The next morning, a group of people with serious faces rapped on the door while I was still huddled in bed. Their voices were indistinct, but the meaning was clear: Bring us the changeling. She needs to face consequences.

I heard both my parents arguing, my father forcing his insubstantial frame in front of the door so they couldn’t come in. I was a child. It was an accident. They had no right.

The men left, but we all knew they’d be back.

After several hours of weeping on Isolde’s shoulder hidden in the leaves of our favorite climbing tree, she told me to pull myself together.

“How can we fix this?” she whispered, her voice blending with the wind in the leaves.

“We can’t,” I blubbered. “I ruined everything. That man, I—” I couldn’t make myself say it.

I killed him.

“No,” she said fiercely, holding my hair back so I was forced to look at her. “It was an accident, like Papa said. You were only defending yourself.”

I wiped my nose on the shoulder of my dress. “I should just go away. Everything would be better if I never existed.”

Isolde looked wounded. “Seelie, you know that’s not true. I’d probably have gotten myself killed doing something stupid long before now if you weren’t around.”

I managed a sliver of a smile at that.

My sister smiled back, then turned serious. “I need you.”

All I could do was shake my head and look away. “It’s not fair,” I whispered. “It’s not fair for me to ruin Mami’s and Papa’s lives. They deserve to have a home and be safe. I’m the only who should have to run.”

A strange sense of calm came over me, and suddenly I knew.

“I’m leaving, Sol. Tonight. I’ll run away so no one can find me, and Mami and Papa and you can live your lives without a changeling messing everything up. Don’t say anything, because I’ve already made up my mind.”

She was silent for a long time. She must have been able to tell that there was no way to convince me to stay and let our parents destroy their lives around me.

Finally, she said, “Okay. But I’m going with you. You can’t get rid of me that easy, Seels.”

“Don’t call me that.”

I stole our parents’ memories that night. The connection that bound our family snapped as I bottled them up. Maybe the townsfolk would remember a changeling girl who once lived among them, but not as the midwife’s daughter, not as one of them. Eventually they, along with my parents, would probably figure out they were under a spell...but that was a problem for another day. Fighting through my magic-induced haze of pain, we commandeered the Destiny, struggling to use the remaining trickles of magic I had left at my fingertips to hijack the mechanism and storm into the darkness.

The next day, after I came to, we scrubbed off the scorch marks, repainted her green with Isolde’s first stolen haul, and dumped all of Cassius Redbrook’s belongings into a river. We renamed the wagon, giggling, so that we could say that, wherever we ended up, we’d been carried there by Destiny.