White Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

my undoing.”
    After his encounter with Lucas Desirée, Danny at least knew what he was. And the knowing helped. But when the war was over, he could think of nothing to do but return to Temperanceville.
    When he got back, he found that he’d been reported killed, one place or another. Some that served with him who had been wounded were home, too, and he noted them giving him sideways glances. And Mother Kelly was in failing health.
    He had been back a bit more than a year when the worst that could happen did. He was at the glass factory, working an extra shift one cold winter day, when a boiler blew. The explosion rocked the building. Hot shards of metal flew everywhere. Clouds of steam billowed. Danny, working closest to the blast, was lifted clear off his feet and thrown through the brick sidewall of the factory. He lay motionless in the rubble. The foreman knelt, felt for his pulse, and shook his head.
To come through four years of the war, and die like this,
he thought.
    Then Danny moaned, opened his eyes, and sat up.
    In a matter of hours, the story was all over Temperanceville. The old women made signs to ward off evil as he passed. Young wives pulled children from his path. He found his belongings on his landlady’s porch, and she would not answer his knocks.
    And standing by an open window of the Temperanceville Tavern, he heard John Kelly—brother to the long-dead Big Tom—talking to the men. About pookahs. And the evil fey. And cleansing by fire.
    Though he thought he could not be killed by burning, Danny did not want to test the theory. His bags were packed—his landlady had seen to that. But there was one last thing he had to do.
    “She told me then, Mother Kelly did, that I was not Katie O’Donal’s son any more than I was hers. Katie had lost her husband and her wee infant to the famine, so when she found me in the very cradle where her babe had died, she asked no questions of God or man.”
    “We’re all foundlings, Danny, you know?” Duncan said.
    “Now I know. I didn’t then. And Captain Desirée didn’t tell me that part.”
    “Where we came from, lad, is not nearly as important as where we go,” Fitz said. “Captain Desirée may have known that.”
    “She said that there were many who called me Katie’s changeling child, left by the faery folk, an unnatural creature who would only bring ill to her. When she died on the ship on the way over, some who knew the story wanted to throw me overboard. But Mother Kelly would not let them do so, and fought with her husband, Big Tom, to save me.” Danny paused. “Do you believe in the faery folk, Mr. MacLeod, that we might be of them? Hugh doesn’t.”
    Who am I then? What am I?
Duncan remembered the man he had been, begging an answer from the only father he had ever known. “That’s one thing Fitzcairn and I do agree on,” he answered, “though there are many who have thought that about us.”
    “Big Tom Kelly did, long before I—died. That was the reason of his not wanting me when I was a child. And John Kelly had heard the tale, too. After the accident at the factory, he was certain. But Mother Kelly said that it mattered not to her from where I had come—I was her son, as true as any she had borne.
    “I cried a bit then—a man can do that, I think, and still be a man—kissed her cheek, and left.”
    There was a silence then, each of the three caught for a moment in his own thoughts.
    “I’ve been called far worse than changeling, young Danny,” Fitz said finally. “Far worse.”
    “With cause, no doubt,” Duncan added.
    Danny laughed, a bit awkwardly. He was, Duncan guessed, shy of having told so much, yet pleased to be able to talk to those who understood. He moved away from the rail, yawned widely, and stretched, one hand reaching toward the sky. “The stars are falling still, Hugh,” he said. “Could I catch one to carry in my pocket for luck, do you think?”
    “They say they’re made of fire, lad,” Fitzcairn