Oberon's Children

by Hal Emerson

  Chapter Eleven: Here You’ll Live

  When I woke the next morning, my mind tried to rationalize what had happened into a dream. I remember my eyes flying open and my hands clutching convulsively at the sheets covering me, the words already running through my mind on a constant repeat: Must have been a dream – must have been a dream – must have been a dream.

  I sat up and looked across the room at the three beds where should have slept Tristan, Celin, and Igrin, and saw nothing but rumpled sheets.

  MUST HAVE BEEN A DREAM – MUST HAVE BEEN A DREAM –

  But it had really happened. It really had.

  Ai’Ilyn entered the room moments later, brisk and commanding as always, but with Celin, Igrin, and Tristan nowhere to be seen. I don’t know why I expected them to be with her – I think I had hoped that they hadn’t been as badly

  – beaten –

  punished as I’d thought. She didn’t discuss it with us, though – and of course none of us were so foolish as to ask her about it without permission. She led us out of the room, through the Bower, to the Hall. When she left us to eat, none of us spoke. Even Brandel was quiet, something that told the rest of us all exactly how intense the prior night’s experience had been.

  We went through the rest of the night in a haze, or at least I did. I was exhausted from the night before, and still trying to absorb what had happened. It was as if a spell of silence had been placed over us all. Again during dinner we didn’t speak, and after the moonlight ceremony we went to bed without comment. I was worried that I would stay awake all night, thinking too much as I always did, but the combination of the prior night’s sleeplessness and the current night’s full schedule of work soon had me asleep.

  The next day was easier. It was as if we’d all taken a full day to digest the events, and were now able to go on about their lives. Brandel started it off the next morning – he made some odd comment about wondering if regular animals like squirrels and deer lived in the forest around the Bower – and then there was a table-wide debate on it. Even Pinur Fe joined in with a small comment about how he’d enjoy a squirrel if they could catch one. Aelyn agreed whole-heartedly, and then blushed and looked down. I don’t know why – maybe she thought it was unladylike to want meat. I’ve never understood that. Food is food. I’m not very ladylike, though.

  But that was it – the spell had been broken, the dark clouds dispersed, the thick silence cut and skewered. Even I found myself drawn into the conversations that followed – simple things that didn’t matter. As the days passed we started using the whole of the benches on either side of the table, not leaving the empty spaces where Tristan and the others usually sat. Aelyn and Gwenel struck up a strange relationship where they talked about things Gwen desperately didn’t care about (hair and nails and how they should have more baths) followed by equal time spent talking about things Aelyn desperately didn’t care about (the arc the moon took through the sky, the way the moonstones produced light, the ratio of Ilyn to children to Fae throughout the Bower). It was one of the nicest truce relationships I’d ever seen. They even seemed to genuinely care about each other after a while.

  Durst and Brandel started getting along, and they loved sitting with Pinur Fe, because he always listened. Actually listened – Faolan and I tried, but after a while we got glazy-eyed, and I think Brandel could tell. Pinur Fe actively listened – and both Durst and Brandel liked to talk at him, though they didn’t seem to particularly care for each other.

  But every so often the room would fall silent, and we’d realized our group was too small – our number too diminished. We were meant to be ten.

  None of us knew where they’d been taken, and none of the Ilyn or greater Fae were willing to tell us anything about it. I broached the subject with Ionmar, when next I saw her, but even she shook her head, the glassy black orbs of her eyes reflecting back my face at me.

  “I cannot.” She turned away, paused, turned back but not all the way; her torso was away from me, her face at a strange angle. “It is not my business or yours. Respect them enough to understand that they are elsewhere thinking over what they’ve done. Let them be. They will return in time.”

  In the end, it was a full moon’s cycle, what Brandel declared a month despite the funny way that time worked in the Bower, before we saw any of them again.

  They returned in the same abrupt non-discussed way they’d left. One moonrise they were simply in their beds as if they always had been there. I thought vaguely when I saw them that I should be shocked or surprised, but I wasn’t; I was curious. I wanted to know where they’d been, where they’d gone; I thought maybe that we could get the answers out of them that we hadn’t been able to get out of the other Fae.

  When Ai’Ilyn came and called us all to attention, I watched them surreptitiously from the corner of my eye, and was surprised to see they moved quickly. They made their beds, as did the rest of us, and then stood in the line as Ai’Ilyn moved up and down the room, examining us and our nestles. She barely spent any time at all on the three of them – but even the small flick of her eyes that settled her vision on each of them in turn was enough to elicit a response. Each of them flinched – even Tristan. Celin looked as though he was muttering something under his breath, but I realized that he was only mouthing words, and maybe not even that. Igrin was holding tightly to the hem of a new Caelyr-silk shirt – they must have received new clothing during the same once-a-month cleaning that we all went through – and was sinking her fingers into the fabric so fiercely that I wondered at the fact she wasn’t shredding it to pieces.

  But these new tics made sense to me – Tristan’s didn’t.

  When Ai’Ilyn’s eyes swept over him, he flinched like the others, and then looked straight at me.

  A shock went through my body, jolting me from head to toe. His dark eyes found mine and then moved just as quickly away. The look wasn’t one of anger or fear or anything I could recognize. I would have sworn that there was nothing there at all, in fact, just a blank canvas staring out at me, but I saw something behind his eyes, some spark of who he once was.

  It was a promise that it wasn’t over between us. We were bound together now, and he was letting me know.

  Throughout that day I watched him whenever I could. He and the others all appeared unharmed – at least physically. They were now the first to respond to the Fae’s commands, whether they came from Ilyn, Paecsie, or Urden, and when we sat down for meals they didn’t speak at all. Brandel tried timidly to question them about where they’d gone, and they told us some, answering questions with simple ‘yes’es and ‘no’es but nothing else. They’d been with the Caelyr, who’d been treating their wounds, and they’d been visited by Ilyn, but they gave us no further details, and when the questions stopped so did the conversation.

  Tristan sat in his accustomed spot at the end of the bench opposite the door, and he was the one of the three who didn’t answer any questions at all. He focused on his bowl of food, and contributed nothing.

  For all intents and purposes, he looked broken. The supervising Fae kept him, Celin, and Igrin in different groups, and none of them were paired with me. I suppose I was the unspoken fourth in that group – something that I hadn’t thought of until they’d returned. I hadn’t been punished, but I had proved that I was closer to them than I was to the others.

  But over time, their self-isolation softened and they became part of our group again, and this time there was no natural separation that occurred. They still clustered together at meal times, but they spoke to the rest of us now, and as the moon cycled through the sky, the horrible night was forgotten, or at least suppressed. We went on as we always had, except that now Celin and Igrin spoke with the others when addressed.

  I kept waiting for something else to happen – for Tristan to look at me again as he did that first night he’d been returned, to show me that spark that I suspected was still down deep inside him, but he didn’t. In fact, he ignored me altogether after that first
look, and I returned the sentiment.

  Months passed that way. At least, they were months according to Brandel. We tried to keep track – Gwenel said she’d tried to make tallies in her nestle, but every time she returned after the moonlight ceremony the tallies were gone as if never there – but we couldn’t, so we depended on Brandel and his memory. Nothing much changed – except for us.

  We started growing, as children that age generally do. With all the activity we were put through and the constant and reliable food, we filled out and then began to shoot up. Pinur Fe shot up first and furthest, and it seemed like every day he was just a bit taller, just a bit broader across the shoulders.

  We went through the other changes that adolescents go through – the awkward ones. We still saw each other naked when we were bathed once a month in the pools below the Bower, and soon those nights carried an electric charge that moved through all of us. We naturally separated on those days – girls to one side, boys to the other – but to say we never looked would be to say we were never human.

  We all knew by some kind of unspoken acknowledgement that everyone had looked at everyone else, though we pretended, of course, that we hadn’t. We all knew Celin had a mole on his upper thigh, and Pinur Fe had coarse black hair, and Aelyn had a scar along the side of her chest and Durst still had baby fat everywhere. I don’t know what the others knew about me – I don’t know what they fixed on. Maybe none of us knew what the others knew – I think we all kind of assumed no one looked at us, even though we all looked at everyone else.

  I’d seen boys naked before the Bower – and I knew vaguely about the things you did when naked. I’d heard the sounds of it – I’d even seen the shapes of it silhouetted in the night in the real world. I’d found it disgusting then – and I knew it was dangerous. I knew men could be naked and force women to be naked too, but that was never the biggest danger – the biggest danger was being naked together and then being pregnant. The whole conception of it was wrapped up in fear for me – the fear I saw in women’s faces as they whispered about it when they thought I couldn’t hear, the fear that followed the weeks after people were naked together, the fear that came when bellies started to round and bulge.

  Being naked for too long was a fearful thing, that’s all I knew, and, I was convinced, all there was to know.

  So when I looked across the pool one night and saw Faolan standing on the edge of the rocky shore, water dripping down his lean body and his hair in a messy tumble, I was completely unprepared for the tightness that pulled in my stomach and the heat that flushed my head and made me feel dizzy. I couldn’t turn away, but instead watched as he turned to the pile of new clothing he’d just received from the Caelyr, and the light of the moonstones highlighted the lower half of his body, the firm muscles and the long lines.

  He started to look up in my direction, and I immediately buried my head in the water and tried to scrub the thoughts away.

  It was only the start then – slowly, everyone began developing, and the fact Ai’Ilyn and the Urden watched us when we bathed but didn’t speak or make us not look added an element of excitement to it all, like we were getting away with something. We kept looking, and sometimes the boys stayed under water until the girls were out and dressed, and sometimes the girls were taken away and spoken to by the Caelyr.

  That was halfway through our second year.

  Things happened, like they always do. There were fights between us – petty things about someone saying something and someone else saying something else. There were weeks when one of us tired of the routine and acted out and were punished, and the whole group of us were subdued. I existed on the fringe of the group and stayed out of most of it, but sometimes even I got pulled in. The rifts between us opened up again and Igrin, Celin, and Tristan, this time with Durst and Aelyn, began to sit together on one side of the benches where they agreed with each other. I kept the same seat I’d always had, and stayed silent whenever I could.

  On the occasions I did speak, it was usually to Faolan.

  We rarely talked about the things the others did. Igrin and Aelyn spoke about the way things looked, commenting on how horrid it would be to be one of the Urden or Paecsies, while Gwenel spoke about esoteric topics and theories that had no practical application to our lives. Tristan and Durst would make jokes, and Celin would laugh obnoxiously. Pinur Fe just listened. Brandel was his polar opposite – speaking was almost like a compulsion for him. You could almost see the words being drawn out of him, like thought given sound and forced through his throat. And his favorite people to talk to were Faolan and I, because we were the only two who didn’t tell him to shut up.

  Well, I did. Routinely. But Faolan didn’t – and Brandel took his silence for consent to keep speaking, which, in some cases, I think it might actually have been. So he played the odds and decided half-approval was better than the outright mockery he encountered from Tristan.

  With Brandel came Gwenel, and with the fourth addition to our side of the group, we officially became the outcast minority. The others paid us little attention – Tristan and Igrin were once more pretty, funny, and cruel, so Celin, Durst, and Aelyn toed the popular line and acted as though we did not exist. Gwenel had been with them for a time, but only because she hadn’t picked a side and thus landed there be default. When she corrected Igrin’s use of the word “farther” in place of “further,” she quickly found herself alone, and Brandel was only too happy to pull her along with him. The only truly odd man out was Pinur Fe, who was such a good listener that no one really found anything objectionable about him. I wished I could affect his dignified silence, but whenever I tried it Faolan quirked an eyebrow at me that quite clearly asked if I was somehow ill.

  During meal times, Brandel would talk about anything and everything. One night he launched into a monologue about the quality of the wood grain in the Bower and how it proved definitively – he was very proud to use that word, like a boy with a shiny new toy – that the tree was living and, indeed, growing around us. He only stopped to let Gwenel correct any information that he may have misconstrued, and then he was off again, pontificating all over us.

  But sometimes he spoke about something important, and when he did I knew to listen. He was seldom wrong about what he thought or saw, and both Faolan and I were in agreement that he, while utterly foolish, was the smartest of the group, save perhaps Gwenel. Tristan exceeded them in the kind of social cunning that comes from a sharp eye and a sharper tongue, but Brandel was in a category of his own when it came to smarts. So when he started talking about the Bower one night over our second meal, I made sure to listen.

  He had been talking about something unrelated – it was amazing how many words he could fit into the bare handful of minutes we were given for eating – when he took a breath and fell silent, which in and of itself was like a night with two moons, and then looked directly at me.

  “If the Fae are real,” he said abruptly, “does that mean more of the stories are true?”

  “I didn’t hear many stories growing up,” I responded, not knowing what kind of answer was required of me and not sure whether I was comfortable giving any at all. He had broached the one subject none of us had dared to talk about in months – ever since the half-answers Ionmar had given me so long ago now.

  I glanced at the others, and saw both Faolan and Gwenel had stopped eating, food halfway to mouths and eyes wide in surprise.

  “What about you, Faolan?”

  He shook his head slowly, his hazel eyes watching Brandel with a sudden intensity. Gwenel looked at the opening that led back out to the refectory, probably wondering, as I was, whether Ai’Ilyn was close enough to hear us. Brandel shrugged, unperturbed, and continued at rapid-fire rate:

  “It’s strange, right? We live with the Fae. There were stories about them – some of them must have been true. Some of them, you see?”

  I nodded slowly though I didn’t see, hoping that the motion would encourage him to continue speaking. Faolan’s
sudden attentiveness was like a shout in a quiet room, and I hoped Brandel wouldn’t hear it.

  “And changelings,” Brandel continued, directing his soliloquy at me since I’d been the one to nod. “In the stories, it’s a child born in the Fae world and sent to live with humans until they’re old enough to be called back.”

  “I never heard that one,” Gwenel said, her mousy brown hair pulled back in the braid that she’d started wearing it in to keep it out of her face. I’d never seen her wash it. I tried to spend as little time contemplating that fact as I could.

  “Oh, yes!” he said quickly. “Lots of stories my mother used to tell me – about all kinds of them. You never heard any? Not even about Gwyn ap Nudd? There’s lots about him.”

  “I have,” I started, then stopped when the other side of the table quieted. We all looked over and saw they were busy with something Tristan was drawing on the table with some of the water from his cup – when he was done they burst into laughter, and I couldn’t help but think it was something crude.

  “The Hunter,” I continued, turning back to them. “I heard stories about that.”

  I glanced at Faolan. As usual, he said nothing, but as he looked back at Brandel, it was clear he was interested.

  “There are others,” Brandel encouraged. “Lots and lots – goblins, elves, sprites, trolls, gnomes, halflings, brownies – there are so many. But there are more here than that – so think about it …”

  He bent in closer to us, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

  “What if all of the real versions of those stories come from here?”

  “I’ve never heard of the Caelyr before,” I said quietly.

  “I have,” said Gwenel, “but not by that name.”

  We all looked at her.

  “There are a lot of stories about spiders coming to the aid of those in need and binding wounds or weaving flesh back together. It’s something to do with eating the insects that try to get into open cuts, like flies. And the idea of women weavers who control life and death… that kind of fits.”

  “What about the Paecsies then?” I asked. My heart was suddenly beating so quickly in my chest that it felt as though it might burst out and start flopping around on the table.

  “Pixies,” Faolan said, modifying the word just the slightest bit so that it sounded entirely different. Excitement was just as clear in his voice as in mine. Brandel, catching onto our excitement, barreled ahead.

  “Elves are missing, of course, and so are brownies and sprites and nymphs, but they wouldn’t be here, I don’t think – they don’t …”

  He grimaced as he tried to find the right word. It was Faolan who supplied it:

  “They don’t fit.”

  We all looked at him, but his hazel eyes were far away.

  “Exactly!” Brandel hissed. “Maybe they’re like Gwyn ap Nudd and his Hunt – maybe they never swore to Oberon at all.”

  “Goblins,” I said, saying the only name I’d heard before. “They’re supposed to be vicious and … they take things in the night, and punish … punish children …”

  “Ilyn,” Faolan said, once again putting it together before the rest of us could.

  “Drop the first syllable,” he said slowly, looking at us each in turn, causing even Brandel to fall silent and pay attention. “-lin. Add an extra ‘i’ in there at the front and you have il-in. Gob-il-in.”

  “Each of the Ilyn use the first syllable in front of the ‘ilyn’ as a name,” Brandel said, no longer watching us but retreating into his own world. “It’s completely conceivable that someone met one of them and thought it was all creatures like that. Met an Ilyn named –”

  “Named Gob’Ilyn,” Faolan finished.

  “No,” I said. “Rob’Ilyn – Robin. Robin Goodfellow.”

  They froze and looked at me, and simultaneously a chill went through us all. Brandel looked like he wanted to say something else, but even as he opened his mouth to do so, he closed it again and his eyes went glassy and far away. Faolan was nodding slightly, his eyes locked on me, and Gwenel was looking back and forth between us all with her mouth open and jaw slack.

  That was the last time we spoke of it out loud. Ai’Ilyn came in very soon after, and we went about our night as always. At the next meal, we talked about something else, and then something else at the meal after it, but never returned to that original subject. We’d touched on something too deep – something that we weren’t ready to face yet. Within the week, though, we were forced to reconsider.

  It was next to impossible to get sick or become injured, another of the facts that we all knew about but didn’t acknowledge. None of us ever woke up with a cough or a sneeze, and though we received bruises from the Ilyn, and aches and pains from the work we were put through, we never endured a serious injury until Brandel broke his leg during a trip and fall in the moonlight ceremony. He was quickly taken away by a number of Caelyr who seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He’d been crying out, clutching at his leg, which was twisted in an unnatural way that made me sick to look at it, and in a matter of seconds all that was left was the impression of the violence done, like an echo in a cave.

  When we returned to our nestles after the ceremony was over and Ai’Ilyn was gone, there was a whispered conversation among us that speculated over where they might have taken him and what might have happened. We asked Celin, Igrin and Tristan where they were taken, but they refused to answer. I distinctly remember going to sleep that night and thinking I might not ever see the boy again.

  But in the morning he was in his nestle, sleeping like a baby.

  Ai’Ilyn woke us up as always, and we all stood up and snapped to attention, even Brandel. I kept cutting surreptitious glances toward him when Ai’Ilyn turned away from my direction, and I saw that his right leg from mid-thigh to ankle had been coated in a thick swath of Caelyr silk, much thicker than our clothing – almost yellow in color – and so tight that it outlined the entirety of his very skinny leg.

  He moved on it easily, only limping slightly as we walked down to breakfast, and when Ai’Ilyn left us, he was bombarded immediately with questions; even Igrin, Celin, and Tristan joined in – they seemed to have forgotten their reluctance from the night before now that Brandel had returned, and were trying to compare the situation to their own treatment after the whipping, months and months ago now.

  “The Caelyr set the bone and then one of them bit me,” Brandel said, looking like a king holding court, drunk on his own power as the center of attention. “It hurt worse than the bone breaking – it was like something was trying to rip off my leg.”

  “Poison?” Celin asked, looking worried in his vague, wide-eyed way.

  “Maybe venom,” said Gwenel thoughtfully. “My mother used to use venom from spiders and snakes to numb wounds when she had to do something painful.”

  “And then,” Brandel interrupted, his mouth pinched into a frown and his eyes glaring ill-thoughts at the girl for breaking into his no doubt well-crafted story. “And then there were dozens of them around me, all hissing and holding my leg. I tried to push them off because I was scared, but all they did was set the bone and then bind it in this cast.”

  “That’s what they did to us,” Igrin gushed suddenly, looking at us with color in her cheeks. She looked self-consciously at Tristan and Celin, but rushed ahead before they could say anything. “They wrapped us up entirely – head to toe – and they hung us … somewhere. I only remember because I thought I was dead. I thought they were going to eat me – I was sure of it – I mean, wouldn’t you be? They’re spiders!”

  The others nodded and joined in emphatically.

  So was the case with every injury or illness. Combined with what Ionmar had told me about the Caelyr being in the Bower for their own safety, Brandel said it made sense that in return they must act as caretakers for the creatures of the Bower.

  Which brought us all, as a whole group, back to the topic of the Fae.

  This time we did
n’t give it up. It absorbed our conversations for that full night and for weeks to come. Driven by the newfound courage of Igrin to reveal what she and the two boys had gone through, and the insistence of Brandel, we talked round and round the subject every time we were left alone. We went over names again, then over what other stories we might have heard, then over what we could guess about the stories, then over what stories we might have half heard, until were talking in circles and ready to bite each other like a pack of wild dogs worrying over a bone already splintered, cracked, and bare.

  But in the end one word remained and kept us talking – one word that always hung about the Bower just on the edge of hearing:

  Changeling.

  I had heard the word – some of the others had as well – in the lives we’d lived before the Bower, but that was all we knew. There were rumors and stories – of children who were stolen in the night, of those who went insane and were called the children of unholy demons – but we’d thought it all make-believe, and living here, living now, seeing the Fae, seeing that the children could never leave – the stories seemed uncanny. How could any of it be true? How could the stories have gotten out if no one could leave the Bower? How could the outside world know anything about this place?

  And that was when we realized the older children had begun to disappear.

  I don’t know how it avoided us all. I don’t know how we never questioned that there were no children more than a few years older than us, how there weren’t any fifteen year olds, and young adults, and adults in general. We knew they weren’t there, and I think we all just forgot about it because there were so many other Fae. But when the observation was made, we all sat open-mouthed at the glaring obviousness.

  “What if the older children stop growing?” Brandel theorized one night, his blue eyes wild and thin blonde hair in disarray. “What if the older ones have been here for hundreds of years?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Durst said in his nervous, shifty way. “There are more that come every month during the Calling ceremony.”

  “He’s right, Brandel – and there are never more than a few hundred children.”

  “The older ones have to go somewhere.”

  “When do they disappear?” I asked.

  There was a long pause where Brandel looked around in a completely serious way as if convinced my voice had come from the wall. The rest of them all looked at me, and in the end he figured it out. Faolan had quirked that eyebrow of his again, but I tried to ignore it.

  “When do they disappear?”

  The second time I said it, the words came out softer and squeakier despite my strident internal commands that they be forceful and brave, but none of the others made fun of it, not even Tristan.

  “Does anyone know?” Faolan asked softly. I looked over at him and saw him glance back and smile briefly. He was backing me up.

  A chorus of “no”s answered him and I nodded, knowing all along this must be the answer – and knowing too that if we were to get to the bottom of this, we’d have to find a way to answer this basic question.

  “What’s your plan?”

  I looked back up and almost swallowed my own tongue when I realized Faolan was looking at me again, quite clearly the one that had asked the question. For a brief second, my brain froze completely solid and a chill went through me that was so fierce I thought icicles might form along my extremities.

  “Watch,” I said.

  The word slipped from my mouth before my jaws closed up, but I wanted to keep going. I swallowed hard and pushed through.

  “Watch them. Who is the oldest?”

  “Kyre.”

  All the heads swung toward the other side of the table, where sat Pinur Fe up against where the bench met the far earthen wall. He froze under our looks, and unlike me he seemed unwilling to continue, and looked as though he was already regretting participating in such a discussion.

  “Who’s Kyre?” Tristan asked.

  “I know him,” Aelyn said quickly, spots of bright pink flaming in her cheeks when she realized she’d spoken just slightly too quickly.

  “Uh … how?”

  “He’s just … he’s really noticeable,” she said, the blush spreading to her neck and giving her a strange glow.

  “Is that the big guy?” Durst asked, squinting to call up an image of him while simultaneously worrying his lower lip between his teeth. “The one who kind of looks like Pinur Fe but older?”

  Aelyn blushed even more and nodded, just one quick jerk of her head.

  “Watch him,” I said, trying to make my point before Tristan sidetracked us by making fun of Aelyn. He was already looking at her with a predatory gaze, and I could see his mind working on the best way to tease her about it. “Watch him – and figure out when he goes.”

  “Time’s up,” Gwenel said, and we all resumed our positions at our bowls and affected an air of nonchalance. Regular as the moon in the sky, Ai’Ilyn appeared at the door just seconds later, and whisked us away for our night of work and moonlight.

  It was easy to watch Kyre – and once we saw him, we realized we all had seen him before. He truly was hard to miss. He was huge, and his skin, which I remembered as white like most of the children save the odd copper or darker hue, now seemed to look oddly gray. I saw him the first time after our discussion at the moonlight ceremony that night – saw him standing in the shadows, hulking behind his group. He did look a little like Pinur Fe – and with a shock I realized that he couldn’t be more than a year older than us.

  Vertigo swirled me around as I realized how long we’d been in the Bower, but I firmly set the thought aside for later consideration. We had lots of time, I remember thinking. In a lot of ways I was like every other child – I thought I’d never change.

  I remember hoping Kyre wouldn’t disappear at all. I hoped it so hard that I had dreams about it – dreams where he came and found us and smiled and we all realized he wasn’t really quite so big, and then he told us that we’d all been mistaken, that Ai’Ilyn had come to him and explained it all and that there actually were adults in the Bower, they just lived really high up in the tree, higher than we’d ever gone. In the dream, that was when I looked up and saw that all the leaves of the tree so high above us were all made up of faces – all the faces of the nestlings

  – changelings –

  that had disappeared, and they were all smiling down at me.

  Kyre was gone by the next full moon.

  When it happened, we all knew it. We’d seen his absence at the moonlight ceremony, and we knew what it meant. That night, when Ai’Ilyn left us, we had a whispered conversation in which we all confirmed that we hadn’t seen him that day. We agreed to wait – at least a few days more. Maybe he was with the Caelyr – maybe he was simply being punished for something and wasn’t allowed to run the moonlight.

  We waited – and never saw him again.

  It changed us, almost overnight. When we went to breakfast the next morning, there was a sense of something in the air with us that we wouldn’t address, like another member of our group that we’d never realized was there, an eleventh child that grew younger as we grew older – a child that would disappear when our time was up.

  We decided to watch some of the others – some of the other children in Kyre’s group. One by one, they disappeared as well. There was no rhyme or reason to it – they simply disappeared. It didn’t happen all in the same month, nor the same week. A few of the children from the group below that group disappeared first, and then more from the older group, and then one from the group two below … then one from the group only one month ahead of us.

  We all began to feel like we were on a ride that we couldn’t stop, one that would take us straight over the edge of a hidden cliff. We started snapping at each other for no reason, and some like Brandel and Durst started speaking with stress clear in their voices. We even contemplated asking Ai’Ilyn about it, but that motion was quickly shot down.

  I started lying awak
e at night, and I know I wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t stop my thoughts from racing around in endless laps, just continually tracing and retracing its old steps, wearing a path around the inside of my skull like the well-worn ruts wheels make on heavily-travelled roads. The questions that had plagued me since we’d arrived – even the question of why we were here at all – faded into the background like sand through a sieve. Nothing else felt as important now, not even the bliss that still came from running the moonlight or the fear of the dark that came with the new moon.

  Where did they go?

  We never came up with an answer. None of us even came close to one. Tristan made fun of us for caring so much – using his baby voice to mock us each in turn. Durst started crying again, not out of rebellion or anything else, simply out of fear and nervousness come to a head. Faolan brooded even more, and I spoke less than I had since the day we’d arrived.

  The life that had seemed to stretch out before us in an unending, unbroken line suddenly had an ending. Now each week that passed brought more and more missing children in the ranks above us. Suddenly we were physically bigger than most of the other children – bigger especially than the small ones who were gathered in every month at the Calling, the small ones who came…

  To replace us.

  Ai’Ilyn was with us all the time now – never leaving us unattended while we worked, even standing in the doorway when we ate. There were dark circles forming under her eyes, and she snapped at us all when we stepped so much as a single toe out of line. One night, I woke from a fitful dream and rolled over to see her standing at the door, watching us all. Her head was nodding, but she shook it and shook herself, standing up straighter and focusing on us once more.

  The tension built to a head until finally something had to go, like water boiling over the edge of a pot. The sense of foreboding we had began to couple with a sense of inevitability, and a sense that once it began to happen, nothing would be the same.

  We were right. When it happened, everything changed.

  Everything.