November 1070

My next coherent memory after what seemed like a half-night of wild passion was waking up in bed with Elfleda lying half on the bed, half on top of me, and a burning desire to relieve myself. I weighed the pros and cons of disturbing Elfleda to do so, and the call of nature won. I gently lifted her and started sliding my way out, which didn't work as well as I hoped and still woke Elfleda.

A hand brushed against my chest and Elfleda murmured, "Harry."

"Sorry, I have to go for a bit," I said.

"Mmm, stay." The request was accompanied by a dragging nail.

"I don't think you want the bed getting any dirtier than it already is," I said.

Elfleda grumbled in wordless discontent but pulled her hand back anyway, rolling over onto her side to let me go free. With waking her no longer being a concern, I pulled the covers back and slid out, shivering slightly from the cold.

Every inch of the bedroom was covered in a light layer of rime. I guess neither of us was really restrained or controlled after we got into the bedroom. At least the aura turned cold around Elfleda; I didn't want to imagine what my room would've looked like if it were literally burning hot. I wiped away the rime from my books with a few murmured spells, and abandoned the rest of the room as a lost cause.

I was lost in thought as I made my way to my bathroom. I'll spare you the sordid physical details involved. Instead, I'll focus on what I was thinking: that I was nervous and excited and worried all at once, that unprotected premarital sex meant something very different thing and could have very different consequences in this time than it did in mine, more practical concerns about what the attack from Gauthier's sorceress heralded. If those cats, matagots, were the extent of what Gauthier could call upon, or if he had more formidable defenses set up around his domain.

Inevitably though, my thoughts went to my prior girlfriends. Not for reasons of comparison, but due to melancholy and concern. I'd been in three real relationships over the years, maybe four to five depending on how you interpreted things. Elaine had been the first, when we were both fumbling teenagers. I don't know if what we had between us was real love or just a teenage crush, but I don't think it really mattered; we were happy and very into each other and full of hope - and then Justin took that away. I spent a decade thinking I'd killed her, which probably accounted for a good half of my attitudes towards women.

Then there was Susan. She was an attractive reporter, and at first she seemed more interested in getting with me than I was with her. Then we ended up in a circle together hiding from a demon after she ended up accidentally drinking a love potion I'd somehow brewed, and things kicked off from there. The road was rocky, but I came to love her, to want to marry her. And then the Red Court screwed it all up, and the end came when I drove that ritual knife through her heart to kill them all. I still don't think I've gotten over that. I don't know if I ever will.

Anastasia was ultimately a fling, I guess. Not because of the way we approached the relationship, but because of how it ended. A necromancer had swapped bodies with her, leaving her in a body probably a few centuries younger than her original one. That left her susceptible to magical mental influence, and a traitor on the Council steadily pushed her towards a relationship with me, to keep an eye on me. Neither of us were aware of that, and for a year and a half we dated. Then everything came out, and she broke it off. I don't blame her for that. Though, I think it says something that "there was never anything real between us" was the best way one of my relationships has ended.

And Lash was, well, I've already gone into detail about Lash. We didn't so much have a relationship as a slow, steady seduction on both ends, entirely intentional on her part and entirely unintentional on mine. In a sense that relationship was the shortest; only a few days passed between when I started seeing her as a real, independent being to when she sacrificed herself for me.

I wasn't sure how to count Shiela. She'd effectively been an extension of Lash, but she'd acted very differently, and to this day I'm still not sure how much of that persona was really false. What I can't deny was that it was very effective; she hit all my buttons and got the promise of a date out of me while an apocalypse was going on. The only reason I even figured out anything was wrong was because of a friend. The point was that, as I said earlier, every single relationship I've been in has either started under false pretenses, ended in the death of my girlfriend - thankfully assumed in Elaine's case - or both. And a large part of me was wondering how this relationship, with Elfleda, would end.

That worry didn't linger for long.

Interesting side note: you know how sometimes, you walk through a door into another room and completely forget what you came in there for? That's not an accident; back in my time, researchers had recently discovered, or maybe more appropriately established, that it was the result of a deliberate brain-quirk. See, the mind kind of works on a priority system. It tries to focus on one task at a time, collating and organizing the bits and pieces relevant to whatever you're working on that point. And when you're done with that task, it gets rid of most of those little side details that were only important to that particular task. Sometimes, it gets rid of a little more. And sometimes, walking through a door tricks the brain into thinking you've started something new, so it wipes the slate and leaves you standing there looking like an idiot.

So as I exited my washroom and closed the door, I stood there like an idiot for a few seconds, wondering what I'd just been thinking. Then it came to me:

Shiela.

I'd been thinking about her, and whether to count her. I nodded, accepted that as fact, and started to go back to the bedroom - and then stopped. With the slate wiped clean, the topic put behind me, new mental associations formed. New connections.

Eve had asked about Shiela. Not exactly by name, but she'd still asked. At first, I figured it was just simple curiosity. And then Eve directed me at Rowena, and I dealt with Esther, and put the question of Shiela behind me. Except, I now wondered if there was more to it. Eve's last question had been a roundabout way to get me to go save Rowena, a "suggestion" that threaded a loophole in whatever bindings came with the Archive. Had she made another "suggestion"?

I would've dismissed it ordinarily, but the thing with Eve was that she could read everything I wrote. And on the boat to France, the day after the Leanansidhe and Mab had "ambushed" me, I'd written about that encounter, the strategy I'd used, the way I'd ordered the questions. Specifically, I didn't ask the question I really wanted to know the answer to at the start, or the end. I asked her in the middle, when she wasn't paying attention.

Eve would have known about that. She could have used that exact method to sneak me another message. But why?

My thoughts started smashing together like balls in a lottery machine.

The Archive in my time had known a lot about Tessa, about her life before becoming a Denarian and presumably after. She would have known everything the Church had ever learned about how the various Denarians and Fallen worked - including Lasciel. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch for her to guess how Lash would have approached me. She could have asked that question just out of curiosity, or she could have been suggesting that someone close to me was not who they seemed to be. Kind of like my subconscious, all those months ago, had suggested that I was missing something, possibly something about Lasciel, about a connection with her.

And then it hit me: I didn't remember any of the sex with Elfleda. That felt odd to me now. I mean, sure, I was tired and excited and we clearly exhausted each other, but I would have expected to remember something, anything, flashes. But no. All I could remember was coming in, getting healed of the burns and the cut, stumbling into my bedroom, tearing each other's clothes off, and that's it. Nothing until just a few minutes ago, when I woke up, however many hours later.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. I was just letting my paranoia and pessimism get to me, I told myself. Or at least I tried to; it didn't entirely stick. I stood there, struggling with myself, wondering if Elfleda had actually been lying all along, was still lying, or if I'd careened down a completely irrelevant and harmful train of thought. I took a deep breath, and tried to clear my mind.

A soulgaze. A soulgaze would do it. If I was committed to staying with her, to effectively endangering her with my presence, then she deserved to know me, to make that choice with as much information as possible. And if she was lying, I would see that.

Determined, I drew myself up and marched into my bedroom. Some of the rime had faded by that point, and Elfleda had settled into lounging position, lying on her side, head propped up one one hand, the blankets pulled up around her chest. She had a very pensive expression as I walked in, one that didn't fade as she turned to look at me.

"Elfleda-"

"Harry, I-"

We both cut off at the same time, not quite looking at each other in our usual fashion. I licked my lips and went to tell her to go first, but Elfleda beat me to the punch.

She sighed, gestured with her other hand, and said, "Please. You first."

I took a deep breath, suddenly very nervous at the last step. "Elfleda, I think... I think if we're going to make this work, you need to be aware of... of who I am. So, to do that... I think we should soulgaze."

Elfleda grew still as a statue. She lay there, not moving, not breathing, for what felt like an eternity. Just lying there, frozen, under my gaze.

After a timeless eon, she let out a long, deep sigh and slowly raised her eyes towards mine. They met, and I expected the soulgaze to start.

And expected.

And expected.

And nothing happened.

It was like the snowflake that causes the avalanche. I felt like the ground had fallen away from me, like I was crumbling, facts and observations and missed details tumbling into place. She'd asked what I would do if she were sidhe. She never truly gave her name. She always tried to balance things. The soulgaze didn't work on her.

My first assumption was that she'd Chosen, become a Sidhe out of fear and then desperately tried to get me to accept her. It would fit with what I'd Seen of her, her reaction to iron upon our first meeting, her ability to lie. Only there were still inconsistencies, ones that became apparent as more things clicked. I'd only Seen her once, seen her touch iron once, seen her lie once. And then I'd accepted her as a changeling and stopped thinking about it. Stopped questioning. Was careful with handling iron around her. Accepted her wordplay as a quirk. But she'd never told another lie since then - or before then.

And as I thought about it, I realized that she had never truly defined her past to me. She'd claimed the name Aldrich, but never said she was actually of that family. She told me her mother was a Winter Sidhe and implied that she'd killed her, but never actually said so - just that her mother was dead, as was her father. She had no aunts or uncles, but never mentioned siblings - like a sister. And Mab had never done anything to Elfleda, never so much as mentioned her. Neither had the Leanansidhe. In fact, when the Leanansidhe took Elfleda, she hadn't used that name. Hadn't called her by it even once. She'd only described her - "woman", "the one you came to save", "that which you cherish." She hadn't even threatened to actually kill Elfleda either, just to shatter everything inside the barrier. That wasn't conclusive, it still ran into the issue of the changeling I'd seen, the potential contradiction that came with what had happened on the boat ride to Cornwall, but even that crumbled under the weight of logic.

If Mab had one body double, what was stopping her from having two? She would have known I used iron utensils; she could have sent a changeling the first time she came to my house, to "confirm" that she was mortal and render herself above suspicion, and every other time she needed to get out a tricky spot.

The Leanansidhe's words came back to me: "When one seeks to capture a man's heart, one must first find the path to it. And then, once the right incentive is at hand, you must properly motivate him." If my worst fears were true, then Mab, and by extension the Leanansidhe, would have known exactly what I would do, exactly how I would react.

Then there was the way my aura reacted around her: always cold, never warm, never even just calm. It wasn't like that around anyone else. It hadn't been like that around the Red Cap and his posse. It hadn't been like that around the Leanansidhe, when she was alone. It hadn't even gone a particular direction around the centaurs, who were themselves fully fae. No, it only ever consistently grew cold around Elfleda, as if she were the one bringing the cold.

And lastly, the specter of what I didn't remember hung over me like a guillotine, taking on a terribly sinister cast. I could have forgotten, or I could have been made to forget, because I realized something during intercourse. Something devastating.

I dug into Bonea's memories in the hope she retained the knowledge, could provide me this final answer, and something I'd never felt before happened: I was rejected. Prevented. It wasn't like the knowledge wasn't there, I knew what that felt like, but that I had been kept from retrieving it.

And then, as if grudgingly, the resistance faded, and the knowledge came to me. It was exactly what I'd feared.

I didn't remember the sex because we hadn't really had sex. You can't have sex with a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a furious winter gale. You can't make love to a mountain, a lake of ice, a freezing wind. What we had was a joining, a point in time where I saw the breadth and depth of her power all over again.

I swallowed, hard, and said in a bare whisper, "Mab."

In the silence that followed, Elfleda's form dissolved before my very eyes.

Author's Note: This, ladies and gentlemen, is why for all that I strongly implied it at times, I went to very careful lengths to never explicitly say that Mab was not Elfleda, to be super, super careful with what Elfleda said, at what times.

And the part I love the most about this, the part that I am so happy no one ever commented on, is that two months ago, I gave you one half of the proof. And a few weeks ago, I gave you the other half - and no one put it together.