“Here we go.” Gillie sauntered back into the room with a wooden plate loaded with buttered toast. “Get that down you, and when you’re feeling better we can have a chat.”
He sat cross-legged on the floor beside Nua, setting the plate down in the middle of us.
“There’s a lot to say, isn’t there, my love?” he said to Nua, leaning over to kiss his cheek.
Nua nodded absently, worrying his fingers in the hem of his shirt. I blinked at the action. I did that a lot too.
When no one moved for a few seconds, Gillie huffed and snatched up a piece of toast.
“Eat up, lad,” he said with a nod at the plate. “You’ll get ill otherwise.”
I let out a shaky breath and slowly leaned forward to take a slice. It was charred in places, still warm, and thickly coated in butter when I sank my teeth into it. But it tasted like normal toast. Normal bread.
Nua took a slice too, and we sat in silence for long minutes, the crunch of us eating filling the warm, earth-muffled space. When I realised I’d been gradually relaxing, my limbs unclenching, I stiffened right back up. It sent a fresh wave of agony pulsing down my missing arm, making my slowly filling stomach churn.
“If you need to throw up, go right ahead.” Gillie nodded at a wooden bucket placed beside my fur pallet. “I put that there last night for you, but you were out cold before we’d even finished bandaging your arm.”
That just made me even more tense. I said nothing, trying to ignore the shaky feeling in my gut as I finished my slice of toast.
I forced myself to pick up a second slice, a tendril of hunger curling in my aching stomach, telling me that it had been a long time since I’d eaten anything. Gillie ate twice as much as Nua and I did, and soon the plate was empty.
“Well.” Gillie looked at me, silver eyes uncharacteristically serious. “Why don’t you tell us everything that happened? What you know?”
“No,” I rasped immediately, looking between them both. “You tellmewhat you want with me. Why you were leaving me notes.”
“We don’t want anything from you, Ash,” Nua said, gazing at me solemnly. “Just to help you. That’s all we were trying to do.”
But I’d heard words like that before, and I didn’t trust them in the slightest.
“If you were trying to help, why didn’t you just tell me what the Carlin’s plan was? Why didn’t you just tell me why she wanted me?”
“Because we didn’t really know.” Nua shrugged helplessly. “We knew it would have something to do with the fact that you’re seelie, and the Brid’s son. We knew it would be bad.”
“Why couldn’t you have at least told me that?” I tried to ignore the pang of betrayal tightening my chest, because it was ridiculous. “Why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t unseelie, or that I was the fucking Seelie Queen’s son? That would have helped.”
“We had to be careful. Her guards roam the forest just outside of unseelie land. There was a risk one of them would get to the note before you. And we didn’t know what she’d do if she thought you were figuring things out.”
I snorted at that. “More like you were just protecting your own skin.”
He flushed, and a tiny part of me felt bad—like I was being a bastard. I forced it back.
“There was an element of that, yes. But if she sent her son or guards to track us down, then we would have been no help at all.”
I said nothing to that, because really, I knew logically that I couldn’t have expected these two Folk to put themselves at risk for me. I didn’t know them, apart from meeting them when I was just a boy, and they didn’t know me either, though they were acting like they did.
Nua looked at me, eyes tight. “What did she do to you? We saw him take you. Balor. Saw him skulking outside your cottage after you’d made your potion.”
So Balor had been the one to smack me over the head and knock me out. I remembered stepping outside of the cottage after making my potion and peering round, but I didn’t know why. Maybe I’d heard him out there.
“They—She chained me up in her throne room,” I said, licking my dry lips. “And said she… was going to scrape my mortal skin off so she could eat me bit by bit and consume my power. To stop the Mild Months from coming.” Rage tightened my chest, blocking out the pain in my head and arm momentarily. “They killed my parents.”
“How did she do it?” Nua’s face was sorrowful. “How did she get your mortal skin off?”
“I—” I swallowed. “They left me alone in there. I don’t know for how long. It felt like I was—like I was dying. And then…” I shrugged my one good shoulder. “I woke up like this.”
“You did die,” Gillie murmured, giving me a small, sad smile. “Your first life gone. Your mortal side burned away.”
I swallowed, looking down at my one hand. The bandaged stump was too conspicuous in my periphery, sending sorrow through my whole body.