The Brightest Fell Page 10

  “You can.” I leaned in and kissed her forehead, murmuring, “I will find them,” before turning back to Simon. “All right. Do what you need to do.”

  “Fortunately, I do not need to enchant you directly; my brother’s binding recoils at the very thought,” said Simon. He took a step forward, holding out his hands. “If my brother and the Lady Fetch would be so kind?”

  Sylvester narrowed his eyes before sliding his hand into Simon’s. After a pause for breath, May did the same with Simon’s other hand. Simon smiled. It was not a kind smile. It wasn’t a cruel one, either. He looked sad, almost, like he understood the enormity of what they were both doing, and regretted that they couldn’t trust him more.

  “We begin,” he said, and started chanting in a language I vaguely recognized as Irish Gaelic. The smell of candle smoke and rotten oranges swirled through the room, underscored by Sylvester’s daffodils and dogwood and May’s cotton candy and ashes. Simon kept chanting. The air thickened, growing heavy—and then the spell burst, sending the unmingled perfumes skittering into the corners.

  Simon stopped chanting and dropped their hands.

  “It’s done,” he said. “If harm comes to either one of us, you’ll know it. You’ll know where we are. It’s down to you to find a way to reach us, if we are beyond this realm.”

  “I’ll find a way,” said Sylvester.

  Simon looked at his brother, and this time there was no disguising the sorrow in his expression. He looked like a man who had never been able to count on the ground beneath his feet, but who had set his own anchors against that instability, only to have them all crumble in the first stiff wind.

  “I wish you had been able to say the same when it came to saving me,” he said softly. He turned away before Sylvester could reply, focusing on me. “Well, Sir Daye? Are you ready to save my daughter?”

  “I’m ready to save Tybalt and Jazz,” I said. “Everything else is secondary.”

  Simon grimaced. “I can understand why you would feel that way, but I’ll need you to rein in your tongue, at least until we’ve finished with our first stop.”

  “Why?” I asked warily. I already had some idea of what he was likely to say. I was hoping to be wrong.

  “We’ll be starting at your mother’s tower.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Of course.” Well. Crap.

  EIGHT

  AMANDINE’S TOWER isn’t a knowe: it isn’t anchored to the human world, and there’s no mortal way to get there. It’s a freestanding structure in the Summerlands, built of fae stone under a fae sky. The most mortal thing ever to exist there was me, and I fled as soon as I could, choosing the streets of San Francisco over a place that seemed determined to erase everything I knew to be true about who I was and who I was meant to be.

  So not the most warm and fuzzy of childhood homes, is what I’m saying here. Walking back to it in the company of a man who had been my personal bogeyman for years didn’t particularly help. Worst of all, Simon chattered.

  “I remember when this forest was all acorns and pinecones and other such rubbish,” he said grandly, indicating the trees around us. The fact that none of the trees were oaks or evergreens didn’t stop his cheerful misidentification of the seeds they’d sprouted from. “Sylvester was absolutely determined to have some sort of demarcation between his land and my lady’s. As if the fact that it was always high summer in Shadowed Hills, with the roses growing rampant, wasn’t enough? Luna refused to entertain the idea of any other season in those days.”

  “What season was it at the tower?” I was ashamed of how eager I sounded for the answer. Amandine had done something terrible to me. We were here because of what she’d done. And yet, she was still my mother, and part of me yearned to know more about her, who she’d been before she had me, who she’d been when she was happy.

  “Spring, usually, but my Amy has always been mercurial. Sometimes it would change overnight, from spring to the depths of winter, and we’d all put on our coats and grit our teeth against the chill.” He smiled fondly, distantly, like he was looking at a memory. “August preferred the fall. Amy used to say it was a consequence of her name. I think our girl enjoyed how calm it was. The growing time was over, and the gathering time was just beginning. For her, it was a chance to breathe.”

  “Why are we starting at Amandine’s tower?” asked Quentin. “That’s the one place we know absolutely for sure that August isn’t.”

  “Because that’s also the one place we know absolutely for sure that August was,” said Simon. “The walls will remember her. We can start to follow her trail from there.”

  “You looked for years without finding her, and you were starting from the tower.” Quentin was making no effort to hide his distrust. That was actually sort of soothing. No matter what happened here, he had my back.

  It was difficult to believe that less than six hours ago, I’d been laughing and happy, and feeling like the world was finally starting to go my way. That would show me not to relax. It was just an invitation for life to kick me in the teeth as hard as it could.

  “I was starting from the tower, but I didn’t have October to help me.” Simon shook his head. “I was in a rare position for a long time: a man, married to one of the Firstborn, raising the first known daughter of her descendant race. Everything August did was a surprise and a revelation. Amandine’s magic was similar, of course—the First are always similar to the fruit their branches will bear—but it wasn’t exactly the same.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Quentin.

  “I mean that you are not just a watered-down copy of your parent and original. How could you be? The Dryad and the Blodynbryd descend from the same woman, and neither has wings. I’ve always wondered how the Mother of the Trees felt about that. For her children to not only be anchored to the earth, but bound to it, rooted to it . . . it was either a punishment or a reward, that they couldn’t be blown away by the wind.”

  “I never thought about it that way,” I admitted. Acacia—the Mother of the Trees, and Luna’s mother—has skin the color of flower pollen, and moth’s wings growing from her shoulder blades. She’s magnificent, but she doesn’t look anything like her children.

  Amandine and Evening, on the other hand, look so much like their respective descendant races, and so much like each other, that they’d both been able to pass themselves off as Daoine Sidhe for decades, maybe longer.

  “Wait,” I said. “How many people actually knew Mom was Firstborn?”

  “Some,” said Simon. “I knew before I married her, as did Sylvester. Our parents told us when Amy was sent into Fosterage with our household. It was our job to help her pass for one of the Daoine Sidhe—we were her protective coloration. We moved as a mob of four, she, my brother, my sister, and I, and we seemed enough alike that when she couldn’t quite perform a trick as one of us would, we could cover for her. It was made very clear to us that we needed to maintain her masquerade until it was safe to do otherwise.”

  “Who brought her to you?”

  Simon shook his head. “That, I don’t know. I was a child when she arrived. To be honest, I can’t remember a time before Amy. She was always there, part of daily life, growing more beautiful with every passing night. It was inevitable that my brother and I should both fall in love with her—but that’s not the story you want to hear right now.”

  “Not really,” I said, feeling slightly sick to my stomach. The thought that my entire life, my entire world had hinged upon my mother choosing between twin brothers was ridiculous enough to be difficult to swallow. “You were talking about the differences between Mom’s magic and mine.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure your magic is a match for your sister’s. You have different fathers, after all, and that could have changed things slightly. Not by enough to make you something other than Dóchas Sidhe, but enough for you to have different str
engths. It’s happened before.”

  “Faerie is weird, film at eleven,” I said. “What could August do that Mom couldn’t?”

  “Magic has a scent,” said Simon. “It’s there for everyone. For most of us, though, it’s a whisper, a secret, a sigh. We’re better at picking up the magical scents of those we feel strongly about—family, lovers, close friends. For years, my best friend was a man who smelled of cranberries in bloom, but all Sylvester could say for sure about his magic was that it was some sort of small white flower. Magic adapts. For Amandine, the scents are secondary. She barely notices them. All her focus is on the bloodlines they identify. She could take one sniff of your squire and know how many generations removed he was from his First, where those generations branched, and how many of his ancestors had been Daoine Sidhe.”

  “Uh, all of them,” said Quentin.

  I said nothing. His mother, Maida, was born a changeling, the daughter of a human woman and a fae man. The mortality had been pulled out of her before she became High Queen; it had been long, long gone by the time Quentin was born. That didn’t change the fact that he had a direct human ancestor. I could see the watermarks in Maida’s blood when I looked at her closely. I could see their echoes in his.

  “Maybe,” said Simon, with surprising charity. “Some of us carry secrets even we don’t know. A world where blood can be changed is a world where what’s beneath the surface is unknowable by many of us. August could see who someone was, not what their blood wanted them to be. She could follow the trail of a spell for miles. Amy couldn’t do that. Still can’t, I suppose, or she would have gone after our daughter long since.”

  The forest was growing thinner. We stepped out of the trees, and the season shifted, melting from high summer into early spring. The meadow where we stood was an endless explosion of wildflowers, some familiar from my time in the mortal world, others bright and impossible and utterly fae. A patch of what looked like glowing poppies had attracted a swirling storm of moths, which danced above the light, not seeming to notice the predatory flock of pixies that was picking off the ones flying at the edge.

  Simon grasped my arm and steered me around the glowing flowers. “There are a remarkable number of toxins native to the plants in this area. The pixies have no doubt taken advantage of them.”

  “Right,” I said. I would heal quickly enough not to lose much time. Simon and Quentin wouldn’t.

  The shape of Amandine’s tower appeared between one step and the next, rising white and pristine from the landscape. It looked almost organic, like it had grown rather than being built. I shivered. I couldn’t help myself. I might have lived there once, when I was too young and too eager to please to know better, but it had never been my home, not really. It had never been mine. It was only recently that I had started to understand all the reasons my mother had held herself apart from me, refusing to love me more than she was absolutely required to. As long as there had been anything fae about me, I had been nothing more than a pale reflection of the daughter I had been intended to replace. She didn’t want another August. She couldn’t understand how a child who shared her eyes could be anything else.

  Simon’s hand touched my shoulder. I turned, startled, to find him looking at me with a surprising degree of understanding.

  “Sometimes the places that should be home aren’t,” he said. “Sometimes there’s no one we can blame for that, and so we blame ourselves, because aren’t we the easiest targets? It’s not like anyone will come to our defense when all the loathing and finger-pointing is happening in the privacy of our own minds.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the bad guy here?” I asked.

  Simon paused before taking his hand away. “My apologies,” he said. “I forgot my place for a moment.” He resumed walking, striding ahead toward the gate to Mom’s garden.

  I stood where I was for a few seconds longer, trying to reconcile everything I knew about the man with the urge to apologize for hurting his feelings. “This was easier when I was allowed to hate him,” I finally muttered, and took off after him.

  Quentin followed me, silent, wary. He’d had as much sleep as I had, which was to say, none, and the fact that he was still standing was a testament to how much he cared about protecting his family and standing by his knight. He wasn’t going to drop until I did.

  When the hell did I wind up needing to do right by so many people? What could I have possibly done to deserve them?

  Simon didn’t wait for us. He reached the garden gate, pushed it open, and stepped through, into Amandine’s world of springtime snow. Every flower she grew there was white. White roses, white daffodils, sprays of Queen Anne’s lace, and beds of snowdrops and white crocuses. There were even white violets, which seemed to defeat the purpose of having a flower named after a color. Some of the leaves and stems were green, but even they seemed less vibrant than the plants growing outside the garden walls.

  We caught up with Simon at the center of the garden. He was crouched, sniffing a large, bell-shaped lily. Turning at the sound of our footsteps, he smiled, wry and sad and something else that I couldn’t put a name to, and said, “My mother, Oberon rest and keep her, always said a lady’s garden should be an ornament for the lady it contained. Amy grew everything white when we met, because she felt ashamed of how little color she had. She wanted to set herself against a blank canvas, so as to look like she existed.”

  It made a certain amount of sense, especially since she’d been raised among the Daoine Sidhe. They don’t have a “look,” the way the Tylwyth Teg or the Tuatha de Dannan do. Instead, they tend toward bright, dramatic coloration, like Simon’s red hair and golden eyes, or Quentin’s brilliant blue eyes and bronze hair, complete with a razor’s edge of growing patina. I’ve met Daoine Sidhe with hair in every color the rainbow had to offer, and a few the rainbow would have rejected for being overly garish. Compared to all that, Amandine’s palely golden hair and virtually colorless eyes would have made her stand out, and not in a good way.

  Thinking about my mother—who had always seemed like the most beautiful woman in the world to me when I was a little girl, the person I could aspire to be, but never become—as feeling like an outsider was a bit surreal.

  “After I married her, I convinced her to add some color to her flowerbeds, for the accent it provided,” Simon said, and straightened. “And when August joined us, she planted such flowers . . . oh, October, you should have seen it.”

  “I have,” I said quietly. “In your memories, remember? When you let me ride your blood.”

  That wasn’t all I’d seen. I had seen August herself, wearing a dress the color of corn husks and holding a white candle mottled in calico patches of black and gold, walking into a forest. I had seen those trees before. I couldn’t remember where, but it would come to me; I was sure it would come to me.

  “Oh, yes,” said Simon, looking pleasantly surprised. “I had forgotten all about that. Come on, then.” He started for the front door, steps light, stride almost casual.

  It hurt to watch him. Not because he was supposed to be my enemy, and he was walking toward my childhood home: because he was a man whose entire family was gone, one way or another, and he was walking toward his own home, the one he had lost through a combination of bad luck and his own actions. Through his own failures. Based on what little I understood of what had happened after August disappeared, it wasn’t so much that Amandine had objected to the methods he’d resorted to in trying to recover their daughter: it was that they hadn’t worked.

  Simon Torquill had been carefree once, the sort of man who would no more turn a person into a fish and walk away from them than he would go outside without his trousers on. Here, in the shadow of my mother’s tower, the ghost of that man still lingered, and it made me ache for what he had become.

  To my surprise, he didn’t walk straight in, but raised his hand and knocked, waiting patiently on the steps as Quent
in and I caught up with him.

  “She hasn’t been home in ages,” I said.

  “Perhaps not, but it’s always better to start with an excess of civility and then move toward breaking and entering, rather than attempting to go in the opposite direction,” said Simon. “There’s no one to apologize to if a knock goes unanswered. There’s quite a lot of apologizing to do if, upon picking a lock, the owners of the place turn out to be having breakfast in the parlor.”

  “I know how to pick locks,” said Quentin. “Toby taught me.”

  “Good,” said Simon. “A boy your age should have useful skills, or else no one is ever going to think of you as anything more than a dilettante, and where’s the fun in that?”

  I groaned.

  The door began to open.

  I snapped to immediate attention, posture straight, chin up, fear and muscle memory propelling me into the posture of a scared teenager who knew her mother would never approve of her. Quentin’s posture almost mirrored mine, although there was more formality in it; he’d learned from the best etiquette tutors his parents could find, rather than snatching knowledge from the shadows and spackling it as thick as he could over the rough edges of himself.

  Then the door finished swinging wide and Amandine was there, still in her gown of white flowers, a frown on her pretty face. The only sign of her activities from earlier in the evening was a single red drop on one of the petals of her skirt. She must not have noticed the blood. I couldn’t notice anything else. It was screaming for my attention, as blood always did.

  Amandine’s frown melted into a look of surprise. “Simon,” she said. “What are you doing here? They told me you’d been elf-shot.”

  “They woke me up,” he said, and smiled, open and earnest and bright as moonrise. “Hello, Amy. It’s been a long time.”

  “Not nearly long enough,” she said. “I said I didn’t want to see you until our daughter came home, and she’s not with you. Just the other one, and her little pet.”