“But I can’t just ignore it,” I admitted. “I’ve spent too many years believing it will happen.”
I could understand why Gane thought it was a waste of time to worry over creatures who did not worry over me, but... what if they did? What if they’d spent twenty years hoping I was okay, and that they might one day see me again?
What if I’d been stolen from them and left here in Crustle? As vengeance, or for my own safety? What if my parents were dead, and there had simply been no one to care for me? There were so many what-ifs, I could make a list as tall as the rafters in the library.
And I would never learn anything if I stayed here.
Gane set his spectacles back upon his wide face, then scratched at the white hair climbing his cheeks in tiny curling clouds. “You have to ignore it. There’s no other option, so cease breaking your own heart. Crustle is your home, Flea.”
But he knew that wasn’t entirely true; otherwise, he wouldn’t have left his podium with another exasperated shake of his head as soon as he’d finished speaking.
“Wouldn’t you wish to at least know where you came from?” I called after him as he traversed the awaiting piles of books in the aisle closest to the desk. “I have to find a way, Gane.”
“You don’t have to do anything. Go home and enjoy Rolina’s lavish life.”
His unwillingness to talk of a land he had chosen to leave when his wife had perished some decades ago did not surprise me.
But his desire for me to leave him alone did.
I jumped down from the desk, hope rekindling and warming my blood. “Gane, if you know of a way, then you must tell me.”
He’d never claimed to, but then, I’d never thought to ask. I’d believed, almost as strongly as Rolina had, that the Wild Hunt would swap me. At the very least, that they would find enough reason to take me home.
My fingers swept over the spines of books as I trailed the hobbling goblin from one aisle to the next. “Gane, please.”
He stopped and feigned rehoming a thick volume on the history of merfolk. One I’d read cover to cover five times. “There isn’t a way. None that I would dare suggest.”
“Then how did you come to Crustle?”
All he’d ever said was that he’d left Folkyn. Which I now suspected wasn’t true.
His silence was telling.
He sighed and turned to squint up at me. “I went to the royal house of Hellebore with the intention of stealing a statue as old as the land itself.”
I blinked, then I smiled broadly. “Really?”
His lips quirked before he made a sound of irritation and shuffled away. “Be gone, Flea. You are no criminal, and I won’t see you endanger yourself.”
I followed him to the back of the library. “But you did it.”
“The king took pity on me because one of his warriors told him of my wife, and he could see I merely wished to have no part in the land that stole her from me.”
“The frosty king of Hellebore took pity on you?” I almost laughed. “But he is a known tyrant.”
“Tyrants have souls too, Flea. Besides...” He waved a hand, entering the swinging waist-length door to the small kitchenette and heading straight to the tea kettle. “Leaving Folkyn and leaving Crustle are two very different feats.”
“Perhaps the governor will take pity on me now that I’ve lost my guardian.”
“You are of age to no longer need a guardian, and the governor couldn’t give two shooting stars about anyone but herself.”
He was right. Ruthless in a way that was almost admirable, the half-fae female who’d fought dirty to earn her role as keeper of the middle lands cared nothing for exceptions unless it suited her own greedy desires.
And despite foolishly feeling like one, I was no exception.
I was far from the first faerie to be thrown out of Folkyn as a babe, and I certainly would not be the last.
Gane set the kettle on the stovetop, and I snatched a piece of cheese from the chopping board.
He glared at me.
“Rolina spent the last of her pay on wine, celebrating the arrival of the hunt for days prior to their visit.” I shrugged and took another piece. “I’m almost out of food.”
“Then I suggest you find yourself employment and quit worrying over finding a way into Folkyn.”
“So there is a way.” I grinned around the cheese, and he snatched the board from beneath my hand when I reached for more. Goblins did not like to share food with anyone but their families, no matter how much they tolerated someone else’s company. “I know there is, and I know that you know what it is.”
“Flea,” he said, beyond exasperated now. “Even if I did know exactly how to get you in, I would take the answer with me to my grave.”
Cheese and disbelief clogged my throat. I swallowed thickly with a wince. “You would do such a thing to me?”
“I would.”
I scowled. “Why?”
“Because I care about you, and I will not see you die because I gave in to your fanciful dreams. Go home and get to thinking about where you might like to work.” With that, he stole through the swinging door of the kitchenette with his cheese to his private quarters on the other side.
I waited to see if he’d return when the teakettle whistled. He didn’t.
It was odd to feel both relieved and saddened by someone’s absence.
Staring at the corner of the kitchen I’d cowered within as a youngling, I couldn’t decide where the sadness even came from. I healed quickly, yet I’d received a thin scar upon my arm at the age of seven years from a plate Rolina had thrown at me while I’d huddled with my arms over my head.
I shook off the memory and finished the last of the raisins.
The sadness wasn’t from missing her, I surmised as I changed into my finest gown of pleated emerald cotton with a cream satin bodice. Rather, it stemmed from knowing the woman who’d never wanted me had lived more than half of her life with nothing but grief and hatred.
And an unshakable belief that had failed her in the end.
I couldn’t bring myself to do anything with her belongings. This entire apartment, even the scant furniture and belongings within my own room, was all hers.
Never mine.
She’d always made it abundantly clear that I was a guest—an unwanted one—so the only comfort I found was when I could forget that fact by escaping into books.
I looked at Rolina’s room one last time.
The bed I’d made that she hadn’t slept in the night before she’d died. The clothing and wineglasses she’d left scattered over the large space for she knew I would clean up after her. The white and brown toadstool dust speckling the small mirrors upon her dressing table.
Then I closed the door.
It was time to search for employment, lest I head back downstairs to the library in a few days to beg Gane to help me when I ran out of food.
I was tucking my feet within my scuffed slippers when a tapping sounded upon the door.
We rarely had visitors. Rolina loathed for those she drank her time away with to pay any attention to me, and no one had come knocking since she’d died.
I wondered if word would spread, or if I’d need to inform all of whom she’d known.
Madam Morin stood upon the other side of the door, her high cheeks adorned in a bright-pink rouge and the tight rust-colored ringlets sweeping down from her updo. “Flea, darling.” Her shrewd apple-green gaze danced over me from head to toe. “My, how you’ve grown.”