Kate was there when the shards burst through her nephew’s skin.
Privately, Kate said quite a bit about the situation in the weeks that followed. She didn’t like to gossip, but people asked—her husband and her father and everyone at church. “You can only teach your children the true path and hope they don’t go astray. Only it helps if you’re a dutiful teacher. And Lena, bless her…”
People would nod and Kate would place her hand on her own daughter’s shoulder, which was mercifully clear.
At the time, of course, all Kate said was, “Oh, Lena. I’m so sorry.”
The family had otherwise gone silent. Auntie Leith picked at her chicken without looking up. Dad swelled, ready to speak before Mom gently pressed a hand to his. It was a testament to the situation that he didn’t say something anyway. Lena stared at the shards. Dark chunks of heavy rock, still finely coated, with mossy veins, tore up the skin along his shoulders and down his arms. The boy saw them out of the corners of his eyes. He looked to his mother. At the time, Kate half-believed that Lena could have made them vanish again if she had only tried.
Lena knelt, pressed her finger to the sharpest stone. “My beautiful boy,” she said, “It’s time to be heading home.”
Kate’s sister would only visit with one or two family members after that, for lunch or a coffee. Never with the boy. Lena was too proud to attend family dinners. She’d been warned about the stories she let the boy read. The children she let him play with, the plays she took him to see, the changelings she allowed into their home. Even after the shards appeared, there were things Lena could have done to slow their growth. But she was stubborn; she refused to believe that having a changeling was down to anything but bad luck.
Every time Kate saw a changeling in the shops or along the school yard—dear gods, there were so many of them nowadays—she held her daughter closer. Before, she had rarely seen them. Now, she saw nothing else. The children unsettled Kate. Always so wary when they caught her watching, skittering away on stone limbs. Adult changelings were, if anything, worse. Stone wings ripped up from their backs, twelve stone spidery arms jittering at their sides, stone veils like some strange mockery of a bride so heavy they had to be wheeled along the aisles, unable to stand for more than a minute at a time. And the way they looked at you. Unashamed. Unpredictable. Unaware that they were grotesque and unnatural.
So when the shards pricked through her sweet baby’s skin, Kate took it as a test from God.
“It’s yours to fight,” she told the girl. “If you do things properly, cut it out at the roots, your own husband will never have to know. You’re still you underneath it. I still love you.”
But it was getting harder to see Kate’s daughter, under the stone. The stones worked together to crowd out her daughter’s sweet voice. The stones gave Kate’s daughter a new name, scribbled in the margins of her notebooks. The stones demanded new clothes. Kate found a hand-written story, secreted away. It was about changeling with wings of stone (the story, unbelievably, called them beautiful), pressing hands and lips to each other in ways Kate had never taught her girl, would never have allowed her to learn.
“You’re not fighting hard enough,” Kate said, “Who you really are is still under there. I still love you.”
Kate’s little girl stared back. Stones lined her lips like tiny studded, veiny jewels, spoke in her daughter’s voice. “What if there is no one else under here? Would you still love me then?”
Kate reached for the knife as a final resort.
Beneath the stones was her own sweet daughter. Once the stones were gone, Kate could try again, raise her up properly, fix things better. Kate slipped the knife beneath the largest stone, just under the girl’s eye, and wrenched. She ignored the screams. The stones came up bloody and thudded wetly when they hit the ground. They screamed in her daughter’s voice, whimpered, begged, breathed hotly, cursed. In the pockets where Kate had cut stone away, there was more stone, bleeding, gaping. Kate prayed. Sang lullabies. Cried. It hurt. It would keep hurting until it was done and God could heal them both. Her daughter struggled but Kate tore up stone upon stone.
The layers came off in that long, terrible night. Kate did not find her beloved daughter in the first layer, nor the second, nor the third. Deeper, then. God would fix it. Once the stones were out, they could build up the girl she wanted.
Her daughter’s eyes stared at her from pits of jagged rock.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” Kate said.
The girl was quiet for a long time. She wore the clothes Kate gave her to wear, submitted to the knife, became smaller and quieter. And then one day, she was gone. But she’d been gone a long time, Kate realized, gone from the moment she’d resisted the knife. Kate prayed instead of regretting. Her daughter would be lonely without her. Her daughter would get hungry. Her daughter would get tired of dragging around the stones. She’d tear them up herself, one day, when she was ready to return.
Traveling around the city became harder after that. The changelings kept coming, more of them in the streets, more of them in the shops, taking up the entire space so that Kate felt she was always hovering around the walls, watching for a flash of her child in their cold expressions and inhuman forms. She wondered if they would recognize each other if they saw each other on the streets.
She wondered if they would want to.
