The Brightest Fell Read online

  Hearing my own mother call me “the other one” stung less than I would have expected. Maybe I was finally growing up. Or maybe the desire to punch her in her pretty nose was keeping me from feeling like I wanted her to be proud of me. “We’re here because we’re about to go looking for August,” I said. “Remember, Mom? You hired me?”

  “I remember that you refused me and forced my hand, and I remember that you’re a devious, sneaky little thing. If I let you inside, you’re likely to try freeing your other pets, and then where will I be? You won’t help me willingly. I have to compel you.”

  “I’d work better if I weren’t worried about them,” I said. “You have my word that if you give them back now, I won’t rest until I find out what happened to my older sister.”

  Her frown became a scowl. “She’s no sister of yours,” she snapped. “Simon had no part in making you, and I claim no responsibility for the blood you bear. August is my heir, and I shall have no other.”

  “I don’t want anything that belongs to you,” I said. “I just want Tybalt and Jazz back.”

  “Then you’re a liar, dear daughter, because right now, they belong to me. You can’t have things both ways. Either you want nothing of mine, or you want my most prized possession. Which is it?”

  “How can they be your most prized possession when you just stole them from me?” I asked, too frustrated to mind my words. “You’re the one who’s trying to have things both ways.”

  “They’re the pretty pets that bring my August back to me, as she should always have been,” said Amandine. She smiled serenely. “There’s no way out of the circle you’re stuck in, October. I won’t give them back. You won’t give up wanting them. So find my daughter.”

  “That’s what she’s had me woken to help her do,” said Simon, stepping in before I could start yelling. There was a soothing note in his voice, calm, like this was a perfectly reasonable conversation. “Amy, remember how I used to laugh and call August our little wolfhound, from the way she could follow a person’s magic from one side of the tower to the other? I suspect October can do the same. May we enter?”

  “October grew up here,” said Amandine. “I think I would have noticed if she had wandered off one afternoon and returned with August.”

  I saw my opening. “Yes, but I was more human then,” I said. “That was how you wanted me to be, remember? I could always detect magic, but it’s only been recently that I’ve really been able to understand it. I can follow it a lot farther than I used to. Let me try.”

  She looked at me with open disgust. “Of course you would embrace the part of your heritage that left you sniffing at the corners like an animal. Fine. Do as you like. Only be aware that I am watching you, and you’ll be punished if I think you’re trying to trick me.”

  She turned on her heel then, stalking back inside, leaving the door open so we could follow. Quentin blinked.

  “Your mom is sort of terrifying, and I don’t think I like her very much,” said Quentin, looking at me.

  “Yeah, well, she stole my fiancé in order to blackmail me into doing my chores, so I don’t like her very much either right now,” I said, and stepped inside.

  Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see Simon scattered all through the décor of the tower, which hadn’t changed since I was a child—or, I suspected, since the first time Amandine had walked away from it, fleeing out into the mortal world to escape the shadows which haunted this place. The floor was polished stone, smooth enough to be pleasant underfoot, rough enough not to become slippery when wet. There was a fireplace in one wall. It shared a flue with the other fireplaces in the tower, one to a floor, all their smoke combining to emerge from the same chimney. The furniture was simple but elegant, rustic and timeless, and chosen with a care that my mother had never shown when dealing with material possessions.

  Simon stopped at the middle of the room, drinking it all in with hungry eyes. Amandine was gone. So were Tybalt and Jazz, if she had been keeping them here at all. I looked around, finally spotting a single black feather on the floor near the rear door. They had been here. She had taken them away.

  “What room did she give you?” Simon asked, turning toward me.

  “Fourth floor,” I said.

  “That makes sense,” he said. When I raised an eyebrow, he explained, “We slept on the sixth, where she could watch the moonrise from our window. It soothed her. August’s room was a floor below ours.”

  I blinked. “That’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the tower only has five floors.”

  Simon looked almost amused. “Ah. Because of course, one of the Firstborn, in her own home, would not be able to manipulate the architecture to her own ends.”

  I resisted the urge to groan. Of course Amandine could change the place around to suit herself. I had always known she had the capability: she had expanded my room at least once, when I was a child, and had outgrown my available space. I just hadn’t expected her to erase an entire floor. Instead, I asked, “How are we supposed to get there?”

  “Unless she’s changed the place more than I expect she has, I know the way,” said Simon, and started for the stairs with me and Quentin at his heels.

  The stairs wound around the body of the tower in a gentle curve, never steep enough to become a strenuous climb. I kept looking around with new eyes, imagining this place full of life and laughter, occupied by a family, not a woman and the daughter she had never intended to save. It was hard. It hurt. That didn’t matter, because I couldn’t stop myself.

  We climbed past my old bedroom, until we were halfway up the stairs leading to my mother’s chambers. Simon stopped, crouching and studying something on the floor. He pointed.

  “See that?” he asked.

  I squinted. “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Quentin, sounding faintly bemused. “What is it?”

  “It’s the edge of the fold Amy made when she sealed August’s room away,” said Simon. “It’s no wonder you can’t see it, October; this is an illusion, a powerful one, and the Dóchas Sidhe have nothing of Titania in them. You’ll never be the illusionist your mother is, and only the fact that she was Firstborn allowed her to pass for Daoine Sidhe.”

  My illusions have never been my strong suit. There have been times when I had to lose my temper before I could even raise the magic necessary to cast a human disguise. It still rankled to hear him dismiss my capabilities so cavalierly.

  “Look,” he said, focusing on Quentin. “If you want to dispel this sort of illusion, it helps to have a tie to the person who cast it—in this case, Amy is my wife, and so I am familiar with the way she spins a spell. Every illusion is different. I could punch through the center of this one, but that would be difficult, and it might do me harm, as she can work quite a bit of power into a casting. So what I want to do is find the thread, and pull.”

  What he was saying made sense, especially when I compared it to the way I perceived other people’s spells. I tilted my head, watching intently as Simon twisted his fingers through the air, finally hooking them over some invisible thread and beginning to pull. The smell of blood and roses, faint, like it had been bottled up and was only now being released, began to permeate the air. The stairs wavered, shimmering, before there was a distant shattering sound, and they seemed to extend, growing longer.

  Simon sat back on his haunches, clearly winded. “Oh, she meant for that to last,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Best get up and move along, before she comes to ask why I’ve started breaking her things.”

  He didn’t need to tell me twice. I started moving, pausing only long enough to offer him a hand and help him up. I wanted to see what was up this new flight of stairs, what my mother had hidden from me in my own home for my entire childhood. And I called myself a detective.

  There was a new la
nding. At the new landing was a new door, closed but not locked, like the occupant of the room on the other side had expected to be back soon. I opened it, gingerly.

  August’s room was a mirror image of mine, and nothing like mine at all. Her furnishings were of the same school, all oak and ash and princess canopies, but they were visibly mended in some places, like they’d been used hard and repaired by an unpracticed hand. One wall was devoted to bookshelves, stretching from floor to ceiling, and there was a cartographer’s desk under the window, with a half-finished map still weighted down at the center of it, waiting for August to come back and resume sketching the lines of its terrain. It didn’t feel like a place that had been shut off for a century. It felt like it had been shut off for less than a day. Good. That meant Simon’s plan just might work.

  I moved to the center of the room, closed my eyes, and breathed in deep.

  Everyone’s magic is different, but everyone’s magic takes something from their parents. I inherited the copper in my magic from Amandine, which I suppose is why the less mortal I become, the less it smells like metal, and the more it smells like blood. The cut-grass . . . I can only think that’s my magic interpreting what I got from my father, because it didn’t come from her. Quentin’s magic was steel and heather, and his father smelled of heather and celandine poppies, while his mother smelled of fresh-cooled steel and dry hay. We carry our past in our veins, and we reflect it in our magic.

  August’s room smelled, at first, like any other lived-in bedroom: clean, but with a faint undertone of sweat, the smell of hot days and tangled sheets, of striving for sleep when it didn’t want to come. That smell has been baked into the walls of every bedroom I’ve ever occupied, no matter how clean the house was, no matter how often we bleached the sheets or repainted the walls. It’s the smell of being alive, and while it’s normally a welcome one, I couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy. We didn’t know whether August was alive or dead. We wouldn’t know for a long time yet . . . and if she was dead, I didn’t know what Amandine was going to do.

  Focus. I needed to focus. My own magic was trying to rise in response to my distress, and I damped it down again, refusing to let it complicate matters more than they already were. I needed to find old magic, not new.

  Amandine was the first person I identified. Her magic was the strongest, as befit a Firstborn, and it was everywhere, touching and tracing every surface. She had spent so much of her time here, with the daughter she actually wanted, never dreaming that one day, a daughter she didn’t know what to do with would sleep one floor below.

  Simon came next—or rather, the Simon I’d seen in his own blood-memory came next, all mulled cider and sweet smoke, with no hint of taint or rot to complicate matters. I inhaled and tried to push past it, digging deeper, looking for the unfamiliar.

  And then, between one heartbeat and the next, I found it. The scent of sweet campfire smoke, close enough to Simon’s candle smoke to be a kissing cousin, but distinct enough that there was no question of whether it belonged to him. It was wrapped with a ribbon of rose. Not Amandine’s wild, woody roses: something small, cultivated, sweet, the sort of rose that would grow in a princess’ walled garden. August.

  “Smoke and roses,” I said, and opened my eyes. “She smelled like smoke and roses.”

  “Yes,” breathed Simon. “Can you follow it?”

  I looked at him and nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I can.”

  NINE

  WE DESCENDED THE TOWER steps with me in the lead, all my concentration focused on teasing out the often-thin, always-faded scent of August’s magic. Only the fact that it had been so concentrated in her room had allowed me to find it at all, and if I lost it, I was going to need to start over from the beginning. Mom was nowhere to be seen. I was grateful for that. She was a distraction, and if there was anything I didn’t need, it was to be distracted.

  At the same time, if she’d been there, maybe I could have used the fact that I had the trail to convince her to return Jazz. One hostage was enough. Tybalt was better equipped to take care of himself. More importantly, he would understand why I had saved Jazz first. He would forgive me.

  Maybe if I told myself that enough times, I would believe it, and stop being faintly grateful that I hadn’t been forced to put the theory to the test. We walked to the tower door and out into the garden, which was a riot of perfumes that should have made my task even harder. Instead, having so many things that weren’t the scent of August’s magic narrowed my focus more and more, until the trail was the only thing that mattered, like a thin ribbon road stretching out to the horizon, shimmering, intangible, and mine.

  We stepped through the gate and out of the garden. The trail divided, heading toward Shadowed Hills and heading away at the same time, and with equal strength. I frowned, pointing down the line of the second trail.

  “Where was she going, Simon?” I asked.

  He followed my finger before adopting a frown of his own. “There’s not much in that direction. September and Malcolm discussed breaking ground there for a home of their own, but abandoned the idea when they decided to return to Londinium.”

  “September,” I said. “Your sister.”

  “Yes.” A shadow crossed his face. “She’s long dead and gone now, and the rose has fallen from the tree.”

  There was real pain in his voice. I put the rest of my questions aside. September was a matter for later, if ever. Purebloods rarely want to talk about their dead. “If no one built there, what is there?”

  “Well, there’s a stretch of marshland, mostly. A flock of pixies lived there the last time I checked; they probably still do. That sort of terrain makes a perfect kingdom for the little things. I used to visit them sometimes with Patrick, after the pixie population from his workshop relocated, and—”

  “Wait,” I said. “Patrick?”

  “Yes. Baron of Twycross, although he set that title aside when he married a mermaid. I believe he’s Patrick Lorden now.”

  A memory flashed by, of Patrick standing in Arden’s knowe, ordering Sylvester never to say Simon’s name again: calling himself “more a brother to him than you ever tried to be.” I’d been distracted with murders and a major political conclave at the time, but . . . “Patrick Lorden is your friend.” It wasn’t really a question, more a statement waiting to be confirmed.

  Simon chuckled wryly. “He may not be anymore, given everything that’s happened. But once, he was the dearest person to me in all the world, outside of my own family.”

  “Huh,” I said thoughtfully. “So he knew August?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would she have gone to see him, maybe, before she disappeared? Since we know she didn’t go to Shadowed Hills.” I was pretty sure Sylvester would have said something if she had. He knew better than to keep secrets from me these days, especially where my family was concerned. Simon was an uneasy ally and August was a stranger, but Tybalt was the one in danger, and Tybalt?

  Tybalt was the cornerstone of my new family, the one I’d constructed for myself, and Sylvester had been working too hard at rebuilding the bridges between us to let them be broken again. Especially by Amandine. We had been over that ground, and I trusted him not to betray me there.

  “Possible,” said Simon, slowly. “She was never a gregarious child—or I suppose, if she had wanted to be, that she never had the opportunity. Amandine worried about her, you see. She kept her close to home, and August didn’t seem to mind. She doted on her mother, and her mother doted on her.”

  If there had been time, I would have sat down and asked Simon to explain, exactly, what the dynamics of their little family had been. I was starting to draw a picture, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. But there wasn’t time. Every minute that passed was another minute where Tybalt and Jazz were at my mother’s mercy. Both of them were purebloods, immortal unless something came along to kill them. That didn’t matter. Having
a lot of time didn’t mean they deserved to have it stolen from them like that.

  “This way, then,” I said, and started following the second trail, the one that led away from Shadowed Hills and my mother’s tower at the same time.

  Quentin stuck close by my side, while Simon lagged behind, hands in his pockets, looking at the landscape with the grave, regretful eyes of a man who had seen too many things change to be truly comfortable anywhere.

  The meadows surrounding the tower gradually gave way to forest. Not the tame, almost decorative forest that divided the tower from Shadowed Hills: this was a dark, overgrown, tangled thing, a forest that belonged in either a nightmare or a fairy tale. The trees—which had some aspects of oak and some of elm and some of nothing that had ever grown in the mortal world—rose around us like giants, their branches clawing at the sky, their trunks heavy with strange burls. Red shelf fungus dotted with white spiraled around the bodies of the trees, while glowing blue-and-white toadstools grew among their roots, filling the air with a strange, lambent light.

  Bushes laden with berries I didn’t recognize grew on all sides, clogging the underbrush. They smelled like candy and Christmas and all good things. I shuddered, sticking to the thin trail someone else had beaten through the wood.

  Simon saw my discomfort and said, “It’s not goblin fruit. Try as people might—and people have tried—goblin fruit refuses to grow wild in the Summerlands. The soil isn’t right.”

  “The soil people use to grow the stuff has to be imported from deeper Faerie, doesn’t it?” asked Quentin. “I always sort of wondered what kind of person found out that Oberon was about to lock the doors and went for buckets of dirt instead of something useful.”

  “Ah, but you see, the buckets of dirt were something useful. They still are.” Simon’s smile was fleeting. “I was born in fair Londinium, along with my siblings—our parents were among the first to feel that their children should be born to the Summerlands, close to the mortal world, where so much was happening. It’s difficult to express how boring things could be in deeper Faerie, when the mortal world was not close at hand and providing points of interest. I’ve heard humans speak of ‘the golden afternoon,’ those days when the sunlight stretches out like taffy and the time seems to go on forever. Well. That sort of thing starts to feel less like a blessing and more like a curse when it’s every day, for centuries without end.”