The Brightest Fell Page 36

  Li Qin still had years and years for making choices. Why had I assumed her choices were already done?

  “I would like to meet her first,” I said.

  Li Qin frowned. “Meet who, April?”

  “Your new wife. I would like to meet her.” I looked at my remaining mother imploringly. “I would like to know if she approves of me.”

  TWO

  Under other circumstances, Li Qin’s silence would have been comic. Her eyes bugged and her breath caught and her head drew back on her neck until the skin below her jaw wrinkled and pouched out at the same time, like she was working diligently at transforming herself into some form of frog. She sputtered. I cocked my head and waited. I have read many books on etiquette and courtly manners, but none of them included information on how to respond in the event of a widowed mother’s remarriage.

  On the other hand, some of them had gone into great detail regarding the topic of divorce. My alarm intensified.

  When purebloods marry, divorce is as simple as closing a file. They inform their liege lord that the marriage is to be dissolved, a ball is thrown, everyone dances until dawn, and the union is no longer . . . unless there are children. If there are children, everything is complicated and changed.

  A child can only belong to one family. So Oberon said, and so it is done. While January and Li Qin had been married, I had been their daughter, and happily. They had been my mothers. Now January was dead, and she wasn’t coming back, and I wore her last name like a layer of bark, wrapped around me to protect me from the cold. April O’Leary. That was me. Who I was, in two names, both given to me by the mother I failed.

  If Li Qin was going to remarry, was going to create another family, did that mean she was divorcing my mother? Did I need to declare which of them I belonged to, whose daughter I really was? Because I loved her—Mother of Trees, believe me, I loved her—but when it came down to a contest between the living and the dead, the dead would win every time.

  I was going to lose her, too.

  Li Qin recovered her breath, seeming to read my thoughts in my increasingly unfocused expression: she grabbed my hands, yanked me toward her, and embraced me hard enough that the edges of my projected form briefly blurred, returning to the light from which they were formed.

  “You foolish, ridiculous child,” she said, her breath a feather-touch against my neck, like the wind blowing through the branches I no longer have. “Even if I were finished mourning—even if I thought I would ever be finished mourning—there’s no way I would give you up. Put it from your mind. I am your mother, and you’re not getting rid of me so easily.”

  Her grip was remarkably strong for such a small woman. I hesitated, unsure how to respond, and my body’s instincts took the question out of my hands, disappearing in a spray of pixelated light and reappearing some feet away. I knew without looking that my clothing had changed in the transition, going from simple jeans and T-shirt to a skater dress patterned with thunderclouds and lightning bolts. My control over my form is precise, but it can be shaken by the unexpected.

  Li Qin smiled indulgently. “I remember that dress,” she said. “January bought it from a vendor at a trade show. She said it matched her mood. It’s reassuring, the number of hand-me-downs you programmed for yourself.”

  “If you’re not remarrying, what are you doing?” I demanded. “Why are you going to the Library?”

  “I’d like to know why you think the Library is involved with marriage, but that’s a confusing conversation for another time,” she said. “I need your help. I need you to listen to me.”

  “I always listen to you.”

  “Yes,” she said patiently, “but you don’t always hear what I’m saying. Like right now. You’re so busy worrying about what I might be saying that you don’t want to listen. Can you listen?”

  “I am an excellent listener,” I said.

  Li Qin smiled, indulgent and motherly. “Of course you are,” she said. The smile faded. “I’ve been looking into a solution for the bodies in the basement.”

  “Fire,” I suggested. “It will consume virtually anything, if heated sufficiently.” My mother was not the only casualty of the events which placed me in command of our small County. She was, however, the only one so severely damaged that her body could not be retained in the company basement, which has served as a makeshift morgue for the past several years. Faerie flesh—even changeling flesh—does not decay as human flesh does. It should. Fae digest mortal food, walk in the mortal world; mortal bacteria clings to their skins. They should rot like anything else. They don’t. I don’t know why.

  When most among the fae die, the night-haunts come to consume the shells they leave behind. Since a corpse is sometimes useful, they leave manikins of artificial flesh and bone behind, to decay in the mortal way. But when the people in my basement died, the vitality—the soul—was drained from their bodies by a machine of my mother’s making and Gordan’s refinement. There was nothing for the night-haunts to desire. They did not come for the bodies.

  There are no graveyards in Faerie, not with the night-haunts to make such things extraneous and the purebloods doing their best to deny that death is a part of being alive. My mother’s body had been so damaged that there was no keeping it safely. The others . . .

  They were still in the basement, all of them, from the first victim to the last. They were a good reminder of what I had done to find myself in a position of power. I am not Daoine Sidhe, for all that I resemble one, but I have been as underhanded and cruel as any of that line, and the trail of bodies marking my ascension is more than sufficient proof of my deceptions.

  Li Qin pursed her lips, a moue of displeasure which said more than any words. “We are not setting our people on fire, April. We’re more civilized than that.”

  “Acid?” It was difficult to see how dissolving people could be considered more civilized than burning them, but given the enduring nature of fae flesh, I was unsure what other options we had remaining.

  Li Qin laughed before she could catch herself. The sound was sharp and bright and beautiful, and I smiled without considering my expression.

  There was a time when Li Qin’s laughter was a common sound in these halls, ringing like a bell above the sound of January’s satisfied voice, which was almost never quiet. They were so well matched, my mothers; each of them could have searched the world over and never found herself a better partner. My smile faded. They had been perfect together, and perfect for me, but I had never been perfect for them. If not for me, January would have been here, alchemist and inventor and loving wife, and they would have had centuries yet to share. If I hadn’t come along and ruined everything, Li Qin’s laughter would never have grown rare.

  She shook her head, unaware of the dark turn my thoughts had taken, and said, “We’re not going to destroy the bodies. April . . . I want you to repair January’s prototype. I think I’m ready to call October. I’m ready to ask for her help.”

  I cocked my head. “Help? For what do we require October’s assistance?” Sir October Daye is a knight errant of the realm. She is an irregular command in the code, a roving antivirus entering compromised systems and repairing what she can before moving on to the next crisis. She has been a friend to me, and I think well of her, but that did not mean I wanted her in my County. Where October goes, trouble reliably follows.

  “April . . .”

  “Wait.” The first part of Li Qin’s request finally registered. “Why do you want me to repair Mother’s prototype? I do not want to touch it. It should have been destroyed.” Would have been destroyed, had Li Qin and Elliot not insisted I keep it intact. Tamed Lightning was mine, but the habit of obedience to my elders remained strong. When they commanded me not to break what my mother’s hands had made, I listened.

  “Because, dearest,” she said, in all seriousness, “we’re going to raise the dead.”

  I
stared at her, speechless. Static crackled in my ears, blurring the sound of the world around me as my hologram heart pounded in my chest, mimicking the behavior of a more traditional body. I could have excised it, had I so desired, left that space open and empty of either organs or the symbolism they represented, but I had always thought it reasonable that I should carry something in my chest that I could blame for the weight of my sorrow.

  In that moment, I resented my past choices. All a heart could do was harm me.

  Li Qin clearly picked up on my distress. She frowned, beginning to reach for me again. “April, what’s wrong?”

  There were no words large enough or complicated enough to encompass my answer. If I tried to reach for them, I would find myself answering her in binary, or worse, in the rushing language of wind over leaves, which I no longer understand, and hope never to speak again, not even in my dreams. So I took the easy route, the coward’s route, away from my problems, away from my mother, who loved me, yet did not understand how direly she had wounded me.

  I disappeared.

  Not back into the code, where I might have found timeless comfort, the space to lay down my virtual roots and restore my sense of peace, but into the rush of space that was not space surrounding every networked article in the building—and there were so many, there were so very, very many. Smartphones and laptops and fitness trackers, handheld gaming systems and new-model cars and even the system which monitored the air-conditioning, keeping it comfortable within the body of the building and blasting in the reception area, where the arctic cold threw visitors off-balance and allowed us to move them into the Summerlands without damaging them.

  I had not been farther into the mortal world than the parking lot since my own near-death and resurrection, my alchemical transformation from wood to living lightning. I pushed myself to the very edge of my range and materialized in a spray of sparks and the stinging scent of ozone. The transition was fast enough to generate friction. It slapped me on my synthesized skin, and I dropped to my knees, digging my fingers into the grass that grew along the edge of the parking lot, wishing I were still a slow vegetable girl, wishing I could still feel my connection to the green.

  How could she?

  THREE

  This is what happened:

  A woman—a wonderful, kind, brilliant woman, with an alchemist’s eye and a blood-worker’s power—crafted herself a daughter from wood and glass and a dying Dryad’s heart, and all she ever asked of the girl was that she learn to navigate this strange new world in which she found herself marooned. That woman was Prometheus and Prospero rolled into a single golden-eyed form, and I loved her more than I had ever loved anything. More than I had loved the sun, or my sisters, or the Mother of the Trees. All those things had come to me by chance, but she? She had chosen me, and all I had ever wanted was to be worthy of her love.

  She worked in lightning and information and ideas: she believed we could all be equal, pureblood, mixed-blood, changeling, and merlin, if she could only create us a new Faerie, one suspended in eternal alchemical crystal. She wanted to render our differences irrelevant, still present, but no longer of sufficient importance to dictate our society. Who cared about castles and territory when the land was limitless? Who cared about the risk of human discovery when we could move outside the tiny slice of home that Oberon had left to us and into an infinite paradise, where everything was tailored to fulfill our every need?

  She was going to change the world. She was going to save us. But something went wrong with the equipment that was supposed to allow everyone access to her paradise. It would copy the data that comprised a person’s soul. It would allow her to upload that data to the system she had constructed. It wouldn’t bring that data to life. The information was frozen, as useless as a history book: a snapshot, rather than a living thing. She had wanted to give all of Faerie the chance to be like me. Instead, she had given all of Faerie the chance to paint their portraits in glittering light before they faded away forever.

  That might have been where her dream died. That wouldn’t have been the worst thing. She was brilliant and she was talented and she wanted to make her mark; she would have found another dream. Given time, she would have found another dream. But I had been so young, and so desperately eager to prove myself worthy of her love. When one of her apprentices had come to me and said, “I know how to make this better,” I had believed her. I had been more naïve then. I had been so easy to fool.

  The apprentice’s name had been Gordan, and right up until she killed my mother, I had believed she was my friend. That is what the death of innocence looks like: like a friend with blood on her hands and a scream in her throat, breaking that which cannot be repaired.

  I can make excuses for myself, have made excuses for myself. When the time to determine guilt had come, my mother’s uncle, Duke Torquill of Shadowed Hills, had been willing to speak in my defense, saying that Gordan had done all of the actual killing. He spoke truly—I had never broken Oberon’s Law. I had never murdered anyone.

  But I was the one who told Gordan when the current flowed correctly. I was the one who accessed Mother’s private notes and gave her the pieces she was missing. I was even the one who strapped Peter into the machine, who helped her stalk her prey, who helped her catch them unawares. Without me, she would still have killed—I am sure of that; I am not so fond of blame that I would assume its full burden without cause—but she would not have killed so many.

  And she would not have killed my mother.

  Gordan chose most of her targets based on how easy they would be to isolate, whether because they were natural loners or because they were in a good position to be lured away from their peers. She chose my mother because January was smart and kind, and she knew the technology. January would have caught her eventually. Gordan thought that, with my mother gone, she could get away with what she had done. She might have, had October not come, had October not stayed, had October not seen. I was so innocent then. I was so young, and Li Qin was so far away, and without my mothers to help me, I had nowhere else to turn.

  When Gordan killed the others—when she killed Barbara and Yui and Peter and Colin and Terrie—she had used the machine the way it was intended to be used, uploading echoes of the dead to Mother’s private server. When she killed my mother, she used the machine to drain her dry, rendering her unappealing to the night-haunts, and then she used an ax, she used her anger, she used everything but the kindest tool she had.

  The others were prisoned in the crystal, sleeping, unmoving, unchanging, but there. My mother, the first woman I ever loved, the first woman to have ever loved me, was not. She, alone in all of Faerie, had been deleted before any form of immortality could be offered to her. I may not have put the ax to her flesh, but I was complicit. Without me, she could not have been killed.

  This was all my fault . . . and now Li Qin came to me speaking of resurrections, of bringing the disconnected back online. Didn’t she realize that her wife, my mother, the love of both our lives, was not among the files available to be restored? Even if we could somehow accomplish the impossible, could somehow restore what had been broken, January would be lost. January would never be coming home.

  “Li Qin said I might find you here.”

  I lifted my head, only now realizing how indecorous my position was. It was not meet for a Countess to be kneeling in the grass, clutching at the soil like a common shrub. I flickered and disappeared, rematerializing on my feet, some distance from my original position.

  Elliot, who had watched the whole thing, didn’t bat an eye. If anything, he looked almost amused, like he was accustomed to me zapping myself around the landscape. I hesitated, reviewing our last several interactions. Perhaps he was. I had never seen the point in going through the motions of traveling between points A and B, not when we all knew what the outcome would be.

  “Has she informed you of her plan?” I asked.

 
; “You mean, did she ask me whether I would agree to let her try?” He looked at me levelly. “What do you think?”

  I opened my mouth. Then I stopped.

  Barbara, the first victim, had been an accident. She had been a Queen of Cats, and Gordan’s best friend, and when they had tested the “improved” system on her, neither of them had been expecting it to kill her. So far as I was aware, she had no family to either claim her body or speak to its use.

  Yui, on the other hand, had been the second victim . . . and when she died, she had been engaged to be married. To Elliot. So far as I knew, she still was, in the most technical of senses. He had never ceased to refer to her as his fiancée, and without her to contradict him, the title still applied.

  Slowly, I said, “I believe she raised the matter with you prior to approaching me.”

  “Good guess,” he said. He tilted his head to the side, a softer, more organic version of my own mannerism. He is not my family, but he might as well be: he has been there for as long as I have been what I am. “What do you think?”

  I said nothing. I looked at him, and I tried to find my voice, which seemed to have inexplicably deserted me.

  There is an odd prejudice, in some pureblood circles, saying only members of the same bloodline should marry: Daoine Sidhe with Daoine Sidhe, Candela with Candela, as if the flesh of Faerie were not only incorruptible but fragile, unable to tolerate contact with itself. Those who claim that blending the code that makes each descendant race what they are will also destroy them do not like to discuss the fact that we are all descended from some combination of Oberon and his wives, or that by their own command, siblings and cousins should reproduce from now until the end of time. They look at people like my mother, and at marriages like hers to Li Qin, and see only inferiority and perversion.

  Elliot is a Bannick, a descendant of Maeve, best suited to cold climates and marshy places. His kind began in Russia, during one of Maeve’s long sojourns away from her husband’s side. Yui was, when she lived—and was still, in the most technical of senses—Kitsune, four-tailed, smart and swift and sure of herself. Her kind are also descended from Maeve, although they originated in Japan, not Russia. Despite that shared progenitor, I know many among the Courts who would not have been pleased by the idea of their marriage.