Mind you, the orchards brought up a whole new set of questions. For instance, what did Micah do with all of this fruit? I mean, I often saw the silverkin harvesting baskets full of apples and plums, but the five of us weren’t eating all of them. I don’t think we could eat all of it, not with all the sugar and piecrusts in all the worlds, Other and Mundane. And what had happened to all the fruit when Micah had lived here by himself? Did he sell it? Compost it? Make burnt offerings to the fruit gods?
“Going for a walk?” I turned around and found Mom leaning against an apple tree.
“Yeah. No.” I sighed yet again, a sure sign of my brain developing a slow leak, and leaned against a tree of my own. “I’m just bored.”
“Your most common complaint,” Mom observed. “If you plan on making the manor your home, you’ll need to develop some sort of a hobby.” I heard what she’d left unsaid—I couldn’t always wait around for Micah to amuse me.
“I ordered a sword from the blacksmith,” I offered. I decided not to bring up the near-purchase of jewelry supplies at the Promenade. With my luck, Mom would scream at Max—or me—for not remembering to pick up her favorite brand of ice cream. “Once it’s done, I’m going to learn to fight with it. Micah’s going to show me how.” My voice trailed off at the end, since there I was, once again waiting around for Micah.
“Oh, we don’t need him for that,” Mom said, pushing off from the trunk. “I can teach you swordplay quite well.”
“You can?” I left my empty cup and half-eaten scone at the base of an apple tree and followed my mother toward the edge of the orchard. Mom had made a beeline toward one of the many heaps of pruned branches.
“Of course,” she replied. “When I was queen, I led every charge and every raid myself. If I couldn’t have handled a blade as well as my men, I would have been a liability. Any leader worth her salt knows not to distract her warriors with her squalling.” Mom selected a branch that was about as long as her arm, handed it to me, and proceeded to dig about for another.
“Was this when you were the Seelie Queen?”
“Aye, and before, when I was Queen of Connacht.”
Having figured out why Mom was digging through the branches, I ventured, “Micah said I should begin with hand-to-hand combat.”
“Why? So you can get your head lopped off?” Once she found a second branch to her liking, she set about stripping away the smaller twigs and leaves. Not knowing what else to do, I followed suit with my own branch. Once both branches were as swordy as they were going to get, Mom began instructing me on how to hold a sword and on proper fighting stances. No more yoga poses for Sara.
“So,” I ventured, after a few practice swings, “are you a fairy or a human?” Mom cocked an eyebrow, but answered me anyway.
“Truly, I do not know,” she replied. “I was born human, that’s true enough.”
“But then you went under the hill,” I prompted.
“Yes, I went into the brugh to escape a few… Well, to escape. And I reigned as the Seelie Queen for far longer than any queen of Connacht had ever reigned. Or king, for that matter.” Mom motioned me toward a tree and pointed toward the trunk at the approximate height of a man. “Since you’re on the smaller side, you need to aim your swing slightly upward, toward your opponent’s head.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to hit an opponent in the chest?” I asked. “Bigger target and all.”
“Aye, but not all beasties carry their hearts where we do. Decapitation is the surest way to halt any foe.”
A childhood memory of Mom hacking up an innocent chicken in the Raven Compound’s kitchen appeared behind my eyes; her one home-cooked meal was fried chicken. She had always been so fast and efficient, her knife lightning-quick with an economy of movement; I used to wonder if she’d ever worked for a butcher. “You learned this when you were the Seelie Queen?”
“Aye, and before,” she replied, with a blood-chilling smile. After I practiced my swing until my shoulders ached, I returned to the subject of mortality.
“So, is it true that fairy wine takes away your humanity, the more you drink it?” I asked, remembering one of the few tidbits of information she’d once shared about the brugh.
“It does, indeed,” she replied, with a sideways glance. “What’re you after, Sara?”
“I was wondering if I’m a fairy.”
“Hmm.” Mom dropped her eyes and became engrossed in her tree-branch sword, two signs that meant that sharing time was over. I understood her reticence to speak of her past, since she had apparently just wandered away from the brugh with Dad, leaving her throne and her people behind. Still, we were in the Otherworld now; shouldn’t she be able to speak of those things without fear?