I started to hyperventilate as soon as I knew we were alone, letting all my panic out at once. Kerry grabbed my arms.
“Breathe, Toby, breathe,” she said. “You broke no rules. You touched no knives, plucked no roses. The cut was small. It’s already healed. Mama will wash your face, and you’ll be right as rain.”
“I bled,” I moaned. “I can smell it.”
“You did,” she said, voice soft. “You bled, and Mama will wash it away, dilute it in so much water that even an Undine could have no use of it. There won’t be a scar. Your sister didn’t see. No one will ever know.”
“Mother will know.”
“Not if we send you to take a load of laundry to Ilya. He can scrub you so clean that even Amandine won’t be able to catch the scent.”
Kerry was trying to sound reassuring, but I couldn’t let myself believe her. Mother was the greatest blood-worker Faerie had ever known, or ever would know. She could pick up the scent of blood on a knife that hadn’t been used in years but had been cleaned and polished a hundred times or more. She would know.
A thread of bitterness worked through my panic. August was allowed blood magic. August was allowed to learn to comprehend and control the gifts we had both presumably inherited from our mother. But I was not, for all that I was as much Amandine’s daughter as she was. I had only illusions, which failed as often as not, and nothing of the blood that I was born to.
Why the rules should bind me so, when most changelings were allowed to freely use their talents, I did not fully understand. But as they were set, so I must obey, and if she smelled blood upon me when she returned home, even a speck, the punishment would be dire.
“Come now,” said Kerry, taking my hand to lead me through the tangled maze of the knowe down into the kitchens, where her mother, Melly, stood over a pot of something rich and savory, occasionally calling out orders to the other Hobs who worked all around her. None of them spared us a second glance. Here, entirely among the servants, we were allowed to be invisible.
“That bastard squire of Etienne’s shoved Toby while she was sweeping up some busted plates, and she got nicked,” said Kerry, presenting me to her mother like a baby bird in need of care. “It’s healed up already, of course, but there was blood.”
“Oh, poor lamb!” said Melly, turning to me. Her eyes widened as she saw what Kerry was talking about, and she grabbed a hand towel, stepping down from the stool she’d been using to monitor her soup as she moved to wet it in a nearby basin. “She’ll have to go to—”
“Ilya, yes,” said Kerry. “August’s upstairs.”
“Whatever could have compelled the boy to assault her? Did she—oh, I hate the asking of this, I hate the sound of it, but did she do anything to provoke him?”
Melly seemed to realize I was shaking, and that I wouldn’t be able to speak until it stopped. Cutting myself, even by mistake, was one of my greatest fears. I hadn’t been allowed to slice my own bread until I was twenty, and Father often used the excuse of my inability to bleed as a reason that I would never be able to cook for an entire household on my own. Mother didn’t know enough about keeping a kitchen to contradict him, and Father smelled comfortingly of blood at all times anyway.
“No,” said Kerry, with a scowl. “She was helping us sweep, and he was talking to August. Then August went inside, and he come running over to make our day a misery.”
“He’s just plain cruel, that boy, and whatever household comes to claim him when his fosterage is finished, I hope they’re a small and powerless one,” said Melly, wiping my cheek with her warm cloth.
“Helen says she was able to get into the Library of Stars last week, and the librarian told her he’s a prince,” said Kerry.
“You shouldn’t be talking to that girl, she’s nothing but trouble, and even if he is a prince of some sort, you know better than to go digging into a blind fosterage,” said Melly, voice gone surprisingly stern. She handed me the cloth with my blood on it. “Here. I’ll get Ormond to put together a load of washing for you, and Ilya will have you right as rain in no time at all.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I finally managed to croak, and allowed Kerry to steer me back out of the kitchen.
Helen was an unaffiliated changeling, claimed by no specific household, flitting between them even outside the bounds of Moving Day, doing all the tasks good employers would never assign to someone they cared about. Because she was useful, she was allowed to continue as she was, but we all knew it was on sufferance: one day she’d go too far or stumble over an unseen line in the sand, and then she would be one more feast for the night-haunts, and one more sad story for us to whisper in the kitchens late in the afternoon.
But sometimes I envied her freedom. To be able to go wherever she wished, whenever she wished, with no concern that she would disgrace her family or attract the attention of one among the First. Oh, it must have been terribly hard. In some ways, it must also have been wonderful.
Kerry murmured quiet reassurances as she led me down the hall to a smaller room, where we stopped to wait for her uncle to arrive with the laundry. She guided me to a stool where I could sit. I fought not to start shaking again, the smell of my blood somehow even stronger now that it was coming from the fabric in my hand. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and hurried for the door. “Don’t you move a muscle while I’m gone.”
“Won’t,” I said, voice an unsteady croak, and watched as she slipped away.
Then, as if drawn by a hook in my cheek, I turned back toward the cloth in my hand.
It was such a small smear of blood, reddish-brown against the white cloth, still wet and pliable thanks to the water. It would still be viable. If a blood-worker were to get hold of it, they could do almost anything, they could tease out Mother’s secrets, they could—
I froze, only realizing that the cloth was more than halfway to my mouth when I stopped lifting it. My throat was dry, so dry, like I was dying of dehydration, like I had never once been given a drop to drink. The water in the cloth would soothe it, I knew, would take the dryness away and leave me well refreshed.
I tried to force my hand back down. It refused to go. The cloth was so close, the smell of blood so heavy in my nose, like there was nothing else left in the world but that. Every scrap of me felt as if it were yearning toward that little speck of red, that cool expanse of white.
My magic wanted this. It wanted this as it had never wanted anything else. Finally, furiously, I gave in, and raised the cloth to my lips.
My blood tasted like my magic, copper and fresh-cut grass, and also like clean linen, fresh water, and then, with a jolt like touching a hot stove, like memory.
The memory felt almost like it was protected by a sugar shell, the fine layer of char and flavor that clung to the top of a crème brûlée. The blood dragged me down and through it, and the shell cracked, and I saw . . .
I’m in a room I’ve never seen before, one that’s dark with shadows, next to a bed where a man sits, watching me with clear and loving eyes. No one looks at me like that, like I’m the whole world, and nothing else could ever matter more. Father looks at me with love, and August with adoration, but I know, without question, that this man would die for me.