The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  It wasn’t hard to know which one contained Simon, as it also appeared to contain every pixie that had been present when I woke up, and several dozen more on top of that. It was like watching a Christmas tree rave in the process of getting started, since they were all glowing, and some of them were flashing, giving the whole thing an unsettling strobe effect.

  There was what looked, at my current scale, like at least a twenty-foot gap between me and them. Whatever magic they had used to reduce us all to pixie-size hadn’t been kind enough to give us wings, or otherwise equip us for life in a pixie-scaled environment.

  Since I couldn’t fly, I settled for the next best thing, cupping my hands around my mouth and shouting, “Hey!”

  A few pixies turned in my direction, looking surprised to see me standing there. I had time to wonder how many unwitting guests they had wandering around the place, if I could be such a shock, before two of them launched themselves across the gap, wings working furiously, grabbed me by the arms, and flew back the way they had come.

  At first, I was too surprised to struggle. Then I was slightly too smart to struggle, since being dropped would have been . . . bad. I’ve fallen from a great height before, great enough to break every bone in my body, including a few that Jin—our resident healer—said she hadn’t been sure could break. Being roughly six inches tall would probably make the landing less traumatic, but I wasn’t willing to bet on it, not when the pixies didn’t seem to be acting in a malicious way.

  They set me back on my feet at the other branch, where a conscious, groggy-looking Simon was standing in the mouth of his own toadstool, awkwardly patting a sobbing Lilac on the shoulder. The purple pixie’s wings were flat against her back, making her stand out in sharp relief from the rest of the pixies, whose wings were in constant, chiming vibration.

  Simon met my eyes across the crowd of diminutive onlookers and grimaced apologetically.

  “I forgot,” he said. “Their colony was much smaller the last time I came through this way, and they didn’t have the resources to defend themselves against travelers. Or to set traps.”

  “Thought you were dead,” wailed Lilac, and went back to sobbing.

  “I know, dear, I know,” said Simon. He stopped patting her shoulder and began stroking her wings instead, the way he might have stroked a cat. The motion seemed to soothe her. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t come to see you, any of you. I would have, if I could.”

  Lilac looked mollified. That didn’t mean she stopped crying.

  “Okay, wait, I missed something.” I pushed my way through the crowd of pixies. They let me by easily. Apparently, the fact that I’d been captured in the company of Simon Torquill, of all people, meant I was owed deference now. “Why would you have been visiting the local pixie colony? What possible reason could you have had for visiting the local pixie colony?”

  “Ah,” said Simon, looking relieved. I’d asked him something easy. “I helped them establish it.”

  I stared at him. I didn’t say anything. Saying anything would mean acknowledging what he had just said as something that made sense, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

  Simon sighed. “Before Patrick married his mermaid and moved to the Undersea, he cultivated a remarkably large colony of pixies in his workshop. As an unlanded Baron, he was afforded a certain amount of courtesy by the other noble households, and if he wanted to keep, ah, ‘pets,’ they weren’t going to stop him, even if they were going to laugh at him behind their hands. The fashion then was for—”

  “I’m going to stop you there, because I’m pretty sure I know what the fashion was.”

  Simon nodded, looking relieved. Lilac’s sobs were slowing. That may have contributed to his relief. “Patrick didn’t want to leave them defenseless, but he couldn’t take them to the Undersea. This land was unclaimed, and close enough to Amandine’s borders that it seemed likely to stay such. He asked me to help them resettle.”

  “You carried an entire pixie colony from San Francisco to here.”

  “Yes.”

  I paused. “Poppy was in Muir Woods. They’re moving between the Summerlands and the mortal world. How . . . ?”

  “They use the knowes, as a rule, or they use the door I opened for them.”

  I stared at him again. “You opened a door. For the pixies.”

  “Yes. It’s in a tree in the Golden Gate Park botanical garden. It’s quite small. No one larger than a squirrel is even likely to notice that it’s there.”

  “Best door,” said Poppy proudly. “Most colonies haven’t got one. We do lots of hunting through it.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, looking at Simon in confusion. It was getting harder and harder to reconcile the things I knew about him—that he’d kidnapped his own niece and sister-in-law, that he’d spent years in the company of a woman who killed for fun as much as for money—with the things I was learning.

  People are complicated. That’s the problem with people. It would be so much easier if they could all be put into easy little boxes and left there, never changing, never challenging the things I decided about them.

  Lilac pushed away from Simon, wiping her eyes. “He used to always come, and then he never came, and we thought—I thought—he had died. And if he was dead, who would tell Patrick where we were? Who would tell him we were all right?”

  “Patrick’s fine,” I told her. “I’m sure he’ll be pleased to hear that you’re all doing so well. But Simon and I need to go, and we need to take my squire with me.” If Quentin was awake by now, he was probably going to be pissed about the fact that I hadn’t untied him before running after the pixies.

  A little discomfort is good for the soul. I’d managed to get myself free, and he could do the same, given the proper incentive. A giant blob of pine resin on his feet was pretty good incentive.

  The pixies exclaimed in dismay, their words lost under the din from their buzzing wings. Simon put up his hands. The pixies settled down.

  “We will come back, but October is right. We have things we need to accomplish, and we can’t do them while here—or while shrunken to this scale.”

  “We do fine at this size,” shouted one of the pixie men.

  “You have wings,” said Simon. “That expands your range rather a lot.”

  “We can’t give you wings,” said Lilac. She sounded genuinely sad about it.

  Simon offered her a warm smile. “That’s all right, dear. A safe trip back to ground level and our original sizes will suffice.”

  “And my squire,” I added hastily. “I really do need him back.”

  “I’ll get the other one,” said Poppy, and launched herself into the air. Seen at this size, the way the pixies took flight was really impressive. She bent at the knees, jumping straight up from a standing start, and somehow snapped her wings open with sufficient velocity to continue propelling her, never allowing gravity to catch hold. The muscular structure behind her wings must have been incredible; otherwise, not even magic would have been enough to support her.

  Simon and Lilac were speaking animatedly when I turned back to them, their voices low, their postures a curious mix of old friends and total strangers. This might have been the first time they had been able to speak as equals. Before, he had been too big and she had been too small, so they had existed in the curious mix of pantomime and patience that had always defined my interactions with the pixies.

  Lilac looked at him like he was a hero. To her, he probably was. And Simon . . . Simon looked at her like she was a revelation he had never expected to have. She didn’t know what he’d done. She didn’t know that he was the villain in so many other stories. She didn’t care.

  Maybe when this was all over, if Sylvester didn’t have Simon thrown into the dungeon to think about what he’d done, I could convince them both that exile among the pixies was the perfect punishment. Sylvester would see it as a way to g
et his brother out of his life forever without actually killing him. Simon . . .

  Simon might see it as a way of going home.

  Poppy flew back, landing in front of me and letting go of Quentin at the same time, so that he pitched forward. I grabbed him before he could hit the ground. He blinked at me, looking stunned.

  “We’re pixies,” he said, tone implying that he couldn’t decide between amazement and offense.

  “No, we’re pixie-sized,” I corrected, setting him back on his feet. “No wings for us. We triggered one of their automatic defenses, and they took us prisoner.”

  “But we’re well sorry now, honest we are,” said Poppy brightly. “Can’t make an omelet without killing a few chickens.”

  Quentin turned his confusion on her. “What do you think an omelet is?” he asked.

  Poppy laughed. “I like this one,” she informed me.

  “I do, too,” I said. Raising my voice, I called, “Simon, it’s time to go.”

  He leaned in and kissed Lilac on the forehead before stepping away from her and walking over to join me and Quentin. “A pity,” he said. “I was just starting to enjoy myself.”

  “You’ve been enjoying yourself since you woke up,” I said.

  He shrugged, expression guileless. “Can you blame me?”

  “I guess not.” I looked back to Poppy. “Can you put us back the way you found us now, please?”

  “You said you’d come back,” she said. “You and he both. You will come back?”

  “A promise is a promise.”

  She grinned broadly. “Omelets for all,” she said. Reaching into a pouch at her waist, she pulled out a fistful of glittering pixie dust and blew it in our faces.

  Then, before any of us could react, she stepped forward and shoved us out of the tree.

  We fell as gracefully as could be expected—which was to say, not at all. The three of us plummeted like rocks, Quentin flapping his arms like he thought he could suddenly learn to fly, me straining to grab hold of him before we got too far apart, and Simon just falling, dropping like a rock as the ground came up to meet us with incredible speed.

  Wait. Too much speed. Our fall couldn’t account for how quickly the ground was gaining, or for the way the landscape was shifting around us, everything becoming smaller, including the pixies, who were dwindling not just due to distance, but due to a shift in scale.

  Then my feet hit the ground, knocking the air out of me with the force of the impact, but not breaking any bones. I bent my knees to keep from toppling over. Quentin wasn’t so lucky. He went sprawling, narrowly missing another of those huge puffball mushrooms.

  Simon landed on his feet, a pleasant smile on his face. “Well,” he said. “Wasn’t that fun? We should really make it a point to bring gifts when we come back. I seem to recall the pixies in Patrick’s workshop being exceedingly fond of preserves and—” He stopped mid-sentence and toppled forward, the smile still on his face.

  “Simon!” I rushed to catch him, grabbing him by his shoulders and hoisting him up as best I could. There was no tension left in his body. He was dead weight, hanging against me like a doll made in the shape of a man. “Quentin, help me!”

  Quentin rushed to my side, helping me lever Simon into a position where we could lower him to the ground and brace his back against the nearest tree. He didn’t wake up. Even when I lightly slapped his cheeks, his eyes stayed closed and his breathing stayed steady, betraying no sign that he was aware of our presence. Quentin and I exchanged a wide-eyed, terrified look.

  “This is bad,” he said.

  “Give me your phone,” I said.

  Quentin didn’t argue, just pulled the phone out of his pocket and passed it to me. There was a new picture of him and Dean on the lock screen, this time of the two of them riding the carousel at the Yerba Buena Gardens, looking disgustingly cute. I barely glanced at it before swiping my thumb across the image, pulling up the keypad, and dialing.

  I had no idea what time it was. Quentin’s phone, despite being modified to work in the Summerlands, didn’t seem to know, either; the time on the display was eighty-nine o’clock, and I was pretty sure that was wrong. Walther might not even be in his office.

  The phone rang once, twice, and I was resigning myself to trying to find a way to leave a neutral but urgent voicemail when there was a click, and Walther said, “Professor Davies here.”

  “Walther, it’s me.”

  “Toby! Did Raj get the formula to you in time?”

  “He did. That’s sort of the problem. We got hit by some kind of pixie knock-out powder and shrunk down to their size, woke up, got re-enlarged, and now Simon’s asleep again and I can’t wake him up. Is there any chance their knock-out dust interacted badly with your elf-shot cure?”

  There was a long pause. Too long.

  “Hello? Walther? Are you there?”

  “All those things were words, and they all left your mouth, but I’m having trouble with the idea that they form any sort of coherent sentence.” Walther took a deep breath, the inhalation clearly audible through the phone. “Okay, first question: is he alive?”

  “He’s breathing.”

  “Good, that means it’s not the sort of spell interaction where you need a resurrection to fix it. What do his pupils look like?”

  I leaned forward and pried Simon’s left eyelid carefully open. His iris had been reduced to a thin ring of honey gold around the enormous black circle of his pupil.

  “Dilated,” I said, letting go.

  “Right. Last question. What does he do when you cause him pain?”

  “I slapped him. He didn’t wake up.”

  “Cause him more pain.”

  “I’m not going to knee him in the nuts just to see what happens.”

  “So stick him with a pin or something. I need the sort of shock that a normal person couldn’t sleep through.”

  I sighed. “Hang on. Quentin, hold this.” I handed the phone to my squire and pulled the knife from my belt. Leaning carefully forward, I dug the tip of it against the skin of Simon’s hand until it broke the surface, sending a trickle of smoke-scented blood running down the channel between his knuckles.

  Simon didn’t stir.

  I leaned back, reaching for the phone. Quentin returned it to me. Bringing it to my ear, I said, “He didn’t wake up.”

  “Okay. It’s a bad interaction. Based on his pupils, I’d say he’s basically stoned. It may wear off on its own. It may also mean he’s out for a while.”

  “How long?”

  There was a pause before Walther said, “I don’t know. If he doesn’t wake up soon, bring me a blood sample and I’ll see what I can find. Try not to let him get exposed to anything else.”

  “Right. I’ll talk to you soon.” I hung up the phone and handed it back to Quentin.

  “What did he say?”

  “That we’re screwed. Hang on, I’m going to do something stupid.” I stood, cupping my hands around my mouth, and called up to the tree, “Hey, Poppy, can you come down here for a second?”

  A bright orange mote of light zipped from one of the high branches and descended to hover in front of my face, where it resolved into the pixie woman who had been so happy to show me around. She waved, expression shy.

  “Hi,” I said. “You can understand me, right?”

  Poppy nodded, wings chiming.

  “Great. So here’s the deal. Simon was elf-shot. I had him woken up to help me find my sister, but the countercharm was still in his system, and I think the stuff you used to knock us out is interacting poorly with it. I can’t carry him the way he is right now. Is there any chance you can shrink him again, so I can stick him in my pocket until we figure out a way to wake him up?”

  Poppy clapped her hands over her mouth, looking alarmed. I shook my head.

  “I’m not mad,
I just need to get moving. So can you?”

  She hesitated before nodding and zipping away, back into the trees. I waited impatiently until she reappeared, and started flying circles around me and Quentin, trying to move us away from Simon’s body.

  I took a big step back, reaching forward to haul Quentin after me. Poppy gave one approving ring before she darted forward, pulling something from her belt, and threw it into Simon’s face. There was a burst of bright orange glitter.

  When it cleared, Simon had dwindled to the size of a pixie. That was expected.

  Poppy, standing there, still barefoot and glowing bright orange, but suddenly built to human scale, was less so. I blinked. She blinked. Then, looking absolutely delighted, she did a little jig step and clapped her hands together.

  “It worked, it worked, oh, I’m a miracle and no mistake! Look what I did! Look what I’ve done!”

  “I can see what you’ve done, I just don’t understand it,” I said. “Why are you big?”

  “Because your friend’s small,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Not a good enough answer,” said Quentin.

  “We don’t have big outside magic like you wingless do,” said Poppy. “If we did, you wouldn’t go in for swatting us half so often, because we’d swat you right back. Pow!” She paused to giggle before adding, “We make an inside magic. All of us together, we can small the wingless down by all giving a little. If you want someone to be small without you calling on the whole flock, somebody has to give a lot. That’s me! I’m giving a lot!”

  I blinked. “So you can make someone else small if you use, what, all your magic?”

  “Not all,” she said. “Most, though. Not too much left for me. If you said ‘Poppy, make yourself to look like a human-kind,’ I couldn’t do it.”