The Brightest Fell Read online

  I took the spot nearest to the trailhead that would take us up the hill to the knowe. Quentin was standing next to the car when I got out.

  “You have a key?” I asked.

  “You’d have one, too, if you’d been here recently,” he said. “Etienne will probably give you one today.”

  “Today” was the operative term. The sky was getting light; we had less than twenty minutes before the sun came up and all our illusions came tumbling down. The Parks Department would probably assume that one of their own had unlocked the gate, since the lock had clearly not been tampered with in any way, but they wouldn’t be nearly so accepting of a bunch of inhuman hikers found running around the place at dawn. We needed to get moving.

  “Come on,” I said, and waved for May and Quentin to follow me as I turned and started walking up the trail. The gravel turned and shifted underfoot, adding gripping surfaces to what would otherwise have been a treacherously slippery climb. That was nice, while it lasted: in no time at all, we were scrabbling up the dirt hillside, grabbing at clumps of dew-slicked grass and fighting not to slide back down to the beginning, where we’d have to start all over again.

  Most fae holdings are hidden in the Summerlands, anchored to the mortal world by enchanted doors. Those places—those directly connected places—are called hollow hills, or knowes, and they can be a bear to access. The people who control them get to decide how difficult the doors will be to find or open. Sylvester Torquill was a generally kind man, thinking the best of people, encouraging them to think the best of him. Somehow, that translated to his knowe having an entrance that could double as an obstacle course.

  Quentin pulled ahead. I didn’t try to stop him. He’d been here more recently than either May or I, and he knew the exact permutations of the current lock, leading us over, under, around and through the hawthorns and the fallen logs and the great sandstone boulders. We played ring-around-the-roses with a wild rosemary bush, whipped twice around a lighting-blackened oak, and stopped as a door appeared in the largest of the old oak trees in front of us.

  May was wheezing. She waved me forward, and Quentin hung back, both acknowledging that this would go better if I were the one to do it. Swell.

  I stepped up to the thick oak door and knocked, the sound echoing into the stillness beyond. I stepped back, glancing nervously at the sky. The sun was almost up. We had five minutes, maybe less, before dawn, and then I was going to be in a world of hurt if I was still in the mortal world.

  Dawn is painful outside the Summerlands. The only reason it isn’t painful there is that it never happens. The Summerlands exist in a perpetual twilight that grows deeper or brighter according to the whims of the purebloods who control the individual slices of territory, but which never quite yields to day. Somehow, crops still grow there, even mortal ones, and no one suffers from a Vitamin D deficiency. It must be something in the water.

  I live in the mortal world. Dawn is part of the price I pay for my freedom from noble oversight, for being able to have things like cable television and midnight trips to 7-11. But I was normally paying that price in the safety of my own home, where I could stick my head under a pillow and wait for the air to come back. I raised my hand to knock again.

  The door swung open to reveal Sir Etienne, who was—for once—less than perfectly polished. His dark hair was in ruffled disarray, and his gray tunic was barely belted, creating the impression that he’d grabbed it off the floor. The air around him smelled of limes and cedar smoke. He must have opened a gate to bring himself to the door, possibly because dawn was so near. His eyes widened at the sight of us.

  “Get inside,” he snapped, stepping to the side to make room. “The sun is almost up. Hurry!”

  It wasn’t the most polite of invitations, but he didn’t need to tell me twice. I rushed inside, trying to ignore the way the world tilted around me at the transition, marking the demarcation between the human and fae worlds. May and Quentin were close behind.

  Etienne slammed the door, sealing the mortal world and the mortal sunrise safely on the other side. Then he turned to me, surprise fading, replaced by wariness. “October,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Who said anything was wrong?” The question sounded frail and strained, even to my own ears. I still had to ask it. If I didn’t keep up appearances, I was going to break down. My conversation with the Luidaeg had proven that much.

  “You’re here,” he said simply.

  For a moment, I couldn’t think of a reply.

  There was a time when it felt like I was driving to Shadowed Hills every ten minutes, looking for answers, looking for help, or just looking for a hot meal. Sylvester was my liege. His wife, Luna, had been my friend once, before things had gotten so strained between us. But they were just the tip of the iceberg. I’d grown up running around the knowe, giggling with the household staff, sleeping in the guest rooms. This had been my home during a period of my life when I’d felt like I didn’t deserve to have one, and I had walked away from more than just Sylvester when he’d broken my heart by lying to me.

  My heart was healing. The bridges between me and my liege were in the process of being mended. And once again, I needed help.

  “I don’t know how many times I can tell this story without losing it, and I need to ask Sylvester for a favor,” I said, all too aware of May and Quentin at my back. May was in even worse shape than I was. I had always known that Tybalt lived a dangerous life. Jazz ran an antique store. She wasn’t supposed to be a target. “Is he up?”

  “For you, he will be,” said Etienne. “I’ll fetch him. I trust you can find the receiving room on your own?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said.

  He nodded, traced a circle in the air with his hand, and vanished through the portal of his own making, leaving the smell of limes and cedar smoke hanging once more heavy in the air. I didn’t wait for it to dissipate before I started walking again.

  Quentin pulled up next to me. I glanced at him.

  “Does Raj know how to get around the wards?” I asked.

  “He can’t come straight into the knowe, but there’s a spot in the woods we always use when he needs to meet me here,” he said. “He can walk from there.”

  “Because Raj will be thrilled that we made him walk,” I said.

  Quentin smirked.

  Raj was a Prince of Cats, but he wasn’t a King yet. Once he was crowned, his power would expand, making him the anchor to the Shadow Roads in San Francisco, and—more importantly, in some regards—opening the wards of the local knowes to him. It’s considered incredibly bad form to ward against Kings and Queens of Cats, just like it would have been considered bad form to ward against Arden. Princes and Princesses are fair game, but the monarchs? They can come and go as they pleased.

  Would Tybalt still be a King when he stepped down? It seemed likely. Power doesn’t like to let go once it has hold of someone. Tybalt would be a King without a throne. An enviable—and dangerous—position to be in.

  It helped a little to think about the future. What he was going to be after I got him safely back from my mother, after he’d recovered from whatever she did to him, and most importantly, after he’d been able to step down from his throne. Abdication was a funny wedding gift, but under the circumstances, I’d take it.

  The receiving room doors were unguarded. Another sign of how late, or early, it was. The people who would normally have been standing by to let us in were probably already in bed. I was grateful that Etienne hadn’t felt the need to wake them just so they could stand on ceremony. Fatherhood really was mellowing him.

  The doors were heavy, but Quentin and I were able to get them open, revealing the spacious cavern of a room on the other side. We started across the black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, toward the dais on the far side. Everything smelled of roses. Not my mother’s roses, thank Maeve; these were cultivated things, pampered
garden flowers, trained and raised up by a loving hand. Luna is one of the best gardeners in the Westlands, and she specializes in roses, which makes sense, since technically she is a rose. She’s of the Blodynbryd, a form of rose Dryad, and where she walks, flowers bloom.

  That wasn’t always how I’d known her. Luna is Blind Michael’s youngest daughter. When we’d met, she had been claiming to be a Kitsune, wrapped so tightly in the stolen skin of one of her father’s victims that the change had run all the way down to the bone. The magic she used to make the change was similar to the spell the Luidaeg used to create the Selkies, but unlike the Selkies, Luna had never been able to put her Kitsune skin aside. She’d been trapped, wrapped in hot, mammalian emotions and biology, until her own daughter tried to kill her and, in the process, stripped the stolen skin away.

  The Torquills are a complicated family. I’m still not sure how I feel about being legally one of them.

  A door opened behind the dais, and Sylvester rushed out. He was wearing tan pants and a white muslin shirt, and nothing else: for a Duke, he was barely presentable. I didn’t care. Relief washed over me, coupled with a sudden hope that maybe, just maybe, we could find another way. Sylvester had loved his brother, once. Who was to say he hadn’t truly known his brother’s daughter?

  “October,” he said, hurrying toward us. “What’s wrong?” He scanned our small group, and frowned. “Where’s Tybalt?”

  There’s no love lost between my liege and my lover, but he still noticed when Tybalt wasn’t there. That made me feel even more hopeful. Sylvester noticed things.

  “Is Etienne coming back?” I asked. “I don’t want to repeat this more than I have to.”

  “I’m here,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned. There was Etienne, with a yawning Grianne standing next to him, her Merry Dancers bobbing sleepily in the air to either side of her head. I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t even noticed the scent of his magic. That wasn’t good. This was not the time for me to start losing my focus. Not if I wanted to bring them home alive.

  “Good,” I said, and looked back to Sylvester. “Amandine came to my house and demanded I find August for her. She took Tybalt and Jasmine as collateral against my doing what she says. The Luidaeg can’t help me. I need someone who knew August to help me figure out where she could have gone, before my mother does something that can’t be undone. Can you help me?”

  “I . . .” He stopped, looking stricken. “I don’t know where my niece is. I’m so sorry. I tried to find her when she disappeared. I was still a hero then, I thought I could save her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but watch my brother break himself against walls that I couldn’t even see. I tried to help him. He pushed me away. He said it was my fault his family had been broken, that if I . . . if I hadn’t encouraged August to heroism, she would never have wandered from the path he had charted for her. I don’t know where she went. I don’t even know if she’s alive.”

  Everything seemed to freeze. My breath caught in my throat as I stared at him, absorbing the true enormity of his final words.

  What if August was dead?

  What if she hadn’t just disappeared, all those years ago: what if she had died, and was no longer out there to be found? Would Amandine take proof of death as my bringing her daughter home, or would she say that I’d failed to do the one thing she had ever asked of me? Would she punish Tybalt and Jazz because I couldn’t raise the dead?

  “I need to talk to Simon,” I heard myself say. It seemed impossible for me to be speaking, since my entire body was numb, but I was doing it. Good job, me. “He’s the only person left who might be able to help me find her.”

  “If you wish to enter his dreams, I’m sure—”

  “No.” I raised my head slightly, meeting his eyes and refusing to let myself look away. “I need to talk to him. Not in a dream. Not in a blood memory. I need to wake him up and make him help me find her, before Amandine hurts our people. Please, Sylvester. Please, I am begging you. Let me wake your brother.”

  His face was stone. He didn’t speak, and so neither did I. I just looked at him, silently pleading.

  Sylvester Torquill is Daoine Sidhe, like Quentin, like his brother: the descendants of Eira Rosynhwyr, daughter of Titania and Oberon. Daoine Sidhe trend toward the beautiful, with dramatic coloration and perfectly sculpted features, and Sylvester is no different. His hair is russet red, like fox fur, and his eyes are the clear gold of wildflower honey. He wore his face with kindness, and his twin brother had always seemed to wear it with cruelty . . . at least until I’d seen Simon elf-shot for my sake. Until I’d traveled through his memories, and seen how much he loved his family. The brothers have more in common than they might ever admit, and I needed both of them to be willing to help me.

  Sylvester looked away first. “He hurt my child,” he said, voice thick with loathing. “He took her from me, damaged her in ways that may never heal. He stole my wife. Why? Because he was alone, and wanted me to be alone as well? Because he thought I didn’t deserve to be happy if he couldn’t be?”

  “Sylvester—”

  “He took you!” Sylvester spun back to face me, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me once, for emphasis. “You, who should have been my daughter, for all the care your mother offered you, for all the love I showed you! He stole the child of my blood, and then he stole the child of my heart, and I still don’t have either of you back! Why should I let you wake him up, when he deserves to suffer for eternity for what he’s done to me?”

  “Because Jazz doesn’t deserve to suffer,” I said softly. “Because Tybalt doesn’t deserve to suffer. Because my mother has stolen my family, has stolen my friend and my husband-to-be, and I need them back, Sylvester, I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t get them back. You can help me. You say I should have been your daughter? Well, be a father to me now, and help me. Give me what I need.”

  “Luna won’t approve.”

  “Luna doesn’t approve of anything I do anymore.” I paused. “But there is one thing I can offer to make her feel better about the idea.”

  He frowned. “What’s that?”

  “We haven’t woken Rayseline because she killed Connor. If we wake her, she has to stand trial, and she broke Oberon’s Law. You know what Arden will have to do.”

  Sylvester’s frown became a grimace. “I do.”

  “But the Luidaeg is technically the Selkie First. I can talk to her. I can talk to Arden. We can try to find a way to pardon Raysel for what she did.” It burned, talking about Connor’s death like it was a bargaining chip. At the same time, I didn’t think he’d mind.

  All he had ever wanted was for me to be happy, and for us to have the chance to be together. We were never going to get the second. Why shouldn’t I do whatever I could to achieve the first?

  Sylvester looked like he was wavering. I pressed on. “High King Sollys was able to pardon me for what I did to Blind Michael. That was only a few years ago. I can testify on Raysel’s behalf. I can tell them the combination of her biology and what was done to her as a child meant she wasn’t in her right mind when she killed Connor—she didn’t know what she was doing, she just knew that she was in pain and needed it to stop. She won’t do that again.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I took the Blodynbryd out of her. Her blood isn’t at war with itself anymore. She’s going to need counseling, and honestly, we should ask Karen if she’ll help Raysel audition therapists before we wake her up, so she’ll already have somebody standing by to give her a helping hand, but she isn’t going to do what she did again. Please. I can help you help her, but I need you to help me first.”

  Sylvester was still. He looked at me impassively, and for a moment I thought I had pushed too far. Then, wryly, he smiled.

  “You are your mother’s daughter, no matter how much you may hate me saying that, especially
right now,” he said. “You know what I want most in the world, and you’d offer it to me if it meant I gave you what you wanted.”

  My stomach churned. Was he right? Was I doing to him what Amandine had done to me, taking hostages against his heart for the sake of my own desires?

  Yes. And no, because if he’d ever asked me to help with Raysel’s defense, I would have done it, no strings attached. It was just that we hadn’t really been speaking, and I hadn’t really been thinking about it. I had been selfish, but not cruel.

  “I’ll help you with Rayseline’s defense no matter what, Sylvester; you only ever had to ask me,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “But I need Simon now, and I need you, my liege, to help me. Will you help me?”

  Sylvester closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I will.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just stepped forward and put my arms around him, resting my head against his chest, and waited for Raj to come with the potion that would change the world.

  SIX

  ELF-SHOT HAS BEEN A problem in Faerie for so long that some knowes, like Queen Windermere’s in Muir Woods, have dedicated rooms for its victims, places where sleepers can dream away the century of their sentence without getting dusty or being shoved into a closet and forgotten. Others, like the now-deposed King Rhys of Silences, kept their elf-shot sleepers in the dungeon, which to be fair, was a large, often unused space, but was not the nicest place for a hundred-year nap.

  Shadowed Hills split the difference. They don’t have a dedicated room, but they have plenty of space, thanks to the eccentric and unpredictable geometry of the place. I knew Rayseline was asleep in a glass coffin in one of her mother’s greenhouses. The imagery of it made me a little uncomfortable, especially since the inventor of elf-shot, Eira Rosynhwyr, is sometimes considered the progenitor of the Snow White story.

  Sylvester led us through a maze of hallways and empty rooms. A few looked like they’d been sealed for decades; dust coated the floors, a stain on the normally impeccable work of the housekeeping staff, marked with footprints along the path from door to door. Most of the prints were clearly Sylvester’s. He didn’t say anything, and so neither did the rest of us. We just followed.