The Changeling

Summary

MERCY RILEY is thrust into life in the cramped, cold little room down back of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows Mother and Baby Home. In the rarely-visited coastal village of Weary Bay. A place of shame, Mercy is born and raised a secret. Never permitted to know her mother, her name concocted for expedience by strangers. While social acceptability is not her destiny neither is obscurity and around the age of thirteen she escapes. Lost and vulnerable she is discovered and aided by Black Annis, not even slightly mortal. Taken in by the Travelers she is sequestered, for her protection and education, with Maisie Raith the Weary Bay’s generations-long practitioner of witchcraft, where she learns some semblance of what it means to live beyond a walled, barred institution. She learns to heal and foretell a person’s death through tarot cards, but she is also taught—maybe randomly, maybe by design—to kill with precision.

At the very close of winter, the city of New Rathmore is rendered powerless beneath the frozen discord of a late season arctic ice vortex. The metaphor of From Winter, Spring is Born, is sung in folktales the world over; is anthropomorphized, of necessity, for children and should change as a youngster becomes adult but… What of truth? What is the game and how serious are the players? And where are the rules?

Almost everyone underestimates Mercy Riley. Most do not realize she is not—and never will be—like them.

The Legends of the Sídhe series is a rewilded ecology in language contemporary mythology.

Final sound production: Motiv Music https://motivmusic.com/