Page 38 of The Court the Fae Forgot
Still, as outraged as he was with my father, Zev reached into his pocket and produced sixteen gold coins carefully counted out and then dropped them unceremoniously on the floor. My parents didn’t dare move, but I knew the moment the fae turned their backs, they’d be on their hands and knees scrabbling after them like the rats they were.
Sixteen gold coins was the price for me.
Sixteen gold coins paid, this time, to take me away from this wretched place.
“Come now, let us be free of this place,” Shiel said, wrinkling up his nose in disgust. “I’m not so controlled as Zev. I can’t promise to keep these wasteful humans alive if I have to suffer their presence for one moment longer.”
CHAPTERFOURTEEN
Shiel stormed outsideto wait while Zev stood watch over my parents, making sure they didn’t try anything stupid in the few moments it took Finch to help me pack for the journey ahead. It took longer for me to pry Ada off of me than it did for me to collect what little belonged to me.
I had only the golden ribbon now a tangle on the floor, my shoes, and the dress half-sodden from my sudden exit from the river, earlier, at the sound of my sister’s screams. It was Zev who stopped me when he saw me start to pull the rags over my still-wet and now bloodstained shift. He caught Finch’s eye, and in a moment, they were prodding my mother toward her bedroom and ordering her to find me something suitable to wear.
I followed after her, promising Finch at the door that I’d be safe in her presence for the amount of time it took to peel the stinging shift from my skin and replace it with something that’s scent wouldn’t draw the wolf packs to us.
My mother pulled the garments wordlessly from a trunk, picking the oldest and yellowest of her shifts for me to wear, and the dress usually reserved for gardening days, with more patches on it than original fabric.
Despite the fact that they were somehow finer than the clothes I’d had before, I couldn’t find it in myself to feel gratitude. Not when, the moment I’d pulled the green and brown laces tight up the back of my gown, still smarting from the pain of the fabric rubbing against the open wounds on my back and shoulders, she grabbed my arm with a vice-like grip and stared deep into my eyes.
Her lips parted, and for a moment, the only sound that came out of her was like a hiss. “I want my real daughter back. You tell her to come back to me.”
“So, you admit it, then,” I whispered back, nearly choking on my own words. “You knew all along?”
“You say that like we’re skin traders,” my mother huffed. “We needed the mill.”
My mouth hung open. “You bought me, from the fae … and you really never planned to tell me?”
“Pay? For you?” The sound of her laugh stung like nothing else. “We were paid to take you. The house, the mill, the money, all of it,” she said, before leaning closer. “We realized right away what a mistake it was. We would have taken it all back if we could. Taking you on was never worth the grief it caused us. You were never even a little bit grateful.”
“Grateful?”
I was mystified by her reaction. The way she was looking at me, the way she spoke … it was as if I’d willingly done this toherinstead of the other way around.
“I was your slave,” I said, my voice suddenly flat. “And you expect me to be grateful?”
A numbness settled over me that was somehow even worse than what I felt before. I stared vacantly ahead, focusing on the searing pain in my body instead of the rapid breaking of my heart. “You never loved me.”
“How could we? You’re an abomination, Aurra.”
There was relief on my mother’s face when she said it, as if the admission of her cruelty had finally absolved her of the burden of it. “How could we ever have loved a changeling like you?”
A changeling.A fae.
There it was, the thing I’d needed desperately to hear from her. Shiel, Finch, and Zev could barge into my home as strangers all they wanted, with all the wild accusations they wanted too, but hearing it from her, from my mother—or the woman pretending to be her—it was something else.
The truth.
The truth about me, my parentage, the reasoning behind the cruelty that had seemingly been my birthright. It suddenly made sense.
I searched my mother’s face one last time for any sign that this was some kind of final, cruel lie, a test, a jest, a joke meant to fully break me before they pawned me off on Rayner as they’d always planned. But I found nothing.
She was telling me the truth, finally, after years—a lifetime—of lies.
I could have read a thousand books written in the faerie language, I could have recognized a thousand mottos of every fae court under the sun. I could have learned to perform their glamour, eaten their food, gone on to wear the crown that Shiel swore was destined for my head … but a small part of me would have always wondered if it was true.
Now, at least, as difficult as it was for my brain to accept it, I knew the truth.
I took nothing more from the cottage. I couldn’t stand to be in it for a moment longer.
