The Brightest Fell Read online

  Both my feet were covered in a thin layer of pine resin, all the way up to the middle of my calves. I scraped as much of it off as I could before standing.

  My head hit the ceiling.

  “Oof,” I said, without much vigor. The ceiling, low as it was, was also soft and spongy, like it was made of foam rather than wood or stone. I reached up with sap-sticky fingers and pushed against it. It yielded. A faint, earthy smell pervaded the room. I closed my eyes for a moment, out of sheer frustration. It wasn’t like having them open changed anything. The room was still totally dark.

  The room was also carved out of the living body of some enormous fungus. The urge to make terrible jokes about mushrooms was strong, and born at least partially out of panic. I don’t have issues with claustrophobia, but I don’t think you need to have issues with claustrophobia to be unhappy about being encased in a living structure with no windows or doors.

  Sometimes violence really is the answer. I punched the wall, feeling it break under my hand. It was like punching foam: bloodless, painless, and remarkably cathartic. I opened my eyes, smiled, and went to work.

  On the fifth punch, my fist went through the wall. When I pulled it back, moonlight poured through the hole I’d created, warm and bright as day in comparison to the dark. I stopped punching and started rending, ripping away great fistfuls of mushroom, until I had created a hole large enough for me to walk through. I burst triumphantly into the moonlight—

  —and stopped as the woman in front of me leveled her wickedly pointed spear at the tip of my nose. Weapons tend to have that effect on me. Normally, my freeze would only have lasted for a few seconds. Normally, the person holding the spear wouldn’t have been glowing. Everything about her, from skin to hair to long gossamer wings, radiated a bright shade of lilac. It was like she’d swallowed a basket full of Christmas lights.

  Or like she was a pixie.

  Once I had the thought, the evidence became impossible to ignore. Her hair was dark purple under the glow: her ears, while pointed, didn’t match any breed of fae I knew, maybe because I wasn’t used to seeing them at this scale. Maybe most tellingly, her clothing appeared to have been made from enormous flower petals, held together with cobweb stitches. There was even a fishbone in her hair, holding her messy bun in place. The spear, while dangerous, was made of a sliver of glass glued to a pine twig. She was a pixie.

  She was also taller than I was. Oh, this was bad.

  I raised my hands, palms outward, in what I hoped would be taken as a gesture of peace. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Sorry about your, uh, toadstool.” I would not call it a mushroom, I would not. If I said the word, I would start making architecture jokes, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop. “I don’t like closed spaces.”

  “Make no moves, prisoner,” she said, wings vibrating as she spoke, like they were amplifying her voice. That wasn’t as surprising as the fact that I could understand her. Normally, the speech of pixies was like the high ringing of bells, fast and shrill and impossible to follow.

  My surprise must have shown. She scowled and said, “Oh, didn’t think pixies could talk, did you? Maybe it’s because you don’t know how to listen, do you? Ears the size of a grown man, and they can’t hear a damn thing but themselves jawing on for nights without end.”

  “It’s less you talking and more me being the same size as you that has me a little off-balance,” I said, lowering my hands. She didn’t seem inclined to stab me at the moment, although Oberon knew, that could change. I have a gift for making people want to see me bleed. “I had two men with me before I passed out. Where are they?”

  “Making demands already? Cheek.” The pixie woman waved her spear in a threatening manner. Lights were beginning to appear at the edges of my vision, daffodil yellow and clover green and a surprisingly violent shade of blue. More pixies were coming. Because what I always needed was to be shrunk, menaced, and then surrounded by hostile people who could fly.

  “Not cheek, concern,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “They’re my responsibility.”

  “You should’ve been somebody’s responsibility,” said the woman. “Then you might’ve known not to go walking in our woods.”

  The giant mushrooms. Naturally. I should have taken them as the warning they were, but I fell into the trap of thinking “I’ve seen this before, in movies intended for human children, which means it can’t be true.” It’s easy to forget that those human legends and stories were based on real things they had encountered and somehow survived, back in the days when Faerie and the human world collided more often. When the deeper realms linked straight onto the mortal world, and not just the Summerlands. Things like the pixie fondness for mushrooms, and for shrinking intruders when they thought they could get away with it.

  “I apologize,” I said sincerely. “I didn’t know this was your territory. I’m just trying to find my sister.”

  “She’s not here, unless you’ve got wings strapped under that leather jacket,” said the woman. The other pixies laughed. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound. Being reduced to their size had taken the shrillness from their voices, dropping them to a register I could deal with.

  “My sister’s not a pixie,” I said. I hesitated, considering my next words carefully. This wood didn’t quite border on Amandine’s tower—we’d walked too far for that—but it was close enough that the odds were good the pixies would know who she was. Would invoking her name help me, or get me locked in the nearest toadstool for the next hundred years?

  Caution isn’t normally my strong suit, and had I been weighing the risks for myself, I might have gone ahead and done it. I wasn’t. I was weighing the risks for Simon and Quentin, and more, for Tybalt and Jazz. I couldn’t take the chance of getting them hurt.

  The woman seemed to take my silence for fear. She laughed. “Oh, look at you, all scared of a pixie,” she said snidely. “What’s your name, wingless?”

  “October.”

  Her eyes went wide, the tip of her spear dipping toward the ground—which was actually a tree branch, judging by the rough brown surface beneath our feet. “October?” she echoed.

  I tensed. This was usually where the stabbing started. “Yes.”

  “Once Countess of Goldengreen, who kept her word even to us, even where so many others would not? Who freed our captives, and filled our stocks?”

  I blinked. Then, more slowly, I said again, “Yes.”

  The woman dropped her spear and flung her arms around me, wings suddenly vibrating so fast that they became a blur of color. The rest of the pixies did the same, and I found myself the recipient of a pixie group hug, which was something like being trapped in the middle of a carillon of bells, all of them ringing at the same time in their own keys. It was surprisingly soothing, for being so incredibly loud.

  A bright orange hand reached through the crowd and grabbed the collar of my jacket, dragging me out. I found myself in another hug, this one singular, but somehow even tighter.

  “I thought I was going to die in there!” cried the hugger, a pixie woman whose body was lit up like a jack-o-lantern. She shoved me out to arm’s length, beaming in every sense of the word. “Hello!”

  “Er, hi,” I said. “I’m . . . sorry. Have we met?”

  “Not properly!” she said. “You let me out of a jar once!”

  I blinked.

  There was a trend among the purebloods at one time—or maybe more than one time; fashions have a lot of time to come and go when you live forever—for lights made of living pixies trapped in glass domes or stuffed into lanterns. No food or water, of course. Those would encourage excrement, and what kind of delicate, decorative lantern was covered in its own shit?

  Pixies are considered somewhere between monsters and vermin by most people, which means they aren’t covered by Oberon’s Law. Killing them isn’t a crime, even though they’re intelligent beings. The end result o
f that loophole was a lot of dead pixies, left to starve in their glass prisons and then discarded when their lights went out. Oberon’s Law doesn’t cover changelings, either. If I ever meet Oberon, we’re going to have a long, long talk.

  When I had accessed the shallowing at Muir Woods, following Rayseline, the kidnapped sons of the Duchess of Saltmist, and my own stolen daughter, the place had been lit by lanterns filled with captive pixies. I had freed them, choosing mercy over expediency, and the pixies had rewarded me by helping me save the missing children.

  They hadn’t saved everyone. The face of the orange pixie fell as I watched, and she said, “I’m sorry about your friend. We couldn’t turn the arrow aside.”

  Connor, who had died of elf-shot in front of me. I forced a sad smile. “It wasn’t your fault. You did more than I could have asked.”

  “That you asked at all was a miracle to us. We still owe you life debts a hundred times over.” The pixie woman hugged me a second time before finally, mercifully letting go. “What are you doing here?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” I said. “I was following the trail of my sister’s magic when I kicked this big puffball mushroom, and woke up in a dark room with no doors.”

  “Ahhh.” She smiled knowingly. “You triggered the sentries. Got yourself ensmallinated. Fun times!”

  “Yeah, maybe, but I don’t have time for fun right now. I need to find my sister. Do you know where the other people with me were taken?”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Don’t you want to explore? Most people don’t ever get to come here, and when they do, they don’t ever get to look around.”

  August’s trail had led through here . . . I stiffened. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Me, or everybody?”

  “Both.”

  “Me, I don’t know. A while. I go to Human sometimes, to hunt and scavenge, when it’s my turn, but mostly I stay here. Help with the kids, see my family, all that stuff you do when you’re not questing. The flock has been here for days and days and days.”

  Right: this wasn’t getting me anywhere. I decided to try another approach. “Do you remember the big earthquake? The one where the old King died?”

  “We don’t have a King,” she said. “You do, but we don’t.”

  The question of whether pixies were part of the Divided Courts seemed like it was best left for another day. “Okay,” I said. “But do you remember when my King died?”

  “It was bad,” she said. “Lots of things burned, and it even shook here, in Faerie, not just in Human.”

  “In . . . wait. You call the mortal world ‘Human’?” It was oddly charming.

  She looked at me like I’d just said something unbelievably stupid. “What else should I call it? The wingless call this ‘Faerie,’ so of course we’d call that other place ‘Human.’ The names go together.”

  “They do,” I agreed. “But you remember the earthquake.”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Did someone like me—one of the wingless—come here around that time? She would have had red hair, but looked a lot like I do, otherwise. She might have been wearing a yellow dress.” August, in her dress like corn husks, walking into the woods by the light of a candle.

  To my surprise, the pixie woman shied away. “We saw her, we saw her, but we didn’t take her, no, we don’t have her, not then and not now, we’ve never had her, I promise. Tell the sea witch we didn’t interfere.”

  “The sea—what are you talking about?”

  “We saw her, yes, we saw her. I was here, helping to hold the walls up while the world fell down, and she had just gone by, walking down our paths, in our place. Some of us wanted to interfere, until they saw the candle in her hand. You know about the candle?”

  I nodded. “I do.”

  “She was already on the Babylon Road, following it to somewhere that wasn’t here, and if she was on a road to a place that wasn’t here, she wasn’t ours to take. You understand? You see? We knew someone else held claim, and so we let her pass us by. We didn’t interfere.” She grabbed for my hands. I let her. “We didn’t.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  Relief flooded her features. “I knew you would. You were kind when you didn’t have to be. Of course you would be kind now.”

  “But I need to find her. My lover and my sister’s lover have been taken by someone who will only give them back if I can find my other sister.” Explaining the actual structure of my family tree would take too long and complicate matters too much. This was the bare bones of it. It would serve. “Please. Can you convince whoever’s in charge here to give my people back and let us go?”

  The orange pixie looked disappointed. “You really won’t stay.”

  “Look, I’ll—I’ll come back, okay? You have my word. I will come back and stay for a couple of days. I’ll let you show me around, introduce me to your friends—honestly, if I didn’t have to do this, I would be really interested. I didn’t even know for sure whether pixies could speak English before tonight. Today. What time is it?”

  “It’s after moonrise in Human, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. She grinned. “The sentries picked you and your friends up hours and hours and hours ago, and you’re the first to wake. Sleep must have wanted the lot of you very badly.”

  I went cold. Simon had only been awake for a few hours. Walther’s elf-shot countercharm would still be in his blood. Who knew how it was going to interact with whatever the pixies had used to knock us out?

  “Can you take me to them?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Follow,” she said, and started walking.

  Her pace was quick but not too fast. She walked like she was accustomed to it, which made me think that pixies must not fly much when they were at home. Which reminded me . . . “I don’t actually know your name,” I said.

  “You’re the first of the wingless to ask a pixie’s name in days and days,” she said, slanting a smile in my direction, like light cutting through clouds. “Should be a monument to say it happened.”

  “Sorry,” I said, feeling vaguely responsible for the rest of the people built on my scale.

  “Oh, don’t be. Not your fault. I’m Poppy.” She waved a hand, indicating some of the other pixies watching us from nearby paths and rooftops. “That’s Dandelion, Parsnip, Lilac, and Stoplight. His mother flew into one while she was carrying, and it was green at the time, and he’s green, so . . .” Poppy shrugged, the gesture made somehow more expressive by her wings.

  “Huh,” I said. “Some of those are pretty common flowers.”

  “Makes for pretty common names,” she agreed easily. “There’s a Poppy in near every flock within two days’ flight of here, and probably more beyond that.”

  “Wingless fae—not that we’re all wingless, although I guess most of us are—tend to frown on reusing names. So it’s just unusual, is all.”

  “Wingless fae live longer,” said Poppy matter-of-factly. “Lilac’s the only one left who was little when I was who still has her parents living, all three of them, and they’ve made it this far because they used to have a wingless patron who’d give them good things when they needed. Set them up solid, kept them out of danger until she was big enough not to need keeping, and then they brought their luck home. Sometimes only way to remember our dead is by naming babies after them, to keep flying when they’re gone.”

  Pixies are fae, which means they’re immortal. But they’re also small, and relatively delicate, and people think of them as pests and thieves and nuisances. Even I did, before I got to know them better. Shame swept through me like bleach, leaving everything washed-out and pale.

  Poppy gave me a sidelong look. “Not your fault. You’re wingless, but you’ve never hurt us a’purpose, and that’s all we’d ask from you. Chin up, shoulders back, wings straight, like my mama always used to say. As long a
s you don’t fly into anything you shouldn’t, you’re probably doing all right.”

  We had reached a large toadstool, the sides smooth and white, the cap bright blue and spangled with silver spots. Poppy leaned in and knocked.

  “Open-open, harvest’s come,” she said.

  The sides of the toadstool rippled before splitting to reveal the room inside. Quentin was sprawled on the floor, bound with the same combination of plant materials and sap as I had been. I rushed inside, crouching down to remove his gag and check his pulse, which was slow and steady.

  “The fresh air will wake him,” said Poppy. I turned. She was standing in the “doorway,” the glow from her skin easily compensating for the loss of moonlight. “We don’t have strong magic for the most part, not like you wingless, but what we have, we have a lot of practice using. Your other person is in the toadstool on the next branch over.”

  “That’s Simon,” I said, turning back to Quentin. “I’ll wake him when I’m done here.”

  There was a sudden loud ringing behind me, like the pixie alarm system had just been activated. I turned again, this time reaching for the knife at my belt.

  Poppy was staring at me, eyes wide, hands clasped over her mouth. “Simon Torquill?” she squeaked.

  “Um, yeah?” I said.

  She didn’t say anything after that, just launched herself into the air and flew away, still ringing like a five-alarm fire.

  “That can’t be good,” I said, and stood, and ran after her. Quentin would have to wait until I was sure that Simon wasn’t about to get himself murdered. If anyone was going to do that, I was pretty sure that it was going to be me.

  ELEVEN

  POPPY WASN’T KIDDING about Simon’s toadstool being on the next branch. Pixies might be content to walk when they were at home, but that didn’t prevent them from building without concern for petty little concepts like “gravity.” Their homes—most of which appeared to have been built from chunks of wood and bark, unlike our organic toadstool prisons—extended both up and down from the level where I stood, and spanned multiple trees.