by C. E. Murphy
* * *
"I've been looking for her for seven years now," Cat finally said. She didn't want to hear her own voice, but some things had to be said. "I've looked and looked, and I can't find my way to her. She might be too far away, Kal." She met Kallie’s gaze, finding empathetic sorrow in her friend’s eyes. "It's always changing, you know that, right? The Waste? It's always getting bigger. It might be that I missed her exit by one step, because the Waste changed under my feet while I walked. I don't know. And I don't want to give up."
Kallie held a horrid silence for a little too long, then prompted, "But?"
Cat shrugged roughly. "But I know where this kid is. And I know if I put myself between Dad and them, then at least somebody will be safe from him. I think…" She faltered and her shoulders drooped. "I think Mom would rather I protected an innocent kid than found her again. If it had to be one or the other. I think…I think that's what she would want."
Kallie sat back with an explosive scowl. "Well, yeah, I guess so, because unless you were a real asshole, that's what anybody would want. And from what you've said, your mom doesn't sound like she was an asshole."
A faint smile twisted Cat's mouth. "I could be wrong. It's not like I was an adult who could see her and her faults clearly when she left. But no, I don't think she was. And I don't want to be. I mean, my dad is an asshole, Kal. He's demonstrably the kind of person who would kidnap a freaking embryo and—"
"He kidnapped you, too," Kallie said in a soft voice.
Cat's heart clenched, lungs tightening until they seemed empty of air. She stared toward the human woman, her vision blurring as blood rushed in her ears and her face heated. Kallie's expression, so challenging a moment ago, was shockingly gentle now. "He did, Cat. Maybe not in a way we think of as a traditional kidnapping, but the truth is he stole you for himself."
"He…I…don't think of it that way."
"I know. But you're pretty much a picture-perfect changeling story, Cat. The human child taken from the mother to grow up a powerful figure in Fairyland?"
"I'm not human." Cat's vision wouldn't clear, and her voice sounded wrong. Too thin, almost remote, like it belonged to someone else.
"Not entirely, no, but you're also splitting hairs and you know it. Listen to me, Cat." Words rushed from Kallie like she'd been holding them in for a long, long time. "I don't know what he expected of you, or what he thought your mother might stop him from making you. A powerful asshole, probably. You think he didn't expect you to survive the Waste—"
"Practically nobody does."
"—but I think he must have believed you would. I'm sure he didn't expect you to bolt for the World instead of going back home to the Torn, though, so whatever he thought he was making of you, he failed. Instead of getting a pawn, he got a queen. You can literally move in any direction, Cat. I get that you've sworn an oath to him, but don't let him trick you into thinking you're trapped, okay?"
"Pretty sure I am." Cat could finally focus again, but moved her attention from Kallie's impassioned gaze to the pile of food on the table between them. After a long few minutes of looking at it, wondering if she wanted to eat and knowing she didn’t, she said, "Okay," much more quietly. She glanced up to find Kallie still watching her with concern. "Okay. I'll try to remember that."
"Good woman. Now get another one of your watches before you finish dinner. I don't want you out there without one and I don't know how your jackass dad will summon you, so no risk-taking, or else."
"What are you, my mother?" Cat rose to do as Kallie said, though, mostly because it gave her an excuse to move. It wasn't exactly running away, but it was better than sitting still with the thoughts Kallie had injected into her mind. The way Kallie interpreted Cat's life, the perception that she had been kidnapped, just as her half-sibling almost had been…hurt. She didn't want to deal with it. Not now. Ideally not ever.
And the other thought, the suggestion that she might be a queen, not a pawn, was maybe even more frightening, or upsetting, or—something. Cat wasn't even sure what word to use for it. She wanted to dismiss the whole idea.
She could have dismissed it, if it hadn't been so apt. A queen, able to move in any direction.
Able to step in and out of the Waste at will.
It didn't seem likely to help get her out of her father's clutches, not with the oath she'd sworn, but the thought itself was goddamn uncomfortable, and felt like one she needed to wrangle with for a while. Like it might help her see something she'd never been able to.
Like she'd been the person keeping herself from seeing it, all along.
Cat pushed the thought aside as best she could and dug her box of Artifacts out from beneath a battered end table. Or perhaps it was her Artifact box, as it both held them and was one in and of itself. To Cat's eyes it was simple, silver filigree on the exterior and deep violet velvet on the inside, and not technically large enough to hold everything that could be put inside it.
Kallie, though, watched with the same slightly befuddled expression she always had when Cat got something from the box. It turned out an Artifact box, made of and holding magic, was hard for humans to see, even if they knew it was there. A furrow appeared between Kallie's eyebrows, like she was trying to hold the silver square in her vision as Cat pushed a couple of trinkets aside and withdrew a chunky sports watch. She closed the box and Kallie rubbed her forehead. "I know it's there. Why can't I see it?"
"Because it's meant to hide things, Kal. It wouldn't do much good if you could just see it, would it?"
"But I can see my watch!" They'd had this conversation about seventy times, and it annoyed Kallie every time.
This time, though, Cat thought she was going through its motions in order to give Cat some more time to bring her emotions back in balance, and if Kallie was making the effort to normalize things, Cat would play along. "The box is meant to hide Artifacts. Your watch is one of the Artifacts it would hide, if I hadn't given it to you. And its whole point is to allow you to call me. It wouldn't work if you couldn't see it."
"I guess." Kallie scowled at the bangly watch on her wrist, and finished up the entire ritualized set of complaints with, "But I still don't get why you don't make yourself something pretty."
"You do get it. You just like pretty things, so you want me to wear them. But everything in the Torn is pretty. I like chonk."
"I wish—" Those ill-advised words were always at the surface when they talked about the Torn, but they'd never slipped free after the first time Kallie had spoken them. Surprise, dismay, and finally anger cascaded across her features as she bit the rest of them back. "Sorry. I don't know—sorry."
"It's okay." It hadn't been, the first time she'd said them, and Cat was surprised to discover it was, this time. "I'd take you there for a visit if I could. If I thought it was safe."
"I know." Kallie's anger deepened, tension drawing lines across her forehead. "I'm sorry, Cat. You told me never to say that again."
"You didn't," Cat said, almost as gently as Kallie'd spoken to her earlier. "You stopped. And a wish half-spoken isn't made at all."
"I'm not sure that's how wishes work, Cat."
"I am." Cat sat down, strapped the watch on, and went back to eating injera. Kallie joined her after a hesitant moment, obviously still concerned about her slip, but she gradually relaxed, and after a while said, "Fuckin' Rick, Cat!"
Cat grinned into a bite of dinner. "What'd he do now?"
"You know that girl he's been seeing? Trina? He ghosted her."
Cat stopped with another scoop of food halfway to her mouth. "Really? I thought he really liked her. She seemed cool."
"'She seemed cool', from the coolest courier in town. High accolades, Cat, high accolades."
Cat snorted. She wasn't cool. She just dressed like she could kick your ass. Which, to be fair, she could. Kallie, clearly following her line of thought, grinned before saying, "But yeah, she does, and yeah, he did. She texted me a couple days ago to see if I knew where he was. She h
asn't heard from him in days."
"You have, though, right? He's on that long haul, isn't he?" Most courier jobs involved getting something across the city as fast as humanly possible. Some wanted to get things farther, faster than that; those were the people who paid Cat for the skill set she never explained. But sometimes there were long jobs that involved shuttling back and forth between states or countries, essentially running errands for people who wanted the anonymity of cheap flights and strangers not obviously on their payroll. Even Cat had done some of those, spending an afternoon in Rome or a weekend in Seville on somebody else's travel dime. Rick called himself a dogsbody and lived for the long hauls, seeing the world one random location at a time.
"He texted me yesterday, yeah. I read him the riot act about Trina, but he didn't even send a guilty gif in response. I dunno if he doesn't like her as much as I thought or if he just found a spectacularly hot babe in…wherever he is right now. Singapore, I think."
"Aw, poor Trina. I hope he's just pulling that girl-in-every-port bullshit that he likes to pretend he's got going on. He'll probably come back all full of sweet talk and apologies."A chill crawled up the back of Cat's neck and rushed over her, raising hairs on her arms. She ran her hands over her arms, trying to warm herself up, and wondered if she was more worried about Rick than she knew.
Kallie tossed her curls. "I hope she kicks him to the curb if he does."
"This is why you should go out with Diana," Cat concluded. "She figures you can't count on dudes either."
"You don't."
"Babe, I don't count on anybody but myself." Cat said it with a superior sniff, but knew it wasn't far off the truth, either. Most of her life, she hadn't. Even now, the idea that she could count on Kallie, on Rick, on one or two others, was strange enough that she couldn't sit comfortably with it. Another chill rolled over her, like someone was putting a cold hand on her nape and pulling the hairs there.
The third time it happened, she rubbed her own hand over her nape, shivering, then, like a slowly-dropping penny, realized somebody was pulling at her. "Fuck."
"Mmf?" Kallie looked up from stuffing the last bites of dinner into her mouth. "Waff wog?"
"I gotta go." Cat stood up, suddenly stiff with nerves. "Dad's calling me."
"He can do that?" Kallie swallowed hard to ask the question with an empty mouth and winced in discomfort at the bulge of half-chewed food straining down her esophagus. "Cat, are you okay? Is this okay? Are you cool?"
"I'm cool." Cat didn't believe it, but then, unlike her father, she could lie if it suited her. She didn't, usually. The fact that her entire life in the World up until seven years ago was fictional carried enough complications without adding to them by lying about other things. But she could, and in this case…
…well, call it a half-truth. 'Cool' stretched the matter, but she'd gotten herself into the situation with her eyes open, and that was close enough to count. "Water my plants if I'm gone too long, aight?"
"You don't have any plants, bitch."
Cat grinned, shrugged, and stepped.
* * *
She hadn't seen the manor she grew up in for seven of the World's years. Only the stars knew how long it had been in the Torn; the stars, and perhaps some reprobate fiend whose entire joy came from counting the passage of meaningless seasons beneath the Torn's thin sun. Cat stepped to the manor's complex, garden-ridden front walkways, not because she didn't dare her father's office, but because she wanted to see if anything had changed in her absence.
It hadn't. She saw that in a breath, in a glance.
What had changed in those seven years was Cat herself.
The organic, living, breathing tangle of the manor looked alien to her. The way it grew, rather than having been built; the lines that curved and bulged and sank where nature dictated, rather than running smoothly as humankind would have them shaped; the colors that changed with the seasons and the shapes that altered with the growth and loss of leaves: they were all she had known for the bulk of her years, and she had forgotten, all the way into the depths of her, how beautiful it was.
The closest humanity came to such structures was through decay and the creep of new growth. Ivy, softening the edges of straight, strong walls, or branches pulling arches toward the earth; that was the World's equivalent of her father's Torn manor, and they were not, in truth, alike at all. Cat walked slowly along the path, following its twists with half a mind and half a memory; they could change without warning, but tended to settle back into shapes they knew, and her father would want her to find the manor's entryway sooner rather than later.
Stone-like shards of rounded glass shone beneath her feet, always shifting; here lay a spate of something not unlike emerald; there ran a river of ruby, building images that teased from the corner of the eye, and faded when looked at directly. A swath of yellow garnet could be a castle, if seen sideways; the blue of aquamarine could be its moat, and no one was to say whether whole lives were lived out in those half-seen worlds. The hedges and grassways bordering the paths were not lovely, and could curl into darkness and danger without notice, but at the same time they often showed the promise of beauty, like bare stark winter branches could carry a hint of spring.
It was never entirely possible to tell where the paths ended and the manor began; the hedges grew thicker, angrier, more impassable, and littered by windows that gleamed darkly from within as they rose in their artless coils to make walls that changed with the light. There were no flowers; the only rose her father had ever liked was Lilibeth.
Cat walked along the wall until it parted in doors made of living oak, and entered a building less raw in its interior than outside, but no more welcoming. The inside of her father's manor mimicked humanity's structures more than its exterior did; the floors were smooth, often enrobed with rugs, and the furniture did not threaten the way the hedges did. But neither were they entirely still, bereft of life, the way mortals built things to be; even the chairs and tables that could be moved had a kind of pulse to them, and the decorations that sat in alcoves and high on walls had the sense of things trapped rather than images captured.
No one welcomed her. No one ever had. There were no signs of Yylana Alara, no hint that a wife had come into the Woodland lord's halls and made herself at home there. Cat climbed a set of undulating steps, following them where they wished to lead her; she could stay on them all day, fighting to reach her destination, if she did not choose the track they wanted her on. As it was, it took only a minute or two to reach the inner chamber where her father was most often found.
It could have been a friendly place, had another master ruled it. With her father in charge, it felt like the heart of an ancient, hollow tree, full of darkness and shadows that parted here and there to allow windows that could not, in any human way, access the light of the outside world. It was lit by torches that dared not singe the heavy, curving sides of the room, nor carry soot to the higher reaches of the hollow. A desk of bending wood reached around one side of the room; her father rose from behind it, an aelfen faerie lord of obvious power.
This was the heart of his domain, his place of singular strength; here, very few could stand against him, and that, only at the risk of their own life. Cat had absolutely no interest in challenging him here, but she'd learned that the hard way, a long time ago. He wore robes of sable and green, made of fabrics woven by delicate, inhuman hands; they would keep neither heat nor cold nor wind nor water at bay, but they looked glorious, and the people of the Torn had other ways to fend off the weather. Around his temples lay a crown of thin black oak, holding his thick wash of red hair back from his sharp-featured face, and for a moment, his expression as he looked at Cat was almost pleased.
And in that moment, she could almost see why her mother had left the World to come here with him. He couldn't glamour Cat, but he didn't need to; here, in the Torn, in the heart of his power, he was beautiful. More beautiful than he had been in the Waste, and, if he was not more beautiful yet in the
World, then the comparison of his strangely compelling features to that of most humans made him seem all the more desirable anyway.
Then his gaze rose on her hair and such irritation flooded his face as to enormously improve Cat's day. "You will have to comport yourself with greater dignity in my halls."
"I really don't plan on hanging around on my off time."
"A vassal has no 'off time'."
"You need me to make Artifacts for you," Cat said with a patience she didn't feel. "No one can make them constantly, and there's no reason at all for me to stay here when I'm not working. Or even when I am, largely. You can put in your order, I'll go make it, and deliver it back to you."
"I will watch you," he said with sudden spite. "Lest you betray me with your workings."
"With all due respect, I don't think you could tell if I did it right under your nose. What do you need me to make, anyway?"
"An item of deception." Her father's voice was cagey, somehow, and Cat squinted uncertainly, then grinned.
"You mean like those elaborate food pranks where you think you're having a burger but you take a bite of it and it's really cake?"
Her father's expression went rigid and Cat choked on a laugh, then gave up and let it out, ending with a cackle of delight. "You're gonna have to be a lot more specific. You know that. Artifacts have to have purpose. They have to be shaped to do something specific. 'An item of deception' won't cut it."
Cords stood out in his throat. "I require an item that will permit me to lie, Leandra."
A cool rush ran through Cat. She hadn't heard that name in years, and never from anyone she liked. Her mother had called her Cat; that was, more or less, what 'Leandra' meant. She'd chosen to be Cat, in the World; hearing her other name felt like a slap.
But even more shocking than her name, was the request. She stood there, almost swaying with it, and simply stared at her father for a long time. Long enough that anger began to creep in thin lines across his face, making him more the man she remembered, and less beautiful than before. Still she stared, in part because her mind ran ahead of itself with all the wretched things he could do with such an Artifact, but more because of its absolute fucking difficulty.
