In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children, #7.5)

by Seanan McGuire

Just as Dr. Bleak was not the first keeper of the windmill, Jack was not the first foundling he had claimed as his own and attempted to train in the long discipline of scalpel and storm. The Moors were a place of delicate balances, every principality held by two monsters of equal power and opposing dispositions. Because the Master thrived in hunger and death, Dr. Bleak stood in austerity and in life, balancing the scales, preventing the judgment of the Moon herself from falling on their shoulders. He had never seen an out-of-balance principality with his own eyes. He’d heard the stories, of course, of what could happen when monsters were allowed to spiral beyond the Moon’s control, and knew that their fallen domains rarely, if ever, birthed anything but more death, destruction, and decay. He was happy to build the foundations of his own principality’s future on the narrow shoulders of a fair-haired girl who hyperventilated when parts of her meal touched one another. All of his former apprentices had failed their tests and trials, when the time came, and all of them had been what the small-minded would call normal in their thoughts, measured and precise in their habits, not ruled by any imbalance of the humors. Perhaps Jack, in her single-minded devotion to cleanliness, was precisely what the Moors had been waiting for. Perhaps by teaching her everything he knew, he would be able to pass the windmill along, as his own master had done for him, and rest. So Jack grew in the s...