The Brightest Fell Read online

  Simon opened his eyes.

  The Luidaeg smiled, showing him a full mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. “Hello, failure,” she purred.

  Sensibly, Simon recoiled, slamming himself up against the arm of the couch. When he couldn’t go any farther, he froze, eyes wide, as still as a mouse confronted with a cat.

  “You know, if it were up to me, I might have left you as you were,” said the Luidaeg. “The Davies boy concocted a clever counter for my sister’s work, but he didn’t account for the brute simplicity of pixie magic. The two were battling for dominion in your blood, and your body elected to go back to what seemed safest: sleep. I don’t know whether elf-shot’s protections would have kicked back in and kept you from withering away. You could have died and taught me something at the same time, but someone was willing to ransom you. Earn this second chance, failure.”

  “October, what have you—” began Simon, turning to face me. Then he froze, eyes going even wider, which should have been impossible. “No.”

  I followed his eyes to Poppy. The light had almost stopped falling. The orange glow of her skin wasn’t fading anymore: it was gone. Her hair was still orange, the color of maple leaves in the fall, as were her eyes. Her wings had changed shape, becoming longer and thinner, more equipped to her current size. They were no longer transparent, but had taken on a dozen shades of sunrise, so that if she spread them against the light, they might mimic a little of the glow she’d given away.

  “Yes,” said the Luidaeg. “This is what it costs when you’re not careful. When you fail again.”

  “Luidaeg, what did you do?” The last drop of light fell from Poppy’s finger. She wobbled. I rushed to catch her and hold her up, keeping her from falling. It felt like the bones had gone out of her legs, leaving her limp and unresponsive.

  The Luidaeg met my eyes over Poppy’s head. “What she asked me to do,” she said. “Simon needed to wake, but Simon was under a pixie charm. The only way to dispel it was to unmake it, and unmaking it required unraveling it at the root. I would have needed to take apart a pixie no matter what. I just happened to have a volunteer.”

  “What did you do?” This time the question came from Quentin, and was underscored with a wounded confusion that hurt my heart.

  The Luidaeg was a monster to me for years before the first time I realized I could see her as a friend. She was a story that local fae parents told their children. “Better watch it, or the Luidaeg will get you.” Quentin, though. He had been born in Toronto, where they had other monsters to warn their kids about. He had made his first bargain with her when he was little more than a child, and she had always treated him fairly, and with kindness, and with her own strange brand of love. She was one of the people he trusted most in the world.

  This wasn’t the first time he had seen her be monstrous, but it was the first time he had seen her do something that could be construed as cruel.

  “We say every kind of fae has a Firstborn, because it’s easier than explaining that the truth is complicated and sometimes things aren’t what they seem,” said the Luidaeg. There was a new hurt in her eyes. She was reading Quentin’s discomfort as clearly as I was, and she didn’t like it. “My mother made the pixies because she was lonely and sad. She didn’t count on the fact that anything made will start wanting a life of its own. Will want to be more than a drop of blood and an idea. So she told them ‘come to me if you want more, and I will give it to you.’” She switched her attention to me. “Remember the Aes Sidhe?”

  “They all died,” I said automatically. Then I blinked. “No.”

  “Oh, yes.” She waved a hand, indicating Poppy. “This is where they come from. No Firstborn. Just a pixie and a promise. They’re related to the Piskies, actually—another family line without a true Firstborn. Some Aes Sidhe missed their families, went home to visit, got frisky, and wound up with size-changing babies. I think that may be part of why the Aes Sidhe died out. Why stick to your own kind when your offspring can be something better?”

  I gaped at her, Poppy a warm weight against my shoulder. “She’ll be alone.”

  “She’ll have friends, and this isn’t why you came to me. Why are you here, October?”

  “We didn’t come to you.” I scowled. “You keep acting like we’re here on purpose, and we’re not. This is just where we wound up.”

  “Even so. You must have been looking for something.”

  “Amandine told me to find August.”

  “I knew that part. You followed her trail.”

  “Yes.” Poppy still wasn’t standing on her own. I gathered as much of her as I could into my arms and half-dragged, half-carried her to the couch, where Simon stood and helped me lower her down onto the cushions. We had to position her carefully, so as not to crush her wings. They twitched as we let her go. Still there was no sound of bells.

  Light, and the sound of bells: those were the things that Maeve had given to the pixies when she made them, intending for them to make her happy. Light and the sound of bells. That was what the Luidaeg had taken away.

  I turned back to her. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “It depends on who you ask,” said the Luidaeg. “Ask your questions.”

  I took a deep breath. “August walked the Babylon Road. Where was she going?”

  The corner of the Luidaeg’s mouth twitched. “That’s not the right question. I already told you that I don’t know where she is or where she went. Ask the right question.”

  “Luidaeg, why did my sister, August Torquill, ask you for a candle?”

  “Now there’s the right question.” She stood a little straighter. “Amandine’s line—your sister, your mother, yourself—is responsible for the loss of our King and Queens, and there are those who say that only Amandine’s line can set right what they made wrong.”

  “Are you one of the ones who says that?”

  The Luidaeg’s eyes flashed black for a moment before returning to green. “I think there may be other ways, but your line is the cleanest of them. The fewest deaths will be lain at the root of the oak and the ash if you fix what once was broken. Your mother never wanted to be a hero. She hated what her mother’s actions and our father’s blood had lain upon her, hated the expectation that she would sacrifice herself for the sake of others. She wanted to be a rose in a walled garden, and not one growing wild by the side of some crumbling, half-forgotten well. So she refused. She could have ended this centuries ago, and she refused.”

  “You can’t blame Amy for the actions of her mother,” said Simon, stepping up beside me. “It’s not fair.”

  “Oh, and do you know who her mother was? Did she tell you, failure, when she took you to her bed and promised to be true?” Simon looked away. The Luidaeg laughed. The sound was bitter. “I thought not. She may have loved you—my sister is capable of love, even if she spends it like a miser—but she’s not so capable of trust. I don’t blame Amandine for what her mother did. I blame her for what she, herself, chose not to do. I blame her for leaving us to clean up her mess. And I blame her for not preparing her daughter for what had to be done.”

  The Luidaeg turned to me. “August came to me and asked me for a candle. She asked to be set on the Babylon Road, because she’d heard Blind Michael had in his keeping a changeling child powerful enough to be capable of opening doors into the deeper realms. She was convinced that Oberon had sealed himself in Mag Mell. Had all the scraps of prose and prophesy to prove it to herself, to be certain she was on the right trail. Had the burning need to prove herself to her mother.”

  “What did she pay you?” asked Simon.

  The Luidaeg looked at him calmly. “She gave me her way home.”

  “You—” His eyes widened, and he lunged.

  Fortunately for him, he was positioned so that I was able to grab him and keep him from getting to her. He was taller than me, but he wasn’t stronger; he’d
never been a fighter. I, on the other hand, have always had pretty good upper body strength, on account of all the stabbing.

  “Let’s not attack the immortal sea witch today, shall we?” I said. “The Luidaeg has to give you what you’re willing to pay for. That’s the deal. She doesn’t have a choice.”

  “When I asked for it, I didn’t think she’d give it up,” said the Luidaeg. “Sometimes my prices are set to serve as a deterrent. She was supposed to go home. You were supposed to have taught her never to undertake that sort of quest alone. You were supposed to have been clever enough to counteract my father’s heroism.”

  “You took my daughter!” shouted Simon. “You left her with no way back!”

  “If she’d managed to find Oberon, she wouldn’t have needed her own way home. His would have been strong enough for the both of them, and then I would have been allowed, by the law of the exchange, to return her own. Really, it was her failure that doomed her, and not me.” The Luidaeg sighed, looking briefly regretful. “I screwed up. I thought she’d go back to you and find another way.”

  “Instead, she went into the woods, and she didn’t come back,” I said. “Luidaeg, we need to follow her.”

  The Luidaeg frowned. “That’s not something I can give you for free.”

  “I know.”

  “It has to cost.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “You’re too deep in debt to be let off lightly; if I had a choice, I wouldn’t bargain with you at all. Think hard before you do this, October, or—”

  “Are you kidding?” I cut her off, taking a step toward her. In that moment, it didn’t matter that she was the sea witch, or that she was Firstborn, or that she could probably have killed me with a flick of her wrist. I didn’t care. “Please tell me you’re kidding, because I can’t believe you would think I hadn’t already thought about this. My mother has Tybalt, Luidaeg. She has Tybalt, and she has Jazz, and she’s going to keep them until I bring August back. Me. So, yeah, I am going to do whatever is in my power to find August, because without August, I’m dooming two members of my family to eternity in a cage. Do you understand? I haven’t got a choice. I have to do this.”

  “And I’m her squire, which means I have to do it with her,” said Quentin, stepping up next to me. His jaw was set. In that moment, there was nothing of the child I had mentored and worried about for all these years; I was looking at the man.

  “I want my daughter back,” said Simon, stepping up on the other side of me.

  The Luidaeg looked between us, focusing on each of us in turn, and finally said softly, “You’re fools, all of you. Fools and heroes, and I don’t know if there’s a difference.”

  “Sylvester used to say there wasn’t a heroic bone in my body,” said Simon. “I suppose I’d enjoy proving him wrong.”

  “Mother preserve me,” muttered the Luidaeg, bowing her head for a moment. When she lifted it, her eyes were black. “Here is the cost of a candle, if a candle’s what you desire: I can’t close the way back, because you owe me, and I don’t give up on what’s mine. So I’ll give you what Amy didn’t. I’ll give you a deadline. Seven days out and seven days back, a fortnight to learn if you’re on the right track, and if by then your path’s not clear, you’ll come to me and stay a year.”

  It took me an embarrassingly long time to hear the binding in the rhyming cadence of her words. They wove over and around us, tying themselves tight before I could protest. Not that I was going to. If this was the only way to get Tybalt and Jazz back—to bring August home—then it was what I was going to do.

  “Fourteen days. At the end of it, you’ll have your sister, or you’ll be my servants, unable to deny or defy me, doing whatever I ask. All of you.” The Luidaeg held out her hand, palm upward. “Swear.”

  “We swear,” said Simon, putting his hand in hers.

  Either he didn’t recognize the danger, or he didn’t care. She dug her suddenly hooked nails into the back of his hand, raking the skin open and pinning him in place so he couldn’t pull away. Blood gushed from his wounds. Somehow, she grabbed hold of it, sculpting it like wax, until she was holding a long red taper streaked with bronze and gold.

  “Mine required saltwater,” I said.

  “Yours was kinder,” said the Luidaeg. She handed me the candle. The wick lit as soon as the wax touched my hand. “This will let you follow August’s trail, as long as you keep your feet pointed in the right direction. You have to follow her, or all is lost. Fourteen days, October.”

  “We’ll find her,” I said.

  “You’d better.”

  Fog was starting to fill the room, swirling around me, smelling faintly of blood and ashes and cinnamon. The spell was taking hold. “Grab onto me,” I called to Simon and Quentin. “The Road’s opening.”

  “You can get there and back by the candle’s light,” said the Luidaeg, and the fog came down, and she was gone, leaving the three of us alone in the unending gray.

  THIRTEEN

  “I SEEM TO BE BLEEDING quite a bit,” said Simon. He sounded pained. That was understandable. The back of his hand was so much raw meat, and it wasn’t like the Luidaeg had offered him an aspirin before she finished the spell. “I don’t suppose either of you has a bandage on you?”

  “You’d think so, with as often as October gets herself hurt, but no,” said Quentin. “She heals too fast for bandages, and I’m pretty good about dodging before people cut me open.”

  “The implied insult is taken as read,” said Simon. “If neither of you has a bandage, do you have a ribbon or other article that I can transform into one? I’m afraid I won’t do you much good if I pass out from blood loss.”

  “Is this what it’s like hanging out with me?” I asked, looking at Quentin through the fog.

  “Sort of,” he said. “You whine more. Also, you’d have lost a lot more blood and already be unconscious. Raj and I usually use that as an excuse to get something to eat while we wait for you to wake up.”

  “Liar,” I said, and pulled the elastic band from my hair, offering it to Simon. “Will this work?”

  “Better than nothing,” he said, and took it, muttering something under his breath. The smell of smoke and oranges rose, and when it dissipated again, it took some of the fog with it.

  We were standing on what looked like the road out of a Gothic thriller: a narrow, hardpacked dirt trail winding through black, empty moors on all sides. The sky was still mostly obscured by clouds; what I could see was spangled with too-bright stars. It was like the air was no longer thick enough to break up their light, allowing it to shine down on us with the force of a halogen beam. It was bright enough that we could easily pick out every detail of the nothing that there was to see in every direction, at least when the fog wasn’t blocking everything.

  Quentin was still taller than I was, and his hair was still bronze, rather than the dandelion gold it had been in childhood.

  “Oh, thank Oberon,” I muttered, earning myself curious glances from both Quentin and Simon. “This is the Babylon Road. Last time the Luidaeg set me on it, I wound up regressing into childhood, because it was part of the price of passage. With Blind Michael gone, I guess the rules are different.”

  Quentin looked horrified. “I forgot about that,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, you were young enough at the time that the road didn’t mess with you the way it messed with me.” I raised my new candle, turning until the flame leaped up and brightened, telling me that it had found its equivalent of magnetic north. “This way.”

  I started walking. The others followed. For a while, that was all we did. I walked, and they followed, and the moors unspooled around us without end, bisected by the dusty ribbon of the road.

  After a time, I looked back at Simon. The smell of blood still hung in the air around him, bright and coppery, promising to tell me all his secrets, if I wanted to know
them. I did. I wanted to know very badly. I didn’t want to know at all.

  “Simon,” I said.

  He lifted his head, looking at me. There was a wariness in his eyes. It occurred to me that there were a lot of unasked questions between us—questions that would change everything once I asked them. What did you do to Luna and Rayseline? Why did you leave them there for so long? What part of losing your child made you think it was right to be so cruel?

  Those were questions for later, when I could afford to hate him without reservation. Right now, I needed to be able to tolerate him. So much depended on it.

  “Why does the Luidaeg call you ‘failure’?” There: that was a safe enough question, if there was such a thing. There was too much bad blood and stony ground between us for any question to be truly safe. Everything could have consequences.

  “Ah.” He sighed, relieved and regretful in the same breath. “She came to the wedding. Not in the form she wears from day-to-day. She looked like a Roane girl, with eyes the color of kelp and a smile like a breaking heart. People didn’t know then that Amy was Firstborn, you see, and so disguises were required, but I knew who she was, and Amy knew. She was the only one of Amy’s sisters to attend, or at least the only one I know of, and she made a toast after the ceremony. ‘All I ask is that you keep her safe, and grounded, and stay by her side,’ that’s what she said. I thought I could do all three. As it happens, I couldn’t do any of them.”

  “What happened to August wasn’t your fault,” said Quentin.

  “It didn’t have to be. I made the wrong choices after it was done. I thought if I could bring my daughter home by leaving my wife alone, that she would understand, and forgive me. Instead, all I did was make her a widow as well as a woman in mourning. Amy may forgive me someday, despite everything, but the Luidaeg? The Luidaeg never will.”

  The moors had started giving way to forest around us, the hills turning thick and bristly with trees. Their branches reached ceaselessly for the starry sky, their leaves rustling in the wind. The fog had all but dissipated, its purpose fully served. We were truly on the Babylon Road. No turning back now.