InsaneJournal

People say that treating a changeling badly will cause the fairies to return the child they stole.

It is important to remember that the cuckoos are not fairies.

But they always return for their children.

They are an odd group. Three beautiful cuckoos watch the fourth of their group. The first three are immaculate, dressed quite literally to kill, numbering two males and one female. The last is just a young boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years of age. He is scruffy, and only his inhuman beauty shows his relationship to the other three.

There is a fifth, an ordinary man. Never handsome, he seems even shabbier in the company of the cuckoos. He is cornered, trapped in his own home by the strangers he has never met and his own son.

He does not understand what is happening. He never will, not if Dominique has her way. She will not let him know that his son is a changeling, that the cuckoos stole his real child.

Dominique watches her son coldly; he may be her blood, but she has no intention of accepting him until he has proven himself worthy. “What are you waiting for, Phillipe?” she asks. “Are you frightened?”

She can see that he is; his hands are shaking as he points the gun at the man he once called father. She doesn’t mind too much; killing is hard at first, even for cuckoos. It will get easier for him with each kill he makes, until he will think nothing of slaughtering one who stands in his way.

“No, Mama,” he answers, a slight hesitation in his voice. He is still not used to calling this foreign woman his mother, even though the two of them look so alike. She has no fears on that score; he will get used to doing so sooner or later. “I will shoot.” It is a promise and in a way, a plea.

She is proud of him, although she does not show it, of course. He has adapted very quickly to his new situation; he seems to understand why he is required to shoot his so-called father. He also seems to grasp the consequences of what will happen if he does not. Clever boy.

“Then shoot,” she says, not bothering to hide her impatience. The man has a thin trace of crow blood in him, which only makes her more eager for his death. It pleases her that the first man her son kills will be of corbae blood.

The boy pulls the trigger, and a muffled shot sounds.

Dominique does not spare a glance for the crow-blooded man bleeding to his death on the floor; her eyes are focused on her other sons, “We should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

With these words, Philippe Couteau is accepted as one of the cuckoos.

“The witch Circe held me captive on her island with her foul spells,” Odysseus tells her. “I tried to resist, but I was no match for the enchantments of that wicked goddess."

Penelope wonders if he thinks that she is stupid. She guesses that there was no spells involved, just the promises whispered by a young woman. What man weary of war and long deprived of a woman’s company would be able to resist the charms of an island witch?

Goddesses are fairer than mortal women, and the wife waiting for Odysseus at home was aging. No wonder that he should falter in his resolve. Still, that he should enjoy himself so, while she languished at home…

It is not a wife’s place to correct her husband.

She keeps silent.

“Then there was Calypso, a naiad. She held me on her island for seven years, captive to her foul desires, until the goddess Athena interceded on my behalf…”

Penelope sees the truth of that too. Perhaps the goddess has granted her clearer sight, so that she may know of her husband’s lies.

Foul desires? No, she knew her husband too well. He would not have balked at the idea of being captive to a woman’s “foul desires”. No, he would have enjoyed that.

If the goddess Athena had interceded, it was only to force him off of that island.

Once again, she remains silent.

“Nausicaa, the princess of the Phaeacians, found me naked at the river. She took me to her home…”

To Penelope, those words sounds suspicious. Had this Nausicaa, who her husband praised as fairest among mortal women, even bothered taking Odysseus to her bower? Or had they chosen to remain at the river instead and enjoy themselves there, like beasts of the field?

She does not doubt that her husband betrayed her with this foreign, faceless beauty. She can see it in his eyes when he speaks the princess’s name, a tenderness that he lacks when he speaks of her.

She hates Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa, though she has never met them and she never will. They are her rivals, and worst of all, they are free, while she is bound by the duties of a queen, a wife, and a mother.

Yet she sympathizes with them, deep inside. All of them, even her, have been forsaken by Odysseus.

She turns her face away from her husband. She will not correct him, but she will not listen to his lies either.

Many little girls believe that someone will come to rescue them from their drab, ordinary lives.

Tatiana believed too, when she was younger, but unlike those other girls, her wish was granted. Idonia, her real sister, came for her and stole her away from her so-called parents once she was of age.

Thanks to Idonia, she was trained to kill, to look her opponent in the eye and shoot him in the back a few moments later.

She learned to fly, to take a second form and spread her wings. She was shown the way to the otherworld.

Without Idonia, her life would have been so different. Idonia had been the first to put a gun in her hands and tell her to shoot the world in the back. Idonia was the one who had taught her how to skin crows, peel their skin back so that they died slow, agonizing deaths. Even now, she enjoyed that.

Of course, that wasn’t the reason that Jack Daw had to die. Truth be told, she had never liked her sister; Idonia was a domineering, sadistic bitch, and everyone knew that there could only be one queen bee in a hive.

The reason, quite simply, was cuckoo pride.

He had eliminated a nest of cuckoos without any effort, and not just any nest, but her nest. Every single one of the Morgans who had been on that farm, dead now because some old jackdaw man had gotten it into his head that the Morgans had wronged him.

It gave cuckoos- and thus Tatiana- a bad reputation. That could not, of course, be allowed.

Jack Daw had to die.