searching her own. “I see,” he said finally. He kept looking at her, the long fringes of black hair on the backs of his arms rippling in the cool breeze. She didn’t like how his eyes made her feel, but she forced herself to wait on him.
He sighed. “You know, Mistaya,” he said finally, “the fairy-born cannot be easily deceived, even by their own kind. Not very often, anyway. Not even by someone as talented as you. We have an instinct for when we are not being told the truth. You have that same instinct, do you not? It is a safeguard against those who might hurt us—intentionally or not.” He paused. “Those instincts are telling me something about you, right now.”
“Perhaps they are mistaken,” she tried.
He shook his head, his chiseled features as hard and fixed as stone. “I don’t think so. Something is going on here that you haven’t told me. You might want to consider doing so now. Without revising as you go.”
She saw that he had seen through her deception, and that lying or telling half-truths was only going to get her deeper in trouble. “All right, I’ll tell you the truth. But please listen and don’t get angry. I need you to be fair and impartial about what I’m going to say.”
Her grandfather nodded. “I will hear you out.”
So she told him everything, right from the beginning, right from the part where she had been suspended from Carrington up to her father’s insistence on sending her to Libiris to oversee a renovation of the library. It took her awhile, and she faltered more than once, aware of how bad it all made her look, even if it wasn’t her fault and entirely unfair. She even admitted that she had used Poggwydd to help her make her escape, and that having done so she found herself obliged to bring him along so as not to alert her parents before she had reached Elderew and the fairy-born.
When she had finished, he shook his head in disbelief.
“Please don’t do that!” she snapped at him. “I came to you for help because you are my grandfather and the only one I could think of who would be willing to consider my situation in a balanced way. And you’re not afraid of my father!”
He arched one eyebrow. “You don’t think so?”
She gritted her teeth. “I am asking for sanctuary,” she declared, liking the lofty, important sound of it. “I’m asking for time to find a way to make my parents see the wrongness of what they are proposing. I don’t expect you to do anything but let me stay with you until they’ve had a chance to think things through. I will be no trouble to you. I will do whatever you require of me to earn my room and board.”
“Your room and board?” he repeated. “And you say you will be no trouble to me?”
“I do say!” she snapped anew. “And stop repeating everything, Grandfather! It makes you sound condescending!”
He shook his head some more. “So your visit to surprise me has more to do with your falling-out with your parents than a desire to see me?”
He said it mildly, but she could feel the edge to his voice. “Yes, I suppose it does. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have missed you very much. I know I should have come sooner to see you, and I might have done so if I hadn’t been sent off to Carrington. I might actually visit more often now, if I am not exiled to Libiris. But you have to help me! You understand what this means better than anyone else! The fairy-born would never submit to such treatment—being locked away in some old building with nothing to do but organize books and papers and talk to walls! Their plan is nothing more than a reaction to my dismissal from school!”
“Your intention, then, is to reside with me until something happens to change your parents’ minds about Libiris and your future, is that right?”
She hesitated, not liking the way he said it. “Yes, that’s right.”
He leaned back slightly and looked over at the fountain as if the solution to the problem might be found there. “I didn’t like your father when he arrived in Landover as its new King. You know that, correct?”
She nodded.
“I thought him a play-King, a tool of others, a fool who didn’t know any better and would only succeed in getting himself killed because he was too weak to find a way to stay alive. He came to me for help, and I put him off with excuses and a bargain I was certain he could not fulfill.”
He looked back at her. “And your mother is one of my least favorite children. She is too much like her own mother, a creature I loved desperately and could never make mine, a creature too wild and fickle ever to settle. Your mother was a constant reminder of her and hence of what I had lost. I wanted her gone, and when she chose to believe in your father, I let her go with my blessing. She would not be back, I told myself. Neither of them would.”
