The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  I couldn’t see Raj through my hand. I could picture his expression. He would be sagging slightly with relief. Relief that I wasn’t angry at him for grabbing Quentin and running; relief that I hadn’t expected them to stand and fight. Quentin is officially my squire, but Raj frequently falls into a similar role. Somewhere between our first meeting in Blind Michael’s lands and my slow courtship with his uncle, I had come to matter very much to the kid, and he had come to matter very much to me. That doesn’t mean it’s his job to risk his life for mine.

  “I should have stayed,” said Quentin. “I should have fought.”

  I lowered my hand. “You’re my squire. You’re also the Crown Prince of the Westlands,” I said. “We were up against one of the Firstborn. None of us knew what she was capable of. Tybalt gave the best order possible, under the circumstances. I’m just glad Raj was able to follow it.”

  “Amandine was really here?” Quentin shook his head. “I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think she knew where we lived. Why did she come here?”

  “Because she wants me to find my sister.” I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath. I could do this. I could find August; I could save Tybalt and Jazz. I could.

  I just needed to figure out how.

  “Why did she take them? They’re not going to help you find anyone when they’re not here.” Raj sounded very small. With my eyes closed, it was easy to remember the skinny, terrified boy he had been when we met, the one who had been convinced that he was never going to make it out of Blind Michael’s lands. I had been the one to tell him to be brave, then. I had been the one to promise him that he was going to make it home.

  I opened my eyes. “Because she wanted leverage against me,” I said. “I told her I wouldn’t work for her. She got mad.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said May.

  “Maybe it was!” snapped Raj. “One of the Firstborn came here and asked you to do something, and you said no? October. Why? Why would you do that?”

  “She’s not ‘one of the Firstborn,’” I said. “She’s my mother. She’s the reason I am . . . well, she’s the reason I am just about everything I am. She knows how to push all my buttons, because she was there when they were installed. I said ‘no’ because I didn’t think she’d hurt me.” But that wasn’t true, was it? She had confessed to doing exactly that. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of turning someone human against their will as anything but hurting them.

  “And it wasn’t her fault,” said May again. Her voice shifted, taking on traces of the strange, nameless accent she had when she was touching her night-haunt roots. She was a part of their flock for centuries untold before she became my Fetch. It was easy to forget that sometimes. “Amandine may be your mother—I may remember her as my mother—but she was planning to take collateral as soon as she stepped through that door. I know enough about her to have no question about that. She came here intending to take something to guarantee your good behavior.”

  “Why?” Quentin asked.

  “Because that’s how Amandine is. That’s how she’s always been.” May shook her head. “I can’t remember much more than that. The memories aren’t mine—I got them from the dead—and those get fuzzy after a while.”

  “I know someone who will remember,” I said. I wanted to run out the door and start looking for Amandine. I had a pretty good idea of where to start: she was likely to have taken Tybalt and Jazz back to her tower. But I couldn’t best her magically, and she might hurt them if I showed up without having even started looking for August. I needed help.

  There was only one person who could give me that.

  Raising my phone again, I called up the keyboard and tapped the numbers in a decreasing spiral, moving from one to eight. As I dialed, I chanted, “Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss a fellow; made a mistake, kissed a snake, now they’re happily married with a dental practice outside Marin.” The smell of cut-grass and copper rose in the air around me, my magic gathering for the attack.

  The copper smelled bloody, arterial. The more of my humanity I lose, the more my magic smells like my mother’s. I have never hated that fact more than I did in that moment.

  The spell coalesced, drew tight, and finally burst, drifting down around me. I lifted the phone to my ear, waiting as patiently as I could.

  The death of the dial tone has not been kind to me. I can have trouble telling whether a call has been successfully completed when I’m calling someone like Quentin, whose phone actually exists. The Luidaeg’s phone isn’t connected to the exchange. She doesn’t have a cell, and her landline doesn’t have any wires; the jack is stripped, the cords cut off close to the body of the phone to keep her from tripping over them when she gets out of bed for a midday snack. The fact that I can call her at all is pure magic, and the spell doesn’t always work.

  There was a long pause—long enough that I started to think I was going to need to cast again—when there was a click and a sound like a bottle smashing to the ground before the Luidaeg asked wearily, “What the hell do you want? Isn’t it enough that I came out in public for you? You know, in my day, people were grateful when I blessed their events with my presence. They didn’t go expecting me to answer the fucking phone to boot.”

  She sounded tired, and annoyed, and a little bit glad to hear from me, although she would never admit it. She sounded, in short, normal, and somehow, that was the last straw. The dam broke and I started to cry, great, racking sobs that shook my entire body. Quentin looked alarmed. Raj looked embarrassed, like this was something he wasn’t supposed to see. May . . .

  May looked relieved. She wasn’t the only person crying anymore.

  “Toby?” The weariness dropped away from the Luidaeg’s voice in an instant, replaced by confusion and a small amount of dread. “October, what’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  “M-Mom,” I managed, before I started sobbing again. It felt like once I’d started, I couldn’t figure out how to stop.

  There was a long pause. Finally, the Luidaeg said, “She’s not dead. I would know, if she were dead. What did she do to you?”

  I couldn’t answer. My tongue seemed three sizes too large for my mouth. The Luidaeg sighed.

  “Fine. Tell your kitty-cat to come and get me, and you can explain in person. I swear on Dad’s guts, October, I wouldn’t go to half this much trouble for most—”

  “He can’t.”

  “What?”

  “He can’t come and get you. Because she took him.” I took a shuddering breath, not bothering to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “She came here, she came into my home, under the auspices of my own hospitality, and she took him, Luidaeg, she took Tybalt.” May was looking at me, stricken. I amended, “Jazz, too. She’s using them as collateral.”

  “Collateral for what?”

  “She wants me to find my sister.”

  There was a long pause before the Luidaeg said, almost hesitantly, “She wants you to find August?”

  “Unless I have another sister out there that I don’t know about.” I paused. The urge to ask the Luidaeg whether I had another sister was almost overwhelming. The trouble was, the Luidaeg was bound by a complex web of geasa that kept her from answering everything I asked even as they prevented her from lying, and more, could bring this whole conversation to a halt if I asked the wrong thing. Much as I wanted to know, I couldn’t afford to get distracted. I resumed: “She named August specifically. She wants me to find her, and when I said ‘no,’ she took Tybalt and Jazz to make sure I’d do it.”

  “I’d ask you why you tried to defy her, but I’ve met you, so I don’t need to ask, and anyway, it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. Amy would have taken prisoners just to make sure you wouldn’t let yourself get distracted. So if you’re beating yourself up, you need to cut that shit out and focus on what matters.”

  I glanced at
May, who was watching me with wide and worried eyes. “May said pretty much the same thing. That Mom would have taken them no matter what.”

  “We ruined Amy. We didn’t mean to, but done is done, and we can’t take it back now. She doesn’t know how to be refused.” The Luidaeg sighed. “Fuck, Toby, I’m sorry. What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to help me.”

  “I can’t.”

  Somehow, that wasn’t a surprise. It hurt all the same. “Why not?”

  “Because she’s my sister. No matter what she may have done to you or anyone else, I can’t stand against her. Not without breaking rules I don’t even have names for. More than that, though, she is our father’s daughter. If she faced me on the sea, or even near it, I’d win. On her ground, on her terms? There’s no guarantee. She might be able to defeat me.”

  That was a chilling thought. I shoved it aside as best as I could, asking, “So what am I supposed to do? She has my people—and she didn’t tell me how long she’d keep them. Do I have three days? A week? What’s my time limit?”

  The Luidaeg chuckled, dark and mirthless and terrifying. It was the laughter of a woman being led to the gallows, already knowing what comes next. “Oh, October. Sometimes I forget how young you are. Don’t you understand? We say ‘three days’ or ‘a week’ or ‘in a fortnight’s time’ because otherwise, we would never stop.”

  I went colder than I already was. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying Amandine doesn’t care about anything as petty as time. She didn’t tell you how long you had because she’s planning to keep them forever. Bring August back to her, and she’ll return her hostages. She took the shifters—may I assume they weren’t in their human shapes when she left?”

  “No. She forced them to transform, and then she put them in cages.”

  Raj hissed at that, his lips drawing back to reveal teeth that were larger and sharper than the human norm, and larger and sharper than they’d been only a few seconds before.

  “There’s your answer. Amy always did like pets. She’ll keep them as long as she has a use for them, and when she breaks them—and make no mistake, she will break them—she’ll say she’d forgotten they were originally fae, and not just vermin. No one will believe her, but that won’t matter. She’ll be above reproach.”

  “I have to save them.”

  “You do. But I can’t help you.”

  “So who can?”

  “Talk to the people who remember August. The people who knew her before she went missing. Maybe one of them will be able to do something.”

  I paused. “I need to ask you something, and I need you not to get angry with me.”

  “For Dad’s sake, Toby . . .” The Luidaeg sighed again, angrily this time, like she couldn’t believe I was making her say this. “No. I don’t know where August is. I’ve never known where August was. If I did, I would have told Simon when he came to me, and I would never have let him do what he did in the name of saving his daughter. I may be a monster, but I know the meaning of mercy. Now go and bring your people home.”

  The line went dead. I slowly lowered the phone. My tears were drying on my cheeks, leaving itchy trails behind. I stood frozen, not wiping them away. Not doing anything.

  “Well?” said May, finally.

  “I know what we have to do,” I said.

  Oak and ash preserve me, but I didn’t want to. And I didn’t have a choice.

  FIVE

  “THIS IS A TERRIBLE idea,” said May.

  “I know,” I agreed, and kept my eyes on the road.

  We were rocketing toward Pleasant Hill at what would have been an unsafe speed even without the don’t-look-here spell I’d asked Quentin to throw over the car. As it was, if I let my attention veer for a second, somebody was going to get seriously injured, and it probably wasn’t going to be me. Predawn traffic is vicious in the Bay Area, as commuters try to beat the rush to work, and succeed only in moving commute hours earlier every year. Luckily for us, we were going against the grain. Getting back into San Francisco was a nightmare for later.

  It had taken us less than ten minutes to get out of the house and on the road, which was a record I might have been proud of under other circumstances. As it was, those ten minutes had felt like ten too many. We would have gone faster, but leaving without grabbing weapons, supplies, and my leather jacket had been out of the question. I didn’t know when we’d be coming back. I wasn’t going out there unarmed. Not when Tybalt’s life was at stake.

  “It’s not the worst one she’s ever had,” said Quentin, from the back seat. He was taking his exile well. It would have been difficult for him not to, considering the situation. If Mom had taken Dean, he would have been baying for blood as loudly as the rest of us, and their relationship wasn’t even that serious yet.

  “Top ten,” snapped May. “You don’t know Simon like I do. You don’t remember what he did to us.”

  “No, but I heard the stories, and I remember what he tried to do to Jazz when she got in his way,” said Quentin. “Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.”

  “He’s not Amandine’s enemy! He’s her husband!” May twisted in her seat to glare at my squire. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “The Luidaeg can’t help us, and I can’t think of anyone who’d know August better than her own father,” I said, tightening my hands on the wheel. A compact car zipped by, coming a little too close for comfort. I hit the gas harder. They couldn’t hit us if they couldn’t catch up with us. “We’re doing this.”

  “I don’t like it, but I’m not trying to stop you, because you’re right,” said May. She twisted back into her original position, staring at the road ahead of us like a condemned woman. “We have to do the impossible and find a missing person who disappeared so long ago that the trail isn’t just cold, it’s fossilized. Refusing to let someone help just because they’re an asshole won’t do us any good. It won’t do Jazz and Tybalt any good, either.”

  Quentin’s phone beeped. He picked it up, scanning the screen.

  I glanced at the rearview mirror, watching him. “What’s the news?”

  “Raj tracked Walther to his apartment and woke him up, and he’s got the countercharm. He’s taking the Shadow Roads, and he’ll meet us at Shadowed Hills.” Quentin paused before adding, “Walther says good luck.”

  “We’re damn well going to need it,” I said grimly. “Is Raj still with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let Walther know that we may still need him, and ask if he can head for his office. I’ll call him there if there’s something he can do.” I might have felt bad about my high-handed assumption that Walther would help, if the situation hadn’t been quite so dire—but then again, I might not have. As Walther himself has pointed out, more than once, I have a tendency to grab for whatever tools were handy when there’s a job to be done. Sometimes those tools are my friends. In my line of work, saving lives is more important than asking nicely.

  Quentin nodded and resumed texting.

  Walther Davies is a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley. He’s also one of the best alchemists I’ve ever known. That, combined with my freakishly precise ability to identify the magical signatures of the people around me, recently enabled him to do the impossible: he cured elf-shot. The spell that purebloods used for millennia to cast their enemies into centuries of sleep is no longer a binding sentence. Oh, elf-shot can still be used, and no doubt will be; it’s just a shorter term of slumber.

  Or a quick and reasonably painless death, for changelings and mortals. Because even a cure can’t make Faerie become kind.

  We were drag racing our way toward the mortal city of Pleasant Hill and the fae Duchy of Shadowed Hills for one simple reason: Amandine’s husband, my stepfather, Simon Torquill, was there. Sleeping. He had been elf-shot in the process of saving me from Evening Winterrose
, also known as Eira Rosynhwyr, also known as “my mother’s oldest sister, who sort of wants me dead for reasons that I do not fully understand.”

  Sometimes I wish my life came with a flow chart.

  Simon was not my ally. Simon was not even my friend. Simon was the man who’d transformed me into a fish and abandoned me in the Japanese Tea Gardens to dream fourteen years of my then-mortal life away. Simon had done worse things than that over the course of his time in Evening’s service. How much worse, I didn’t know . . . but for much of that time, he’d been involved in some sort of relationship with Oleander de Merelands, an assassin and poisoner who had definitely killed Lily, the Lady of the Tea Gardens, and had probably killed King Gilad Windermere in the Mists, Arden’s father and our rightful King. Simon could have been complicit in all of that. There was no way to be sure, save for asking him.

  Traditionally, once someone has been elf-shot, it’s a little difficult to have a conversation. My niece, Karen, is an oneiromancer, and could carry me into his dreams, but that wasn’t good enough. Dreams are funny things. Even lucid dreams, guided by an oneiromancer, could be more symbols and ideas than actual facts. I needed information. I needed guidance.

  I needed Simon to wake up.

  The parking lot at Paso Nogal Park was empty. It was also locked, with a heavy chain holding the lot’s wooden gates together. I stopped the car and glared at the chain, as if that would be enough to bust it open.

  “What in the name of the root and the branch is that doing there?” I demanded.

  “Parks Department,” said Quentin, unbuckling his seatbelt. “Kids from the local high school were driving up here at night to smoke and drink, so they started locking the gate again.”

  “Park on the road,” said May.

  “I’ve got this,” said Quentin. He got out of the car, walking to the gate, and produced a key from his pocket. It fit the lock exactly, and in a matter of seconds, we were driving through.