Read Chapter 18: The Missing Stepmother

The carpet of the pub floor was still damp from the morning mop, and the smell of stale porter and wood polish wrapped around Maeve like a shroud. Home. She had dreamed of this smell for what felt like a thousand years, and now it sat in her chest like lead.

Da was behind the bar, wiping the same glass he'd been wiping when she walked in. He hadn't looked at her properly yet. Hadn't hugged her. Hadn't asked where she'd been for the three weeks she'd been gone.

"Da." Her voice came out raw. "Where's Mam?"

The glass stopped moving. He set it down with too much care, then turned to face her. His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw set in a way she knew too well. The way he looked when he had to tell her the dog had died, or that Uncle Padraig wasn't coming home from the hospital.

"She's gone, Maeve." He said it flat, like he was reading a weather report. "Left two weeks ago. Said she couldn't stay here with—" He gestured vaguely at the pub, at the village, at everything. "With all of it."

"Left." Maeve repeated the word like she was testing its weight. "Mam wouldn't leave. Not without Conor. Not without telling me."

"You were gone, love." Da's voice cracked on the word *gone*. "You were gone, and she just—she left a note. Said she needed air. Said she'd be back when she could."

Behind her, Ciarán shifted in the doorway. He was a shadow in the daylight, too tall, too still, too *other* for the familiar space of O'Connell's Pub. Da's eyes flicked to him and away, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

"And who's this?" Da asked, though his tone said he didn't want to know.

"A friend." Maeve didn't look away from her father. "Da, listen to me. I need to see the note."

He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and handed it over. The handwriting was Mam's—looping and uneven, pressed hard into the paper like she'd been in a hurry. *Gone to clear my head. Don't look for me. Tell Maeve I love her when she comes home.*

Maeve read it three times. Twice for the words. Once for the lies between them.

"Her handwriting's wrong," she said quietly.

"'Course it's wrong. She was upset—"

"No." Maeve shook her head, folding the note with trembling fingers. "Mam dots her i's with circles. Always has. Look at this—" She unfolded it again, pointing at the word *head*. "Plain dots. And she spells *clear* with an e, not an a. She's been correcting me about that since I was six."

Da stared at the note. Then at her. The comprehension dawned slowly, like frost creeping across glass.

"Now, Maeve, you can't mean—"

"I mean exactly that." Maeve's voice was steel wrapped in grief. "The fairies have her. The queen took her because I ran. Because I found the scroll. Because I'm still here, and the queen knows exactly how to make me wish I wasn't."

The truth of it hit her like a fist to the sternum. The queen had orchestrated a child's abduction a century ago. Of course she'd take a mother now. Hostages were leverage. Maeve had been so focused on Conor, on the contract, on the mortal year turning—she'd never once considered that the queen might already be reaching into her world.

"Conor," she breathed. "Where's Conor?"

"He's upstairs. He's been crying for his mam every night, and I've been telling him she'll be back, and now you're telling me—" Da's voice broke completely. He braced both hands on the bar, his shoulders shaking. "Jesus, Maeve. You're telling me they've taken her."

"Yes." Maeve crossed the room and took her father's hands. They were rough with work, calloused from years of pulling pints and hauling kegs. She squeezed them hard. "But I'm going to get her back. Do you hear me? I'm going to get her back, and I'm going to break this contract, and I'm going to make sure the queen never touches this family again."

Da looked at her. The grief in his eyes was a living thing, but underneath it, she saw something else. Fear. Not of the fairies. Of her.

"You're different, Maeve," he whispered. "What have they done to you?"

The question landed like a stone in still water. Maeve looked down at her hands—at the faint silver tracery that had begun to creep up her wrists, the mark of her time in fairy. She pulled her sleeves down quickly.

"I'm still me, Da. I promise. I'm still me."

She didn't know if it was true anymore.

Upstairs, Conor was curled in his bed with his back to the door. He'd grown in the three weeks she'd been gone—or maybe that was just fairy time stretching things wrong. He was eleven now, nearly twelve, and when he rolled over to look at her, his face had the pinched, wary look of a child who'd learned to stop expecting good news.

"Maeve?" He sat up, rubbing his eyes. "Maeve, is it really you?"

"It's really me." She sat on the edge of his bed and pulled him into her arms. He clung to her, his small body shaking with the force of held-back sobs. "I'm sorry I was gone. I'm sorry about Mam."

"Do you know where she is?" His voice was muffled against her shoulder. "Da won't tell me. He says she left, but Mam wouldn't leave. She made me pancakes every Sunday. She said she'd teach me to make them myself when I was older."

Maeve's throat closed. She stroked his hair, the same unruly dark waves as their mother's.

"I'm going to find her, Conor. I promise you, I am going to bring her home. But I need you to be strong for me, okay? Can you do that?"

He nodded against her shoulder. When he pulled back, his eyes were dry, but the set of his jaw was older than his years.

"It's the fairies, isn't it?" he said quietly. "They took her like they took—" He stopped, glancing toward the window as if something might be listening. "Like they almost took you."

Maeve's blood ran cold. "What do you mean, *almost* took me?"

Conor's face went pale. He shook his head, pulling his knees up to his chest. "Nothing. I don't—I don't remember. I have dreams sometimes. Dreams where you're in a pretty garden and you can't leave. And there's a woman with silver eyes who laughs at you."

The queen. Conor was dreaming of the queen.

Maeve forced a smile she didn't feel. "Just dreams, love. Just—" She stopped. A cold certainty was settling into her bones.

The queen had taken her mother. But she'd let Maeve go. Let her reach the mortal world. The border crossing had been too easy. The steward too helpful.

*This was the plan,* Maeve thought. *The queen wanted me to get here. Wanted me to see what she's taken.*

The question was why.

She looked at Conor—at his too-pale face, at the shadows under his eyes that shouldn't be there, at the way he kept glancing toward the window as if afraid something might be watching. The dreams. The missing mother. The queen's war march.

Maeve had thought the stakes were her brother's aging. She'd thought the contract was the worst of it.

But the queen wasn't playing for contract terms anymore. She was playing for the whole board. And she'd already taken her opening moves.

"I need to go back," Maeve said, standing. "Now. Tonight."

"No." Ciarán's voice came from the doorway. He'd followed her up without her noticing, and now he stood there, tall and grim, blocking the exit. "You just crossed a border the queen is sealing. If you go back now, you may never leave again."

"Then I'll stay." Maeve's voice was flat. "I'll stay, I'll find the scroll, I'll break the contract, I'll find my mother, and I'll bring them both home. But I'm not sitting here while the queen uses my family as leverage."

Ciarán's jaw tightened. "And the whistle? You're willing to give it up?"

Maeve's hand went to the silver whistle at her throat. The weight of it was familiar now—the cold press of metal, the faint hum of Ciarán's debt tangled in its echo.

She thought of the healer's offer. A sliver of the whistle to dissolve her bonds. No blood. No sacrifice.

She thought of her mother, somewhere in the fairy court, waiting for someone to come for her.

Slowly, Maeve pulled the whistle over her head. It swung on its chain, catching the light of Conor's bedside lamp, and for a moment it looked less like silver and more like something alive.

"Maeve." Ciarán's voice was sharp. "What are you doing?"

She held the whistle out to him. It trembled in her fingers.

"I'm making a deal," she said. "And you're going to help me make it count."