1 preface.

For a while we are all disappointments and a shame to our family, for me it was since my conception. I didn't balk from the low esteem they had for me, I gave them the full tormentful ride.

When I was born, there weren't words to define what I was- thousands in thousands more languages and gestures.

They would call me witch, assuming I would be like my mother, sisters, brothers and a legion of cousins.

I later showed that I wasn't. So it became a competition for whoever coul devise the most derogatory name for what I was. And it didn't help that I claimed my father's lineage.

The Fey Court. We were counted least of all the Agnate even though the Court was the oldest; our traditions spat on, our powers ridiculed by those who believed they lorded over us.

But Aunt Hetta said that the others ostracized us because it was their only hope to belittle our formidability.

Whatever that meant.

As I said earlier, my maternal family were born of the full blessings of Penemue. The craft was their inheritance, magic their lifeblood; witches they were easily called.

I never knew or met my father much to their relief.

Aunt Hetta always so cruelly helpful would throw storms of curses at the man whom Mom had caught the eyes of, eighteen years ago.

From that crone's tirade and my siblings' ridicule, I realized the story of my existence.

It had been at the Fête de L'apanage, my father had attended in the company of the Fey Queen and taken one look and chosen the youngest grandniece of Henrietta St. Ours as his victim of 'sacrilegious seduction'.

Uliana, one of my elder aunts, confided that my father burned bright like newly smelt bronze in a winter's night. And that he burned still in hell for what he did.

And Mom, though married and already had three children for her husband, fell and proved susceptible to Fey beauty and charm- a sin that until the turn of the century would have meant her exile from the coven and her family.

But the only guilt my mother had pled was that of being victim to ****.

To which Johann, my stepfather had nearly marched into the Moors in a fit of rage to kill the Fey responsible.

But he'd been calmed with only the knowledge that my father was dead already.

Even that didn't last as my mother soon realized her dalliance with the Fey left a permanent mark then Johann turned his ire to my yet unborn self.

I was conceived and born to a mother who damned my father's memory with **** to assuage her own shameful lust.

For most of my childhood years, my half siblings would sneer that Mom should've listened to her family's advise to drown me in the hour of my birth.

My half sisters joked over how often they would enchant snakes and venomous spiders into my crib.

But the day came when Mom took me from my crib- an unnamed six days old baby, to bring and abandon me in the Moors.

So that my father's kin would find and take me off her hands.

Regardless that I was too young, I remembered everything.

Maybe because of the Fey blood in me, maybe the Saints wouldn't let me be ignorant of the struggles I'd had to go through even that young.

Sophie St. Ours, my venerable mother would have left her newborn son, her living breathing shame, in the gloomy forest on a chilly October night.

To be torn by feral beasts or frozen to death, she didn't care. No one would blame her for her actions. Her family had cursed and reviled me, her husband's anger unrelenting.

But she couldn't leave, not when the Fey Court had gathered for a revel at the same hour she had chosen to abandon me.

It was entertainment to the Court, watching a mother leave her week old baby to the cruelty of winter.

I remember their faces; angel faces over demon souls. They blurred and blazed in every conceivable color of skin, scale and fur.

Then Mab came and picked me off the forest floor of ferns and late blooming bluebells, the under of the blanket I was wrapped in must have been wet from melting snowflakes.

Later Mom would say to any of coven who asked her that she couldn't leave me because she was after all my mother. That at that moment, she finally felt the maternal instincts that had evaded her for six days.

But I knew she didn't follow through because she'd been terrified of doing so.

Even Aunt Hetta, senile with her vengeful spells, would be if standing face to face with the Fey Queen.

Queen Mab had whispered some secret that filled my mother's eyes with cold dread that she welcomed me back into my arms when the Fey Queen offered.

It was a secret she had told no one. Not the husband she had sought to pacify by abandoning me or her powerful great aunt whose advise she had heeded.

The only gift I received that eventful night was from the ice cold lips of the Fey Queen.

Mab gave me a name, uttering it in a fancy of hidden wickedness. A Fey name to live with in a household of witches who cursed it every day. Senoy.

Burning fury, it meant in the Fey tongue.

Perhaps Queen Mab had meant for it to give those who would harm me, caution; warning them of the repercussions.

But it seemed to have been lost on the household of St. Ours and the entire witch covens who followed their example.

I grew up in the isolation and insults my older siblings and cousins gave me.

His eyes are like the piss of an anemic.

What kind of hair he grows, like bloody feathers of a canary.

Most of those earliest jibes were from Jean and the brood of my cousins and children of coven members, he ruled over.

My eldest sisters, Lisette and Fleur had no concern to bother themselves with alienated brother from another father.

Though occasionally Fleur showed her interest with the gifts of snakes and spiders in my crib.

Otherwise they were always at their father's side; sitting in his lap at meetings and eating from his plate at dinners.

Johann handled his daughters like the Hope diamond while me he scorned like that rusted nail which he couldn't wait to hammer furiously on.

I remember thinking maybe if I proved I was nothing of my father or his kin, that they would all accept and love me.

I didn't even know where to start. What I could cut back on; the mannerisms; the way I talked or moved? Should I not be revolted by iron and salt?

But then how would I know I did those things as a Fey would when the one time I had been in the presence of one was a few short minutes.

Yet no matter how much I tried acting like other children, it was no use. I never fit in even if I wanted to.

My aunts would hiss and burn pungent herbs with spells that smoked into my room, to keep me confined at night when everyone slept.

Lest I snuck into their rooms and steal their tongues or put a cut in their soul.

The Jeans- what I came to call my brother's circle of adoring friends and my daily torturers- put rowan berries and salt in my food just to watch me vomit blood.

Or they would find me in the dilapidated atrium of the greenhouse Aunt Hetta spent her days in, to shoot slingshots of iron clippings which gave me blisters for days.

I would always run to the lake just off Allais and into Legion territory, to hide and cry. And when I heard children of the Legion playing, I'd hide up in trees or in the dirt so they wouldn't catch me and probably do worse than my brother.

I cried because all of that proved I was more Fey than witch.

It got worse when I couldn't understand the magic and spells, Mom or my aunts spent some afternoons teaching the children, I gave up trying.

So I left them to their hatred and prejudices even though it hurt me severely.

I was alone and I raised myself away from the mother who was ashamed of me, the brother who hunted me and the sisters who forgot me.

I found refuge away from Manor St. Ours, deep in the Moors where the Court held sway. There I swam in a race against nixies, learnt the Fey speech and brawled to impress gushing nymphs.

The Moors became the home I wanted, regardless I never talked about my time with the Fey as it was sure to cause more problems.

I realized I fared better apart from the St. Ours anyway yet it seemed to cause me more chastisement.

Solitude had been a balm but having found my life with creatures more like me, I welcomed it wholeheartedly.

I was forgotten soon enough when the twins were born.

I hadn't known my mother was pregnant till she wasn't anymore.

At the christening ceremony, which I wasn't given by the way, Johann allowed Eleazar Khan to be my new sister Margot's godfather.

Mom glowed with pride because Margot was from that day claimed for Eleazar's son. The highest honour amongst the Agnate.

"Every son is a reflection of his father."

It resonated as an insult to my illegitimacy amongst them though he was referring to the second twin.

Johann named the boy after him but everyone would call him Hans so as to not confuse them both.

Because they were trueborn witches, Hans and Margot became the favorites of Manor St. Ours.

Whilst Lisette and Fleur was fixed to Johann's side, Jean could do no wrong in Mom's eyes and the twins were the salve to my mother's shame- placating the insult my presence brought to the coven.

So as they posed as my antithesis, I learned what I needed to survive and guard myself against them all.

As years passed I discovered that I could endure salted foods- which were a constant at the house- only with a steady diet of wild fruits.

Mom or any of my aunts who did the grocery never saw to it that those were ever available.

That would have to mean that they cared enough to not starve me. Which I would've when I was thirteen and all I had eaten for weeks were over seasoned foods.

I could barely speak. My tongue burned and hissed with any try I made and the Jeans laughed and offered me water concentrated in salt.

It was the first time I cursed them. For that Johann had locked me in the cellar the whole night because of it.

I couldn't sleep because my whole body was in agony.

I knew I was going to die by morning and everyone of them would be relieved for it.

I didn't want to give them that satisfaction. I would live to be their greatest torment as much as they are mine.

And that night was the first time I shed my skin.

I couldn't explain the feeling even now that I have done it countless times.

Maybe it was the zeal to live or the anger swelling from all the years of neglect. Now how they didn't care if I died, locking me in the rusty cellar of the Manor like a diseased pig.

It was the first time I understood my name for what it was.

Burning fury.

Indeed wvery inch of skin, marrow of bone and vessel of blood came aflame like I had been pushed into a fire pit of Aunt Hetta's making.

I didn't know what I became.

But I escaped the cellar, waking up naked in the Moors with my lips painted from wild fruits and deer.

When the St. Ours had come looking for me. Fleur, in sneering disgust, confided that Mom and Aunt Tereze had found my clothes and tufts of gamboge red feathers.

My mother took me from Johann before anything else happened.

It was the first time in years that she afforded physical contact with me since she left me to my own devices.

Bringing me to her own bathroom she shared with Johann, she bolted the doors and set to running me a hot bath.

I waited for the reprimand either physically or emotionally delivered.

But all she did was scrub me clean, she said nothing.

I sat underneath murky water scented with her own bath oils, head bowed to my knees I brought up to my chest.

Her nails dug painfully into the roots of my bright shaggy hair, releasing grass blades and twigs.

Auburn feathers floated above the bath water and I felt like the Thanksgiving turkey that was killed and plucked at the backyard of the Manor.

When she was done, she wrapped me in clean towels and carried me in her arms to my room.

I saw the shocked faces of my stepfather, siblings and the rest of the St. Ours family who had lived with all the ten years of my mother's neglect to me, the Fey spawn.

All that she said to me before she left me in the safety of my room was, "It is the gift of your father. Now the rest will follow."

And she was right, the rest did follow.