Page 90 of The Courting of Bristol Keats
Bristol sat in the wide nook of the window, her arms hugging her knees. A blanket she’d pulled from her bed circled her shoulders and twisted around her feet, and her hair was a swirl of neglect. She leaned her head against the wall and stared out the window at the hazy expanse of the distant city, tiny figures on tiny horses navigating tiny streets.
But mostly she saw other things.
Twenty-two years was a lot to sift through. Truth and lies had been longtime partners, and they’d played a glorious good trick on her.
For four days her attention drifted from the bed to the ceiling to the past. She fingered her way through memories like slips of paper, memories she had folded and tucked neatly away in hidden places. Now they fell loose, in disarray around her, small bits she tried to make sense of, until one would catch her by surprise with its sharpness, a paper cut slicing into her skin.
Come away, child. Come away from the tree.
She was four years old when she wandered into an overgrown park, wild with weeds and abandon, not far from their motel.
But, Mama, it whispered to me. It wants to give me something. It’s asking me to—
Come away, child! Now! Do as I tell you!
Her mother’s voice was harsh, and her cheeks were flushed with fury. Bristol ran into her arms, crying, not sure why she was scolded.
Leanna Keats scooped her up, squeezing Bristol so tightly she couldn’t breathe. Her mother ran the whole way back to their motel chanting jibberish, then frantically rubbed herbs into Bristol’s hair, like she was washing away invisible dirt. That very hour, they packed up their van and left for another city. Any city. It didn’t matter which one, as long as it was far away.
Come away, child.
It was her mother who was fae.
Hermother.
She had repeated that revelation often over these past days, thinking sense would come from it. A burst of enlightenment. Instead, she had to painfully sort through memories that didn’t come easily. But they were there, tucked into deep dark places. Maybe some things she had chosen not to see as they were. Things she didn’t want to remember. Like the way her mother would stare vacantly across the room and slide her thumb along her fingers, a phantom motion, like she was kneading something between them—the same movement she saw Madame Chastain use before she summoned magic. But there was nothing magical about her mother, no chanting, no spells, no supernatural scents that hinted at anything beyond the ordinary.
Cinnamon toast, meadow grass, campfires, powdered doughnut, orange soda, the oily trace of long hours in a beat-up old van, and the joyful whiff of rose oil after a long bath at a motel, those were the scents of her mother. Everyday scents. If her mother knew any magic, she never used it—at least not that Bristol ever saw. Maybe because it would have led other fae to her—the ones she was trying to escape from. How had Bristol not seen the signs? But it was the only life she had ever known, the truth of her world, and her mother’s quirkiness was as much a part of it as washing up in rest stop bathrooms, and sleeping like a tangled litter of pups stuffed in the back of their van.
Maybe sometimes you couldn’t see truth until you gained distance from it. Fae and magic hadn’t even existed in Bristol’s mind. And that wasn’t by accident. It was by design—her parents’ design.
Memories flooded back. The things she had ignored—or was trained to ignore. The simple things her mother didn’t know. Civics. Riding a bike. How to step into an elevator and make it move.
Then there were the things she and her sisters never questioned, like how their mother’s hair color would change overnight, though she never went to a salon. Or the strange desperate language she spoke in fevered dreams, her father waking her with a gentle shake. Covering for her.
They both lied. And to cover up who they were, they placed a—
Sour saliva swelled on her tongue. It was one of the reasons it was hard for her to eat. Every bite would also feed the creature on her back so it could go on sucking away more of who she was. Madame Chastain told her the tick had probably been there since she was a baby—a way to keep her magic stunted and concealed. Going through the portal made the years of repressed magic explode within the tick. The High Witch had never dealt with anything like it before and said she had summoned someone of exceptional skill and experience who might be able to get the tick to release its grip on her.
A tick. Ugly vermin deliberately placed on her.Her own parents did this. And they never told her.
And then another memory. One that faded in, out. A hazy slip of paper cutting her over and over again. A recollection so blurred she wasn’t even sure it was true. Toddling into the bathroom and screaming. Her mother not looking like her mother. Her father scooping Bristol up and carrying her out of the bathroom.
It’s only a costume, darling. Mama’s playing dress-up. She’ll take it off.
Only a costume.
Bristol asked Madame Chastain if she had known her mother. “No,” the witch answered, “she wasn’t from Danu.”
Maybe her mother did grow up in a small town with a rotten family just as she claimed—a rotten fae family. All her fellow recruits were born and raised in the mortal world. There seemed to be plenty of them there. Or did her mother and father meet in Elphame? Or maybe they—
This was the game Bristol had played for the last four days—or maybe it had been her entire life. The truth had become as twistable as the balloons molded at street fairs into different creatures for the price of a coin. It was pliable between skilled fingers and could be anything you wanted it to be. How skilled her parents were.
If I’m bloodmarked, I got it from her, Bristol thought.
If.
But now, with her mother dead, Bristol would never know for sure. Unless she found her father. Surely, he would know. If he was alive. Now even Willow’s “truth” seemed suspect—as did every truth of Bristol’s entire life.
