It sounded like a strange question at first. When Ilsa understood why he was asking, she was afraid to answer; afraid to hear the rest of the story.
“A few hours, p’raps,” she said. “No more than that.”
“But I daresay you’ve experienced a little of the feeling of your mind growing more animal. Changelings who have spent weeks as animals take time to recover. Those who have spent months, without respite, have been known to suffer permanent damage to their minds. Lazaro told my mother and father the work they were to do for him if they were to repay their debt, and when they transformed, he bound them in Changeling leather; bonds which, upon contact with Changeling skin, suppress our ability to transform. They cage us within whatever form we are in.”
Ilsa resisted the sudden urge to touch her wrists. She was familiar with Changeling leather, she realised. It was what Captain Fowler had used to foil her escape in the fish market.
“I wasn’t permitted to see them, of course. Lazaro guessed rightly that I would unbind them, and damn the consequences. But there was a very small window in the room where I slept that looked onto the stable in which he made them live. Every night, once he shut me in, I would open it, and my mother and father would come to the window, and I would talk to them. I would see in their eyes the man and woman they truly were.
“As the years went on, sometimes it would take longer to encourage them towards the window, and it was plain that they understood me less and less. But still I talked to them. I would tell them stories about our life back in Brema in the hopes it would keep something of their old selves alive.”
He paused, gaze on something in the middle distance; on his memories.
“One day, when I opened the window and called to them, they came immediately. I reached out to touch my mother’s face, as I always did, and she began lipping at my fingers. When they saw I had nothing for them, they lost interest. Lazaro had neglected to feed them again, you see, and they thought I was bringing their feed. Like horses. I could see it in their eyes. I should say, in fact, it was what I couldn’t see. It’s a small comfort, but… by the end, they no longer remembered they were human at all.”
Ilsa could only nod. She had no words of comfort for such an unimaginable fate, for Oren’s parents and for their son. To lose them slowly, over years, when they were right there.
“I was luckier, of course,” he went on. “I’d been apprenticed to a merchant back in Brema, and I had skills Lazaro could use me for in his shop. I knew better than to ask him for much, but I was foolish enough to hope my mother and father would receive a proper burial. But they did not. ‘They were animals,’ he told me. ‘They are worthy of no such thing, and neither will you be.’ I was unaware of the existence of the Fortunatae at that time. I knew only that Lazaro attended a salon once a week, hosted by someone who called themself the Sage.” He looked down at his hands. “He had been devoted to the ethos for decades, and he had not only bought our debt, but helped others bring Changelings into forced servitude as well. It was a practice banned by the Principles.” He looked up at Ilsa and smiled. “By your mother.”
“So after the Principles, Lazaro had to let you go?”
Oren shook his head. “Unfortunately, it was not quite that simple. Lyander could not get the other faction leaders to agree to write off debts some citizens felt they were owed, but she did convince them that all debtors be forced to sell the debt to her. She came to the shop herself one day. I knew nothing of the Principles; Lazaro kept current affairs from me as much as he could. I could see in her eyes what it cost her to give the man who had stolen everything from me a fair price for my life.” He looked around at the ballroom. Ilsa saw the reflection of the specks of rainbow in his eyeglasses. “She brought me here. She fed me at her table, with her husband and her son, and told me there was a position for me within the wolves should I want it, and money to start my life over should I not. I have been a free man ever since. The debt I will forever owe your mother is not servitude or money. That debt is my privilege to bear.”
He stood, and returned the chair to the exact spot from which he’d taken it.
“What the Fortunatae did to my family is personal for you too, ain’t it?” Ilsa called as he was leaving.
Oren smiled, but shook his head. “It is personal to every Changeling, Ilsa. Questions of one’s humanity always are.”
16
Ilsa wanted nothing more than to spend the following day in a quiet spot deciphering Lila’s riddle but, as Fyfe had warned her, the afternoon was to be taken up by a different activity: defence lessons.
The two Whisperers in the drawing room were more like Ilsa than an Oracle or even a Psi – in fact, they looked entirely like the Londoners of the Otherworld – but still Ilsa shivered in trepidation as she looked upon them.
The woman was fair-skinned with greying hair pulled into a severe bun. Her eyes were unusually large, unfocused, and golden-brown in colour,
