Isla's Inheritance

by Cassandra Page

After speaking on the phone to Dad’s neurologist the next morning, Aunt Elizabeth told me he was allowed to have visitors that afternoon. The doctor didn’t want to overwhelm him with too many people at once, so he insisted only family visit for now.

  By the time we were ready to leave for the hospital, I was a knot of anxiety, pacing the lounge with my hands balled into fists to stop them shaking. I wanted to talk to Dad in private, but the rest of my family were as keen to see him as I was. Worse, Sarah and especially Nana knew what I wanted to talk to Dad about, and were eager to hear his story as well.

  At least, Sarah was eager. I found it hard to read Nana’s emotions—they were a confusing swirl and not one I was able to interpret. But she was clearly intent on being in the room when I talked with Dad, which made my throat tighten with apprehension. Whatever he had to tell me about my mother was personal, and when I heard it for the first time I didn’t want to feel like part of a drama production or a spectator sport. And I was sure Dad wouldn’t talk about the duinesidhe if people who didn’t know about them, such as my aunt, were there.

  So as well as being anxious, I felt a little resentful—and ashamed of my selfishness—when Aunt Elizabeth, Nana, Sarah, Ryan and I filed into Dad’s hospital room.

  “Hey,” he greeted us, smiling. The head of the hospital bed was raised so he lay on an angle. As we gathered around him, he turned off the portable stereo on the bedside table.

  At the sight of him, my negative emotions blew away like morning fog. Forgetting my questions and the rest of my family, I ran across the room, throwing myself into his embrace. His warm arms wrapped around my shoulders as fiercely as mine did his. He didn’t feel weak or tired at all.

  Tears flowed from my eyes. I knuckled them away, suppressing a sob.

  “It’s good to see you too, pumpkin,” he whispered in my ear. I looked up and saw wetness glittering in his eyes under the fluorescent lights.

  They vanished, blinked away, when I scowled. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  “I’ll try not to,” he said with a grin. “Although no one seems to be able to tell me what I did.”

  Sarah gave me a significant look. She was leaning against the windowsill, the same spot Jack had stood in the night before. I shook my head at her almost imperceptibly. Shoulders slumping, she turned to get me a tissue from the shelf beside the bed.

  “Mum!” Dad exclaimed then, smiling at Nana. “Liz told me you’d come across. I’m so glad to see you.” But as he embraced her, I saw the deep pink of his aura flicker with amber for a moment. It reminded me of the orange lamp on a traffic light.

  “How do you feel, David?” Aunt Elizabeth asked, leaning over the bed to give Dad a peck on his bristled cheek.

  “Not too bad,” Dad replied. “Tired; confused about how I got here. A bit like I reckon Sleeping Beauty felt after her curse was lifted.”

  I jumped at the word curse, covering my reaction by dabbing at my eyes with the tissue. Dad narrowed his gaze, but didn’t say anything.

  “Do you remember anything at all?” Ryan asked. “Did something hit you in the head?”

  “Nothing I can remember. I was leaving the farm and got out of the ute to close the gate. I pulled a package from the mailbox. Then I woke up here.”

  “What was in the package?” This question was from Nana.

  “I don’t know. I never got a chance to open it.”

  “Mrs Wilson never mentioned finding a package,” I murmured to my cousins.

  “Maybe the old bat kept it,” Ryan muttered back, earning himself a stern look from his mother. I agreed with her; Mrs Wilson was a busybody, not a thief.

  “It might have fallen under the passenger seat in the ute or something,” Sarah said, trying to keep the peace. “She could have missed it when she found the, ah…” She trailed off, blushing.

  “The photos,” I finished for her.

  Dad gave me a long look. “You found them?”

  “Mrs Wilson did. She gave them to me.”

  He opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. Suddenly he did look weary.

  I tried to think of a way to change the subject, but Dad beat me to it. “So, what have I missed during my nap?”

  I kept quiet, drinking in his animated expressions and his laughter as my grandmother, aunt and cousin—only one of them, because Ryan didn’t talk much either—filled Dad in on the goings on of the past nine days. The truth was there wasn’t a lot to tell; the biggest news was, of course, his illness … and none of us wanted to burden him with the grief and worry we’d felt.

  Although, Dad being Dad, he probably figured that out anyway.

  Nana spent some time talking about her flight over and updating him on the status of the same relatives she’d told Aunt Elizabeth about in the car the day after she’d arrived. The most interesting bit of gossip was that two of Dad’s cousins were grandparents already. Dad looked at me, seemingly horrified at the notion I might make him a grandfather sometime soon. I smiled back reassuringly. Life was complicated enough without little people running around.

  When Nana was done, Sarah chattered on about our upcoming birthday party and how her friend’s band was going to play—long past the point where I suspect Dad had lost interest.

  Finally a nurse came in, a tall Scandinavian woman with sharp features and a prominent nose that reminded me of an eagle’s beak. She took one look at Dad and ordered us to leave. Sarah looked crestfallen, cut off halfway through her description of the decorations.

  “Come on, you lot.” Aunt Elizabeth grimaced, mortified. “We’ve overstayed our welcome.” She stood to shoo us all from the room.

  Dad caught my hand. “Stay a little?”

  I hesitated, looking from the nurse to the rest of my family. The nurse scowled, about to say no, but Dad smiled at her and she softened. I saw the shift in her aura from harsh, bright colours to something mellower: pastel shades that moved more slowly. I rubbed my eyes. Colours whose names I knew swirled around everybody I saw, but their meaning was still a mystery. The distraction every time they shifted drew my attention from the conversation and made my temples ache. “Okay,” the nurse nodded. Then she gave me a stern look. “But don’t wear him out. I will be back soon to check on you.”

  “Here,” Sarah said, handing me the keys to her car. I’d come to the hospital with Sarah and Ryan, while Aunt Elizabeth had brought her car with Nana. “We can catch a ride with Mum.”

  “Thank you.” I gave her a hug. I knew she wanted to stay, not just out of curiosity but to provide moral support. Guilt sat like a stone in my stomach for ever wishing she hadn’t come. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “You better,” she replied, mock-fierce, and left Dad and me alone.

  Nana looked unhappy as the door swung shut with her on the other side of it.

  Silence fell, a merciful relief at first. I perched on the edge of Dad’s bed, gazing at him, giddy with happiness that he was looking back at me.

  Then the quiet began to feel a little uncomfortable.

  “So,” Dad said after a long moment. “I guess I owe you an explanation. About your mother.” If he were standing, he would have shuffled his feet like a naughty child about to receive a scolding.

  “Let me help you out a little,” I said, twisting the edge of the blanket between my hands. “She was an aosidhe named Melpomene. She can manipulate emotions. And she’s still alive.”

  He stared at me, mouth agape. His entire aura was suffused with electric purple, like the arcing plasma from a Tesla coil I’d seen at a science show: a more appropriate colour to depict shock I couldn’t imagine. It was almost retina searing.

  He closed his mouth with an audible click of his teeth. “You’ve been busy,” he said, voice tight.

  I nodded, reaching into my bag and bringing out the tattered envelope with the photos inside. “Here, these are yours.”

  He hesitated and then took the envelope, cradling it to his chest.

  Despite everything, he still lo
ved her.

  “How did you meet?” I asked, my voice soft with sympathy.

  “I’d just finished school. Some friends and I went on a backpacking holiday to Scotland.” He cleared his throat, and his gaze drifted towards the window. “We were idiots. It was winter and cold. Really cold. We should have gone south, somewhere warmer. But we’d found cheap accommodation, a dingy hostel in Edinburgh. The others went to the pub. I was waiting for my socks to dry out a bit before I followed. I had them hung over this old bar heater and—”

  He glanced at me, saw my nose was wrinkled up with disgust, and laughed a little. “Anyway, I followed them about half an hour later. It was after dark—in winter that far north the sun sets at four in the afternoon. I got a bit turned around. And then I found her.

  “She was in an alleyway, and when I stepped closer her lower lip trembled. I asked her if she was okay, and she said someone was chasing her. She looked me in the eye and asked me to help her. And I loved her from that moment. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone as beautiful as her, and, when she needed my help—well, every young man wants to be a hero, don’t they?” He laughed again, self-depreciatingly. “I didn’t do a lot. I took her back to the hostel and we talked. She was pretty uncomfortable there, with the various steel fixtures and things, but it was safe for her. Her pursuer couldn’t detect her through the steel.”

  I blinked, startled. “Wait a minute; you knew what she was?”

  He nodded. “I was raised with tales of the fae. At that point she hadn’t hidden the shape of her ears, and her sensitivity to the iron bed frame was another clue. Your nan knew a lot about them from when she was a girl. Liz was never that interested—she was always the sensible one. But I used to pester Mum for stories all the time.”

  “And you trusted her? Melpomene, I mean?” I couldn’t bring myself to call her “mum”.

  “I shouldn’t have,” Dad said. “Not after everything your grandmother told us. But I made her promise not to hurt me, to swear. You understand about fae oaths?”

  “A little.”

  “Well then. I knew I could trust her. She came back to London with me, and we got married and had you.” He smiled, leaning forward to brush my hair away from my face.

  I blinked at the story’s abrupt ending. “I don’t understand why she would do that,” I said slowly. “From what Jack … that is, from what I was told, the aosidhe are pretty arrogant.”

  “Oh yes,” he agreed. “And they can be cold. But she loved me too.”

  “Then why did she leave?” And there it was, the question that burned me the most. My throat tightened.

  He sighed and looked out the window. “Because it was in her nature. Because, despite everything, she didn’t belong in our world, and I didn’t belong in hers. She gave me you, though.”

  We sat there in silence for a long while, Dad’s gaze far away and wistful. He looked so happy, lost in his memories. His hands ran over the faded ivory paper of the envelope containing the photos.

  The photos and the wedding rings.

  I remembered something then. One of the rings, the smaller one, had something engraved on the inside of it, and it had been scratched out. The thought nagged at me; I tried to dismiss it, but I couldn’t.

  My father had raised me to have an analytical mind.

  “You’re not telling me something.”

  A frown creased his forehead.

  “It doesn’t add up. Who defaced the engraving on her ring before she left? And why, if you both loved each other, did you flee to Australia and surround yourself with iron? Doing that pretty much guaranteed you’d never see her again.”

  He nodded, slowly. His expression was a curious mixture of consternation and pride.

  “What was engraved on the ring, Dad?”

  He spoke reluctantly. “It said ‘true love.’”

  “And who scratched it out?”

  “She did.”

  “Why?”

  “She was angry with me. Furious.”

  “Why?” I asked again. A suspicion was growing in my mind. When he didn’t answer, I pressed him. “What did you do, Dad?”

  “He made her swear an oath to love him,” a voice said. We both jumped; we hadn’t heard the door open. It was Nana.

  “Mum!” Dad protested. My imagination flooded with images of my father using the same tone of voice with his mother when she’d embarrassed him as a teenager. But this was far more serious.

  “It’s true,” she said, sweeping into the room past the other, empty bed. The door thudded closed behind her. “She needed your help to escape pursuit that day. In exchange for your help, you made her swear to love you and, because of the oath, she did. Because that’s how duinesidhe oaths work. And you swore in turn to never let her be hurt.”

  I turned on Dad, a sick feeling in my gut. “Is it true?”

  He nodded, miserable.

  “You trapped her into loving you?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that.” He sat upright in the bed, taking my hand. I pulled away, horrified.

  “Then what was it like, Dad?”

  “We really did love each other.”

  Nana spoke again then, standing at the foot of his bed with her hands on her hips. “Be truthful with the child, David,” she scolded him. “She deserves to know what happened. Tell her about the day she was born.”

  “It…” He trailed off, took a breath, started again. “It broke the oath between us. That she would love me and I would protect her from hurt. Because, you see—”

  “Childbirth hurts,” I whispered. Dad nodded, miserable.

  “That’s why he came halfway around the world and took up ironwork,” Nana said, relentless. “Because he knew she’d be angry. He knew she might seek revenge on both of you.”

  And there it was: the ugly truth. My mother hadn’t loved me, hadn’t wanted me. She’d gotten pregnant—the only aosidhe ever to become pregnant with a half-human—because she knew it would break their oath in a way that wouldn’t cause her permanent harm. And that there was nothing Dad could do to prevent it.

  I was a key. A tool. Nothing more.

  I felt ill, as though I were in the presence of iron myself.

  Nana opened her mouth to say something else, her expression reproachful. And in that moment I loathed her.

  “Shut up!” I screamed at her. “Just shut up, you hateful old bat.”

  “Isla!” Dad protested from his bed.

  Nana began to speak and I pushed her—not with my body but with my mind. All of the frustration, self-doubt and disgust I felt in that moment, I shoved into the mind of my elderly grandmother. If there was any thought at all in my head, it was to show her what she had done, to make her feel how I felt … but I acted more out of instinct and self-defence than anything else.

  Her aura exploded with a confused riot of colour, a rainbow of static like the picture on an old analogue television when it lost the signal. She staggered back against the wall, hand to her chest, gasping for air like a landed fish.

  “Mum? Are you alright?” Dad asked, swinging his legs around to climb out of the bed. “Isla, call a nurse. I think she’s having a heart attack!”

  I stepped back, staring at her in horror. What had I done?

  I knew I had to undo it, but I wasn’t sure how.

  I tried to focus on the memory of draining the emotion from Jack and reached out, putting a hand on her shoulder, fingers resting on the base of her neck. Her skin felt hot; her pulse fluttered against my fingertips. I struggled to calm my thoughts, to visualise the violent burst of colour separating, draining, returning to a single dominant shade.

  At first, nothing happened. I breathed deep.

  I had done this. I had to fix it.

  I recalled the touch of Jack’s hand on mine when he helped me remove the elf shot. I used that memory as an anchor: the strong trunk of a tree that barely shifted, even as the branches were violently shaken, the leaves stripped bare.

  It worked.


  Slowly at first, and then in a rainbow flood, I drained the violent emotional assault from her into myself. The emotions returned to me in a skein, dulled after filtering through my grandmother’s consciousness, diluted by a mix of her own feelings. Her lingering suspicions crawled along my skin. She believed my motives were impure, tainted by my half-fae blood. Her self-righteous anger at her older child for mixing with the fae after all her warnings warred with her deep concern that he’d made a devil’s bargain, one that would cost him more dearly yet. Underlying everything was her sadness that he’d pulled away from her and her disapproval, steadfast in his love for an aosidhe.

  And, despite all this, the love for her son endured beneath the dull blue concern. A mother’s love.

  Or what a mother’s love should be, if the mother weren’t my own.

  I picked that thread of love out of the tangle and fed it back to her, filling her aura with warmth for her son. The kernels of the other emotions were there—I was careful to strip nothing bare—but the brilliant rose of love washed over and overwhelmed them.

  Behind me, the door to the room slammed open. I jumped back like a startled cat, wondering if I looked as guilty as I felt.

  The stern Scandinavian nurse hurried into the room. Sarah slipped in behind her, biting her lip. “What is this racket? Why are you out of bed, Mr Blackman?” She saw my grandmother slumped against the wall and pushed me aside. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  “I’m quite fine, young lady,” Nana said. “If you could…?” She held out her hand, allowing the nurse to pull her up. As soon as she was on her feet again, she turned and embraced my father.

  Dad’s eyes widened.

  “I’m sorry, my boy,” she said. Based on my few days with her, the loving tone was atypical. “I have been a—” she glanced at me and a little knot of suspicion flared slightly “—’hateful old bat’, it’s true.”

  “She’s a sly old fox too,” Sarah whispered beside me. “She said she needed to go to the bathroom and then slipped away. What happened?”

  “I’ll explain later,” I whispered back.

  Nana heard anyway. “No need to restrain yourself on my account. Why start now, after all?” she said. Her voice sounded strange—the words themselves were bitter but the tone was quite placid.

  “Mum, please don’t,” Dad said, sounding resigned.

  The nurse—her nametag said Helga—looked at all of us for a moment before shrugging. “Mr Blackman, I must insist you return to your bed at once. And your visitors must go. All of them.” Her pointed look said she thought the fuss was my fault.

  If only she knew.

  Dad clambered back into the bed and Helga tucked him in firmly, as though by doing so she could stop him from escaping again. Nana stood beside the bed, running her fingers over Dad’s arm in a familiar manner. He looked uncomfortable and alarmed by her sudden, affectionate behaviour.

  Had I gone too far when I amplified her love for him? Made it too strong?

  Only one way to find out.

  “Come on, Nana,” I said, reaching for her arm. She pulled away but, with the touch, I drained a little of the rose from her aura. The tiny kernels of her other emotions, less smothered, flickered brighter.

  She relented and stepped away from the bed.

  It was getting easier to manipulate emotions; I hadn’t concentrated as hard, and it felt more natural. Energy fizzed through my veins, as though I could run a marathon or dance for hours. A healthy diet of others’ emotions seemed to be all the food I needed.

  The thought made me shiver.

  Dad was looking between Nana and me, concerned there might be more yelling. “We’re fine,” I assured him, not sure it was true.

  “Come back and visit me tomorrow?” he begged.

  All three of us nodded.

  “Out.” Helga pointed at the door.

  I grabbed my bag, leaving Dad with the envelope of photos.

  Something about the whole incident made me uneasy, something beyond the increasing ease with which I’d changed my grandmother’s demeanour. We were walking into the foyer, where my aunt and Ryan waited by a vending machine, when I figured out what it was.

  The possessive, adoring way Nana had touched Dad’s arm in the hospital room was the same way he’d run his fingers over the envelope full of photos of my mother.

  I stopped in my tracks, startled into immobility.

  Was it possible the reason Dad fell so desperately in love with my mother that day long ago was that she’d bewitched him with duinesidhe magic? What was it he’d said? That she’d looked him in the eye and he’d fallen instantly in love with her.

  Of course it was possible.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, it seemed not just possible but likely. Dad should have been wary of her. Nana had raised him to believe the worst of the duinesidhe, but he hadn’t. He’d fallen in love.

  The thought tempered my horror at what he’d done to her in return. He hadn’t been himself.

  Sarah tugged my hand, dragging me over to the rest of our family.

  “You decided to come home after all, Isla?” Aunt Elizabeth smiled, oblivious to the tension between us.

  “The nurse chased us out,” I said.

  My aunt flicked a look at Nana, but relaxed when she saw the older woman’s happy little smile. My grandmother didn’t have that fixated, possessive look on her face anymore, but she still seemed a lot more relaxed than she had. Maybe I had found the correct balance this time. “Right, then,” Aunt Elizabeth said. “Let’s go home.”

  Sarah and I gave Ryan a lift to a friend’s place and then the two of us drove back to our house. On the drive I recounted Dad’s story and my theory that he’d been manipulated into an artificial love at first sight.

  “They can do that?” Sarah asked, sounding awed.

  “Um. Yes. But not all of them.” I’d forgotten I hadn’t explained that part of Jack’s tale to her. “Apparently that’s my mother’s thing. Manipulating other people’s emotions.”

  “Oh.” She fell quiet for a moment, changing lanes to overtake a car towing a trailer.

  “I should tell you,” I added reluctantly, fidgeting with the strap on my bag. “It seems to be my thing too. Sort of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Shamefaced, I told her about the incident with Nana.

  She stared at me, shocked, until I indicated the traffic in front of us with a jerk of my head. “Still driving!”

  “Sorry,” she muttered, swinging her head back to look at the road. “So you can change the way people feel about something?”

  “Not very well, but yes. It seems so.”

  “And you can see how they are feeling?”

  “I don’t understand most of what I’m seeing. But yes.” I grimaced. “I wish I couldn’t.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “That would be so handy. Think of the possibilities.”

  “I am.” My tone was sharp. “Like making someone fall so crazily in love with you that they go to the extreme of binding you with a magical oath so you have to stay with them until you can have a baby to escape.”

  She was quiet until we pulled up at a set of traffic lights; then she looked across the centre console at me, blue eyes brimming with sympathy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” I apologised. “I shouldn’t snap at you. It’s not like this is your fault.”

  “Do you think you could do anything to remove the … spell she put on your Dad?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I botched the thing with Nana. And my mother did what she did to Dad almost nineteen years ago. It’s got to be pretty ingrained by now for him to still feel that way. Right?”

  “Maybe Jack will know. You should ask him.” She grinned. “And when you do, invite him to our party.”

  Chapter Sixteen