The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  That was the second time she’d implied that things would have been better if I hadn’t held onto my fae blood. “Are you seriously saying things would be better if I were mortal? Mom, that was sixty years ago. I’d be lucky to be alive now!” Mortals can live to be sixty and beyond, but my luck has never run to the good, or to the safe. If it hadn’t been for my changeling resilience, even before I started healing at an accelerated rate, I would have been dead a long time ago.

  “I know,” she said serenely.

  That was the last straw. “If you wanted me to be human, why the hell did you save me when I got elf-shot?”

  “Because the roses begged,” she said. “It seemed a shame to disappoint them, when they asked so sweetly.”

  “Right,” I said. “Okay. No, Mother, I will not be taking the job. I’m sorry. It’s been too long, and I don’t want to deal with you, and I need you to leave now.” I felt bad even as I spoke. It wasn’t August’s fault that our mother loved her more than she loved me. Maybe my sister was out there somewhere, trapped, suspended in some terrible limbo, like Luna and Rayseline had been after Simon orchestrated their kidnapping. Maybe she needed me.

  But I didn’t need Amandine. I could refuse to work for her and go looking for August anyway, on my own terms. I could bring her home without ever involving our mother.

  “I was afraid you’d say something like that,” said Amandine. She slipped a hand into the froth of petals on the side of her dress. When she pulled it out again, she uncurled her fingers to show me two long, slender seeds, like something I might dig out of an orange. “I would ask you to change your mind, but that would be very much like begging, and I do not beg my own children to do what they should have done willingly. You will learn your place, October. I only regret that I have failed you so completely that the lesson is necessary.”

  “Get out of my house,” I snarled. I stuck my hand behind myself. Tybalt dropped a knife into it. I wasn’t going to attack my own mother—I didn’t think I was going to attack my own mother, especially not when I had formally granted her the hospitality of my home—but I’d be damned before I went unarmed for another minute.

  Amandine sighed. “No,” she said, and tossed the seeds into the air. The blood and roses smell of her magic was suddenly everywhere.

  The seeds germinated instantly, bursting into tangled masses of thorny vines that whipped through the kitchen, wrapping themselves around everyone who wasn’t Amandine. There was a splash as Jazz’s pot of cocoa hit the floor. Jazz yelled, as much in surprise as from the pain of the hot liquid hitting her feet. Then the thorns were breaking our skins, and there was something more important to worry about than a little spilled milk.

  The pain was hot and intense, racing along my nerves like lightning. I inhaled, preparing to scream—

  The pain stopped. Completely. It was replaced by a soothing numbness, and by absolute immobility. I couldn’t even move enough to squeak. I tried to look for the shape of the spell, to unweave it as I had other bindings, but it slipped away from me like water.

  Of course it did. Amandine is Firstborn—my Firstborn. My magic is a pale imitation of hers. Any tricks I know how to perform, I inherited from her. No matter how powerful I become, how much practice I get, her spells will probably always be the only ones I can’t unwind. I was caught.

  We all were. Tybalt was behind me, outside my frame of vision, but I could see May and Jazz. They looked terrified, wrapped in their cocoons of calming thorns. Only Amandine was free to move around the room.

  She walked to the kitchen table, clearing it of mail, newspapers, and dishes with a sweep of her arm. Something smashed when it hit the floor. She didn’t appear to care. “Even as a girl, you were willful,” she said. “You never wanted to listen. You never wanted to mind me, even when minding me would have been the proper thing to do. I thought it was the humanity in you, so I forgave it—I was making it worse, wasn’t I? That meant it must be what I wanted. But look at you now. Barely clinging to your mortality, and still you refuse to mind me. It’s a flaw in your nature. You’re a part of my punishment. Well, I’m sorry, October, but you need to learn how to mind your mother.”

  Amandine reached into her dress again, this time coming up with a handful of thorny twigs that looked like bits of briar. She placed them on the table in two tidy piles, stacking them on top of each other like she was preparing for a game of pick-up sticks. Then she snapped her fingers. The twigs writhed and stretched, weaving together until they had grown into two small wicker cages.

  “You think me a monster, I’m sure. Heroes always think the people who tell them ‘no’ are monsters. Heroes and children have a great deal in common.” She plucked two bunches of Queen Anne’s lace from her skirt and tossed them into the cages, where they expanded and fluffed out, becoming blankets thick enough to protect the eventual occupants from the thorns under their feet.

  Nothing would protect them from the thorns in the walls. Whatever she intended to shut up there would be cramped, and confined, and unable to move.

  I strained against the thorns binding me, reaching again for the shimmering threads of her magic, wishing I could scream when they flowed away from my mental hands. I was starting to see the terrible shape of her intentions. It couldn’t be real. I refused to let it be real. I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  Amandine walked across the room, stopping to caress my cheek with one hand. Part of me—the part that was still her frightened, abandoned little girl—relished the touch. She hadn’t touched me like that since I’d made the Changeling’s Choice, all those years ago. The greater part of me raged. She had no right to touch me like that. No right at all.

  “My poor child,” she said. “You really have no idea how outmatched you are, do you?”

  She stepped past me, out of sight. There was a snapping sound, and the smell of blood and roses grew stronger, suddenly underscored by the mixed scents of pennyroyal and musk. When she came back into view, she had a struggling tabby tomcat by the scruff of his neck. The spell of the thorns had broken when she transformed Tybalt against his will: he spat and writhed, digging his claws into the alabaster skin of her arms over and over again. It didn’t do him any good. She was healing as fast as he could hurt her, and only a few drops of blood were able to escape and fall to the floor.

  Amandine walked calmly back to her cages, the purpose of which was suddenly, terribly obvious. She dropped Tybalt into the larger of the two and slammed the lid before he could leap out. A knot of thorns wrapped itself around the latch, sealing it.

  “No Shadow Roads for you, cat,” she said, a smug smile on her face. “My magic is greater than yours, at least while you stand within my ring of roses. Best calm yourself, or it will not go well for you.”

  Tybalt’s response was an infuriated yowl before his paw lashed between the bars, claws cutting lines down her cheek.

  Amandine sighed, the scratches already healing. “Or you could choose to be trouble, and learn what waits for recalcitrant cats. It’s entirely up to you.”

  I struggled against the vines that held me—or rather, I struggled to find the strength to struggle. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move a muscle. I couldn’t even blink. All I could do was watch in mute horror as Amandine turned her back on Tybalt and walked across the room to where Jazz was pinned by her own encircling cage of vines.

  “Skinshifter,” said Amandine, looking back at me. “Your Fetch is a reflection of yourself. I would have thought any child of mine would have slightly better taste than to love someone who keeps their ties to Faerie on the outside—but then, you dallied with that Selkie boy before you moved on to better beasts, didn’t you, darling? I blame myself. With a human for a sire, there was nowhere you could go but down.”

  She grasped Jazz’s chin firmly in her hand. The spell weakened enough for Jazz to widen her eyes in terror before Amandine was holding the beak of a v
ast black raven. She moved quickly, sweeping her other arm around to pin Jazz’s wings against her sides.

  “Struggle, and I’ll shred the pretty bauble you call a cloak of feathers. I’ll leave you on two legs forever. How do you think you’ll care for that, hmm?”

  It was difficult to read Jazz’s expression when she was in raven form, but she didn’t fight against Amandine, and I suppose that was answer enough. She held perfectly still, seemingly frozen with fear, as Amandine walked across the room and dropped her into the second cage. She sealed it the same way she had sealed the one containing Tybalt.

  “Nothing sensible keeps its magic outside of its body,” said Amandine. “It’s one weakness too many. Find another lover, Fetch of my child; this one is beneath you.”

  She picked up the cages, one in each hand, and looked over her shoulder to smile at me thinly. There was no kindness in her expression, no love; she was looking at a servant, nothing more.

  “I’ll take care of these for you while you find your sister,” she said. “Don’t fail me, October. You won’t care for the consequences.”

  She walked to the back door. It swung open at her approach. Then she stepped outside, taking Tybalt and Jazz with her. The door slammed shut.

  They were gone.

  FOUR

  THE VINES DIDN’T DISAPPEAR when Amandine did: they remained as tight as ever, and the stasis lingered with them, holding me and May in place. Then, bit by bit, they seemed to loosen. I could blink. I could breathe. I hadn’t even realized I wasn’t until I started again. That was alarming.

  The vines loosened more. I strained against them, feeling the thorns bite deeper into my arms—and now there was pain, sensation beneath the numbness. May still wasn’t moving. I didn’t know whether Mom’s magic had less of a hold over me because I was Dóchas Sidhe and May wasn’t, or whether I was just more willing to hurt myself, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting loose.

  Amandine had frozen us right after Tybalt handed me my knife. I had a knife. Carefully, I began working it back and forth, sawing it against the vines. The position of my pinned hand meant I was only sawing it against the vines, and not against my own leg, but that wouldn’t have made any difference to me. Not now. I needed to get free. I needed to save them.

  The smell of Amandine’s magic hung in the air, blood and roses, getting fainter all the time. For the first time, my own magic was strong enough to sketch out the subtleties of those two elements, the crisp brightness of the blood, the woody wildness of the roses. They had a strong perfume, but they were wild things, the sort of roses that grew rampant in wooded places, never tended by a gardener, nor planted by a human hand. I filed the details away in the part of my mind that was always documenting the magic of others. It might matter someday, and if it didn’t, at least it was a small distraction from what she had done. I needed the distraction. I needed to keep sawing, and I needed not to drop the knife. If I lost that, we could be trapped here until the boys came to cut us loose.

  The boys. Amandine had come here with the intent of taking hostages—the presence of the seeds in her skirt had proven that. They’d been enchanted before she came to the house, requiring only a small amount of magical effort to trigger them. Why? It wasn’t like anyone who lived here could stand against her.

  But the Luidaeg could. And the Luidaeg had been at my bachelorette party. Ridiculous as her presence had seemed at the time, it was probably the only thing that had stopped Amandine from making her visit in the middle of a mortal karaoke bar. Everyone in Faerie is supposed to help maintain the secrecy of the whole. For someone like Amandine, that could mean transforming every human in the place into rabbits and leaving them to be eaten by urban predators. A few missing persons cases have never been a big deal for the purebloods. There are always more mortals to abuse.

  Which brought me back to the boys. They’d been in the house when the doorbell rang, or at least they should have been. Had Amandine taken them as leverage before coming to offer me the chance to work for her? Or had they somehow missed the sound of everything going terribly wrong in the kitchen? There was no way they were sitting idly by while this went down. It wasn’t possible.

  My knife finally sliced through the vines pinning my arm. I began cutting the rest of them away, faster now, the numbness receding more and more as the vines fell. When I pulled my legs free, the numbness dispersed entirely, leaving me physically fine. Mentally . . .

  May rolled her eyes, silently pleading with me to hurry.

  “Sorry,” I gasped, running across the room to her. I was halfway there when I tripped, stumbling into the nest of thorny vines. They barely punctured my skin. They’d been sharper before, hadn’t they? They had felt so much sharper, so much more dangerous.

  More of Amandine’s magic. We couldn’t trust a thing she did—or said. For all I knew, she was already hurting Tybalt and Jazz. I hadn’t included her in my offer of hospitality. Faerie would offer no consequences for what she’d done. If she killed them . . .

  If she killed them, I was going to show her what I’d shown Blind Michael. Firstborn are hard to kill, harder than purebloods, maybe even harder than me. That doesn’t mean they can’t die. It just means I have to work a little harder.

  May started sobbing as soon as I sliced through the first layer of vines and freed her from enough of the stasis to let the tears come. My own eyes were dry. Shock and fear had chased my tears away. I kept thinking of the look in Jazz’s eyes when Amandine had forced her to transform, of the way Tybalt had yowled. Tears would have been a luxury. I could cry when they were safe. When they were home.

  The vines fell away. May collapsed into my arms, hanging bonelessly against me for several seconds before she pushed herself back to her feet, grabbed my shoulders, and exclaimed, “We have to save them!”

  “I know. I know we do.” I felt a surge of shameful gratitude. Jazz had been taken along with Tybalt. Much as I wanted to fall to pieces with worry, I couldn’t do that. She needed me. May needed me. I could stay strong, because someone else’s heart was at risk.

  I’ve always been better at being strong for other people than I am at being strong for myself. Maybe it’s the way I was raised—or maybe it’s the way I was made. Either way, I guiltily shoved the gratitude to the back of my mind, pledging that May would never know about it. Ever.

  May’s fingers dug into my shoulders until it hurt. I didn’t welcome the pain, exactly, but I was grateful for the distraction it offered. “Well?” she demanded. “Go! Get them back!”

  “I can’t.”

  She stared at me like I’d just confessed to summoning Amandine to the house myself. “What?”

  “I mean, not yet. The boys—”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, oak and ash, where are they?” She looked around the kitchen like she expected them to appear. “They should have heard . . .”

  “Maybe they did. Hang on.” I pulled my cellphone out of the pocket of my jeans and swiped my thumb across the screen. Quentin’s name was at the top of my “frequently called” list, which made sense. Tybalt doesn’t have a phone, and the Luidaeg’s number is the very definition of unlisted.

  She was going to be my next call. Just as soon as I knew the boys were safe.

  The phone rang twice before Quentin answered, sounding breathless and hesitant. “Hello?” he said, cautiously.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “Prove it.”

  “Last week you tried to convince me to help you make a sushi pizza for your boyfriend, and I laughed until orange juice came out of my nose. Not my most dignified moment.”

  “You don’t have dignified moments,” said Quentin, sounding profoundly relieved. “Is it safe? Can we come home?”

  That confirmed my impression that if he had been in the house, he would have at least tried to come to my rescue. “Where are you?”

&
nbsp; Silence answered me. I pulled the phone from my ear, and saw the call had dropped, just as the smell of pepper and burning paper filled the air, mercifully washing away the last of the blood and roses. I turned. Quentin and Raj were in the corner next to the fridge, Raj with his body positioned to block Quentin from the rest of the room. It was a protective gesture. It was also a sensible one. If anything tried to touch them, Raj could shove Quentin backward, onto the Shadow Roads, before either of them was hurt.

  I lowered my phone. “Hey,” I said.

  “Where is my uncle?” demanded Raj. He raked his eyes across the chaos in the kitchen, glaring at the wilting vines littering the floor and the bloody pinpricks on May’s arms. His gaze finally settled on me. Only the faint tremor in his lower lip betrayed how frightened he was. “Where is he?”

  “Amandine has him,” said May, stepping forward before I could speak. “She took Tybalt and Jazz. As collateral.”

  “Collateral against what? Wait—Amandine? She was here?” Quentin shoved his way in front of Raj, starting toward me. “Toby, I’m sorry, we were coming out of my room when Tybalt appeared in the hall upstairs and told Raj to get out of the house, I didn’t want to go with him, I wanted to stay and fight for you like a squire is supposed to, but once we were in the Court of Cats, I didn’t know how to get back—”

  “Stop apologizing,” I said. To my great relief, he did, and stood there looking at me mutely, waiting for me to tell him how I was going to fix this. Waiting for me to tell them all.

  I couldn’t, because I didn’t know. Instead, I rubbed my eyes with one hand and said, “I didn’t ask Tybalt to give that order, but I would have if I’d been thinking. Raj did the right thing getting you out of there.”