Girl Who Never Was Read online

  “Exactly. The Seelie Court may have its issues, but the Unseelie Court, well, no one wants them in power. Anyway, the four fays born of the seasons would be Seelies themselves. No other fays would have nearly enough power. So there was a prohibition on the Seelies creating children.”

  “But…” I begin.

  “But here you are,” Will agrees. “Your mother fell from the Otherworld. She was pushed. To this day, no one has ever caught the perpetrator, and the assumption is that it was someone from the Unseelie Court. She fell and your father found her, and he nursed her back to health—it is a long distance to fall. Your mother was in his debt, a dangerous place for a Seelie to be. She was desperate to be out of it. She asked him to name his payment.” Will pauses. “And he named a child.”

  I am silent for a second. “Why would he do that?”

  Will looks at my aunts, and I follow his lead.

  Aunt True and Aunt Virtue exchange a look, and then Aunt Virtue starts speaking. “We are ogres, child. The last of the ogres—your father, True, me. We came here with Will years ago, here to this place. Safety from the Seelie Court, for all the creatures of the Otherworld who weren’t faeries—it was Will’s idea. The Seelie Court was always biased a bit in favor of their own kind.”

  “Yes, their cruelty toward faeries is slightly milder,” agrees Will drily.

  “So Will founded Parsymeon, an Otherworld place locked into the Thisworld for all the non-faeries to stand together, to weave our own protective enchantments, and together, all of us, we could keep faeries out.”

  “Parsymeon?” I say.

  “Boston,” says Ben. “Will insists on calling it Parsymeon, but it’s Boston, centuries ago, before the Boston you knew. This is Will Blaxton, who founded Boston by planting apple trees on Beacon Hill, apple trees born of the apples of the Isle of Apples.”

  I stare at Will. “Boston was founded by a wizard?”

  “Yes, as a home for supernatural creatures.” Will sounds annoyed that I sound so dubious. “A new world—why should it only house Puritans? I named the place Parsymeon. But then the Puritans were dying in their stupid little settlement, and I felt bad, and I invited them here, and they renamed it Boston and they ruined the whole place.”

  “Blaxton,” I realize. I look at Ben. “You called him Will Blaxton.”

  “It’s where your mother’s last name came from, yes,” he confirms. “Surely you’ve realized by now where the Faye comes from. It isn’t her name. It was simply the best we could do with the records.”

  “Faye like your last name?” I say to Ben.

  “Yes,” Will answers on Ben’s behalf. “But it really just means faerie. Benedict’s family happens to be a very old one.”

  “But not a royal one.” Ben smiles tightly. “We have a bad habit of falling out of favor, we Le Fays.”

  “Anyway, Parsymeon is still supernatural today,” continues Will, who is beaming like a proud father about this. “It has the highest concentration of supernatural beings anywhere in the Thisworld.”

  “But only two faeries,” murmurs Ben.

  “Well, wasn’t that the point?” says Will. “Keep the Seelies out, keep all faeries out?”

  “How did you get in?” I ask Ben.

  “Special permission from the Witch and Ward Society,” he replies. “I had to apply and everything. But you were to be kept safe, and they needed a faerie to do that, much as they hated to admit it.”

  I look at my aunts, connecting the dots. “Because you don’t like faeries,” I conclude.

  “Faeries are flighty and capricious,” says Aunt Virtue staunchly, “and you are not one. Not entirely. There is ogre in you.”

  “Ogre,” I echo. “So I’m…half and half.”

  “Exactly,” agrees Aunt Virtue.

  Aunt True says, “We’d wanted a baby so very desperately for so very long. Centuries.”

  “Or minutes,” murmurs Ben.

  My aunt ignores him. “But how were we to get one without faerie magic? So your father asked your mother for a baby.”

  “I warned him not to,” Will says. “I knew the prophecy. I knew the danger you would be in from the very beginning. And I knew there would be a price—the Seelies always extract a price. But Etherington would not be dissuaded.”

  “And your mother brought us a baby.” Aunt Virtue smiles at me, her expression so soft and full of affection. “You. A beautiful little changeling, half-faerie, half-ogre.”

  “Which made you”—Aunt True’s voice is hard—“only half ours.”

  “My mother named me,” I realize.

  “Of course she did,” Will says. “Power over you.”

  “Is it a problem that everyone knows my name?”

  “No one knows your whole name,” Aunt True tells me.

  “Your middle names are secret,” Aunt Virtue adds.

  “You should keep them that way,” says Aunt True.

  “Why?”

  “In order to completely dissolve a faerie’s powers,” explains Will, “you would need to know all of the faerie’s middle names. Faeries frequently have three or four middle names, to make them harder to dilute. Of course, give a faerie too many names, and they can’t work under the weight of their burden, and you have the same effect as their name being known.”

  “I have a cousin with 302 middle names,” muses Ben. “She’s quite useless.”

  “So, know a faerie’s whole name, dissolve all his powers. Know just a couple of his names…” I look at Ben.

  “It weakens us. But it doesn’t destroy us completely.”

  “That’s why you couldn’t hold the enchantment around me together anymore.”

  “Right. It was broken. And why I had such a difficult time jumping. I was wet and diluted.”

  “But,” interjects Will softly, and he is staring at me, delight in his face, “not dissolved.” He turns his look to Ben now. “Oh, it’s very pretty work, Benedict. I would never have known it was there if we hadn’t been discussing your enchantments.”

  “What?” I ask. I look from Ben to Will to my aunts in confusion.

  Will is still smiling at Ben, looking a cross between proud and amused. “How much energy is that taking you, to keep that up? No wonder you’re letting the Seelies get closer to you than usual and fretting about the moisture in the air.”

  Ben looks embarrassed. “It’s not a big deal,” he grumbles.

  “What?” I demand.

  “Benedict’s still got you enchanted. It’s a minor enchantment, but it’s very well done, virtually undetectable—”

  “The protective charm,” I realize.

  “Yes,” says Will, eyes narrowed speculatively at Ben. “And what a very pretty thing it is too.”

  There is a moment of uncomfortable silence.

  I venture finally, “If faeries aren’t allowed into Boston, how did my mother manage to get here?”

  “Ah,” says Will. “That is a question we have never been able to answer. She was pushed through to Thisworld, but we don’t really know how.”

  “And Ben got here because of the Witch and Ward Society. What’s that?”

  Will rolls his eyes. “Let’s not talk about them. That’s the problem with Boston these days—so much bureaucracy, so many societies and sewing circles, it’s ridiculous.”

  “Will hates the Witch and Ward Society,” says Ben, “but I’ve always found them quite reasonable to deal with.”

  “Well, they didn’t steal your book, did they?” grumbles Will.

  “I’d rather deal with them than the Sewing Circle,” remarks Ben.

  Will makes a noise of abject disgust.

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  “The Sewing Circle is the link between Boston and the Otherworld. The Witch and Ward, if they could, would close all borders entirely. The Sew
ing Circle insists on keeping Park Street open.”

  “The Witch and Ward has never understood that Boston’s power is in balance,” says Will. “Half-Thisworld, half-Otherworld. It must stay locked into overlapping to keep its power. Unlock the worlds, and the supernatural powers would cease to be augmented by the presence of the humans and the Seelies would be able to get in. Safety from exposure—I’ve never understood what’s so tricky about that for them.”

  “Safety for everyone except faeries,” remarks Ben. “Faeries you locked into the Otherworld, good riddance to them.”

  “Faeries caused the disturbance in the Otherworld in the first place,” Will tells him.

  “A few faeries. Was it our fault the Seelie Court happened to be composed of faeries?”

  “How did you get involved?” I ask Ben.

  “He found you,” Aunt True answers, looking displeased. “Even here.”

  “Well, it’s my job: locate faeries trapped in the Thisworld. It happens, you know. And I’m unusually good at Thisworld magic, so it falls to me to do it. So I snuck into Boston—”

  “He jumped,” says Aunt True, glaring. “Which strictly speaking isn’t allowed. This is why the goblins tried to get rid of all the travelers.”

  Ben flickers a glare of displeasure at her but otherwise ignores her. “I jumped in, and there you were. And I knew what you were and I knew about the prophecy, so I knew you had to be protected.

  “Ogre magic can only do so much to hide a faerie. Faerie blood is powerful. It calls to other faeries. As I explained to your aunts, if they wanted to hide you, they needed a faerie to cast the enchantment over you.”

  “You,” I conclude.

  “Yes.”

  “We didn’t want to have to trust a faerie,” says Aunt True.

  “Never trust a faerie,” adds Aunt Virtue.

  “But we didn’t have a choice, and of course, Will said Benedict was on our side.”

  “All faeries outside of the Seelie Court are on your side,” says Ben. “Things are bad in the Otherworld. Faeries disappear all the time, named for no reason. Everyone exists in a state of terror, waiting…” Ben actually shudders. “All of you panicked when you shut us out of here.”

  “No, it was the only way for us to be sure to keep the Seelies out,” retorts Aunt True. “Make sure there was no faerie blood allowed here at all.”

  “Well, there is faerie blood allowed here,” replies Ben and gestures at me. “There she is.”

  “She is an ogre,” Aunt Virtue proclaims grandly.

  “Only half. She is only half-ogre. You cannot claim all of her.”

  “Maybe no one should claim me at all,” I interrupt. “Maybe I’m just me. Why has no one considered that ever, in my entire life? I’m more than just a pawn in some stupid prophecy. So let me get this straight: to keep me safe, all of you decided an enchantment should be placed over me?”

  “Yes,” Aunt True says.

  “And I wouldn’t know who I was—what I was?”

  “You couldn’t,” Aunt Virtue says desperately. “You couldn’t know. We had to hide you from everything, even yourself, in order to hide you from them.”

  “Did it never occur to you that maybe I didn’t want to be enchanted?”

  “It was for your own good,” Aunt True says.

  “You don’t understand,” says Aunt Virtue. “Benedict was supposed to kill you. Immediately.”

  “What?” I exclaim.

  “Long-standing order,” replies Ben, not looking at me. “Kill any changelings I might find born of the Seelie Court.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Ben gives me a look that can only be described as disbelieving. “I don’t kill babies, Selkie. That’s a terrible thing to do. To take a baby’s laugh out of the world is one of the most dangerous types of black magic that can be performed.”

  “It’s true,” says Will, “but what’s mostly true is that the Seelie Court severely overestimated Benedict’s loyalty.” Will looks delighted by this.

  Even Ben looks amused. “This is a common mistake when it comes to me,” he admits. “You were prophesied to save the Otherworld. I wasn’t about to kill you.”

  “And we were desperate to keep you safe,” says Aunt True, begging me to understand.

  “They never wanted you to break the enchantment,” says Will.

  “That’s why all of you tried to get me to stop asking questions,” I conclude. “You never wanted me to find out who my mother is.”

  “It didn’t matter. Eventually you told Benedict your birth date. That was the first link in the chain. There was nothing anyone could do after that. Prophecies will not be denied.”

  “As if prophecies function so cleanly,” retorts Ben bitterly. “You know how prophecies work, overlapping and contradictory. There was nothing to say which prophecy was going to be the correct one.”

  “You used to be quite keen on it being this prophecy,” says Will scathingly. “Saving the Otherworld, that’s what you were all about. Now, the fay of the autumnal equinox turns out to be her, and you’ve changed your mind.”

  Ben crinkles his nose, looking displeased in the extreme.

  I look at him, because there it is again, the implication that I am special to him, and I can’t help it: I want to be special to him, even after everything.

  There is a long silence.

  I look at my aunts. “What do you think, about this prophecy that I’m going to bring about the reign of this evil Unseelie Court, then—”

  “That’s just it,” Will cuts me off. “You’re not. I’ve studied the prophecies. You’re going to bring about the downfall of both courts, Seelie and Unseelie. Peace will finally reign over the Otherworld.”

  “So,” I summarize, “I’m a faerie princess who’s apparently going to orchestrate a coup d’état.”

  “Yes,” says Will brightly. “Make sense?”

  “No,” I say. “Not really. Not at all. So the Seelies want to kill me?”

  “The Seelies. The Unseelies,” Will responds cheerfully. “Lots of people want to kill you.”

  “You see?” says Aunt True to me desperately. “You see why we had to do what we did? We had to keep you safe.”

  I am silent for a long time, considering everything. This is all insane. I cannot believe I’m sitting in my kitchen, next to the boy I’m in love with (faerie), my aunts (ogres), and the owner of a museum in Salem (wizard). This has to be a dream, right? It must be a dream. I just can’t understand how I ended up here, all because I wanted to know who my mother is.

  “And what about my mother?” I ask.

  Everyone exchanges a look.

  It’s Will who answers.

  “She wants to kill you too.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I am silent, stunned in the wake of this, the biggest revelation of them all. My mother wants to kill me—my mother, who I have longed for my entire life. It is no longer just that she abandoned me, that I have been suffering from neglect. Neglect would be good, benign—not, you know, murderous. It is no longer just the confirmation of my great fear that my mother might not love me. My mother doesn’t want me to be alive.

  How can this be true? I look at my aunts, mournful and silent, and I wonder. Would they lie to me about this? About this? Just to keep me with them?

  Will is talking, something about what we should do now, but I can’t even be bothered to translate the words. How can I think about moving on from this?

  The house is suddenly suffocating.

  “I need to go for a walk,” I hear myself say.

  “Outside?” asks Aunt Virtue fretfully.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” says Will.

  “She isn’t hidden anymore,” Aunt True points out. “The faeries can find her.”

  “But we’re in Parsymeon,” says Will,
“the safest place she can be. Faeries can’t get into Boston, remember? Well, nontraveler faeries, and so far as we know, there’s only one of those, and he’s right here already. And Seelies especially can’t get in.”

  “I’m going outside,” I reiterate, because I have to get out of here. I need to breathe. “I need some air.”

  I walk out into the foyer. The grandfather clock on the landing chimes six, and I pull open the front door and stand on the stoop. It is very late by now, and Beacon Street is as silent as it ever gets. Across the street looms the Common, normally my refuge when I need to think. But normally, I meet Ben there. Normally, it’s being with Ben that I find so soothing. Normally, Ben seems to exist outside of all of the chaos of home and school. And now he doesn’t. Now he seems to be the source of all of it. I lose all interest in taking a walk, in going to the Common, in moving. I sit heavily on the stoop. I want to talk to someone about this, but I have no one to talk to. I want to call Kelsey, but I’m not even sure if she still exists. I lean my forehead down to my knees and breathe.

  I don’t know how long I sit there before the door opens and closes, bringing with it briefly the sound of voices from inside the house. Ben sits down next to me. I don’t look, but I know it is him.

  “What if I didn’t want you out here with me?” I ask, voice muffled by my knees.

  “I wouldn’t have been able to come out here,” he replies.

  Smug, I think, but don’t correct him, because it’s true. I don’t really want to be alone; alone is how I feel—like I’m the only half-ogre, half-faerie princess prophesied to bring about a coup d’état in the whole wide world. Well, I probably am.

  “They’re arguing about the Sewing Circle. I had enough of that,” he continues.

  I say nothing. I have nothing to say about sewing circles. I have nothing to say about any of this. My mind is so full, it’s a blank.

  There is a moment of silence.

  “Are you very upset with me?” Ben asks finally, sounding hesitant.

  “I have no idea,” I respond truthfully and then look at him for the first time. He looks like Ben, swaddled in layers, dark curls all unruly on his head. His unusual eyes are silver at the moment. Faerie eyes, I think. Are they faerie eyes? “How old are you?” I can’t help asking.