sliding straight down into dreaming.
The dreams always start in the same place, and they always start so kindly, with a sunny kitchen in a little house in Oakland, California, and a smiling woman with white-blond hair baking cookies like a Donna Reed fantasy come true. My mother. Amandine.
I always knew she wasn’t human; that’s not the sort of thing you can hide from a kid. It took me longer to understand that I wasn’t human either. They’ve called my mother’s side of the family the Kindly Ones, guardians of the garden path, stealers of children . . . or in her case, before she met my father, assistant clerk at the local five- and-dime. Playing human teenager amused her, and I guess when you plan on living forever, you do whatever it takes to make the days pass. The arcane mechanisms of modern retail served well enough to keep her entertained for a while.
That was in 1950. They say the mortal world was simpler then, but it was complicated enough for her.
Daddy wasn’t like her, and that drew Mother to him like a moth to a flame. She played faerie bride better than I did; she could weave an illusion in an instant, hiding pointed ears and colorless eyes behind a human smile before the people around her had time to blink. She never got caught out by the dawn or wound up shouting excuses from the bathroom while she tried to shove her “face” back into place. The fae are liars, every one of us, and she was the best. They met in 1951, married three months later, and had me in ’52, in the month I was named after.
In the dream, she puts the cookies on the table and takes me in her lap, and we eat cookie dough while we watch the house clean itself, feather duster and broom and mop moving as smoothly as anything animated by Disney. Amandine was really my mother then; she grinned a chocolate smile as she held me, happy as anything with her weird little version of reality. She’d never played faerie bride before. The game enchanted her, and she followed its rules with the scrupulousness that was her hallmark. They were happy. We were happy. That’s something I try to hang on to. We were happy once. She held me in her lap and brushed my hair; she taught me to love Shakespeare. We were a family. Nothing can change that.
My blood meant it was inevitably going to end.
Every changeling is different. Some, like me, are relatively weak. Others get a full measure of faerie magic— sometimes more than their pureblood parents—and they can’t handle it. Those are the ones that get whispered about in the pureblood Courts, the ones no one names once the fires have been extinguished and the damages have been tallied. I learned the stories when I was little, first from Mom as she tucked me into bed, and later, after things changed, from the ones who came to get me. I don’t know who was more relieved when we found out how weak my powers are—my mother or me.
Even weak changelings can be dangerous. They’re allowed to stay with their human parents while they’re young enough to keep their masks up instinctively, but that early control fades as they get older, and choices must be made. Some changelings have to make the Changeling’s Choice as early as three; others hold out until their late teens. That was the only time in my life that I’ve been on the precocious end of the curve, because I was seven years old when my baby magic started to fail.
I don’t know how they knew, and I don’t know how they found us. I was in my room conducting a tea party for my stuffed animals, and they were suddenly there, stepping through a hole in my wall, beautiful and terrible and impossible to turn away from. Looking at them was like looking into the sun, but I did it anyway, until I thought I would go blind from looking.
One of them—a man with hair the color of fox fur and a long, friendly face—knelt in front of me, taking my hands. “Hello there,” he said. “My name is Sylvester Torquill. I’m an old friend of your mother’s.”
“Hello,” I said, as politely as I could through a mouthful of awe. “I’m October.”
He laughed, unsteadily, and said, “October, is it? Well, October, I have a question for you. It’s a
“I can try,” I said, frowning. “Will you tell me if I answer wrong?”
“There are no wrong answers, October. Only right ones.” The door—the real door—opened, and my mother stepped into the room. She froze when she saw Sylvester kneeling in front of me, holding my hands, but she didn’t say a word. Tears started rolling down her cheeks. I’d never seen her cry before.
“Mommy!” I shouted, trying to pull my hands free, to run to her and stop those tears.
Sylvester tightened his grip. “October.” I kept tugging. “October, look at me. You can go to your mother when you answer me.” Sniffling and sullen, I stopped pulling and turned to face him. “Good girl. Now. Are you a human girl, October? Or are you fae?”
“I’m like Mommy, I’m just like Mommy,” I said, and he let me go, and I ran to her. She put her arms around me, still crying, and she never said a word. Not when Sylvester stepped up to kiss her cheek and whisper, “Amandine, I’m sorry,” not when the ones who had accompanied him grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her, and me, through the hole in the wall. It closed behind us, but not before I saw my bedroom burst into flames, wiping away the traces of our passing.
My human life was over the moment they found us; the only real question was whether I went to live with the fae, or whether I learned firsthand how cold immortal “kindness” can be. Changelings don’t grow up in the human world. It simply isn’t done. If I’d chosen to stay human, there would have been an accident, something simple, and my grieving mother could have stayed with her husband in the mortal world. Instead, I chose Faerie and condemned her to the Summerlands. That’s when she stopped being the mother I knew: I couldn’t fill the hole my father left in her heart, and so she never let me try.
Sometimes I wonder if the ones who choose to die aren’t making the right decision. No one told me “changeling” could be an insult, or that it would mean living trapped between worlds, watching half your family die while the other half lived forever, leaving you behind. I had to find that out on my own.
I tried to fight free of the dreams, surfacing just far enough from the unsettling memory of my Changeling’s Choice to actually believe I might be able to wake myself up. I could handle collapsing at work, I could go and talk to Sylvester’s page, anything, I would have taken almost anything over the dreams of my childhood and the choice I didn’t mean to make. Almost anything . . . except for what I got. I slid back into those golden-tinted dreams . . .
. . . and back into the pond.
I dream the fourteen years I lost to Simon’s spell often, although there aren’t many specifics; my memory of that time is a long blur of ripples through the water, and that’s probably a mercy. A few things stand out, but not many: the first light of day coloring the water; humans walking by on narrow wooden pathways; frantically circling at the surface of the water twice a year, on the Moving Days, even though I didn’t know why. I never saw any pixies on Moving Day, but I didn’t understand what their absence meant. I didn’t understand much of anything.
Even as a fish, dawn burned. I rose to the surface every morning, letting the light hit my scales, and for a moment, things would almost start to make sense. Part of me knew, however dimly, that something was wrong, and that part understood that dawn could free me, if I was patient. If I hadn’t been able to hold onto the knowledge that something about that place, that world, that . . . everything . . . wasn’t right, I might have stayed in the pond until I died. Maybe the sunrise helped, peeling the spell away one slow layer at a time until it broke. Maybe not. The odds are good I’ll never know.
What I do know is that Simon’s spell gave way just before dawn on June 11, 2009, exactly fourteen years and two days after it was cast. There was no warning. The spell didn’t compel me to rise to the surface or lift me out of the water like some modern Venus on the half shell. It just let go, and I started to drown. I shoved myself away from the water, sobbing in helpless confusion and gasping for air. The spell had released my body but still held my mind, and I couldn’t understand what was happening. The world was wrong. There were colors that shouldn’t exist and everything I saw loomed straight ahead of me instead of being tucked properly to the sides. Acting on disoriented instinct, I stood, and promptly fell backward as my already shaky grasp on reality refused to admit that I had legs.
The sky paled while I huddled in the water. The cold eventually drove me to the land, and I somehow managed to stand without killing myself. I don’t remember how I did it. I just found myself walking down the paths on half-frozen feet, totally alone. None of the normal denizens of the Tea Gardens were there—no pixies, no Will o’ Wisps, nothing—but I was too confused for their absence to seem strange. That would come later, when I started understanding what had happened. A lot of things would come later. For the moment, I wandered at random, occasionally stumbling or stopping to cough up more water. I didn’t know my name, or where I was, or what I was.
