She’d not carried any weapons I could see when last we’d met, but the trees had been awake then, and she’d had the entire forest at her command. Her shoulders were stiff, her expression watchful. I heard a faint pattering against the roof. Ice.
“I fear we will be here some time.” Karin offered me her water skin as I sat beside her. I drank, grateful for the cold water against my dry lips and throat.
“Kyle isn’t ready to travel yet anyway.” My stomach was grumbling again. I drew a strip of jerky—the meat Kyle had refused—from my pocket and split it with Karin. She offered me a handful of dried fruit in turn. “Blueberries,” she said at my puzzled look.
That was what I’d thought; I wouldn’t have hesitated otherwise. The berries should have burned my skin, but apparently they were quite dead. I set one hesitantly on my tongue, and tart sweetness flooded my mouth. Karin was the only person I knew who could harvest fruit safely. I stowed the rest of the berries in my coat pocket, though I could easily have eaten them all. Maybe Kyle would like them better than dried meat. “Karin, do you think the Lady is looking for us?”
“The storm that stops us will stop her as well, for a time,” Karin said.
“What about after the storm?” I kept my voice low so as not to wake Kyle.
Karin stared into the dimness. “No. I don’t think she’ll look for us. I think she’ll look for your mother.”
“Liza, could you get Kyle to my town by yourself?”
I shook my head. I could, but I wouldn’t. I knew why Karin was asking, but I’d not abandon Mom to the Lady, not while my thoughts were my own. My hand went to the chain around my neck. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to bring myself to part with its protection again.
Karin sighed, and the leaves around her wrist fluttered restlessly. “I am willing enough to face my mother alone, and I cannot deny I would feel more at ease knowing you and Kyle were far away from her. She is almost certainly relying on your concern for your mother. She knows we’ll follow her to your town, and she has time enough to make plans against us that even the bond between student and teacher cannot shield you from. It may be that the best way to thwart those plans is for you and Kyle not to appear.”
Ice tapped more loudly against the metal ceiling. “Karin, why does the Lady hate my mother so?”
Karin turned to me. “Tara did not tell you? When she returned?”
“She hardly told me
“You don’t want this story from me, Liza.” By the orange light Karin’s face looked less pale—more human. “The storm will not last forever, and we have other matters to discuss.”
The ice didn’t sound as if it were letting up anytime soon. “How long was Mom glamoured for?” I shivered in my coat. I understood now why Mom didn’t want to speak of glamour. I didn’t want to speak of it, either. “How long did Caleb—” I stopped abruptly, afraid Karin wouldn’t want to hear me speak badly of him.
“I do not know.” Karin lifted a stray screw from the floor and rolled it between her fingers. Its threads were thin and precise, as only work from Before was. “I paid little attention, in those days, to the games my brother and his companions played with humans. I ought to have paid more attention. If I had, I might have seen sooner what was happening between Kaylen and Tara, but I was more concerned with trying to be what my mother needed than with protecting my youngest brother.”
I didn’t need to ask if she thought she’d succeeded in pleasing the Lady. I heard it in her voice. “I was never who my father wanted, either,” I said. My voice sounded too loud in the small space.
“Yet you stood up to him at the last.” Karin carefully set the screw down on the floor. It rolled away just the same. “Kaylen told me.”
I looked down, ashamed. “I didn’t send him away soon enough.” Caleb must have told her that, too.
“None of us can change what we’ve already done, Liza.” Karin’s hand brushed my shoulder. I flinched, and she drew respectfully away. “That the past cannot be undone was one of the War’s hardest lessons. We remain responsible for our actions there, but we have no power over them. We only have power over the thing we do next.”
“Even under glamour? Are we responsible then?” I traced a finger through the dust on the floor. Dust from Before—it smelled of oil, too. “Karin, how often did you—” I stopped myself. Karin had fought in the War. No doubt she’d used glamour in ways I could scarcely imagine, and other weapons as well.
“Never as a game.” Karin stared at the orange light between us. “And never since the War. Kaylen understood, sooner than me, that your people are not mere toys. I did not understand until I heard their cries as they died. I did not understand until I came to a human town, and began to care for its people, and they for me. I understand now.”
Why should it take death to understand such a thing? Yet I hadn’t understood until a few months ago that Karin’s people weren’t all monsters, either. “Karin, Mom says you think she and Caleb started the War. Do you?”
Karin laughed, but there was no joy in it. “Tara always did have a way of simplifying things. Fault and blame are complicated matters. Tara and Kaylen played a role, certainly. So did I, and my mother, and Tara’s father.”
“Who people are is never simple in your world,” Karin said. “Among your people, position is not defined by birth or strength of magic. Tara’s father was neither a wielder of power nor a maker of goods—he was merely a merchant, a procurer and seller of the goods others made, weapons in particular. In my world, such a person would be of little consequence. I did not understand how different matters were in your world until your mother—” Karin stopped abruptly. “I cannot tell this fairly, Liza.”
“I’d rather hear it unfairly than not at all.”
“I know less than you think.” The vine around Karin’s wrist unwound a little, creeping toward her fingers. “I did not note when your mother first found her way into Faerie. I do not know how she and Kaylen came to care for one another, even through the glamour my people use so easily upon yours that we do not even think of it as part of our magic. I don’t know what made Kaylen certain the caring was more than a part of the illusions he wove. My brother did not ask my advice in those days, and if he had, he would not have liked the advice I’d have given. I know only that Kaylen lifted the glamour from Tara at the last and, in doing so, swore an oath to never use glamour against your people again. I have since taken the same oath, though I was slower to do so.”
“You thought he was reckless to make promises to humans,” I said.
Karin looked sharply up, and I remembered I only knew that from my vision. “If I thought Kaylen reckless for releasing your mother,” she said in a level voice, “I had some cause, given what Tara did next. Once her thoughts were her own, once she understood what had happened to her, she grew wild with anger and fear, like the child she was. She fled from Kaylen, back to her human home.”
I’d seen that, too. Wind blew ice pellets against the trailer walls. I shuddered, remembering how the Lady had bent my very thoughts to her desires. “Of course Mom ran.” How could Karin have expected her to do otherwise?
“You do not understand. Tara told her father everything. She gave no thought to who he was. She thought only of her own pain. Yet she found no comfort in the telling, and so she fled her father as well. She returned to Kaylen, seeking—I don’t know what she sought. Love? Protection? A means of forgetting her pain? You’ll have to ask her, for I truly do not know. I know only that her father followed after her, and that much grief resulted from that in the end.”
“The War resulted from it.” My words were nearly lost to the noise of ice and wind. “But Mom couldn’t have known what would happen. She wouldn’t have gone back, if she had.”
“We all would do differently, could the seers read the consequences of our actions more clearly. That doesn’t make us any less responsible for those actions, no matter how much we wish it otherwise.”
Wind gusted through the hole in the ceiling. Mom had to tell someone what had happened. She hadn’t been wrong about that. Maybe her father hadn’t been like mine. Maybe she hadn’t known he was the wrong person to tell. “It wasn’t her fault. Not all of it.”
“Nor did I say it was.” Karin gazed at the ivy around her fingers. “I know well enough Tara did not move my
