Little Red's Riding

Aster

"I never lied to you, Tansy." Aster was clearly exasperated with her daughter's response to what she had just revealed.

"Morrow hasn't been with our father and her twin all these years? Where the Hell has she been then?" Tansy was on her feet now, pacing back and forth across the room.

"Let me start with the prophecy. When I was pregnant with your sisters I took a trip, with your father's blessing, to visit my mother and sisters. I went with a full entourage of Fey guards. While I was there they had a blessing ceremony and the seer who had long served my mother was of course in attendance."

"She had only just stepped into the room when it all went so horribly wrong. It had been years since she had been thrown into an involuntary trance. It hardly ever happened that the Gods took her forcibly and poured forth their will. But it happened then. She began to speak in a deep voice that was not her own. It wasn't even the one that she usually poured forth the Gods' wisdom to our people in."

"She said that if your three girls were together in the Palace, that life as we knew it for all who were Other, that's what my people called anyone who wasn't simply human,noth only the Fey and Werewolves and every other non-human, but also those humans with magic in their blood, would end. She said that I had to take the two strongest of my daughters and that I needed to return to my family and raise them to be strong leaders, before the twins' third birthday."

"I didn't want to leave your father. I loved him. And I knew that if I told him what was happening that he would never let me go. Not for some silly prophecy. That was what he would call it. He believed in magic, but he'd never truly believed in the gifts of prophecy that our seers had. But I did. I'd seen them come true at least a dozen times before. And I had seen her fall on the floor. I had heard the voice of the Gods. And I knew what I had to do even if it broke my heart.."

"So a fortnight before the girls turned three I took you and Morrow. She was always stronger and she had a temper that I knew would serve her."

"But we didn't grow up with your family." Tansy's voice was softer and confused and her mother finally looked up and met her eyes.

"No. We didn't. We made the long journey. We had to go a roundabout way. Your father had men searching for us immediately and even with my magic, it was difficult to hide from all of the forces that the Fey King could bring to bear. But finally we made it home, to the territory that had long been held by my family. It was within the borders of this Kingdom," she glanced up at Dahlia by way of explanation, before her eyes returned to her daughter's face.

"Etan was not the first in his line to hate what he didn't understand. As magic runs in my veins, hate seems to have been passed down through his. I was told by the humans in the neighboring village that the soldiers came in the middle of the night. Not a single one of the people in the village that my family lived in survived. They burned everything to the ground. There was nothing left."

"Why would you bring us back to the Capital?" Tansy was sitting again, heavily, on the bench.

"It was easier to blend in the city than in the villages. Here you could pass as a northern child. Your father was a Norseman, I told people. Some believed it, others didn't. I gave Morrow to another Fey family the first week we were in town. They knew who she was. They vowed to protect her with their lives. I just thought that it was safer to separate the two of you. That way if one of you was caught, the other still had a chance."

"I've doubted my choices every single day. But I also felt that I had to do it. It was the will of the Gods. But these days I've wondered if I've played right into some sort of trap. Because I received a message from Morrow's family."