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She starts to forget colors after a time, in the dark. They don’t actually know how much time has passed; her mother had dug tallies in the soft earth beneath them for a long time, but it was like the hollow they were in resisted any definition in space or time. Her mother would count the tallies in exacting tones each time they awoke from slumber, and yet they would change each time, adding or subtracting random values between one moment and the next.
Once, her mother had lost the count entirely, had run shaking hands over smooth dirt over and over and made her do the same until she finally went quiet and still and would speak no more for the rest of the night. When they awoke once again, her mother did not resume her count.
But—the colors. She begins to forget them, feels them bleed together into formless dark in her mind’s eye.
Her mother cries when she tells her.
Rayseline hates when her mother cries.
~*~*~
She asks for her mother to speak to her, because it is the only time where both she and her mother feel real in the nothingness. Her mother has spoken to her of her father’s knights before, and often. Their names, their ranks, their deeds. But she is forgetting colors, and though she has not spoken of it before she is forgetting faces.
When her mother sleeps and she lies awake, she sometimes draws her fingers over the planes of her face, the curve of her Kitsune ears. She pretends that she can picture what her mother looks like from the touch alone. She can’t.
She always loses track of things in the dark.
So. She asks her mother to describe her father’s knights, because she cannot bear the heartbreak she would hear if she asked her mother to describe her father.
Etienne is Tuatha de Dannan. He has olive skin, a severe face, thick black hair and copper eyes. Rayseline doesn’t remember his face, but she remembers his hands, calloused and strong. He used to scoop her right out of whatever trouble she’d gotten into in the gardens, and though he’d carried her with an awkward air, she had felt safe with him.
Sir Etienne, her mother had started out saying, will be looking for us. As time had stretched on it had transformed into Etienne is keeping your father safe. She does not know what her father needs to be kept safe from.
(If she is anything like him, the answer is: himself.)
From Etienne it then goes on to Grianne, and Tavis, and on and on to Toby.
Her mother always ends with Toby. Rayseline never knows if it’s because her mother knows that stories about Toby always settle a part of her mind, or if she does it for her own reasons. Whatever the case, her mother sketches out October Daye’s face with her voice.
“Toby’s eyes are so pale,” her mother says, “Her hair darkened when she grew up, but her eyes never did. I kept waiting for them to shade blue or purple, but they always stayed that foggy gray. It’s unsettling when she looks at you—it always seems like she’s putting clues together or planning something. Her hair is brown, but not deep. Less like earth and more like unvarnished wood.”
“And she’s looking for us?” Rayseline asks, every time.
“She’s looking for us,” her mother always says, “Toby would never stop looking for us.”
“Good,” Rayseline says, and falls asleep.
~*~*~
Years must pass, because Rayseline grows from a gawky child to a lanky teen in fits and starts. For a long time, her arms and legs ache almost every day, and hunger gnaws at her stomach even though the food seems to show up more now that she needs it. She bleeds, and wishes she didn’t. She cries more, loses her temper, stops letting herself be soothed by stories and promises.
It grates on her mother, she knows it does. It frays her already strained mind, but Rayseline cannot bring herself to care because she feels like everything is slipping from her grasp, tastes and smells and colors and faces and the memory of light.
She still listens when her mother retreads the old tales of knights and subjects and friends.
When her mother reaches the end, Rayseline says, “She isn’t coming. None of them are coming.”
“She is.” Her mother says, iron-solid and iron-poisonous faith. “Even if no one else is coming, Toby is.”
Rayseline stays quiet. She does not want to have another fight, does not want to claw at the walls of their enclosure. But she thinks, She is not coming. She never will.
~*~*~
The first thing she registers about light is that it hurts. The second is that she’s drawn to it, leaning forward to soak it in before she even realizes what’s happening.
And then she sees the woman.
And Raysel realizes that she hadn’t forgotten colors so much as doubted her own recollection. Red, deep red, rose red, blood red, is the first she recalls.
It’s smeared all down the woman’s mouth and chin, her wrists, her hands, her shirt (blue, she thinks, blue like the sky she’s silhouetted against).
The woman’s hair is a snarled mess of ashy brown, and her eyes a gray so pale it looks almost silver to Rayseline’s color-starved gaze. Anyone else may have seen her as watercolor pale, but she is the most vivid thing Rayseline has seen in so long that looking at her hurts.
“There you are.” The woman says, sounding deeply relieved. “There you are.” The last part fades into a mumble as she falls over herself into a dead faint.
“Toby,” her mother breathes. “You found us.”
And Rayseline finds she is not surprised; that for all the screaming and arguing and bitter, bitter tears, she had never lost hope in her father’s changeling knight.
She steps forward, and the light embraces her. She steps forward, and the darkness recedes. She steps forward, and looks down at Sir October Daye.
~*~*~
Between the two of them, they manage to get Toby to her feet. Toby herself keeps making this harder by jolting into brief fits of consciousness where she’s desperate to grab at Rayseline or her mother and make sure they’re with her.
“We’re here, Toby, we’re here,” outside of the darkness, her mother’s voice is not strong. It dips and wavers and her eyes dart around. Her ears are pressed back, her tails lash at every noise. Rayseline catches herself in her staring more than once, but she can’t help it. Touching is not seeing, hearing is not seeing, only seeing is seeing, and Rayseline is seeing her mother for the first time in—
She doesn’t know how long it’s been. She knows that she grew taller than her mother ages ago, though the stopping of her growth is harder to pinpoint. Not recent, but it has to have been less than a decade since then.
Right?
“Luna,” Toby says, “Raysel,”
She has not heard her own name on the lips of anyone besides her mother in so long.
“Toby,” she says.
“Raysel,” Toby says again. Her cheek is smashed into Raysel’s shoulder. She’s probably getting blood all over bare skin. “You’re tall.”
Raysel pauses, looks down at her. “Am I?”
Toby nods, and then her eyes open to that foggy gray. “I expected you to still be small.”
“Toby,” her mother says, “how long have we been gone?”
“Seven years,” Toby says. “I was a fish for most of it.” Then, as a scream traps itself in Rayseline’s throat, she adds, “Raysel, you need to take my jacket. You’re very naked.”
Oh.
~*~*~
They don’t know where they are. When Toby drags herself away from unconsciousness enough to make sense, she squints around and says, “Uh. Yeah. I have no idea.”
Raysel maybe wants to throttle her.
“I came in on the Summerlands side. We’re definitely in the human world now, though. The place you were in was kind of like a. Shallowing? A bubble? A shallowing bubble? I’m honestly not sure, the Luidaeg could explain it better—“
“The Sea Witch?” Her mother says suddenly, almost dropping Toby’s entire weight on Raysel as she looks the knight over frantically. “You bargained with the Sea Witch, October?”
“Don’t full-name me.” Toby whines, and then, softer, “I had to find you two.”
Raysel maybe wants to bury her face in Toby’s knotted hair and cry. The throttling can wait.
“What did you give in exchange?” Her mother asks.
Toby looks at her feet.
“What did you give, October?”
“She helped me find two lost people,” Toby says, finally. “And so one day I’ll help her do the same.”
Her mother closes her eyes and draws Toby to her, cradling her like she’s much younger than she is. It’s, Raysel realizes, how her mother must hold her.
They stand like that a long time.
~*~*~
Between the three of them, Rayseline’s mother is the only one who can cast an illusion. Toby tries three times, until she finally gives up, wincing more each time. “I used way too much magic,” she tells them, morose.
Rayseline’s magic is similarly unresponsive; she’d gone into the darkness with her baby magic intact, and she’d come out of it at least two decades older and no more practiced in magic.
“My magic isn’t meant for this,” her mother warns. “I don’t know if it will last.”
“We just need to get to a payphone,” Toby says. “Shadowed Hills put phones in recently, so we should be able to reach them.” She hesitates. “If not, I’ll call the Luidaeg.”
“No,” The Duchess of Shadowed Hills says, suddenly queenly and firm. “You’ll not dig yourself any deeper in debt, Toby.”
Toby shrugs. Raysel is fairly certain that if push comes to shove, she’ll call the Sea Witch regardless of the consequences.
Her mother’s magic settles on like a second skin, smothering and comforting in equal measure. Toby sneezes hard, twice in a row, as humanity drapes over her features. Her eyes darken to blue, her cheekbones soften, and the traces of blood vanish. Raysel looks down at herself. There’s a pink skirt swishing down to her ankles, but when it brushes her skin it feels insubstantial and fragile, like if she pulls at it too hard it will disappear.
Her mother’s face shows the strain. She, too, has not cast magic like this in years.
“Best get moving,” her mother says, and they set off. They find a path in the redwoods, eventually, and with a path comes people. Rayseline has already talked to more people in the past hour than she has in years and years and years, and her voice shrinks and catches in her throat.
She wants to scream. She can’t make herself.
Toby talks to the first pair they run into, casual and chatty. She tells them they got turned around on the trail. She tells them they’re trying to find the exit. She gets directions, and Raysel leaves the interaction panicky and sweating and having said not a word.
Her feet begin to ache quickly. Her mother’s illusion shoes are not good enough to trick her feet into ignoring the rocks and twigs, and she hasn’t had to walk this far since the very early days where her mother would hold her hand and take her along on an unfruitful quest to find the exit. She’s out of practice.
Her mother keeps craning her head around to stare at everything, to marvel at the plant life. A part of Raysel wants to join her. A part of her wants to curl up in the darkest hollow of a tree she can find, sleep until things are less wide and open and colorful and loud and too much.
She keeps her eyes fixed on the back of Toby’s head, and does neither.
~*~*~
They finally reach the end of the trail, and with it comes a squat brown building, looking alien in the midst of the forest. She remembers enough of her letters to read the “Visitor Center” stamped on its side, which is a relief she had not expected.
“I’m going to ask to use their phone.” Toby says, and Raysel feels no shame in immediately dropping to sit on the bench. “Try to look sick of the worker peeks out?”
There’s a pause. Raysel changes nothing about her bearing.
“Yeah,” Toby says, “Like that. Luna?”
“I need to be outside right now.” Her mother says, voice thin and fragile as glass.
“Okay,” Toby says softly, and leaves them.
She isn’t doing more than stepping into the little building, travelling a handful of yards away to help get them home.
Rayseline still finds herself reaching out, instinctive in her panic. Don’t go, she wants to say, don’t leave us. Toby doesn’t even notice, the door closing behind her and blocking her from Raysel’s sight.
She lowers her hand, limp and useless, and stares for a long, long moment at the door.
All of a sudden the too-muchness of the world tips over. The colors hurt. The light hurts. Even the sight of her mother’s face hurts.
She buries her face in her useless hands and tries to make it all go away for a while.
~*~*~
Her memory is fragmented after that. Toby returns, and Raysel seizes onto her wrist and refuses to let go. Toby doesn’t make her. She just leads Raysel and her mother to a secluded area off the parking lot, and then there is a portal, and Sir Etienne’s face had warped slightly in her faded memory.
There is a man with fox-red hair and tired golden eyes, and he looks older than she recalls. Later, Rayseline will see him in herself in the mirror. Right now, she just allows herself to be embraced as he cries, and her mother cries, and Raysel… does not cry.
She does not feel anything. She is home and all she can think is it’s too much.
~*~*~
She keeps getting into fights. With her mother, with her father, with anyone who speaks at her for any length of time, it all goes boiling over and she finds herself snapping and screaming and when it ends she can’t even remember what she said and they always look at her with the same expression.
They look at her like she’s a tantrumming child, like a broken thing, and maybe she is broken but she had her childhood ripped away from her by a man with her father’s face and she can’t just slot herself back into the spot that her child self had left. She can’t. She won’t.
“Can I join you?” A familiar voice asks.
“Might as well.” Raysel says, and feels the rustle as Toby lays down next to her on the bed of leaves and rose petals. Her mother has set to the grim task of rehabilitating all of her abandoned gardens, but for the moment few dare to venture into the overgrown things. Raysel likes them. If she closes her eyes, she can smell the sweet roses and feel the breeze on her face. It is similar enough and different enough from her prison to be comforting.
Toby doesn’t say anything, just breathes into the silence.
“You’re the only one that doesn’t treat me like a child,” Rayseline says, finally. “Even my mother—she was there as I grew up, and still she expects me to go back to how things were the same way she has.” Bitterness coats her tongue and throat, as sour as bile.
“Purebloods don’t understand time the same way as changelings.” Toby says, careful. “For me and you, seven years is a long time when it’s so much of our lives. For them, it’s a blip. They think you should still be that child, and it hurts them when you’re not.” There’s a hint of raw pain in her voice as she says it, and Raysel remembers Gillian in a distant way. She wonders if Toby looks at her daughter the same way Rayseline’s father looks at her.
“It wasn’t seven years for us.” Raysel says, and it comes out as a whisper. “I didn’t just grow up fast, it was—time was—it was longer, in there. I know it. I know it.”
“Ah.” Toby says. “That sucks.”
Raysel squeezes her eyes shut tighter to ward off the sting of tears. “Yes,” she says, “It does.”
~*~*~
It is in this half-between state of child and adult that talks of marriage emerge. Her parents want a minder for their little girl, and her mother wants her grown daughter to find love like she has, and her father wants a child he can be proud of, and and and.
And what does Raysel want?
Raysel wants to scream.
~*~*~
Toby finds her with her shoes thrown to the side, her toes pressed in damp earth and her fingers tangling with the roots of a rosebush.
There is a more animate rosebush nuzzling into her side. She likes the prickle of it, likes the way it draws thin lines of blood if she doesn’t treat it precisely the way it wants. She feels a little like the rose goblin at the moment, prickly and half bristling thorns.
Toby levers herself down to sit beside Raysel, reaches out to stroke a careful hand along the rose goblin’s spine. Raysel, caught in her kindred feelings with the goblin, finds herself considering that careful hand down her own spine.
She shivers, and watches Toby’s hands tangle and play with the goblin’s vines as they sit in silence.
~*~*~
“I don’t want to marry Connor O’Dell.” Raysel tells Toby, and hates how small her voice is. She had spat it with venom not three hours ago, when the subject had been brought up again, and yet now she cannot feel the rage that had fueled her. Now it’s just misery, and dread, and a hard lump in her throat that she doesn’t know the word for.
“They’re throwing Connor at you?” Toby asks. “He knew me when I was a kid. He wasn’t that much older, but still. And a selkie?”
Raysel feels such strong vindication that she’s rendered momentarily speechless.
“Do you even want to get married at all?” Toby continues, doubtful. “I know a lot of purebloods go with the whole arranged marriage thing, but it seems a little… soon?”
Raysel mutely shakes her head. “Not to any of the people they’ve put forth. I don’t even know them.”
Toby wrinkles her nose. “Then don’t get married. Sylvester and Luna will get over it, once they realize you’re your own person. You may have to run away and crash on my couch, but they’ll get it eventually.” She rolls her eyes when she says the last bit, and Raysel remembers all over again that Toby was, in many ways, her parents’ daughter long before Raysel came around.
A small, bitter part of her (okay, not so small. Very large and loud, in fact,) wonders if they would have preferred another daughter like Toby. Someone who asserts herself without screaming, who has proven herself over and over and over again, who has fought for her place and earned it.
Someone who can love them back, and still be her own person.
It is the idea of Toby-as-her-parents’-daughter that brings the thought to her head, and it’s so out of the blue that Raysel says, out loud, “Huh.”
“What?” Toby asks, her head tilted to the side. There’s a smile on her lips. Raysel has been trying not to notice it.
“Would you marry me?” She asks, before she can engage her brain in the useful task of filtering her thoughts.
Toby softens. “Of course, Raysel. You’ve been through a lot, but so have the rest of us. You care, and you try to understand even when it’s hard. That’s why you get so frustrated, I think. Because you’re trying and it feels like no one else is. Anyone would be lucky to have you.”
Raysel’s heart is pounding in her ears. “But would you, October Daye, Knight of Lost Words, marry me?”
Toby’s expression freezes on a warm smile. “Uh, what?”
~*~*~
Raysel is up and pacing in a heartbeat as she tries to explain. “They want—someone who will take care of me, who I can love, someone who can protect me and you’re the only one who has ever saved me, and if I marry you then I can get out of here and, and my father will be so happy to call you his daughter.”
She doesn’t remember when Toby stood, but at some point she must have because they’re standing and facing each other and Raysel has Toby’s hands clasped between her dirt-stained ones, and Raysel has her head tipped down so she can look Toby, gaping with shock, in the eye.
It’s her last point that has really struck Toby, she sees. The other woman swallows, hard, something like longing in her gaze before she looks away.
“We don’t have to be married for you to come stay with me, Raysel,” Toby finally says, and the lighthearted tone she’s going for doesn’t quite land. “And we don’t have to be married for me to protect you.”
“They’re not going to stop until I marry,” Raysel says. “And if I run away, I’ll just end up hurting them, after all of it. But if I do what they want, and they can send me away with someone they trust, maybe… maybe we can learn to love each other again.”
It’s a dirty trick to pull, but Raysel has realized in the past five minutes that this is something that she wants, desperate and bone deep. Her parents have only been entertaining suitors like Connor O’Dell, ones who will move in and play happy family in Shadowed Hills and trap Raysel here as surely as if she’s back in—
(Don’t think about that, she scolds herself.)
But, Toby. Toby is independent. Toby refuses to live in the knowe. Toby has a mostly-human daughter, Toby has a business in the human world. If she married Toby, she would have to leave.
Toby studies her intently. “You really think it would work, Raysel?”
“I do.” Raysel says. “Let me try and ask them. Please.”
“What the hell,” Toby mutters to herself, and then says warningly to Raysel. “I don’t think they’ll say yes, but at least then I can work them down to just letting you stay with me and get out of the knowe for a while.”
Raysel is already nodding, and there’s an unfamiliar grin stretching across her face, and on impulse she leans in quick and featherlight to press a kiss to Toby’s cheek.
And then she’s spinning away, narrowly avoiding the friendly rose goblin at her feet, and she’s out of the gardens before she can see Toby’s reaction.
~*~*~
Her brain is buzzing and soaring, mood higher than it’s been in—a long while.
She’s still barefoot and beaming when she walks into the audience hall. The way there is straightforward and short, when Raysel is used to forgotten little hallways winding around themselves.
She glides in with dirt between her toes and the hem of her dress grass-stained and crumpled, and she says, “I’ve decided who I’m going to marry.”
Her mother takes one look at her and Raysel can see understanding crash over her in a wave, can see the exact moment that her mother’s eyes fill with hope.
Her mother does want love for her, Raysel thinks, and she can be charitable when she feels this weightless.
Her father is looking at her like he’s seen a ghost. He covers it quickly after she turns her gaze to him, but she sees it, and even in her gaze of triumph she can feel the way it stings.
“Oh, my little rose,” Her mother says, as the courtiers scatter from the room without the order having to be given. “Look at you. Look at you.”
Raysel doesn’t have to look down at herself to see what her mother sees. Dirt, and the scent of flowers, and a crumpled dress and hair that only seems to snarl when she’s been working in a garden.
And a smile. She’s not used to it. Her face kind of hurts, but she can’t stop the wide, smug grin.
Raysel knows that if her mother was anyone else, this state would be sure to get her a scolding. But her mother has always wanted to see more of herself in Raysel, and right now she can almost imagine this is how her mother looked centuries ago, in love and dreaming of the future.
Oh. Huh. Love.
That’s what that is.
“You didn’t want to get married hours ago,” Her father says, baffled. He adds, after a moment, “I was going to put it to rest for the next three years, at least.”
Her mother shoots a narrow-eyed look at him that Raysel doesn’t miss, but she can’t quite bring herself to care right now. Later, she will probably be mad about it. Later.
“What changed?” Her father finally asks.
“I talked to Toby.” Raysel says truthfully.
“…Toby.” Her father says after a full thirty seconds of dead silence. “Toby… convinced you to get married. Toby.”
The doubt is clear. This is reasonable, Raysel decides magnanimously, and so she tilts her chin up and explains. “She told me I should just run away from the knowe and stay with her, and I decided if I was going to do that I might as well just marry her.”
Her father blinks, slow and still, and then he says, “You want to marry October?”
“Yes.” Raysel says. “Obviously.”
He drags a hand down his face, pausing halfway through to pinch at his nose and breathe deeply. Eyes closed, he says carefully, “And does Toby know about this.”
“I asked, she said yes, we’re getting married.” Raysel really does not see where he’s getting lost.
Her mother, having processed this information much quicker, says, “Well. It is romantic.”
“Exactly.” Raysel says.
“Your knightly savior.” Her mother continues.
“You understand.” Raysel agrees.
“And if you’re already in love…” her mother continues. Her father, in the background, lets out a pained moan.
“Hm.” Her mother finally decides. “She won’t be likely to get another title, but she is sworn to your father. Her loyalty has never been in question. She’ll keep you safe, and she’ll care if you’re happy, and if you’re married then we can also have Toby come around more often. Yes. I think this is a good idea, Raysel. Oh, Sylvester, stop that.”
Her father has entirely slid down in his chair, boneless and suffering.
“Toby will be your daughter, this way.” Raysel tells him.
“She already is in almost every way.” Her father says, but he heaves himself back into a proper sitting position and opens his eyes.
“But you would get to call her daughter.” Raysel wheedles.
“…I would, yes.” Her father says, and something in the line of his shoulders eases. “If it is what you both want, then I suppose we have a wedding to plan.”
Raysel suddenly feels that she has miscalculated. So many eyes on her, so many places to snap and mess up.
On the other hand, the more the idea sits the more she knows she needs to tangle Toby up in wedding vows, bind them close together until Toby looks back at her the way Raysel wants her to.
“I really thought you were going to say no,” the mumble carries unnaturally across the room, and Raysel turns to look at her future wife.
Pale gray eyes blink back at her, mildly panicked and overwhelmed. Her ashy brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, wisps already escaping from the tie. She’s wearing mortal clothes, jeans and a tank top and a light jacket. Her sneakers, like Raysel’s feet, are covered in dirt. The rose goblin, having trailed behind her, weaves between her ankles and rattles happily.
“They didn’t.” Raysel says helpfully, and her grin is returning. “Congratulations, we’re getting married.”
“Oh,” Toby says, faint, “Okay, then.”
Raysel just keeps beaming at her, drinking in her face and all of her colors with hungry eyes. She doesn’t want to forget this ever again, wants to keep this moment perfectly crystalized in her mind.