The Changeling's Fortune (Winter's Blight Book 1)

by K. C. Lannon

  When night was falling and Sister Teresa took roll of the young girls, she noticed Deirdre was missing. No one spoke up, except to report when they had last seen her, so she began searching. She and a couple of the other Sisters began searching the grounds and the halls, calling out her name.

  Deirdre had looked up. At first she assumed she imagined her name being called, but it came again. Through the shut wardrobe, the voice sounded unfamiliar and strange. For a wild moment she thought maybe it was her own mother.

  “I’m here!” She sat up straight. “I’m here!” She began to smile, all she had ever imagined about her mother coming back to mind, real, immediate.

  She wasn’t dead! I’m going home. I’m going home!

  When the wardrobe opened and she saw the familiar face of Sister Margaret, the image of her mother shattered. She began to cry again, not resisting as Sister gently urged her to her feet, leading her away to the kitchen for some hot milk before taking her to bed. Deirdre drank it without tasting its sweetness.

  The next morning she sat up in bed and scanned the room for Charlotte; she was asleep like all the other girls. But she did not dare face Charlotte alone again. So the moment Sister Teresa stepped inside, before she could even open her mouth to wake the girls, Deirdre ran across the room to her and, pointing at Charlotte, told her the entire story.

  Of course Charlotte was punished a little, and Felicity and her friends were punished a lot. But Deirdre also went without playtime privileges for a couple of days, and she had to apologize to Charlotte for slapping her. And she did so but only because she didn’t want to go back into that wardrobe (or even see it, ever again).

  Charlotte, Felicity, and her friends did not try to get back at her. But they did begin to call her a sneak, a tattletale, and a snitch.

  Unwilling to be locked up again, Deirdre stopped doling out punishment on her own. But hating the title “snitch” and all the shame that came with it, she didn’t report any bad behavior to the Sisters either. Even playing wasn’t as fun as it used to be without rules to be followed, and she nearly stopped playing altogether. As she entered her eighth year, her list of friends dwindled down to zero.

  Sister Margaret, in charge of eight- to eleven-year-old girls, had first assumed her growing listlessness was a result of being locked inside. She held off from acting or giving her special attention, hoping she’d grow out of it.

  A couple of weekends after fall term began, Deirdre was headed toward the library, lagging behind after having to clean up a mess she made during breakfast. Sister Margaret walked briskly toward Mother Superior’s office, her face red and her fists balled.

  “What’s wrong?” Deirdre asked, falling into step beside her.

  “Nothing,” she replied immediately.

  Frowning, the girl pressed. “Lying is against the rules.”

  Sister Margaret smirked at her. “You’re cheeky, aren’t you? It’s nothing— I’m just a little upset at one of the Sisters.”

  Deirdre nodded; this she could understand. “Was she mean?”

  “No, but she broke one of the convent rules. One of the small ones, but…” She bit her lip, stopping and looking at Deirdre again, realizing she had said too much.

  “But you couldn’t punish her for it, could you?” Deirdre asked.

  “Oh, no, that’s Mother Superior’s job,” Sister Margaret answered. “I’m going to report everything to her.”

  Deirdre blinked. “So you’re a snitch?”

  Sister Margaret slowed, considering her. “Deirdre, authorities decide what punishment is given. You know that, don’t you?”

  “But you don’t see all the bad things the other girls do. They lie and cheat sometimes, but you don’t see it! None of you do. But I can’t tell you who or when… that’d be snitching.”

  Sister Margaret froze, but then she crouched down and took Deirdre’s hand, saying, “It is okay to tell us when you see something bad happening. It’s good to report something bad to me or another Sister or to Mother Superior. We have the experience and knowledge to know how to handle the situation. And if some girl is doing something really bad, us knowing about it will help that girl.”

  Deirdre faltered, biting her lip. “Everyone says… Charlotte says that’s being a tattletale. That it’s bad to tell on people.”

  Sister looked her in the eye, a small smile playing at her lips. “Do you really think Charlotte knows better than I do?”

  Immediately Deirdre shook her head, her short ginger curls flying back and forth.

  “Then forget about that. If you see something that you believe is truly bad, don’t be afraid to speak up. Tell one of the Sisters. We’ll be happy you did. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Sister Margaret,” Deirdre said, a smile forming on her face.

  “Good.”

  Within a few short days, Deirdre became known as the very worst tattletale in the school. The other girls could not get away with anything, and her popularity certainly did not increase. But now when she was called a snitch, she grabbed that insult, tossed it over her shoulder, and kept walking. She knew what she should do to ensure all was right, and so her spirits buoyed back to full life and vigor.

  Her unrelenting insistence on fairness did not change as she kept growing; in fact, she changed very little compared to her classmates, especially once they turned twelve. Her classmates began to outpace her in academics, asking questions and having ideas deeper than she could conceive. They began seeing the world in new ways. Especially when it came to boys.

  While they didn’t have any boys in the orphanage, there were plenty in the nearby village. They became the sole topic of discussion for the girls during their free time. For hours, they would compare and argue over whose crush was cutest. Deirdre would try to change the subject, but it was fruitless. She felt stupid, completely out of the loop.

  Once she tried to engage in their chatter, during which they did their hair in a variety of styles and played with makeup they weren’t supposed to have. After she was forbidden from using the makeup to make monster faces, Deirdre stood up, saying, “This is boring,” and left. The girls called her weird or slow or a child as she walked out the door. Their words made tears spring to her eyes, but she still immediately joined a game of freeze tag with the younger children, unwilling to play alone.

  As she became a teenager, Deirdre spent almost no time with girls her age, becoming a playmate and a “cool” big sister to all the younger girls. Spending time with creatures smaller, more fragile, and far more sensitive than her forced her to learn skills that had so far eluded her. Through trial and error, she learned how to determine what games were appropriate for which children and how to explain the rules. She learned how to wait for the younger children to catch up when they went for walks or runs on the grounds.

  Finally she learned how to bond with those she would usually ignore. There was one little girl named Iris who got sick easily and so was rarely able to run and play. Once, Deirdre saw Iris confined to her bed, crying from boredom and loneliness, which prompted her to ask the Sisters to teach her new games—quiet, safe indoor games that even the most nauseous child could play without getting sick or exhausted.

  She then taught those games to Iris, who was a sharp learner. They most often designed and made paper dolls; Iris was especially amused at how Deirdre, nearly twice her age, was remarkably awful at it, often accidentally cutting her dolls to shreds (after which she usually tore up the pieces in frustration).

  And when Iris was too sick for even that, Deirdre would either make up stories or read them to her. While Iris liked to hear stories where orphan children found their birth parents, Deirdre read them reluctantly. The thought of her parents still stung. While she had been completely confident they were dead ever since the wardrobe incident, it still hurt to think that she would never see or hear them, never see what she would look like once she grew up.

  On better days when Iris was not nauseated or fevered, Deirdre would put the li
ttle girl on her shoulders and run her outside. She knew it was a good day if Iris also laughed as much as she as they dashed out the door.

  When Deirdre turned fifteen and Iris was eight, the girl was adopted by a lovely, sweet-spoken mother and a charming father, who lived in a small town with clean air and open fields. And as they tightly hugged farewell, for the first time Deirdre cried both from sorrow and happiness.

  This must be what it’s like to have a family, she realized as she kissed the little girl on the forehead.

  Shortly after Iris left, Deirdre and her class began to dress differently, more like young women than girls, with middle-length skirts and boots that went to their knees, always with modest, thick leggings underneath instead of tights. They began to learn professional and domestic skills: finance, sewing, embroidery, education, and everything that would make them an exceptional future secretary, teacher, manager, or small-business owner.

  When she turned sixteen, Deirdre was trusted to take the ten-year-old girls on weekly hikes; she also took them and other groups on camping trips, lasting anywhere from two days to nearly a week. The weekly hikes thankfully overrode her one sewing and embroidery class. Mother Superior encouraged her to focus more on childhood education than home economics, though she still emphasized that Deirdre needed to learn finesse in sewing at some point in her life.

  Deirdre didn’t cling to her or anyone else’s criticism. She rarely minded that she spent almost no time with girls her age; the only thing she disliked was being alone. Only Adelaide, who had grown into the sort of person who always assumed the best, went out of her way to spend time with Deirdre. The other older girls had labeled her as irrevocably weird when she never showed any interest in or attraction to romance or marriage.

  “It probably just means you’ll be a nun,” Adelaide offered helpfully between classes one day.

  “But I don’t want to be a nun,” Deirdre countered. “All the Sisters say that they knew it was their calling. I’ve never had that feeling.”

  Adelaide just shrugged in response.

  That May, just days before she turned seventeen, Deirdre brought up the subject once to Sister Margaret, who was now her advisor and spiritual counselor. She listened and then shrugged as well.

  “You may just be called to be single, and that is perfectly fine,” she explained, looking Deirdre in the eye as they sat side by side on a stone bench on the orphanage grounds. “No vocation is superior or inferior to another.”

  “But what if I am weird or slow like the girls say?” Deirdre pressed, swinging her legs.

  Sister Margaret waved her hand dismissively. “Deirdre, this is England. The English are remarkably good at calling people not like them all sorts of silly names. So don’t let it get to you when those girls, or anyone else, says you’re weird or odd or bad simply because you are different. They’re just being rude. Understood?”

  Deirdre sighed but nodded. “Yes, Sister.”

  “Besides”—she brushed back a lock of Deirdre’s curly, bright red hair that was hanging in her face—“you’re going to get singled out even more when you leave us and go to Neo-London to finish your schooling after summer’s end. I don’t know if you are Scottish like me or Irish like your name… but your ginger hair won’t be smiled on much in Neo-London. But don’t let it get to you. God gave you that lovely hair, and He knows what He’s doing.” She smiled at Deirdre. “Don’t let anyone make you think you need to dye or straighten it!”

  Summer passed by too fast. Deirdre let her hair grow longer than ever—all the way down to her waist (it was actually longer, but the frizz and the curl always pulled it up a few inches). She played and camped out with the younger girls, and every day Sister Margaret encouraged her to get her fun in now. Neo-London was the biggest city in England, she said, but there was no room for a young woman to run free. Deirdre wasn’t entirely sure if she believed her; she hoped for the best, thinking a city so full of people must have a lot of fun in store.

  The last day of August arrived, and she, with one tiny suitcase of clothes, stepped onto the local grocer’s truck that was headed to Neo-London. She was going alone; all the other girls had jumped ahead of her in their studies and had already graduated, leaving to go to university or their first job.

  She hugged all the Sisters, and she kissed and picked up and spun around all the young girls. Some of them cried, and she joined in.

  Last of all, she turned to Mother Superior, whose face was stiff, almost severe. Deirdre had seen that expression before when other girls had left. She knew the moment she had driven out of sight that Mother Superior would begin to silently cry.

  Unwilling to make the proud woman unravel, Deirdre simply curtsied, saying, “Goodbye, Mother Superior.”

  Mother nodded, patting Deirdre on the head. “Your hair is so long. Be careful it doesn’t get caught on anything, like it got caught on those branches last week.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “And always say please and thank you. You forget to do that a lot.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “And we’ll be praying for you, so don’t worry and do your best.”

  Deirdre nodded, beginning to smile. “Yes, Mother. Is that all?”

  She shook her head quickly, waving her hand in dismissal. “Off you go, child.”

  And as she sat in the back seat of the grocer’s truck and waved and shouted goodbye to the girls and the Sisters, she could see Mother Superior turning away, wiping her eyes. Tears beginning to fall from her own eyes, she kept waving until they rounded a corner and the orphanage was out of sight.

  In her heart, she dearly hoped she would be back as soon as possible.

  Chapter Three

  James Callaghan had last seen his mother six years ago. She had been wearing a bright yellow skirt and a vibrant green blouse; that was the most clear, sharp image, standing out against grey of the city. From the window of the small bedroom he shared with his brother, James had watched her walk out of sight from the military housing. She had packed lightly for a sudden, weeklong holiday to visit her family out of the city. Her goodbye had been brief and forgettable; no matter how hard James tried, he could not conjure her parting words in his mind.

  The moments he did remember were as bright as the colors she wore: she used to tell James and his older brother Iain stories at night. She weaved fantastical tales, some of them retellings of folktales and some of them true stories. After she got home from her shift at the hospital, she would sit in a chair between their two beds, and before they knew it, they were awake far past their bedtimes. Night was never quiet in their house when Mum was there.

  Frequently they received noise complaints from their neighbors because of their riotous laughter when Mum told them personal stories from her youth, like how she had convinced her grandfather to let her and her sister eat all the sweets in their home: “Once upon a time…,” she would begin, “my sister Delphi and I were once mischievous girls, very badly behaved!

  “After my grandfather came home from working all day, he would always remark, ‘Oh, how clean this house is! I wonder how it happened?’ Of course, he knew it was my grandmother who kept the house so clean, but she did not know he teased her. He was not the brightest man. My grandmother became fed up with all her hard work not being recognized, and one day she answered back, ‘It’s the house faery that keeps it clean! Don’t you know anything?’ Grandfather was confused. He had no idea we had a house faery!”

  The boys had to stifle their giggles with their pillows. A Romani family, keeping a house faery? It was ridiculous. It was bad luck. It was the kind of thing the gazhe would invent about them to validate his or her fear of the fair folk.

  “Well, he wondered why a faery would work for us. What did we give the faery in return for its hard work? It didn’t seem fair. Delphi and I told him that we paid the faery in sweets and that he had upset the faery by not acknowledging its existence.

  “The only way to appease the faery now was to m
ake it all the treats it could eat and leave it on the counter before he went to bed. If all the sweets were gone by morning, it had worked. So Grandfather spent the evening in the kitchen, making batches of cookies. When he woke up the next morning, sure enough, not a bite remained. Delphi and I had snuck out of bed and eaten all the sweets at once! We were so full we could hardly move! My mother nearly had to roll me to church!”

  Sometimes she lapsed into silence, after she’d wiped tears of laughter from her eyes, and Iain always reached over and gave her hand a pat. James never understood how such happy, loud stories could make her so quiet.

  “I wish you could meet them all,” Kallista would say wistfully when she spoke of her large extended family and the Romani community that used to be prevalent in the city. “They would love you.”

  “Why can’t we meet them?” James would ask. The children at school always complained about having to visit their grandparents and having to listen to their anecdotes about the days before the Cataclysm, and James thought they were lucky to have such a privilege.

  Kallista’s explanations were always vague, and she quickly changed the subject. When they got a little older, she would tell them simply, “My father wanted me to marry someone else. But I fell in love with your father, and that was that.”

  James wanted to ask “Why?” He had asked Iain once, and Iain had smacked the back of his head sharply. He didn’t understand why she loved their father, and he didn’t think it was fair of Iain to punish him for it. But Iain had always maintained his loyalty to their father.

  It was not that their parents did not get along—they coexisted with ease and supported each other. Their father was more like a specter drifting through their house than a participant, rarely joining them. He was quiet and cold and impossible for James to understand.

  All James had in common with his father was his green eyes and brown hair. James’s complexion was dark olive brown like his mother and brother’s, and he had unfortunately seemed to inherit his mother’s slight frame and height as well, though he was still hopeful he’d have another growth spurt (and that Iain would stop teasing him about it).