Behind me, a man spoke in a language I didn’t recognize. As I turned, though, his words started coming clear, first one or two in a sea of babble, then fully English, heavily accented, forcing me to struggle to understand him, my mind latching on to words like a swimmer catching hold of a pool ladder, pulling herself up from the water.

“—changeling child.”

I looked around a wattle-and-daub house that was little more than a shack. The voices came from a second room.

“Your true daughter was stolen by the fair folk,” the same voice continued. “This twisted monstrosity—”

“—is my child,” a woman said. “My child. Ask the midwife. There was something amiss from the start. A lump on her back. She is afflicted, to be sure, but she’s not a changeling. She came from me. From my womb.”

“I understand your distress,” the man said. “But this is no human child.”

“She’s my daughter,” the woman said.

“She’s not mine.” Another man. His voice raw and bitter. “She looks nothing like me.”

I pushed up and walked to the door. Three people stood around a wooden cradle. The woman wasn’t much more than a child herself, maybe seventeen. The younger man was at least a decade older, dressed in rough-spun cloth streaked with dirt, his boots and calloused hands caked with it. The older man was clean and more finely dressed, in a dark gown with a beaded chain around his neck. A wooden crucifix hung from the chain.

“Have you had any contact with the fair folk?” the clergyman asked.

“No, none.”

“Are you certain?” he said. “I have heard reports that you were seen dancing in the forest on Midsummer’s Eve, shortly before you realized you were with child.”

“What?” the young woman said. “Dancing—? I can barely dance at all with my twisted foot. I walk in the forest when I can, gathering herbs for my grandmother, and if the summer’s day is hot, I’ll go out in the evening instead, but . . .”

She trailed off as the clergyman shook his head.

“No,” the young woman said. “No, it’s not true. William, tell him. Please, tell him.”

Her husband looked away. The baby let out a wail, and the floor opened up beneath me again.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

I crashed back into my body. I felt the smack of it, like a belly flop, pain slamming through me. Yet I didn’t make a sound, didn’t move a muscle. My eyes were closed, and I was lying on Patrick’s couch. I could hear Gabriel’s voice, feel his iron grip on my arm, and I tried to open my eyes, but I could only lie there, limp and still.

“She’s snapped out of it.” Patrick’s voice.

“Then she should wake up. She always wakes up.”

A cool hand resting gently on my forehead. Not Gabriel’s. Patrick’s, then.