“Yes, Grandmother.” Zelli ducked his head. “I didn’t think—you will say ‘No, youdidn’tthink.’ And you are right. Tahlen… I…”
Tahlen standing over him, jaw set, his eyes empty.
Zelli shook his head again, harder. His breathing was loud. “Iamsorry.”
“You’ve been here since yesterday.” Grandmother explained as though Zelli hadn’t spoken. “It’s early morning now. Not quite dawn, I’d imagine. You are also mostly yourself again. Or perhaps this is you, now.”
Zelli gave her a glance, startled, then studied his hands, which had no fur. Or claws. He seemed to remember claws. He reached up to pat the top of his head. No horns, either.
“Your eyes,” Grandmother explained further. “In the night, when we checked your eyes, they were black. They are still black. I don’t know if that will change or if it’s another gift.”
“Do I have eyes like they do?” Zelli could feel no fur on his face and his ears were again small and human.
“They?”
“Our family,” Zelli answered, abandoning his self-study to put his hands back over his chest. He had the strangest urge to keep them there, as if they had to hold something in.
Grandmother’s eyebrows shot up. “Did you meet them when you were gone?”
“I met my other parent, I think.” Zelli’s voice grew hoarse. “They were proud of me.”
Grandmother softened. “It’s easy to be proud of you, Mizel, although it is equally easy to worry over you. Did they say anything? About, well, anything?”
“Not exactlysay.” Zelli tried to grab and hold his thoughts, but he was surprised he hadn’t fallen back to sleep with how slow and heavy his body was. He put out his hand and Grandmother reached over to take it. Her hand was warm and dry, but there were no colors in her skin or in his. “Maybe it’s only when I’m more like them,” Zelli mused. “I asked them to keep everyone safe. I asked them…. I didn’t have anything to offer but my blood. But it was already there so….” He closed his mouth when the sadness filled her gaze again. “Grandmother, I….” She shut her eyes, so Zelli let it go for her sake. “I don’t know if they said yes.”
To which she said nothing, but she did eventually reopen her eyes.
“He is really all right?” Zelli pressed. “Uninjured?”
“Tahlen is as well as can be expected.” Grandmother deliberately wasn’t telling Zelli more but she wasn’t lying. “There were some injuries from those on our side—including those guards of yours.”
“Mine?” Zelli shook his head and had to take a moment to recover from the dizziness that created. “They’ve sworn no oaths.”
“Hmm.”
Zelli was too tired and queer-feeling to interpret herhmm. “What did the Villucatto think about all this? Have you spoken to them?”
“I imagine when the news reaches the rest of them, they will be furious. Some perhaps even hurt over the loss of Kear.”
Loss. Zelli jumped. His grandmother didn’t remark on it.
“But they are fighting on several fronts and Tye is more interested in the capital right now,” Grandmother continued. “Perhaps, if Tye gains that and manages to hold it, she will turn her attention to us. But I think she will hesitate before she acts. Most, if not all, of the ancient families will hesitate before they come here once word of this gets out. I’m not sure if that was the fae’s answer to you or if it was their plan all along. But I would say the country will remember our ties to the fae now. Maybe the fae felt others needed the reminder of their power, and it had nothing to do with us or with the life you seemingly offered them.”
She gave Zelli a hard look.
“I didn’t intentionally…” The argument only made his grandmother flintier. “That is, I was already d…” Zelli paused, suddenly aware that he had thought he was dying, that hehadbeen dying, or so it had seemed. But now he was fine. He rubbed his chest. The itchy wrong feeling had been replaced with a hot, sore ache, but he was definitely not dead. “My blood was there,” he finished quietly. “So I used it.”
“You did,” Grandmother agreed. “I wonder more that they took it. But I do not and perhaps will not ever understand their ways. You died, my Mizel. And they let you. Your other parent….” She went momentarily silent. “They let you die.”
Zelli shuddered and turned his head. “Many dead, from the sound of it. The Villucatto and Lyralinah guards?”
He half-expected to be told it could wait or that he ought to go back to sleep. But Grandmother appraised him for a moment, then said, “After they tried for me, our people were upset. Tahlen,” she gave the name weight, “was not in the mood to offer mercy, and I was not of a mind to ask him to, not after what he and his sister had already lived through. Neither were your adopted guards, who seem to understand some of what those two were feeling. But four of those with Kear survived and were pulled from the muddy pit that the rain created to swallow them.”
“What?” Zelli demanded in a faint voice. “Pit?”
Grandmother swept on, but gently. “The fae gave them no escape, leaving them to drown in the mud if they were not hunted down. But two of those who were taken by the pit had prior injuries and so did not survive for long.”
“Mud?” Zelli tried to grasp this fact but couldn’t imagine it. “A pit? Is it still there?”
