At moonrise, the baby let out a single cry. He was a tiny, sickly creature, weighing no more than a bundle of sticks and hay. His little eyes were still squeezed shut, had yet to take in the new world, but the sound was clear and loud and determined.
I will live, that cry declared.
I swaddled him in velvet—purple, for royalty—and held him out to my Queen. His hair had dried; it was soft and fair, and his eyelashes were long. A pretty baby, sure to tempt any mother.
But she turned away.
The baby let out a single cry and after that was silent. I set him gently in his cradle. I stroked his tiny hand, his soft cheek. I settled the velvet blanket around him.
He opened his eyes then, and I felt a weight slip from my shoulders.
He may have been Sebastian Morgenstern’s son, but his eyes were not black. They were a bright, beautiful green.
—
“You may call him Ash,” the Queen decided, when I insisted the boy needed a name. “Because that is all that remains.”
Of her kingdom, I knew she meant.
Of her pride.
Of her heart.
—
Ash was a perfect baby, but a weak and quiet one.
In fact he’d made not a single sound, after that first cry.
His mother would not leave her bed, would not look at the baby, much less hold him.
She lay propped against her cushions, her hair a scarlet tangle, her green eyes glittering with fury.
She was not angry at me, I knew, but at the fate that had taken the father of her child from her at the same time that it had shamed her people.
She simmered with rage like a pot on the boil, and some of that rage had spilled out upon her son.
“You must feed the babe,” I told her, summoning my courage. “Otherwise he will surely die.”
“You’re the healer, Nene,” the Queen said. There was fire in her voice for the first time since the descent of the Cold Peace. “You make sure he doesn’t die.”
And so I scooped tiny Ash gently into my arms, and returned to my own chambers. He fit snugly into the crook of my arm as I sat down upon my bed. I had soaked a cheesecloth with milk, and I brought it to his lips; he sucked eagerly, his tiny fists working as he fed.
“Don’t be afraid, little one. You are not alone,” I murmured. It was not natural, a baby suckling at sopping cloth rather than his mother’s breast, but Ash was clever, and he wanted to survive.
When he had taken enough milk, he drifted into sleep. I watched his little chest rise and fall. He had a dusting of blond across his pale head. He smelled of snow and milk.
He woke with a loud cry, and I laughed with the relief of it. He would live, I knew. And under my care, I pledged, he would thrive.
I had never cared for an infant before, but Ash made it easy.
He cried only when he needed something—food, changing, comfort.
Otherwise, he was quiet, gazing with bright curiosity at the world around him.
One day, I picked him up, and he smiled for the first time—smiled at me, I thought. As if he recognized me.
I rocked him to sleep each night, and now it was Ash I gave my stories to.
Not for him, stories of destruction or betrayal.
I told him stories of my sisters, in our youth, before the age of suffering.
I told him stories of pleasure and delight, music and magic.
I wanted everything he knew of the world to be light and lovely, at least as long as it could be.
After a month, the Queen finally rose from her bed. I found her in my room, wrapped in a dressing gown the color of a starry night. She was standing over the crib I had borrowed, peering down at Ash.
“Have you come to take him away?” I whispered.
It was, of course, only a matter of time. I knew that.
But it hurt.
“Certainly not,” the Queen said. “He seems to be thriving. Bring him back to me when he can swing a sword.” She turned then, all interest lost, and took herself away.
Ash watched her go—I saw his gaze track her, and I felt sure that some part of him understood, this was his mother, but she did not care for him. She would not stay with him.
I pulled him to my chest, held him tight.
“You are not alone,” I whispered. It was my constant refrain.
Ash would be mine to raise, the Queen had willed it.
Mine to raise, but not mine, I reminded myself. It was important to care for him; it was just as important not to love him. Because I knew well, from six sisters, you could not love that which did not belong to you. Not if you hoped to survive it someday being taken away.
—
Sebastian would have raised his son to be a warrior. A leader and butcher of men.
The Queen would have raised her son to be a king. Demanding, arrogant.
But Ash was not mine to shape, and so I let him be what he chose to be.
He grew out of his scrawniness, into a handsome child that many in the Court admired.
But even as a baby, Ash was not indiscriminate with his affection.
When he received visitors, he never cooed, never cried, certainly never played, he only watched them with his serious green eyes, and quickly his visitor would grow bored and leave us to ourselves.
Only with me was he playful. With me, he laughed.
My sweet, perfect little Ash, with his scrub of blond hair and his eyes like an enchanted forest. When black wings sprouted from his back, he cried for a moment, with the pain and surprise of it, and then we both laughed with delight, for they too were perfect, and though wings were not unusual in Faerie, they were special.
Of course, I thought, my Ash was born to fly.
—
Soon he was old enough to stand, to walk, to run—even to swing a little wooden sword, which I taught him to do.
His mother returned, occasionally, to appraise his progress.
But she did not claim him. He still loved to be held and rocked; he loved to hear my stories.
But he loved, most of all, to play. Hide-and-seek was his favorite.
Ash could hide anywhere, squeeze himself into the unlikeliest of places, a tiny ball of joyous life, holding in his laughter until I finally found him.
I always found him.
On his fourth birthday, he begged me for a game.
“Soon, my little one,” I promised him. “I need only to finish my work and then we will have all the time in the world to play.”
Ash scampered off, and I went about my duties—I did less healing, once Ash was entrusted to my care, but sometimes I was still needed.
A knight of the Court had entered into some foolish duel, and been wounded.
Under the Cold Peace, we Fair Folk had too much time to spare and too much to prove, a dangerous combination.
I ministered to the knight as efficiently as I could, patching his wounds but thinking only of Ash, and the cake I planned to surprise him with.
The gifts I had collected for him. The smile that would light up his face.
I hurried back to my chambers, where he now had a little room all his own. “All right, little one, it’s time to play!”
But he was not there. Not in his room, and not in mine, where he preferred to spend his time.
Not in my closets or under my bed. Not in my antechamber.
Not in the kitchen, curled up beneath the stores of food or digging into the secret cake.
Not in the rooms for washing up or dressing.
Not even in his mother’s chambers, where he was forbidden to go but sometimes, against all caution, ventured anyway.
My heart began to thump in my chest, as I ran out of places to look, began searching again, again.
I could not call out for him, could not reveal my dawning panic—I could not let word be spread through Court that I had lost sight of the Queen’s heir, for how could she continue to leave him in my care if I could be so careless?
She might not have loved him, but he was still hers, and what was hers, she guarded fiercely.
What if he had somehow found his way outside, alone, into the wild? What if someone had taken him, someone who meant him harm, someone who wanted the heir to the Seelie throne for themselves?
I could barely breathe. If harm had befallen him, if he was lying, still, unmoving, beneath a toppled shelf, if he had stumbled into the Queen’s menagerie, and been swallowed whole by a ravenous beast—
And then I returned to where I had begun, my own chambers, and in the room where I concoct my healing draughts, I spied a cabinet I’d thought was locked, and pried it open, and Ash blinked up at me, oblivious to my panic and relief.
“Why are you hiding here?” I took his little hand in mine and helped him climb out.
He blinked his big green eyes. “Because I wanted you to find me, Nene.”
He wrapped his arms around my legs, and squeezed so, so tight. I lowered myself to the ground, and looked into his face. So clear it was, so trusting.
“I got scared,” he admitted. “That you wouldn’t come.”
“I would always have found you,” I told him, and it was a promise to both of us. “Even if you hid somewhere very far away. I would never stop looking for you.”
I knew the truth of the words only as they slipped off my tongue.
I would never have stopped. Not because I was afraid of getting in trouble, but because I could not lose him.
“But why?” he asked.
My heart sank.
My heart sang.
I had made a terrible mistake, but the mistake was made, and there was no unmaking it.
“Because I love you,” I said.
And I cannot lie.
So I knew it to be true.
—
Once upon a time there were six sisters who suffered terribly in love, and a seventh sister who believed herself too wise to love. But she was only too foolish, and too afraid.
Foolish, because she thought if she avoided love, she could spare herself suffering.
Foolish, even more, because she thought love was a choice, and that she could choose against it.
—
I loved Ash.
This was not my choice, this was not my plan, it simply was.
I chose to accept it, rather than flee. I chose to open the floodgates of love, to invite more of it, and more of him, into my heart.
And I discovered a heart is a wound that can never be sutured. Once torn open, it only grows.
And so my heart opened to my sisters, each one of them, who I had never let myself love—but who I now discovered I loved nonetheless.
I grieved the loss of them, each one, the dead and the living.
I grieved the loss of Miach and Alessa, who I could have known, but chose not to.
My heart was a howl of pain for all I had lost, which is how I knew my heart had learned to love.
My long-ago lover, the poet—who I thought I had chosen not to love, but who I understand now, I loved nonetheless, and who I grieved as I never had before—once told me that mortals believe there are only two kinds of story, comedies and tragedies, their nature dictated by their ending.
Stories that end happily, with love, are comedies, he told me.
Tragedies are the stories that end with loss.
More mortal illusion.
All stories are driven by desire, and so all stories, all true stories, end in loss. No love can last forever.
—
My story will be a tragedy, like all stories.
I will lose Ash, or he will lose me; these are the only two possibilities love allows, and loving a child like Ash—a child who will always be a pawn to power—means the loss will likely happen sooner rather than later.
And it will come, I suspect, dressed in blood.
And yet, no story can be defined by its ending, any more than a life can.
My story will be a love story, like all stories.
And if my sister was right about children’s need for love, perhaps my love for Ash will change his story too.
Love may be ruinous, but perhaps it is also salvation.
Perhaps I can keep my sweet little one sweet, even as he grows, even as the Morgenstern blood runs through his veins.
I saw, in Sebastian’s cold black eyes, the possibility of a world without love, a grim future shrouded in darkness.
A sliver of that future lives in Ash, mingled with the blood of my icy queen.
I cannot change who he is, but perhaps I can change who he becomes.
I stayed quiet through the last war, thinking there was nothing I could do to change things.
Perhaps this is what I can do to avert the next one.