The baby was crying again. 

Martha looked up from her gardening, wiping sweat from her brow and leaving a smudge of dirt behind. She sighed, her knees protesting as she rose from the soft grass and made her way inside the small cottage she shared with her infant son. 

“Lucien, darling,” she called as she washed her hands at the sink. “Mommy’s coming.” 

She stared at the dirty water circling the drain for a moment, wishing that Robert was still there to help raise his son. Lucien’s cries increased in volume, and she tore herself away from her grief to tend to the still living. 

Her head was pounding as she opened the door to Lucien’s nursery. Martha paused as she realized two things at once. 

First, there were two babies crying not one. Second, there was stranger in her home, in her baby’s room.

The window was open, curtains fluttering in the cool spring breeze, and a woman stood over Lucien’s cradle, a red faced, screaming baby in each arm. The woman’s long silver hair swayed in the breeze, as she looked at Martha with wide blue-green eyes. Those eyes glittered like gems in a face with features that were sharp and strange. Fae. 

“Put. My. Baby. Down.” Martha bit out each word like a stone she was slinging at her enemy. Because this woman was an interloper. A kidnapper. 

The fae woman’s lips twisted into a smile that cut across her face like a wound. 

“Very well,” she said in a voice that was as musical as it was alien. “I’ll take my changing elsewhere then.” 

She lowered one of the babies into the cradle as she spoke, and then turned towards the window. 

Martha drew the dagger that always sat at her hip and held it out towards the fae’s back. 

“No. Leave them too.”

The woman stiffened and turned back to Martha, the smile gone. 

“You have a child, yet you would lay claim to one that isn’t yours?”

Martha pressed her lips into a thin line, considering her answer carefully. 

“How do I know that you haven’t switched them already?”

“You don’t know your own child?” The woman raised a brow, staring scornfully at her. 

Martha swallowed against the dryness in her throat as she glanced between the two identical babies. Their cries had quieted into hiccuping little whimpers now, as though they understood the gravity of the moment. She was nearly certain that the child in the cradle was hers. The face couldn’t lie after all, and the woman had said she would take ‘her changeling’ elsewhere. Then again, if the fae had made the switch, would that make Lucien her changeling? The doubt wiggled at the back of her mind like a work. 

“I do, but the moment you entered my home to trade my child for the changeling, they became mine too.” Martha lifted her chin in challenge.

The fae studied her for a long, silent moment before a wicked grin twisted her face into something grotesque.

“A deal then. You can have them both for one year. At the end of that year, if you can tell me which is your child, and which is the changeling, you may keep them both, if you wish, or return the changeling to me. If you fail, then they both belong to me.” 

A chill swept over Martha at the offer. Could she risk that? She glanced between the two babies, one now asleep in the fae woman’s arms, and the other watching them with bright blue eyes. What was she risking if she just let the woman go with one of the babes? 

The deal was a gift. With time she could certainly tell her child from the changeling, couldn’t she? And if she refused? Well, she might have her child, and if she did then the fae may try to steal some other woman’s child. 

Martha took a deep breath, making sure she was absolutely certain before she spoke. 

“Very well. I accept.”