Girl Who Never Was Page 21

  “What?” I ask in surprise.

  “It’s like New York City, everything’s so sensical; it’s the only place in either world where I feel lost. It’s so devious.”

  I peer at the books. Ben’s right: they’re alphabetized. Apparently, such a system stymies faeries. “Good thing you brought a wizard with you,” says Will, coming up to us and holding up a book. “Here it is. A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.”

  Ben is looking at him with something close to awe. “How did you do that?”

  “I could have done that too,” I point out. “He just walked over to the Ds. It wasn’t any sort of wizard magic.” A bit disgruntled, I take the book out of Will’s hand.

  The first few lines read: IME the first Lord in the younited States of A mericary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and I cant Help it and so Let it goue.

  “It’s…nonsensical,” I say, flipping through the book. “I mean, the spelling is one thing, I know it’s old, but there’s no punctuation.”

  “The punctuation’s all at the end,” says Ben simply, as if that makes perfect sense.

  There are indeed pages of periods and commas at the end of the book.

  “What are you supposed to make of this?” I ask in exasperation.

  “It’s fluent Faerie,” says Ben, and takes the book back from me.

  I look down at the book, wishing that it made sense to me. Shouldn’t it? It’s part of my prophecy. But it doesn’t. “Can you read it?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “Then let’s get this over with,” suggests Will. “Figure out who hid the other three fays.”

  “That way if I get detained by the goblins, you can still go on and fulfill the prophecy without me,” notes Ben wryly.

  “No,” I say firmly and look at Will. “We are not leaving him behind. We do all of this together. Ben and I promised each other.”

  “Ah. I see. A promise from a faerie,” says Will.

  “Stop, she won’t be dissuaded,” says Ben distractedly, because now he is flipping through the book. His eyebrows are drawn together in dark consternation. “This…doesn’t make any sense.”

  “In a faerie way or in a real-world way?” I ask, because I’ve noticed that the two are very different.

  “It says it was my mother.” Ben’s voice sounds oddly detached for this pronouncement, like he can’t wrap his mind around it.

  “Your mother?” echoes Will, and then, “Well, that would make sense actually. A Le Fay enchantment has always been the best. That’s why we went to you for Selkie here.”

  “No, you went to me because I was mentioned in your precious prophecy.” Ben’s voice is hard. He sounds furious all of a sudden. I look at him in surprise, but his gaze is still riveted to the book. “It says here that my mother hid all of the fays of the prophecy she could find, which might be all three or maybe not. But at any rate, for that she was imprisoned in Tir na nOg. From which she promptly escaped.”

  There is a moment of utter silence. The traffic sounds from Copley Square drift up through the windows.

  Will looks evenly across at Ben. I swallow, uncertain.

  “Did you ever hear,” Ben asks, his voice silkily soft, “that my mother escaped Tir na nOg?”

  “She didn’t,” Will answers after a moment.

  “It is here!” Ben shouts. “In this ridiculous book of power that’s been kept hidden from everyone! It is right here!”

  “I know what you’re thinking, that your mother is alive, and she isn’t. If she’s alive, where has she been all this time?”

  “You want me to believe that my mother escaped Tir na nOg and isn’t still alive? If she could escape Tir na nOg, what could possibly destroy her?”

  “If she’s still alive, why hasn’t she ever contacted you?” Will asks gently.

  Ben sucks in a breath and his eyes widen, twilight blue. “To keep me safe. To keep me…to keep me…to keep herself safe. If she escaped Tir na nOg, she couldn’t exactly—I mean, look at us!”

  “Benedict. It doesn’t make any sense, and you know it.”

  “Sense? Sense? We are talking about the Otherworld here!”

  I think of what Will told me, ages ago or just the other day, when I had first proposed rescuing Ben from Tir na nOg. “You told me she was rumored to survive, Will,” I say, and my voice sounds small to me, but I know it must be said. I must be honest. I must give Ben all of the information.

  Ben’s head swivels toward me, and his eyes are gray and cloudy. “What?” he demands, his voice low and furious.

  “She was rumored to survive Tir na nOg. She was rumored to be the only faerie to escape Tir na nOg,” I manage. “Until us.”

  Ben looks back at Will. “Is this true?”

  “It was a rumor, Benedict. It was never anything more than a rumor. Nobody was ever able to even find a trace of her, not a shred of evidence to—”

  “Evidence?” echoes Ben. “William Blaxton, you have lived in the Thisworld too long. Do not speak to me of evidence, not in the Otherworld. If there was a rumor, I should have been told. If she is in the Unseelie Court, then there wouldn’t have been evidence. There wouldn’t have been a trace of her; there would have been only rumors. She is a Le Fay. She was the best enchantress ever. Do you think she couldn’t have erased herself that way?” He turns his eyes to me, slicing like the dangerous silver glint of a well-polished sword. “I cannot believe you knew.” His tone is accusatory and, underneath the thickness of that, hurt.

  “Ben—” I try to defend myself.

  “That you knew, and you knew what I thought, and you never once—That no one ever once—” He cuts himself off in sudden shock. “Lied to!” he realizes. “You were lying to me. I was…And I didn’t…Never once…” He looks horrified. He turns back to Will. “You did this on purpose. You did this to protect your prophecy.”

  “Benedict,” begins Will.

  Ben sticks his hand out toward Will. “Take it.”

  Will blinks. “What?”

  “Take it, damn you, before I change my mind and leave you here in this room,” snaps Ben.

  Will takes the proffered hand hastily.

  I take the one Ben shoves at me.

  We walk in silence. Well, it’s more like marching. Eventually, we come to a surprisingly small door, all out of proportion to the height of the ceiling and the size of the windows. Ben hesitates with his hand on the doorknob then nudges it open a crack, and then he pulls all of us quickly through together.

  I just have time to register that there is a single man there. He is an extremely attractive man in a black velvet suit and black riding boots, a cape jauntily flung back over his shoulder. He has one hand resting on the intricately jeweled hilt of a sword at his hip. On his head sits a large, bejeweled crown, flattening black hair into cowlicks that peek out from the back of his head. He focuses on us with eyes a brilliant shade of blue.

  There is a moment when I feel sure that the man could have touched us, when I almost think that he is about to speak to us. But that couldn’t have been possible; we were in front of him for the merest nanosecond before Ben whisked us away, and I find myself back in the middle of Beacon Street. A truck blares its horn as it screeches toward us, but Ben takes his hand out of mine and waves at it, and in front of my eyes, the truck lifts into the air like a feather and lands safely on the other side of Ben.

  “Don’t go, Benedict,” Will says.

  “I have to,” Ben snaps, shaking Will’s hand out of his.

  “No. You do not.”

  “What is it?” I ask, staring at them. “What’s going on? Where are you going?”

  “He’s going after his mother,” Will tells me.

  “I have to go,” Ben insists. “All of my life, I have been trying to do this, and she has been out there, hiding, from me. And now that I’ve m
anaged to track her down, you want me to stop because—”

  “Because we have more important things to do,” says Will.

  “I have done the more important things for you, Will. Here is the fay I kept safe for you. Here is the book you needed me to retrieve. I’ve been playing at double agent for longer than a city has existed in your apple orchard. I almost got myself named several times in the process, and the whole time, you never once told me the most important fact about me.”

  “Because I knew you would do this,” Will defends himself.

  “Exactly. So you’ve manipulated me quite long enough, William Blaxton. I’ve done my part. When you liberate the Seelie Court, be sure to invite me for dinner at Tir na nOg, yes?”

  “All right,” says Will with the air of trying to interject some reason into the conversation. “All right, I used you, you’re right, and I’m sorry. But I’m not telling you not to do this because of the prophecy. I’m telling you not to do this because I don’t know if you can trust her, Benedict.”

  “She’s my mother, Will.”

  “She’s a faerie, with a lot of very ancient faerie blood in her, Benedict. You know how these things work. Ask Selkie about her mother.”

  “I know about Selkie’s mother,” Ben snaps. “Selkie’s mother is a Seelie. Selkie’s mother is not my mother.”

  “If you wanted to trap Benedict Le Fay, can you think of any better way to do it than to dangle in front of you the promise of the mother you are so relentlessly compared to?” Will asks him pleadingly. “You have it in your head that she’s better at this than you are, and she’s really not. You’re the most powerful Le Fay in existence.”

  Ben takes a deep breath and then exhales very slowly. Then he says, “I appreciate your concern. I’ll be fine. You can wait for me if you like.”

  “Do it later,” begs Will. “You can do it later, after we’re done. You’re not even thinking this through.”

  “Thinking this through,” echoes Ben. “It’s like you’ve never met a faerie before in your life.”

  I suddenly lunge forward, catching Ben’s sleeve, terrified he’s going to disappear and go somewhere.

  He glares at me.

  I have no idea what to say to him, but I want to talk to him. I want to apologize. I want him to look at me without all that hurt accusation in his eyes.

  “I didn’t think it would help, to tell you. I was going to tell you, in Tir na nOg, and then I didn’t think it would help, to get your hopes up like that, when I thought it was just…a faerie tale. I didn’t think it was really true.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says.

  “Of course it does.” It’s obvious that it does.

  “It really doesn’t,” he denies again. “I am so very old, Selkie. It really doesn’t.”

  “I know what it feels like, to want a mother so desperately and then to have her turn out to be…Even if your mother is alive, the fact that she never found you…I went looking for my missing mother, and look what happened. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to you.”

  “It really doesn’t matter,” Ben snaps, finally looking at me. His eyes are dark and flat. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

  “What mistake?” I ask blankly.

  “Never trust a faerie,” he says, and the words slice through me like he’s cut me.

  He shakes me off, but I grab for him again, refusing to be shaken, terrified that if I let him go, he will immediately jump somewhere else. Grappling, we move untidily across Beacon Street and onto the Common.

  “Ben, listen to me. You can trust me. I would never hurt you. I was trying not to hurt you. I—” The words I love you get stuck in my throat. Can I say them now, like this, when he is angry and hurting and probably won’t say them back? Can I bear that? I’m not sure I can.

  He is not slowing down and he is still fighting me, and now I am no longer apologetic and desperate. I am furious that he’s not listening and that he’s doing this in the first place. So I gather myself and shout at him, with intent, “Benedict Le Fay.”

  He stumbles, reaching out a hand to a tree to catch himself from falling completely to the ground.

  He looks at me and narrows his eyes. “Not fair,” he says.

  “Shut up,” I snap back. I am so angry with him I could shake him. “You’re lucky I didn’t use all four of them. What is wrong with you?”

  “Wrong with me?” he repeats. “Wrong with me?” He sounds offended at the very idea.

  “Yes! You’re going to leave me, in the middle of all this, to go after your mother?”

  “And now I know why you didn’t tell me about her either!” he accuses.

  “I didn’t tell you about her because I was trying to keep you from getting hurt. Which is exactly why you lied to me about who I am for my entire life.”

  He seems to acknowledge that point. “If I don’t go after her now—”

  “You’re not the only one who never knew their mother, Ben,” I remind him scathingly. “You’re not the only one who was manipulated into staying away from her.”

  “That’s different—” he begins.

  “And when you asked me not to go to her, when you asked me to trust you and not her, I did.”

  “That was different,” he insists.

  “Excuse me,” says someone to my right, and we both turn our heads. A smiling couple is standing there, looking cheerful and bundled up against the bright Boston cold. The male half is holding up a camera. “Would you take our picture?”

  Ben and I both stare at them for a second.

  Then Ben reaches out, snatches the camera, and flings it up over our heads, where it explodes into a million fluttering pieces of tinsel.

  “Oooh!” exclaims the woman. “Was that a trick?”

  “I will do that to you,” says Ben, “if you don’t walk away from us right now.”

  The couple’s eyes widen, and they bustle away, and I would think it almost funny, except for the fact that I feel on the verge of tears, like their interruption has made all of my fury recede away from me, leaving nothing but a swamping sorrow.

  “I knew what I was talking about with your mother,” Ben tells me. “You’ve never met my mother. You want me to give up on finding her on the basis of some self-serving suspicion Will has that—”

  “I want you to give up on finding her because of me, Ben,” I interrupt him, and now I am worried that I sound like I am about to cry, and I don’t want to sound that way, even if it is true, even if it is possible that I am crying already. “You’re not supposed to leave me. You promised me that you wouldn’t leave me. I know that you’re upset, but I—but I—” All of the words refuse to come out. I gulp at them.

  He is silent long enough for me to collect myself, for me to pull the tears back inside and grow furious at him again.

  “I have to do this,” he says. “The same way you had to find your mother. When everyone told you to stop asking questions, did you stop?”

  “I should have,” I say helplessly.

  “And then you would never have known who you were,” he points out. “And you wouldn’t have been able to bear that.”

  I look at him, and he is looking at me so tenderly that I just say it. “Stay with me because you love me.”

  I decide, in that moment, that I will remember the look on his face for as long as I live, however long that is in the strange changeling life that I lead. And it’s not that I’m going to remember it because it’s plain on his face that he doesn’t love me. That would almost be easier to take. Because I think that it is plain on his face that he does, and that it is never going to be enough for him—that he loves me, this little changeling girl, one of so very many that, for all I know, he has loved throughout centuries. I will simply never be enough. It could be that Benedict Le Fay loves me now, at this moment in space an
d time, in this human world, but his eyes dart, and he looks toward Park Street, and the clock ticks forward.

  I let go of him and take a step away.

  “Selkie,” he says, his eyes returning to me. “I can’t. Please. Can’t you understand? I—” He reaches for me, and it’s funny, because I was just clinging to him, but now I step backward, avoiding him as much as I can.

  “Don’t,” I say, holding up my hands to keep him away.

  “No, Selkie, listen to me. I don’t want to—”

  “Of course you want to. If you didn’t want to, then you wouldn’t.” My voice sounds flat, and I feel flat, like everything inside me has retreated. “You promised me, Benedict Le Fay.” I don’t say it with much intent, but he flinches anyway. “Silly me. Never trust a faerie.”

  We stand on the Common, separated by a few feet, and stare at each other. Then he vanishes, and I realize at that moment exactly what that means: he is the best traveler in the Otherworld, and the best enchanter, and the strongest Le Fay. I may never find him ever again if he doesn’t want to be found. And how did we get here?

  I have never felt more lost in my entire life.

  All of the emotion that had retreated inside of me barrels back, a tidal wave of it that had gathered force and momentum in the interim, but I don’t let it. I tremble with the effort of refusing to let it, my hands deep in the pocket of my sweatshirt, standing alone on the Common.

  “Selkie,” Will says gently, and I feel his hand, tentative, on my shoulder. “Let’s go. You’ll freeze out here.”

  It seems like such a silly thing to say when I am already frozen. I feel like everything stopped in the instant before Ben vanished, that I am just holding my breath now.

  “Benedict Le Fay will betray you,” I hear myself say, as if from a very great distance. “And then he will die.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I admit that I kept putting off writing my acknowledgments because I wasn’t sure what to say. At first I thought I would write this really witty acknowledgments section full of all of the little things that inspire a book—Andrew Belle’s album The Ladder for being on constant repeat while writing; Tealuxe where so much of the book was written; the city of Boston and its inhabitants and all of its/their quirks for filling the book so entirely—but then I realized that, actually, while those things all deserve nods of acknowledgment for being true and real influences on the book, they were kind of taking the easy way out: they are easy for me to write about in the acknowledgments, because I know what to say about them.