The Brightest Fell Read online

  “You left me in Annwn,” she snapped.

  “You got out.”

  “Oh, yay, now there’s more of you,” muttered Quentin. “I can’t wait until May’s in the room, too, and everyone just keeps yelling.”

  May. She had been waiting for us to come home and save her girlfriend since we’d left Shadowed Hills. I took a deep breath, swallowing the last of my anger, and asked the most important question I had left:

  “Hey, Luidaeg, can we use the back door?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  FIRST PROBLEM: AUGUST DIDN’T want to come. By which I mean “August had no interest in going on a road trip with her half sister, especially since I’d already hit her with a baseball bat.” She folded her arms and glared at me, and if there’d been any question of whether we were actually related, it would have been answered then and there.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” she snapped. “You’re changeling filth and I don’t have to do as you say.”

  “Does she heal like you normally do?” asked Quentin. “Because we could break her arms to distract her, and I bet I could carry her.”

  August’s attention flicked to him. “You’re a bloodthirsty boy.”

  “I learned from the best,” said Quentin coldly. “You hurt my knight. I think I’m owed a little nonfatal payback.”

  “We could stand here arguing about this for hours,” I said. “It’s not going to change anything. You’re coming with us.”

  “I will rip the last of the immortality from your veins and leave you human and weeping on the floor,” said August.

  “You can try,” I said.

  The Luidaeg looked between us. Then she turned to Quentin, lowered her voice, and said, “We’re approaching the part where I remind them that I’ve only been bound against harming the children of Titania, and neither of them is covered by that label. Which means if they don’t stop squabbling and move, I can gut them both like trout.”

  “Can you gut someone who isn’t a fish like a fish?” asked Quentin.

  “We could find out.” It would have taken a fool to miss the warning in the Luidaeg’s tone. Her patience—never her greatest attribute—was rapidly coming to an end.

  The last thing I wanted was to add an angry sea witch to my list of problems. I focused on August. “Do you want to see our mother or not?”

  Her eyes widened. “You know where Mama is?”

  Aw, hell. “I should probably have led with that,” I said. “Yes, I know where Amandine’s tower is, and I need to take you there. She has hostages. I want them back. Will you come willingly?”

  “You should absolutely have led with that,” said August. She waved a hand airily, dismissing the idea of my people being a factor. “Take me to my mother. She’ll want to see me, and to hear what’s become of Papa.”

  “You might want to reconsider how much she’s going to care about that, but sure,” I said. “Luidaeg, can we use the back door now?”

  “I should have hidden that thing better,” said the Luidaeg. She couldn’t lie, so I knew she meant what she was saying, but there was no rancor in her tone: only a bone-deep weariness that I sympathized with all too well. “Simon should be well clear by now. But, October, you should be aware that my back door is very rarely used by anyone but me. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  It meant the walls between worlds hadn’t been worn thin and forgiving: it meant that in my current, nearly human state, the crossing would be disorienting, if not actively painful. I grimaced and nodded.

  “I do, but I really don’t want to drive across the Bay Area wondering whether she’s about to grab the wheel, and I doubt she’s letting me put her back in the trunk.”

  “I am not going back in the ‘trunk,’” said August firmly.

  “Okay,” said the Luidaeg. “You can use the back door. It’s your funeral.”

  “Maybe someday,” I said. “Not today.”

  The Luidaeg looked unconvinced, but she led us through her apartment to a door that I had somehow never noticed before. It wasn’t the one Quentin and I had come through with Simon, or maybe it was, because when she opened it, it revealed the swamp.

  Looking at the spreading marsh reminded me of something. I turned to her and asked, “Where’s Poppy?”

  “Watching your policeman,” said the Luidaeg. “She’ll let me know if he wakes up.”

  “Is he . . .”

  “I don’t know.” She looked at me, suddenly weary. “Humans weren’t meant to spend time in Annwn. He may recover completely, and I may be able to edit his memory enough to let him go home. Or he may be broken forever, stranded on the wrong side of the knife until his mortal life is done. Only time is going to tell us. Now go. Make your mother give your people back.”

  “That’s the plan,” I said, and stepped outside.

  The world didn’t spin so much as it whipped into a maddened circle, moving so fast and so erratically that I dropped to my knees and vomited on the path, barely catching myself before I wound up facedown in my own sick. Throwing up didn’t make the whirling stop. If anything, it made it worse, because I hadn’t been able to breathe while I was barfing, and now that I was done, I couldn’t catch my breath. Everything was wrong. Everything was so wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I knew it, and the air knew it, and my body and the world were perfectly willing to go to war if that was what had to happen.

  “Toby?”

  The voice, though distant, was recognizably Quentin’s. He sounded worried. I hated being the reason he would sound that worried, I hated it, but I couldn’t fix it if I couldn’t breathe. Everything hurt. Everything was wrong. Everything was spinning—

  “Let me.”

  This voice wasn’t Quentin’s. I muddled through the pain and the nausea and the oxygen deprivation and identified it as August’s. That was . . . not a good thing. I was incapacitated. Quentin wasn’t unarmed—he was my squire, he was never unarmed—but his knives wouldn’t be enough to stop her if she really wanted to fight him. Daoine Sidhe are specialized in blood and illusions. He didn’t have the combat training to use blood against her, if that was even possible, and disappearing only helped if you could move afterward, getting out of range.

  “If you hurt her . . .”

  “I need her to take me to Mama, remember?” Now August sounded annoyed. “I’m just going to nudge her a little bit, so she gets her balance back.”

  “I’ll slit your throat if you do more than that.”

  August laughed. It wasn’t a cheerful sound. “I’d live.”

  A hand touched my wrist, delicate and almost gentle for the first second, before it clamped down and everything else in the world—the spinning, the nausea, the inability to breathe—was replaced with an electric jolt of pain so extreme that it felt like it rattled my teeth in their sockets. I was stunned enough to start breathing again, sucking in a great lungful of air.

  “There.” August jerked her hand away from me like I was something too disgusting to handle for long. “She’ll be able to function now.”

  My blood sang a song of magic and immortality and change in my veins as I pushed myself slowly, awkwardly to my feet. I still wasn’t what I had been, and I was still going to need the hope chest to give me the oomph I needed to put myself all the way back to normal, but I could breathe again. I reached up and pushed my hair aside, feeling the newly-sharpened point of my left ear. August had nudged me closer to the half-and-half that had been my default state for so many years. Not quite there, but . . . close.

  When I looked up, she had her arms crossed and was glaring at me. Quentin was next to her. He wasn’t glaring. He wasn’t even looking my direction. All his attention was focused on August, and his hand was on the hilt of the knife at his hip.

  If she thought she was in control here, she was going to be sorely surprised.

  “Well?�
�� she demanded. “Let’s move.”

  “I miss being an only child,” I said, and started walking.

  The swamp didn’t get much traffic, and while the ground was soft, it wasn’t swift to wipe our footprints away. The tracks of our earlier passage were still there, and following them was a simple matter. When the first glowing toadstools appeared, I looked back over my shoulder at August and said, “Mind your step. If you kick one of those, it’s night-night for all three of us, and I’d rather not deal with that at the moment.”

  August sneered. “I know pixie traps when I see them. They’re pathetic, clumsy things. Anyone with eyes can spot them. What do you think I am, a changeling?”

  The sound of ringing bells was our only warning before the pixies descended from the trees. They came in a single mighty flock, wings a chiming blur, bodies glowing in a hundred candied colors, like flying Christmas lights going on the attack. It was a relief to see them. It was even more of a relief to hear them. One of them buzzed past my cheek, so close that I felt a diminutive hand brush my skin before it joined the rest of the swarm in circling August.

  They surrounded her in an instant, ringing and buzzing, feinting toward her face only to dart away again before her wildly swinging hands could hit them. August might be a pureblooded Dóchas Sidhe, but all the blood magic in the world couldn’t equip her to fight off a couple of hundred pissed-off pixies.

  A scrap of purple light separated itself from the flock and came to hover in front of my face, resolving itself into Lilac. Her wings rang and her mouth moved, although I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She was too small, and too fae, while I, at the moment, was neither.

  Oh, well. I knew from past experience that pixies could understand me, even when I couldn’t understand them. “Hi,” I said. “It’s me. October.”

  August shrieked as the pixies buzzed too close to her eyes. Lilac bobbed in the air in front of me, wings ringing again, looking distressed.

  I sighed. “Yeah, it’s a long story. That’s, uh. That’s Simon’s daughter. I’m taking her home to her mother. Could you maybe ask the rest of the flock to stop torturing her?”

  An indignant ring.

  “I know, she was saying some pretty shitty things, and I’m not going to pretend I’m not thrilled that you made her stop. But I need to get her back to Amandine before some people I care about get hurt. Can you call them off?”

  Lilac rang again before buzzing off to join the rest of the flock in swarming around August. In a matter of seconds, they had stopped their circling and were rising into the air, taking up a hovering position just outside of arms’ reach.

  “That’s great,” I said, while August bent forward, panting, to rest her hands against her knees. “I really appreciate you backing off.”

  August raised her head, staring at me. “What are you saying?” she demanded. “They’re vermin.”

  “See, that is one attitude I know you didn’t get from your father,” I said, as the pixies chimed warningly and flew in a slow spiral above her head—one that looked dismayingly like the mouth of a cyclone getting ready to touch down. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to find herself spat out in whatever the pixie version was of Oz. “Much as I’d like to leave you here and let them teach you the error of your ways, I need to get you to Mom before she does more damage than she already has. Are you ready to walk?”

  “I’m ready to punish them!”

  “And they’re ready to punish you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being a jerk.” I shrugged. Pixies landed on my shoulders and hair, ringing softly. “Pixies don’t like assholes. Who knew, right? Now come on.”

  August glared as she straightened up and walked down the path to where Quentin and I waited. As she got closer, she switched her glare to the pixies in my hair. Wisely, she didn’t say anything.

  The pixies chimed smugly. I got the feeling they didn’t like my brand-new sister any more than I did.

  “Come on,” I said again, for lack of anything better or wittier to say, and resumed walking toward the edge of the swamp. The path turned gradually firmer under our feet, and the marsh grasses gave way to the twisted trees that had marked our way before. The pixies in my hair stayed put, their wings giving occasional small chimes, like the ringing of distant bells. I got the feeling they were keeping an eye on August, and I was fine with that. She was the sort of person who could do with some supervision.

  Quentin stayed close. The farther we got from the Luidaeg’s door, the more August did the same, until she was walking close enough that our arms were almost touching. Her glare had finally faded, leaving her looking around with wide, hopeful eyes, and an expression on her face that made her look so brittle that I was afraid she’d shatter if I brushed against her.

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I remember this place,” she whispered. She didn’t look at me. “I used to come here with Papa. We’d pick berries and flowers, and sometimes I’d make him crowns and call him King of all Faerie, and he’d laugh and tell me that meant I was a princess. I remember this place.” She reached up to wipe away a tear on the verge of escaping her left eye. “I thought I’d dreamt it all. But I remember it, and now here it is. It’s real.”

  For a moment, I felt painfully sorry for her. Sure, she was being awful, and sure, I might have been happier if I’d been able to keep her locked in the trunk of my car, but she was still my sister, and she was still a person who’d lost her home for a century, all because she’d made the wrong bargain, followed the wrong candle.

  “Why did you do it?” I blurted. This time August did turn to look at me, brittleness giving way to confusion. I pressed on: “Why did you decide to go looking for Oberon? If the Luidaeg said it was a bad idea . . .”

  “Mama said it was a bad idea, too,” said August, looking like she’d just bitten into a lemon. “She said heroism sounded too much like ‘hurt’ to be something any daughter of hers would do. She said she had made me a garden where I could bloom, and be safe and loved and beautiful forever.”

  Quentin frowned. “Then why—”

  “I didn’t want to be safe and loved and beautiful forever! I wanted to be a hero like Uncle Sylvester. I wanted to make Mama stop looking afraid every time someone talked about prophecy. She said she was glad all the seers were gone, because nobody should have to live in fear of the future. I wasn’t scared of the future. I wanted to hold it in my hands. I wanted people to treat my father with respect, and I wanted my mother to stop trying to hide, and if I could get there and back by the light of a candle, why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because you couldn’t,” I said. August gave me a baleful look. I shrugged. “I’m sorry, but when the Luidaeg says ‘don’t do that,’ maybe you should listen. She can’t lie, remember? She wasn’t trying to be a jerk or make you stay safe at home, she was trying to protect you from an impossible task. You didn’t listen. You got lost.”

  “She should have told me.”

  “She did,” said Quentin.

  August sniffed and turned her head, refusing to look at either one of us.

  The trees had melted away, leaving us to walk through an endless field of flowers. Then, between one footstep and the next, the white spire of Amandine’s tower appeared on the horizon, looming over everything. It was a neat trick. When I was a kid, it had even impressed me, the way Mom could bend the world to her whims. Now, all I felt was tired.

  Tired, but with a faint ember of hope. Maybe this was all about to be over. Maybe Mom would see that I’d done what she had asked of me and give me back my people. For the first time in forever, I allowed myself to believe that I was going to have Tybalt safely in my arms again, that I was going to bring Jazz home. That in restoring her family, I had not managed to utterly destroy my own.

  “Mama,” breathed August, and broke into a run.

  She mo
ved with a pureblood’s fluidity and grace. Quentin, chasing hard on her heels, did the same. I, on the other hand, was an avalanche trying to run, stumbling on every rock and tripping over every uneven patch of ground. By the time I reached the garden wall, August was already through the gate and racing up the path, with Quentin still close behind.

  The door swung open as her foot hit the step, and there was our mother, as beautiful and brilliant as the morning, standing with her arm swept wide, hand flat against the wood. August froze. So did Amandine. The two of them stared at each other, separated by a few feet and the length of a century.

  “Mama?” whispered August.

  “August?” Amandine’s voice wobbled, nearly cracking. She kept her hand flat against the door, but it was no longer to hold it open; instead, it was to support her weight. Her knees seemed to be on the verge of buckling, leaving her reeling and unsteady. “I . . .” She stopped again, mouth working soundlessly against all the things she needed to say.

  “I was so lost,” said August. “I was so lost, for so long.” She burst into loud, sloppy tears.

  “Oh, my poor child,” said Amandine, and stepped forward, and gathered August in her arms, and held her.

  The white flowers of my mother’s garden framed them perfectly, two pale watercolor women, their hair hanging long and loose, their arms locked around each other. Only August’s mortal-style clothes spoiled the impression that I was looking at a pre-Raphaelite painting, and she would change those soon enough, I had absolute faith in that. She would go upstairs to the room that Mom had hidden from me all my life, and open her closet, and whatever gown she chose would still fit like it had on the day when it was made. She would slide back into her life, seamlessly filling the hole I had never been enough to patch.

  My mother had her beloved daughter back. She had her home again. Well, a vital piece of my home was locked in two cages somewhere in her tower, and it was time for her to keep her word.

  “I found her,” I said. I knew it was a bad idea to interrupt their reunion. I also knew how long two purebloods could take to circle their way through something like this, and my patience had run out somewhere between the pixies and August rebalancing my blood on a whim.