The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  “That doesn’t explain the dirt,” I said.

  Simon actually laughed. “You see? I talk like what I am, because I expect to have forever to get to my point. The dirt, then. When Oberon said he was going away, and that we were all to move ourselves to the Summerlands, because he couldn’t trust us unattended in the deeper lands . . . oh, it was an exodus the likes of which I can scarce describe. Worlds upon worlds, some large, some small, all pouring into the bounds of one small realm. Deeper Faerie is not all of a size. Some of the realms are more properly considered islets, islands where the local rules of engagement have been established to benefit one race of fae over another. Avalon held no more than five hundred hearts when it was turned inside out and wrung dry for the sake of Oberon’s order, and it was one of the larger single holdings.”

  “So deep Faerie is more like a bunch of really big knowes?” asked Quentin.

  “In a sense, yes. If you took all of my brother’s land, not only the part which forms the knowe proper, but the gardens and the forest and every other scrap of it, and if you dropped it into empty space, out beyond anything, with only a thin channel of power to clasp the nearest anchor, it would become a seed, and from that seed would grow another realm, one large enough to house all those who dwelt there, slowly drawing power from them to fuel its own expansion. With no one living in them, the deeper realms can grow no greater.”

  “Will they die?” asked Quentin.

  “No. But they may slumber. The dirt.” Simon clapped his hands, not seeming to notice how I flinched away. “There are crops which only grow in certain soil, things that various of our newly homeless citizens couldn’t imagine doing without. The more entrepreneurial among them realized that with greenhouses and buckets, they could corner the market on those little tastes of home. People who carried dirt away from their abandoned lands are richer now than those who carried only gold and jewels.”

  “So what are the berries around here?” asked Quentin.

  “Something that arose in the Summerlands. I doubt anyone has eaten many of them, save perhaps for the local pixies: they’re as likely to be poisonous as they are to be delicious, and why should we take risks when we have so many of the fruits of home yet to enjoy?”

  “Snob,” I said, almost fondly, and Simon looked pleased.

  The trees were getting shorter and twistier, becoming almost parodies of themselves, while the mushrooms and toadstools were becoming taller and broader, casting umbrella-shaped shadows over the land. The glow came from their gills, and as the size of those gills expanded, so did the intensity. The earthy smell of fungus pervaded everything, sometimes almost obscuring the scent of August’s magic. I had to close my eyes a few times, trusting Quentin to guide me as I clung to the thread I was trying to follow.

  Part of me was rebelling at the ridiculousness of the entire situation. I was following a magical trail over a century old, and I didn’t have the training to know whether it was the right one. Maybe I was on my way to discover August’s favorite mushroom-picking spot, and we should have been heading for Shadowed Hills after all. Or maybe there were a hundred trails like this one, a thousand, all leading somewhere different, a child’s map of the land surrounding Amandine’s tower. I had never really explored that much. My world had consisted of the tower and the woods between home and Shadowed Hills, where I had run night after night, looking for companionship, for warmth, for welcome. Amandine hadn’t made a home for me, and so I hadn’t felt like it was safe to use her as my compass.

  It was hard not to be jealous of August. She had been the one to enjoy our mother’s attention when Amandine was present and focused, not mourning for the child she’d lost and resenting the one she had. It felt weird, yearning for my mother’s love when she was the reason I was hiking through a creepy toadstool forest instead of tucked safe home in my bed, but that’s the thing about parents: they’re never simple. They’re never straightforward. And try as we might, we can never quite be free of the shadows they cast over us.

  The ground was getting marshy, tugging at our shoes and slowing us down. I scowled. “Next time Mom decides to ruin my night, I hope she does it after I’ve had time to change my clothes.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything, but your footwear is quite unsuitable,” said Simon.

  I glared at him. It was almost a relief to have a person to glare at. Glaring at a situation is possible, but it’s never as fulfilling as we want it to be. “These sandals were totally appropriate for a karaoke bachelorette party,” I informed him.

  Simon blinked. “I understood perhaps three words of that.”

  “Time marches on,” I said airily. “I was at a party, these shoes were fine, then I was dealing with a home invasion and the abduction of my fiancé, and now these shoes are not fine. I don’t want to be barefoot in the middle of the creepy mushroom forest, I’ll deal.” There was a time when I would have been worried about blisters and chafing. Thankfully, that time was past. Any blisters that tried to form would heal as quickly as they’d come, and I would keep on going.

  “I can try to improve them, if you don’t mind,” said Simon, with surprising delicacy. “You would need to remove them first, as I am forbidden to use my magic upon you, but I know a few tricks.”

  I eyed him. “You want to transform my clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  “The old Queen used to do that to me all the time. Generally without my consent. Illusions weren’t good enough for her.”

  Simon grimaced. “I won’t make excuses for her. Her ascension came at the cost of a good man’s life, and destroyed the lives of his children for far too long. I didn’t know the full scope of the plan before it was too far along for me to change a single thing in how it unfolded.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You were there. I mean, a lot of people were there, but you were—were you already with Oleander? Do you know?” Everyone said Oleander had been responsible for King Gilad’s death. No one had ever been able to prove it.

  “Shoes, please,” said Simon. He held out his hand.

  It was clear that I wasn’t going to get any answers until I gave him my sandals. I sighed and bent to undo the buckles before stepping out of my shoes and handing them over. The soft earth squished between my toes. Quentin looked entirely too amused. That may have been the sleep deprivation. He normally had more sense than that.

  “To answer your first question, no, I was not yet with the Lady de Merelands, although I had made her acquaintance a time or two. Enough that—and I say this not to boast, but with the resignation of hindsight—she desired me. She disliked your mother for reasons of her own. The thought of stealing and corrupting a Torquill boy from his lawful wife appealed to her. She was already in Even—in her employ. I’ve asked myself, more than once, whether what happened may have been triggered by Oleander asking her mistress for a puppy.”

  Simon’s fingers moved as he spoke, plucking twigs from the bracken, blades of grass from the base of nearby mushrooms: anything, in fact, save for the mushrooms themselves. He began to weave his pile of pilfered ingredients into a small wicker loop.

  “And my second question?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Simon shook his head, not looking at me, still weaving. The smell of smoke and rotten oranges began to rise from his pores, tainting the air around him.

  I took a step backward. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “King Gilad Windermere was a good man. I think that may be what people say about him the most. Not that he was a brilliant ruler, not that he was a kind king, but that he was a good man. Good men with crowns are difficult to find. The fae soul was not meant to have so much power over others without becoming harder, colder, less capable of charity. We have too much time to spend. It makes us miserly with it, in a way all out of proportion to its plenty. But he knew time was short. His parents had been assassinated when he was young, you see, and the throne thrust upon him.
His princehood was a brief, cruel thing, not long and rich and palatial. He understood that things change. He understood that brief was not the same as nonexistent. So he encouraged the acceptance of changelings in his Court. He allowed mixed-bloods to inherit from their parents—before him, titles passed only along purified bloodlines. So far as he knew, the Mists possessed no hope chest, and my Amy refused to reveal herself solely for the sake of becoming someone else’s tool, and so when love rose between fae of different worlds, their children were allowed to exist untampered with. My niece, January. You met her, I believe?”

  “I did,” I said quietly. It hadn’t been a long acquaintanceship: Jan died shortly after we met. I hadn’t been able to save her. Oh, I had tried, and sometimes it still ached to know that I had failed.

  “There are places, even still, where the fact that her mother was Daoine Sidhe and her father was Tylwyth Teg would have worked against her. Where she would have been expected to live as one thing or another, forsaking half her heritage.” His fingers continued moving, tying smaller and smaller knots. “But it was her mixed blood that gave her the alchemy that enabled her to do the marvelous things she did. Tylwyth Teg are more resistant to iron than many of us. She used that to her advantage, and she was happy. She was always such a happy girl.”

  “She has a daughter,” said Quentin, and watched Simon to see how he would react.

  To my surprise and relief, Simon smiled. “I know. I hope I have the opportunity to meet her someday.” He used his little loop of woodland rope to tie my sandals together. “Regardless, there were those who did not care for Gilad’s egalitarian approach to the monarchy, and feared he was making those changes because he thought to take a wife who did not share his bloodline. The woman who would become my keeper, she already disliked having a Tuatha de Dannan family sitting upon such a prominent throne. All thrones, she felt, belonged to her.”

  “But the false Queen was a mixed-blood,” I protested. “She had at least three different Firstborn.”

  “Yes. That was my keeper’s little joke that no one else understood, perhaps because it wasn’t funny. The imposter was the worst possible manifestation of certain peoples’ fears: someone whose heritage was so mixed that she couldn’t possibly bring stability to the land, whose magic was unpredictable, too weak and too strong at the same time. Someone they couldn’t judge based on the slope of her ears.”

  “That sounds sort of racist,” said Quentin.

  “It is, and it isn’t,” said Simon. “Similar fears fuel it. But in the case of Faerie, the blending is not so much race, although we use the word, as it is species. Some of us are not meant to mingle.” He waved his hand above my sandals, focusing the scent of his magic. Then he snapped his fingers.

  The wicker rope expanded to cover my footwear, wrapping it tight before falling away to reveal a pair of black leather ankle boots, the sort that seemed designed to wade through lava without being scorched. Simon offered them to me with a flourish.

  “This will do you better,” he said.

  “I hope so,” I replied, dodging the forbidden “thank you” as I took them. They fit my feet perfectly. “These are great.”

  Simon beamed. In Faerie, praise is often a suitable replacement for gratitude. “The spell should hold, if you don’t pick at it before it has a chance to settle.”

  “Swell.” We started walking again. “Do you really think Oleander killed the king because she wanted your body?”

  “No. She killed the king because she was ordered to. But the timing . . . it was an intricate thing, the timing. August announced that she was undertaking a quest, that she was going to find the doors to the deeper realms of Faerie and open them. That Oberon had always wanted us to find our own way home, and she seemed to know what she was talking about—she seemed to know a bit more than she should have. She had been speaking to someone. When I asked if I could help, she said no.” Simon took a deep breath. “She said I wasn’t a hero, and I wasn’t Firstborn, and I couldn’t help her.”

  “I saw her with a candle in your memory,” I said. “Do you know why?”

  “She was going somewhere,” he said. “On the Babylon Road.”

  That was a road I had taken myself. I frowned. “Do you think maybe the woman you worked for told her where to go?” August could be a tree in Acacia’s forest, enchanted to save her from Blind Michael. That would explain why she had never come home. Trees aren’t all that migratory.

  “Maybe,” said Simon. “I’d rather not wake her up to ask.”

  I shuddered. Then I sneezed.

  “What the . . . ?” I looked down. My foot was buried in the heart of a puffball mushroom, filling the air with glittery spores that swirled around us in a silver-and-blue cloud. I blinked. That didn’t help. My vision seemed to get more blurry every time I closed my eyes, even if it was only for an instant.

  I yawned. So did Quentin.

  “Uh-oh,” I said, and fell down.

  The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was a figure coming toward me through the glittering cloud. It was either very small or very far away, and it didn’t really matter either way, because I was gone.

  TEN

  I WOKE IN A DARK ROOM. My hands were tied behind my back, my feet were weighed down by some heavy, enveloping substance, and a sugary-tasting gag had been stuffed into my mouth, blocking off both speech and a distressing amount of my air. I bit down, and the gag yielded, releasing more sugar into my mouth. Suddenly, breathing was an exciting race to see whether I could chew faster than I choked.

  The worst part was, this wasn’t the strangest wake-up call I’d ever had.

  I was swallowing my third mouthful of the gag when the part of my mind that was constantly cataloging and storing away the labels for magical scents finally decided to come to the party, and informed me that I was chewing on a violet. That made sense, as far as flavor went, while simultaneously making no sense at all. The gag was exactly that—a gag, a single strip of material pulled tight around my head. It wasn’t a mash of pressed flowers, or anything ridiculous like that. Although I supposed it could be the petal from a gigantic violet, turned to a unique and somewhat antisocial application.

  There was another option there, one that probably made a little bit more sense, but I didn’t want to think about it until I had myself unstuck. All it would do was upset me. That was bad no matter what I was currently chewing on; I needed to keep my wits where they were.

  One nice thing about getting knocked out: it substitutes pretty well for sleep a lot of the time. I felt more alert than I had in a while. Eating my gag, bizarre as that sounds, was also helping. My blood sugar had not been in a good place.

  I took a last hard bite, swallowed a last sugary mouthful, and felt the gag drop away. Good: that was step one. I still couldn’t see anything, which was unusual. Fae have excellent night vision. We’re like cats, able to see in the slightest trace of light. For it to be this dark, there had to be no light at all—that, or something had been done to my eyes. The thought caused a brief spike of panic, until I blinked several times and confirmed that I could still feel my eyes. No one had removed them or sealed my eyelids shut.

  It says something about my life that this was a concern.

  If my gag had been edible and organic, maybe whoever tied me up had made the same mistake with whatever was tying my wrists. I twisted them inward as much as my bones allowed, until I could get the nails of my right hand against the bonds. Holding that position ached but didn’t actually hurt, which was a pleasant surprise. Gritting my teeth against the strain, I began digging my nails into the “rope.” It definitely wasn’t rope. It tore like an organic thing, yielding under my hand until I began to feel like this was some sort of perverse joke. Maybe whoever it was who had tied me up didn’t have much experience, or maybe they hadn’t actually been intending to hold me; maybe they just wanted to slow me down.

 
The world narrowed to my nails against the vines—I was almost sure they were vines—and the sticky green smell of sap that rose from them. Sweet pea, murmured the cataloging part of my mind, not as an endearment, but as an identification. Someone had gagged me with a violet and tied me up with sweet pea runners. This day just kept getting stranger and stranger.

  When the last vine broke, I pulled my hands from behind my back, massaging my wrists for a second before bending and feeling for whatever was covering my feet. To my dismay, if not surprise, my questing hands encountered what felt like the largest glob of hardening pine resin in the world. It hadn’t reached the “hard enough to shatter when you hit it with a hammer” stage yet, but it was well on its way. Swell.

  Pine resin is sticky, viscous, and greedy, if such a thing can be said about an inanimate substance: what it catches, it likes to keep. Still, it’s a liquid until it hardens, and it’s possible to pull things free, if you move slowly and don’t yank. Yanking is bad. Yanking increases the resistance of the stuff, and increased resistance means increased hardness. I would recover if I broke half the bones in my foot, but it would hurt, and it would slow me down. Better a little slowness now than a lot of slowness later.

  Carefully, I began to pull my knees to my chest, tugging against the sap. It tugged back, but as it wasn’t alive, and didn’t know what I was doing, it couldn’t fight as effectively as I could. It was like challenging a sleeping giant to a slow-motion wrestling match—and honestly, I would have been a lot more comfortable with an actual sleeping giant. At least then I could have screamed until it woke up and turned things into a more standard sort of fight. As it was, I had to keep pulling steadily but constantly, never varying the amount of pressure I was putting on, until finally my left foot came free, quickly followed by the right.