately wished I h
adn’t said anything. I started to withdraw into myself again, thinking they’d mock me for the way I sounded, but the one word seemed to be all the encouragement Gwenel needed to break through her fear.
“I was asking you if you were all right,” she explained, quirking her head to the side as she did. Her brown eyes were wide, and yet they had narrowed somehow, almost as if the pupils had tightened of their own accord. “You’ve been funny … ever since the Calling ceremony. Is it because you have to share the moonlight with us now? Are you mad?”
My surprise must have been quite clear, because Gwenel held up her hands defensively. “I don’t really like it,” she said, admitting things she didn’t need to in order to smooth over a problem that didn’t exist. “If the Ilyn didn’t make us, I probably wouldn’t.”
“I would,” Brandel said, looking at Gwenel as if she’d gone insane, clearly not understanding what she was trying to do. “It’s really great – and you said you did like it. Why are you lying?”
“Brandel,” she hissed, her muddy brown eyes wide and angry, as she jutted her chin toward him with a pointed look.
“No,” I said, surprised into speaking more than anything else. “No – I’m not … no.”
They absorbed this in a beat of silence, and then Brandel spoke.
“So then what is it?”
I shrank back away from the question, watching both of them in turn. What was this game they were playing? Were they trying to make me tell them something that would make me look stupid? Maybe they thought they could become part of Tristan’s group – the distant side of the table laughed again as I thought of them, effortlessly taking up their cue – by making fun of me.
But they were both looking at me with worry very clear in their faces, and it was this that stopped the downward spiral of my suspicions. I swallowed and cleared my throat, trying to force myself to ignore that warning voice shouting in the back of my head that told me not to reveal anything about myself, not to speak, to simply fade into the background. They were both looking at me with honest, inquiring faces. Well, Gwenel was. Brandel was wearing that dispassionate bird face again. Even Faolan was watching me, though his expression was veiled.
“The other night,” I said, then stopped when I realized my voice was too quiet. It felt like there was a latch in my throat that I couldn’t unhinge. I cleared my throat as quietly as I could, keen to attract no attention from the Tristan side of the table, and opened my mouth to speak again. “The other night … I was … surprised.”
Gwenel looked at Brandel with an ‘I didn’t get that, did you?’ expression, and Brandel just continued to stare at me, slowly chewing on a piece of his stored food.
I sighed and rubbed the back of my neck roughly, then scraped my cheeks with my fingernails and set my hands in my lap.
“I was surprised that the … the girl … she left.”
This time the muddy water of Gwenel’s eyes lit up, and it was clear she was following me now. I opened my mouth to continue, but a huge wave of anxiety came crashing over me and shut my lips again with a strange ploof sound. I shifted on my seat and clawed my hands together into one ball.
“The Ilyn,” Faolan concluded for me, watching with a soft and steady gaze. I felt the tension drain out of me as he said the words, relief that he’d gotten to the point.
“The Ilyn,” I repeated, and was completely surprised when my voice came out straight and intent without its usual croak. I glanced over at Gwenel and Brandel and saw they had exchanged an excited glance. Brandel had begun to chew faster, this time even swallowing some, and Gwenel was leaning forward, rocking on her elbows as she licked her lips.
“We’ve been thinking about them too,” she said quickly, though I had the impression Brandel was the one who most wanted to talk. He looked at her askance, and I could have sworn he sent her a nonverbal reproach for speaking, which slid right off of her. She was just as oblivious as he was.
“What about them?” Faolan asked, shifting his eyes from me to them. I didn’t know what was more surprising about this meal – that I’d been drawn into a conversation or that Faolan had.
“Well,” Brandel said, rubbing the bridge of his nose as a greasy strand of his thin blonde hair tickled him there, “we’ve been thinking about what it means that the Ilyn can be parents. It means that they must be a little bit like us – a little bit like people. I know they don’t look like it, but it means that they must be, otherwise how could they … well … make babies?”
He blushed furiously red at this, and Gwenel smiled awkwardly, looking as though she wanted to giggle but couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. Faolan rolled his eyes.
“But, also,” Brandel continued quickly, eyeing Faolan, “it got me thinking about what happens outside the Bower. Think about it – where did that Ilyn take the boy? Where did they go? And what are all the Ilyn here for? What are all the Fae here for? What’s the purpose of this place at all? Why don’t all the children who come here just go to live with whoever their Fae parent is –?”
“Meal’s over.”
Brandel cut off abruptly and swallowed the huge lump of his food. I spun and saw Ai’Ilyn standing in the doorway, looking down on us imperiously. Her face was stony and silent, and I couldn’t tell if she’d heard any of what we’d been talking about. We stood and filed out, Tristan with a swaggering reluctance that earned him a sharp slap and a fresh bruise, the rest of us with studied eagerness.
We didn’t have a chance to speak more that day as we scrubbed more floors, but the questions Brandel had asked had infected my earlier thinking, and now new questions plagued my mind.
What did we really know about the Ilyn? They were vaguely human, that was true, but they were also clearly Fae. If one of them had managed to have a son, was it possible the others could too? How did he get out of the Bower and into the world outside if he was one of the Ilyn who took care of the children? Did it mean he’d had a child with someone while they were here? Had he only recently come to the Bower? Did Fae come and go all the time?
But time wore on and the questions were left unanswered. More weeks passed, and then another Calling ceremony where none of the children were claimed, and finally the questions faded. There was always more work to do. Ai’Ilyn kept us scrubbing floors until we were used to it – then she had us carrying bales of roots up from the deep caverns into the refectory, a chore that left my back a mass of tortured muscle – then she had us in the field, pulling rocks from the ground and tossing them into the forest – then she had us in the highest branches of the Bower picking berries from huge thorny brambles that grew all throughout the leaves of the tree, giving us several dozen prickle wounds each to add to our growing inventory of ailments. In the midst of all this, there was no time for idle thought.
By then, most of us had begun to follow the rules – even Tristan. He still acted out, using his sickly sweet baby voice to protest his innocence when he was caught, but his resistance was no longer the outright rebellion of his earlier days; it seemed instead a token show of protest. His moods changed as quickly as the moon, though, and each night found him in a different humor. He could be happy and smiling one minute, and then yelling at even Igrin or Celin, his most devoted followers, the next.
All told, the shock of our life at the Bower was wearing off. Our work changed night by night, but it was always there, bordered on either end with food and sleep. It rained a dozen, the heat rising high the night before and then breaking the night of, letting forth a downpour of water that seemed ready to flood out everything in the entire forest. But come the next moonrise, everything was still standing, the children were still set to work, and the Fae still moved about the Bower.
We had adjusted, each in our own way – all except for Durst.
For the first month, he’d borne up along with the rest of us. For the second month, he’d been withdrawn and often quiet, speaking neither with Tristan and his group, nor making an attempt to speak with Brandel and Gwenel who were out
siders but still more approachable than Faolan and I. He laughed at jokes Tristan made, and that made him tolerated, but none of us really knew him. We just knew he was there, silent and waiting.
Then he began to cry.
It started at night, when at first he thought no one would notice, or so I assumed. It was just sniffling at first, and I thought that maybe I was the only one to hear it. He slept in the nestle directly next to mine, and if I could barely hear it, then the chances were that Aelyn, who slept like the dead on the other side of him, never heard it at all. When he did get to sleep, he tossed and turned, and even whimpered, like an animal being whipped. He started going through the nights of work with bloodshot eyes that were sunken deep in his face, and though he’d never before been disciplined by any of the Ilyn, he began to make stupid mistakes, dropping a bucket of soapy water so that it spilled, ripping a new bed sheet so it had to be replaced, stumbling as he carried a load of the root-vegetables up from the caverns so that they fell into the dirt.
He began to fall to pieces on a regular basis. He was a very fair child, with pale skin, wispy white-blonde hair, and blue eyes, all so light of color that it seemed as though he was barely there at all, like he might suddenly disappear in a heavy gust of wind that would take the aggregate parts that had been carefully fitted together to make him and scatter them back into the world.
There was nothing we could do about it. He simply refused to go on. Ai’Ilyn tried everything, and so creative was she with her methods of motivation that I think nothing else was possible. The normal punishments wouldn’t work on him – he never actually did anything wrong, it was that he didn’t do anything that was the trouble. Ai’Ilyn tried to motivate him with fear, using threats, but that made him dig in harder. She used shame – trying to make him feel like his behavior was beneath him, berating and belittling him where we all could see and hear, but all he did was look at her through red-raw, tear-streaked eyes and refuse to budge. She used encouragement, telling him she’d seen him do this or that task before, telling him he was nearly done, but he shook his head, screwed up his face, and didn’t or couldn’t hear her. Finally, she took him away – simply took him elsewhere while we were working – and did who knows what, but when he returned he was unchanged, and if anything seemed more set in his temper. He began to cry openly at night and keep us all awake until Ai’Ilyn came in and dragged him out by the ear, pulling him down the hallway as he fought, his cries only growing dimmer when they’d disappeared deep, deep into the Bower. When walking through the corridors, he let his legs fall out from under him and threw tantrums like a two year old, only crying harder when she ordered him to be silent.
Faolan said it was because he was too sensitive, that he was sweet and kind and couldn’t do what was being asked of him. He pitied the boy, almost like a younger brother. I was the only one who saw it for what it was:
He was a coward.
I hated him when I realized it, and when I saw that look in his eyes, that small piece of triumph that came the first time he was allowed to stay back after refusing to work, I hated him with my whole body, a visceral contraction that just raged through me until I could barely think about doing anything but slapping his stupid, smug face. What did he know about a hard life? He with his trimmed hair and nails, his white teeth and pudgy frame that showed he was well fed and loved. At the first sign of trouble, his instinct was to revert to childishness and force others to care for him. He’d rather give up, lie down, and let others play by the rules while he got around them. It wasn’t defiance he was doing; it was something dirtier, something that revolted me.
Now I look back and pity him. But I was a different person then – we all were different then, and to my rigid mind he was despicable. Even Tristan wasn’t that bad, I remember thinking – even Tristan wouldn’t stoop that low.
But eventually Ai’Ilyn found a way. The Ilyn always found a way.
It happened after all of the others had begun to run through the field in the moonlight ceremony, and I was spared the effort of trying to describe it. Brandel summarized it better than I ever could have anyway: “racing against time for the prize of happiness,” though Faolan said that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. But he said it while nodding, and I think that maybe he agreed.
They were introduced to it one by one, and if they couldn’t handle it they were taken out. It took several weeks for all of them to participate fully. Tristan was the first after me – I think Ai’Ilyn did it in an effort to push him off balance and knock him down a peg, but it didn’t work. At first I’d thought it would – we’d all thought so, even Tristan. On the night Ai’Ilyn told him that he would dance the moonlight, his eyes grew big and wide with fear before he remembered to feign indifference. When we got to the field, I watched him carefully and saw his legs begin to shake around the knees as he bit his lower lip and watched the empty expanse of the field. The moon hit its mark above us, and I rushed past him, grinning madly, and looked back to see Ai’Ilyn push him forward, the black and silver leather bag thrown around his shoulders and bunched around his neck like a noose.
But after the first faltering step, he seemed to swell, and I realized with moonlight-induced clarity that of course he would have no trouble. He was Tristan – he was born for this kind of madness. I remember even in the euphoria of the shining light feeling the sour taste of disappointment fill my mouth as I watched him laugh and run with all the others, never faltering in the dance. He gloated for weeks that he had managed it on his first try, and was obligingly worshipped by Celin and Igrin, both of whom asked him for tips on how to run it better, never even thinking to ask me, the one who’d done it when I wasn’t even supposed to.
But only Tristan and I were able to get it on the first try – even Faolan had trouble controlling himself his first night, and when the moon passed the zenith and the bathing light cut off, we saw him kneeling in the middle of the field crying, his face buried in his hands, his clothes smoking. He wouldn’t talk about what had happened with the others, but the next night he made it through so they dropped the subject. None of the others did much better, and many of them actually did worse. Brandel confessed openly during dinner after his first attempt that he’d started seeing things and hearing voices as soon as he’d stepped into the field.
“I heard my mom,” he said, and shuddered. I’d never seen him look affected like that before – hungry, curious, sometimes amused, but never sad or shaken. It was an odd thing, like watching a woodland animal talk about itself. Sadness and regret just didn’t fit him. “She told me that she’d been looking for me … told me that I needed to come back. That she was worried to death and that I needed to come home …”
Gwenel went through something similar, but she didn’t give us details. Celin wouldn’t stop running when the moonlight was over – we had to run him down and tackle him, all while he laughed maniacally, like we’d been playing some life-or-death game of tag – and Igrin said that she felt weighed down as soon as she set foot on the field, like she was trying to move with lead tied to her arms. Pinur Fe we found trying to dig himself into the ground with his bare hands, and Aelyn was just lying there prone after her first run, staring at the sky, saying that she’d seen angels. I asked Faolan once to tell me what it was he went through, when we were carrying roots up from the caverns. Ai’Ilyn was far ahead of us with those more likely to cause trouble, and we’d been left back, either by accident or design, enough that we were out of earshot.
“What happens to you when you go through the moonlight?”
My voice shook once as I asked the question, hitching over the word moonlight, but otherwise came out smooth. It was easy to talk to Faolan – like talking to myself.
He glanced up ahead of him, shifting the woven basket of Fae-vegetables, these ones large, purple, and cylindrical, so that he could see me better. He did the accustomed Ilyn-check, the quick flick of his eyes to either side that all of us had mastered, and then settled on me as we continued
up the slope.
“It just … hurt.”
“Hurt?”
“Really badly,” he said, his voice strained with the effort of carrying the basket but clearly also the tension of the memory. “Like knives all over my body. Like someone was … trying to cut off my skin.”
“Oh. Does it still hurt?”
“Not if I keep moving,” he said, “but I can’t get it out of my head. Every time I’m convinced I’ll feel the same pain again, and it makes it harder to go out there …”
He broke off, shuddered, and I asked him nothing else. Left alone with my thoughts, I couldn’t help but wonder:
Why had I never hesitated?
But whatever it was that was holding them back, somehow it grew less each time they tried. Faolan managed a full run by the third time through, coming back flushed and exultant, beaming and looking like some kind of conquering warrior. Brandel couldn’t stop talking about it by the end of the week he finished, just going on and on over meals about the sensations he felt and trying to analyze each one until Faolan and I both told him to stop. The others were all the same, joining in when conversation turned to the moonlight, even Tristan, who usually tried to pretend nothing in the Bower was worth his notice, and Pinur Fe, who rarely even smiled.
All of us but Durst. He was the last.
It made me seethe when Ai’Ilyn told him he’d be allowed to do it. How could she let him do this, this thing that was for the children who followed the rules, this great thing that I somehow knew was tied up in what the Bower was really about, tied up in who we were and who the Fae were and what underlay everything? How could she let him be a part of that? A part of us?
But I never asked those questions out loud. I knew the rules.
When she told him, he looked at first as if he’d simply refuse again and throw another tantrum, and part of me wanted him to. I wanted him to prove that he didn’t deserve this. I wanted Ai’Ilyn to see that she was wrong after all.
In the end, though, he did it. I saw his eyes light up when she told him he could; saw his ill-temper disappear and the feigned nervous ticks that he had picked up along the way fall forgotten as he stared with eager eyes at the field. When we’d all lined up, I wondered if he’d change his mind, and it almost looked like he would. He was nervously licking his lips and blinking, his whole face twitching.
The moon, that night a thin wedge on its way down from full, hit its peak, and the field ignited in silver fire. I lost sight of him in the mad rushing and dancing, and I didn’t think about him again until everything was done. I lost myself in the ecstasy, the pure rush of running and dancing as every nerve was lit on fire with frenzied laughter.
When it was over and we’d given out bags to the waiting Ilyn as we always did, I remembered, and turned to look for the boy. I didn’t see him with our group, didn’t see Ai’Ilyn either –
They were on the other side of the field, where Durst was attacking one of the other children.
Shock rang through me and I took a step toward them without really thinking about why. What was I planning to do? Help Ai’Ilyn? Defend the child? Subdue Durst? Would I be punished for interfering?
But Durst pulled away as soon as shouts began to ring out for someone to “grab the boy.” He stumbled back toward the center of the clearing framed by the high root-walls outside the Hollowed Hall, and I saw that he was holding a full bag of moonlight in his hands. As I watched, horrified, he ripped open the stitching with his bare hands, ripping as well two fingernails out of his skin, spraying a halo of blood around his feet. Everyone was shouting now, children yelling for him to stop, Ilyn yelling that someone needed to stop him, Ai’Ilyn rushing forward but two steps too far away.
He began to drink, gulping down the moonlit dew, a silver stream of liquid that ran over his face, his clothes, his entire body. I watched him shiver and saw his knees buckle and hit the ground. I saw his throat working, straining for every last drop it could take in, his shaking hands spilling the liquid as he quivered –
Ai’Ilyn pulled the bag away from him effortlessly, and he sat there for a moment, stunned. His cheeks and chin were streaked with lines of molten silver, and his chest was a gleaming mess of dew and off-white silk. His mouth was open in a dumbfounded “o” that made him look like a baby who’d just lost his bottle.
He slowly turned his head toward Ai’Ilyn, and then he began to convulse.
“GIVE IT TO ME!”
The shout cracked across the clearing in an alien voice like nothing I’d ever heard before. How it could have come from the boy’s throat I didn’t understand. He shot up, gaining his feet in a jerk that turned into a stumble, and then he launched himself at the Ilyn. She pulled the bag back behind her and caught the boy by the throat, her red and white hand holding him immobile. He let out a choked cry of despair, his bulging eyes focused only on the bag, his whole body jerking and shaking in strange waves and ripples.
“Gain control,” Ai’Ilyn said to him, her voice calm but with an edge of danger.
“GIVE IT TO ME – I NEED IT!”
“Gain. Control.”
“NO – NO – YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”
Her hand closed tighter around his throat, and suddenly he had no air with which to speak or breathe. His bulging eyes bulged further, so far out now that I thought wildly that they might pop from his head and dangle there like ripe cherries. He tried to pull back, jerked with all his strength, but Ai’Ilyn held him effortlessly.
“Gain. Control.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes, stamped his feet and struggled with all his might to free himself. His fingers reached up to claw at her hand, his legs arched out to strike her side, her knees, anything he could reach. Ai’Ilyn bore it all with no complaint. Her eyes were fixed on his and nowhere else, two fiery orbs that would not be denied.
“Gain. Control.”
“No!”
The word was no longer a shout but a rasping, ripping noise that flew from his mouth in a spray of spittle that mixed with the silvery dew and dripped down Ai’Ilyn’s arm in thick, ropey lines.
Ai’Ilyn’s jaw tightened and her lips twitched. She squeezed tighter, and I realized his time was up. His motions began to slow even as his lips and mouth opened and shut frantically, trying to gasp in the much-needed lungful of air that she was denying him. He tried once more to jerk back away from her, but it was a pitiful gesture that ended with him sliding to the floor, his knees buckling once more as the muscles lost their strength and went limp. Finally, his eyes rolled back up in his head and all motion ceased.
Immediately, Ai’Ilyn released her hold and dropped him to the ground.
He fell there, unmoving, and I watched with bated breath as she knelt over him. She raised her hand up to his face and parted his lips, held her ear to his mouth, laid a hand on his chest. She grimaced, pulled back, and rammed a fist against the ribs over his heart, sending a rippling thump through the clearing as the sound bounced off the high root-walls that surrounded the scene. She slapped his face, once, twice –
Durst pulled in a gasping breath, and then turned to the side and retched all over the grass, spilling watery, silver vomit over himself and everything within six feet. It was this that broke the spell holding the rest of us, both children and Ilyn, immobile. Everyone seemed to take a collective breath at the same time, and I realized that we’d all been transfixed by the scene. The usual ritual took over, and the Ilyn began to call for the children to follow them into the Hollowed Hall. I slowly walked across the field toward Ai’Ilyn, and felt the others following behind me.
She was holding Durst by the shoulders as he retched, the boy still convulsing and sending wave after wave of the moonlight back into the grass, where it stunk and shone, an abominative cousin of the pure dew it had been only moments before.
“Zal’Ilyn!” she called past us.
I turned and saw the male Ilyn who often looked over us when we ate. He was approaching by himself, and I wondered suddenly
where his children were. He’d said he’d had them – hadn’t he?
“Will you take them back to their nestle?”
“Of course. Where?”
“Same as always.”
He smiled.
“Change can be good, you know.”
Durst made a violent choking noise and brought up another wave of silver vomit, this one flecked with bits of undigested root and nuts. I heard someone gag behind me and turn away, and I only just avoided doing the same.
“Whatever works,” she said, thumping Durst on the back with a look of resignation.
We followed Zal’Ilyn up to our room that night, and, I think sensing that we needed supervision, he set himself up leaning against the wall beside the twisted entryway and watched us as we lay in our nestles, his eyes questing over each of us in turn, one by one down the row, until he reached the end and repeated the process in reverse.
I couldn’t sleep, and I don’t think many of the others could either. I lay awake curled in my blankets, heart racing in my chest, lungs balled up into a tight curl of tension in my throat. Could that have happened to any of us? Was that what happened to those who didn’t make it through? Would the boy survive? Maybe he was dying out there right now, dying in the moonlight –
There was motion at our door, and not a single one of us managed to keep from turning over to look at Ai’Ilyn and Durst as they re-entered the room. The boy was glassy-eyed and walked with the half-frozen gait of someone partially paralyzed. He dragged himself down the room, a cloud of stink following him all the way like a physical barrier that separated him from us, and then fell into his nestle, where he lay still and silent as the dead.
We turned as one back to Ai’Ilyn, unable to help but wonder what she would do next. She cocked an eyebrow at us – well, the skin where an eyebrow should be – and we all closed our eyes. I knew I wasn’t the only one, though, who invested every ounce of consciousness into straining to hear the Ilyn’s conversation.
“Thank you,” Ai’Ilyn said softly to Zal’Ilyn.
“My pleasure. You have a good group.”
Ai’Ilyn hissed at him, a low sound of displeasure that we were used to. Even now, when it wasn’t directed at me, I seized up in my nestle, knowing what it meant.
“Fine, fine, I’m going.”
I heard movement, the scratching of something hard against wood, and then the rustle of clothing … and silence.
“Go to sleep,” Ai’Ilyn said, loud enough that I winced back. She knew us well enough to know we’d been listening. “I’m here until you do.”
I heard the sound of her settling on the floor, and knew she meant what she said. I rolled over and tried to do so, and soon found I could.
When we woke, Durst was gone, but Ai’Ilyn was not.
We went about the day wondering where he was – even going so far as to discuss it over our breakfast as a whole group, the popular Tristan side pulling in me, Faolan, Brandel and Gwen for one of our rare moments of social cohesion. Nothing came of it – we went round and round saying how any of us could disappear too, how any of us might have ended up like Durst, and then someone else would say that we hadn’t, and someone else would say all that mattered was where he was now, but then someone would start back at the beginning saying wasn’t it terrible that any of us could disappear, how any of us might have ended up like Durst …
We didn’t seem him all day, and Ai’Ilyn told us nothing about him. None of us were brave enough to ask her, though we’d likely have received a slap and a rebuke in lieu of answers even if we’d tried.
He did reappear, though only once that night. After we’d eaten dinner and were heading out into the field for the moonlight ceremony, we saw him waiting at the open entranceway next to Zal’Ilyn. He was heavily bandaged around the chest and neck, and the two fingers that had lost their nails were encased as well. He walked slowly and his breathing was high and wheezy, and he wouldn’t look any of us in the eye as Zal’Ilyn pressed him forward to join us as we passed.
We all lined up for the moonlight, exchanging glances with each other, all of us together, once again in that strange social cohesion that appears when a group is collectively threatened, but Ai’Ilyn said nothing, and neither did Durst.
Was he going to run with us again?
Ai’Ilyn handed out our bags, going by each of us one by one … and skipping Durst. I was watching carefully so that I saw her skip him, and saw too the expression on his face turn from cautious hope to pain and finally settle on abject misery. He began to shake where he stood, and when Ai’Ilyn was done handing out the bags she turned to Zal’Ilyn.
“Hold him,” she said.
The moon hit the top of the sky, and we danced through the light. When it was over, I saw Durst staring at us like a thirsty man who sees water but is denied the chance to drink. Zal’Ilyn was holding tight to both the boy’s arms, and though Durst was straining forward, it was clear he was going nowhere. When the moonlight cut off, he began to whimper like a kicked puppy, and then to cry. We could all sense the beginning of a tantrum, but Ai’Ilyn headed it off before it could start.
“Take him back,” she said.
“You’re cruel,” Zal’Ilyn said with an admiring smile. Ai’Ilyn grimaced and said nothing. “Come on, boy,” he said, “time to go.”
He hadn’t let go of Durst’s arms, and so simply began to walk away, pulling the boy after him. Durst had no choice but to follow.
It was only then that I realized what Ai’Ilyn was doing.
Durst was back the next night just the same way, and again he was made to watch and then led away. The next night was the same, and the night after that, until he returned to us in his nestle one night on waking, his bandages gone and his bruises almost entirely healed, but his eyes haunted and staring. He ate with us, worked with us, but was held by Zal’Ilyn again that night during the ceremony as he strained to get into the moonlight. He was crying when we finished that time, and he had to be led away again.
Every night for the next week was the same.
Ai’Ilyn had found the way in. He’d happily gone through physical pain, through humiliation, through threats, through everything, but he was, at his root, a spoiled child who wanted what he wanted and knew not how to resist the call of the moonlight.
He lasted only to the end of the next full week. As if by magic, he suddenly could do all the things he’d wailed and cried and swore were impossible. He could scrub floors for hours at a time without crippling pains in his back; he could make multiple trips up and down the Bower with the Caelyr to fetch extra silk without wheezing; he could eat his entire bowl of food without grimacing or pulling a face.
Ai’Ilyn kept him out for another week, regardless.
He began to beg her. He didn’t want us to hear, but I made sure I was close enough to listen. It was the only time that my relationship with Faolan became strained – one of the only things in my life of which I’m truly and deeply ashamed.
I enjoyed the boy’s pain the way I’d enjoyed watching Tristan beaten. I am not, at heart, a good person, though thanks to him I’ve tried to be. I know now that it was a part of me that was tied up in the madness – tied up in who I was as a girl with Fae blood. It’s part of why they did what they did, part of everything this memory is about. I wish I could have seen it then. I wish I could have known what they’d turned me away from and appreciated it.
Did I forget all of this because I didn’t want to remember?
What matters, though, is that Durst taught me the lesson I needed to learn – taught us all the lesson we needed to learn. Everyone can be broken. It’s what makes us people. Because they can always, always get to you. But what makes you smart, what made you a survivor, is if you play their game until you beat them at it. Dignity, rage, shame, guilt, all of that gets in the way. It makes it impossible for you to realize that one truth – you are disposable. The only person that cares for you is you – the only person responsible for your survival is you – t
he only person you can blame when you lose control or you get hurt is you. You are responsible for everything in your life – you hold in your hands the keys to happiness or pain.
Life has rules. Even Fae can’t escape them.