“I won’t bore you with the details of these experiments, except to say that they involved the study of the differences between the temporospatial properties of the fabric of this realm, and those of several Otherworld realms. Instead, I will skip straight to the end of this leg of the story. When your mother came back to Tír na nÓg after the conclusion of her experiments, she did not come alone.”
I swallowed thickly. “She was pregnant. With me.”
He hummed affirmatively.
“I bet Mab was happy about that. Her daughter having a half-blood child.”
Tildrum tilted his head from side to side. “Queen Mab was not angry, merely befuddled. Your mother was never known to make foolish decisions. She was raised to be shrewd in all things that she did, and she acted thus, without question and without fail.
So the matter of the pregnancy simply came down to a question of
‘why,’ a question your mother answered quite readily and not without some degree of excitement.”
Acid bubbled up my throat. “She had me for a practical reason then.”
Tildrum patted my shoulder in a way that wasn’t entirely derisive. “All sídhe have children for practical reasons. You know this, Vincent Whelan. The sídhe exhibit no passion without logic, no love without restraint. Do not hold your mother’s nature against her, and do not think her cruel for acting in accordance with what she thought was best, for herself, for her people, and for the Otherworld as a whole.
“Never did she treat you poorly in the time she had with you. She cared for you as all good sídhe mothers care for their children.
And had she been given more time to raise you, I believe you would have been proud to have her for a mother.”
I pressed my palms against my eyes and blew air through my teeth.
This was too much for one day. But I’d asked for the truth, so I had to see it through.
“What happened to her?” I asked softly. “I regained a memory recently, one where I was upset that she hadn’t returned to Camhaoir after several weeks…”
“I know the day you speak of,” Tildrum said, almost wistfully. “I took you out to play in the ice garden after you finished your studies. You enjoyed skating on that pond with the statue of—”
“Tildrum,” I said in warning. “What happened?”
He was silent for almost a minute, and it took me most of that minute to realize the King of the Cats was actually sad. That he had been friends with my mother, and that her death had legitimately hurt him. A primordial monster from the dawn of time had found true camaraderie in a bold and crafty young sídhe, only for her potentially immortal life to be cut tragically short.
At last, he said, “We never learned precisely what happened. What scattered intelligence made its way back across the Otherworld only informed us that the enemy had caught on to one of our spy cells and destroyed it in its entirety. The cell in question was one your mother had been working closely with for some time to try and get closer to the enemy than anyone had previously. They were getting very near to some important revelation, and then they were found out.”
“If no specific information came back,” I said, weary, “how do you know she died?”
Tildrum pressed a finger to my chest. I could feel his glamoured claw through it. “Queen Mab’s power is not limited to the standard magic of the sídhe. Her soul maintains an intimate connection to the primeval power that is the essence of Unseelie, that half of the great god who was split in twain when the original home of the sídhe suffered a cosmic catastrophe. Each of Queen Mab’s children also has a connection, a smaller connection, to this same power, and through those like connections, Mab can sense her children. Their lives, and their deaths.”
“She felt her own daughter die?”
“She did, yes.” Tildrum paused. “And you felt her die too.”
“That thing I’ve been drawing energy from,” I barely whispered,
“that funnel attached to my soul…”
“Is also a connection to that power,” he finished. “Yours is yet smaller than those of Queen Mab’s children, but as you have demonstrated, any connection at all to that power can give one a substantial advantage.”
“Um…” I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand. “Can Mab sense when I use that power?”
“Yes.”
“So she’s essentially been watching a play-by-play of everything I’ve done today?”
“Oh, we’ve been watching a ‘play-by-play’ of everything you’ve done for the past year, via means that provide far more clarity than an energy expenditure.”
“Okay, that’s disturbing. But I’ll bite.” I absently picked at a large splinter sticking up out of the swing’s armrest. “Does that have anything to do with the reason you chose me to handle Abarta? And what about my exile from the court? Why’d you kick Mab’s grandson out of Tír na nÓg?”
“The answers to both those questions fall into the same general progression of events, so let me pick up where I left off.” He gazed out at the dreary neighborhood, but what he saw was something not of this Earth. “Because the strength of any fae is unclear until they reach maturity, the few of us aware of your existence could only speculate on how much your human side would inhibit, or bolster, the traits you inherited from Queen Mab’s bloodline.
“Therefore, the original plan was to keep you hidden away from the public, at least until you were grown and at peak power.
However, your mother’s death ‘threw a wrench’ in that plan, as the humans would say.
“You see, we had no way of knowing if the enemy, or their agents, interrogated your mother before her death.” He growled under his breath at his own implication, that they may have either tortured her or magically broken into her mind. “If they had, that meant your safety could be at risk. You were a young child, with minimal control of minimal magic. If the enemy sent one of their uncanny agents to assassinate you—”
“Hold on.” I raised my hand. “Why would the enemy want to assassinate me? I was six years old. I wasn’t a threat.”
“But your mother’s theory was that you could become one. And a serious one, at that.”
“You’re referring to the reason she had me in the first place.” I dropped my hand into my lap. “It’s something about my human half, isn’t it?”
“It is.” His sharp eyes flicked to the left, cutting through a dense bank of smoke hanging off in the distance. Whatever he saw there, if anything, he didn’t deign to share with me. “Your mother came to believe that the properties of this realm extend
to its inhabitants, and therefore, any being with human blood may possess some natural resistance to the powers of the enemy and their agents.”
“And she was right,” I murmured. “That’s what happened today.
When the Interloper tried to possess me. It didn’t work. Because my human side was incompatible with whatever method it uses to possess people.”
“Precisely.”
“But I’m not the only half-fae. What makes me more special than…?” I slapped myself upside the head. “Royal blood. I’m the only half-fae with royal blood.”
“Yes, you are.” He rapped his fingers against the porch railing in a rapid cadence, giving off the impression that we were running short on time. “Your mother thought that having a half-sídhe connected to the essence of Unseelie might give us an edge in the war with the Enemy from Beyond, because the enemy’s power would not be able to corrupt or dominate such a being.”
“So I was born to be a weapon.”
“All sídhe are weapons,” he countered. “Born in ice or born in fire. Born in day or born in night. The sídhe have been born as half-forged weapons and honed into fine blades since time immemorial, and blades they will be until the end of time itself.
You are ‘special,’ in a way, but you are not so different from the rest that you have good reason to resent the circumstances of your birth. So do not dwell in some grossly misplaced self-pity.
<
br /> That’s an unbecoming habit.”
I lifted my hands in mock surrender. “Fine. I’ll save it for my inevitable mental breakdown later tonight. Let’s pick back up with the ‘story.’ You exiled me because…it was too dangerous for me to stay in Tír na nÓg as a child, when the enemy might be aware of my existence? So you sent me across the veil, to grow up on Earth, where the enemy’s agents can’t go? Is that right?”
“That is exactly right.”
“And what was up with the memory wipe?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “I did not wipe your memories, as you well know. I simply rearranged them so that what you knew of life in the court, and in the palace, would be inaccessible to you for a long while.”
I scowled at him. “You scrambled my memories yourself?”
“Of course,” he snapped. “I would never have trusted someone else with so delicate a task, nor would Queen Mab.”
“Oh, so I should be happy you fucked with my head?”
“Your lack of accessible memories allowed you to grow up like a relatively normal half-fae on Earth, and you suffered no brain damage from the spell I use to achieve the effect. So I would say that, at worst, you should be neutral on the matter.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, all right. Let’s go with that. Please continue. You mucked up my memory, you tossed me onto my dad’s doorstep so I could grow up like a normal boy, and then, decades later, you…repeatedly risked my life by throwing me at Abarta of the Tuatha Dé Danann?”
“Well, yes. Placing obstacles in your path was always part of the plan.” He arced an eyebrow, expectant.
“The plan to…?” I thought about it for a second. “To figure out just how powerful I am?”
He gave me a slow nod. “As I said, we had no way of knowing what the mix of human and royal blood would produce, and we couldn’t properly test your limits until you reached adulthood.
Originally, we were going to reveal the truth of the matter to you when you reached the age of thirty, the point at which most half-fae reach their full magic maturity. Then we were going to administer a comprehensive series of tests and training exercises to learn just what we had to work with.
“Unfortunately, the first stage of Abarta’s ridiculous plot derailed that plan most thoroughly.”
“The purge. The war. The collapse,” I said solemnly. “You decided to make those the first of my tests, didn’t you? Since surviving those were more difficult than what you had originally planned.
And since I came out of all that shit relatively intact, you decided to throw Abarta at me next. Because what better way to challenge me than to provide me with an adversary that no normal half-sídhe could overcome?”
“The decision to adjust your role in the ‘grand scheme’ was not as easy or as callous as you make it seem,” he replied, and honestly, he sounded kind of hurt that I would think otherwise.
Tildrum was showing more emotion in this conversation than he’d demonstrated to me in the entire year we’d known each other. “But essentially, you are correct. Abarta is a valid threat to the courts, as he has proven on more than one occasion. And now that he has woken more of the Tuatha and joined forces with the enemy, he represents an even more serious threat to the realm.
“So we set you up to be his opponent, reasoning that if you could match him in any way, if you could survive him, if you could walk through a trial by fire and emerge unbroken, if not unburned, then you would indeed have the potential to be all that your mother hoped you would be.”
Tildrum gestured to me. “Here you are. With a cracked souled.
With a bruised body. With a battered mind. But intact and victorious nonetheless.”
“You’re conveniently skipping the part where I almost died numerous times,” I said with just a touch of bitterness. “And also the part where you saved my life more than once.”
“It was supposed to be a test,” he retorted, “not a death sentence. I let you risk your life within reason, and bailed you out only when the things that threatened your life were things you could not have possibly foreseen. I know you think me cruel, pulling you along on a string through an obstacle course filled with deadly traps, but I was merely doing what was best. For my realm. For my people. And for you.”
I barked out a laugh. “For me? You think you did what was best for me?”
“I know so,” he said with absolute conviction. “What were you a year ago, Vincent Whelan? A half-sídhe using half his skills to creep around through a wasteland, stealing shiny trinkets for sad humans in need of mementos from a fading past. Compare that to what you are now. A half-sídhe who has saved his world from certain destruction, who has slaughtered the scourge known as vampires wholesale, who has fought and defeated literal gods, and who has emerged on the other side of all these trials far stronger than before.”
“I didn’t want to do any of that,” I spit.
Tildrum shook his head, chiding me like the child he used to know. “You have always wanted the same thing, the desire your father instilled in you when you were a child with no memory in a world that you did not understand.”
He shoved his hand into my coat pocket and yanked out a small gold object, holding it up near my face. My police badge. “You want to help people. You want to save people. You want to protect people. And in the world before, you did so by slapping handcuffs on humans who did bad things. But this world is no longer threatened by humans. It is threatened by things far beyond them.
And to do what you have always passionately sought to do, you too must be far beyond them.
“You spent so many years stewing in misery after the collapse that you refused to better yourself despite the fact that the world needed you at your best. So we pushed you onto a path that would force you to pull your head out of your ass and become what you were meant to be. For your own good.” He swept his hand around, indicating Kinsale as a whole. “And for theirs.”
“Are you joking?” I said weakly, shocked by his outburst. “Abarta wrecked Kinsale, twice over, because my interference in his schemes made him hate me.”
Tildrum scoffed. “Do not pretend to be so naïve. Abarta destroyed this whole world once, for no reason other than to distract the sídhe. This world is expendable to him, and he will render it nothing but dust floating in the endless expanse of space, if doing so will get him one step closer to his ultimate goal.
“All you did was draw a fraction of his ire toward this one particular city. Had it not been you, it would have been another.
Perhaps someone in a larger city. Perhaps someone who could not survive his wrath. And then what? You would rather all those people be dead instead?”
I bit my tongue. “No. I wouldn’t.”
“Then stop blaming yourself for things that are not your fault.”
A tense silence fell between us, and I could only stand it for so long.
“So now what?” I asked. “Where do I go from here?”
Tildrum unfurled and rose from the swing. “Now that it is likely Abarta has forged an alliance with the enemy, and the farce of the shadow war can no longer serve its purpose, the task of hampering the Tuatha schemes soon to come will not rest on your shoulders alone.
“By this time tomorrow, all matters relating to the Tuatha resurgence and the Enemy from Beyond will be public knowledge, and thousands of soldiers and other agents of the courts will be assigned new duties. You will be included among that number.”
“What makes you think I’ll perform those duties?” I said, indignant. “My life, which has hardly been a picnic this past year, is about to become a whole lot harder. Once people find out who I really am, it’s going to change the dynamics of my interactions with everyone.
“The humans are going to be terrified of me. The half-fae are going to trip over their own two feet to get the heck out of my way. And the full-blooded sídhe are going to resent me for having royal status with only half the ‘right’ DNA. So what makes you think I’ll do anything more
than what I’ve already done, especially when there’s no longer a need for me in particular to deal with Abarta? Hm?”
“Because the duties we assign you from here on out will pertain to the continued protection of Earth,” he replied, “a realm that, as you now know, has great value to the Otherworld. And a realm that, as you have always known, has great value to you.”
He tossed the badge at me, and in the split second I took my attention off him to catch it, its former place in his hand was filled by a photograph. “The half-fae, and even the human mages, will be a valuable commodity in the coming war. The enemy will do all it can to destroy them, so that they cannot thwart its efforts to overrun the Otherworld. That will include sending its new allies, the Tuatha, to visit death upon the Earth.
“You will try your hardest to make sure that they fail, whether Queen Mab orders you to do so or not. Because that is the kind of person you are.” His lips curled into his trademark cat’s grin, but there was something hollow about it this time, as if he wasn’t putting any real effort into what I now understood was false contempt.
“But Queen Mab will order you to do so,” he continued, “as such orders will be viewed as befitting of a half-blood scion of the royal line. They will impress upon the court that you belong, that you are important, and that you are not to be trifled with by those who would scorn you for your mortal heritage.
“They will also give Queen Mab an airtight excuse to provide you with any resources you desire, and therefore, allow her to avoid any accusations of nepotism. In the public’s eye, Queen Mab must be perceived as impartial, even to those of her blood.”
He offered the photograph to me. “Also, there is one other reason you will do as you are told.”
Hesitantly, I took it and turned it over. It was printed on the pretty gilded paper the sídhe like to use for photographs of formal events, but the event this picture had captured wasn’t formal in the least. It was a candid shot, taken from behind a bush. The subjects of the photo were a woman with dyed black hair, white roots peeking out, and a small boy with brown hair.
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