The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  Her tone was mild, almost bored, like she was remarking on the weather or talking about what she was going to serve for dinner. I stared at the back of her head, so much suddenly making sense. Blind Michael had borrowed the eyes of his Riders, but there had always been elements in Faerie who would have been delighted, even honored to join his Ride. People for whom a few extra teeth and claws would have seemed like a gift instead of a punishment. Instead, he’d taken children, snatching them from their beds and twisting them to his own ends. Why?

  Because there is power in blood, and there is power in suffering, and for centuries, Blind Michael’s lands had been a constant source of suffering. He had carved the islet with his own two hands, and stabilized and expanded it on the backs of the children he destroyed.

  This was a graveyard that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other. No matter how far we walked, we would still be walking in the footprints of the dead.

  Acacia looked over her shoulder, smiling sadly at the expression on my face. “Now you understand,” she said. “My mother set her children against us—against me, who had the audacity to love a son of Maeve. She would have killed us both for our crimes, slaughtered our children in their cradles, and all for the sin of loving. He Rode with the best intentions, once. What he took, he thought the world could spare.”

  Simon turned his face away, but not fast enough to keep me from seeing the profound discomfort in his eyes. Good. He needed to remember that monsters were made from the best of intentions—and I needed to remember that Simon, despite being polite and friendly and beloved of pixies, was also the man who had taken me away from my family and Luna and Rayseline away from Sylvester. He claimed to have done it all with the best of intentions. Well, Blind Michael had claimed the same thing, and look what that had done. Some of his victims—most of his victims, when I counted the dead—were never going to recover.

  Quentin was still holding my hand, clenching tightly enough that my fingers hurt. I didn’t try to pull away, not even when we turned a corner and there it was: the stable, so close that I could smell the straw and horse-sweat scent of it. I tried to breathe shallowly, but I couldn’t stop the scent from creeping in and filling my nostrils, bringing too many memories along. This was where nightmares were born.

  The tangled thorn briars that had once locked the stable doors were gone; the doors stood open, allowing the inhabitants to come and go as they pleased. That wasn’t the only change. The walls were still dark wood and stone, but they had been scrubbed at some point, and were no longer caked in several centuries of filth. The floor was clean. Everything smelled of horse, but not of urine or feces. Just hot skin, and fur, and all the other scents that were unavoidable when there were animals present.

  Given more time, given more changes, this place might stop making my skin crawl. But I wasn’t going to count on it.

  “The changeling boy was kept here,” said Acacia, indicating the stable.

  “Wait,” I said. “Blind Michael snatched a changeling powerful enough to rip holes in the world, and stuck him in the stable?”

  “He was mortal,” said Acacia, like that explained everything—and maybe, to her, it did. “Rider or ridden. In all the years I watched my husband working, you were the only changeling I ever saw him treat as anything other than a beast of burden.”

  “Lucky me,” I said bleakly, looking at the stable. I pulled my hand out of Quentin’s. He didn’t fight me. He knew what I was about to do, and he wanted no part of it.

  Might as well get this over with. I turned and offered him the candle. To no one’s surprise, it burst back into flame as soon as it was clear that I intended to give it to someone else. “Hold this,” I said.

  He blinked. “What—?”

  “It’s going to be hard enough to find August’s magic under everything in here. I don’t need to have the Luidaeg’s candle confusing me.” The Babylon candle didn’t smell of blood. It didn’t really smell of anything, not even smoke. That didn’t mean it couldn’t confuse things. The Luidaeg is a sledgehammer in a world of scalpels, and when she gets involved, it leaves a mark.

  “Okay,” said Quentin uncertainly. He took the candle and pulled it close to his chest, so that the light of it bathed his face, making everything golden and wavering.

  I offered him the most sincere smile I could muster, clapped him on the shoulder, and turned away from him. What came next was something I would have to do alone.

  Blind Michael’s stables—and they would always be his, Acacia could be lady of these lands for a thousand years, could do everything in her power to erase the stain of his legacy, and this place would still belong to him, drenched in the effects of his good intentions, of his monstrosity—loomed like an empty eye socket, black and bleak and dripping with menace. I took a deep breath and forced myself to step inside, past the threshold. I didn’t look back. If I had, even once, it would have become impossible to continue on.

  With every step, the shadows got deeper, and the smell of horses got stronger, even though most of the stalls were currently empty. I shivered. This was the real reason I’d given the candle to Quentin. If the shadows had danced when the flame flickered, I would have run screaming.

  Some wounds never really heal. They just scab over enough to let you keep on going.

  When I reached the center of the building, I stopped, braced myself against what was about to hit me, and closed my eyes.

  Your name is October; you are doing this to save the man you love, I thought, and breathed in deeply.

  Magic is distinctive. No two people have the same magic, no matter how superficially similar they may seem. Amandine’s roses are not Evening’s roses are not Luna’s roses. My copper is not my mother’s blood, no matter how similar the two might eventually become. Magic echoes. It does not repeat.

  Magic is ephemeral. It fades with time, with distance, as other scents and other footsteps blur and rub it away. Even the strongest spells were never intended to last forever. In the mortal world, dawn chips away at magic with every sunrise, erasing it from the world, making space for something new.

  This wasn’t the mortal world. This wasn’t even the Summerlands, where a thousand competing local regents wrote and rewrote the land according to their own desires. This was an islet, so far from the places most of us knew that the rules were different. For Blind Michael’s lands, the time between August’s arrival and mine had been nothing more than one long, unending night. Acacia had softened it, finally allowing it to die, but there was still a chance.

  I breathed in, and the magic of hundreds of stolen children washed over me, screaming. Here were the illusions they had spun, desperate to hide themselves from the man who had stolen them, who was still stealing them, breaking their minds and bodies in order to remake them in his own image. Here were the transformations they had attempted—and, in some cases, achieved. One child’s magic had smelled of bluebells and meadowsweet, and when I breathed it, I could taste the moment he had burst into a whole warren of rabbits, each holding a single piece of his heart. They had fled for the trees, and for all I knew, some of them were living there still, mute and unaware of what they had once been, but free.

  August, I thought. I am looking for August.

  Flowers and fruits and minerals and ideas, the smell of spilled cream drying in the sunlight, of fresh-milled grain, of ripe tomatoes, of sunlight on a bird’s wing. All the shades of magic washed over and through me, choking me, bringing tears to my eyes. Most of these children had died here. The ones who hadn’t . . . they would never go home. All this magic had been lost, harvested like wheat to reinforce Blind Michael’s own aspirations.

  And under so much of it—not at the bottom; I didn’t think I could find the bottom if I spent a year trying—I found a ribbon of rose wrapped in smoke, all but buried under magic fueled by panic and agony and fear. August hadn’t been in emotional distress when she’d arr
ived here. She had been on an adventure, doing something bright and brave.

  Had she even paused to realize how many children she was leaving behind? Had she promised them she would come back, and died a little inside when she broke her word? Or had she seen them as just one more obstacle between her and the goal of fulfilling the prophecy about our bloodline? I didn’t know. I didn’t even want to guess. It was impossible not to wonder.

  “Quentin, bring me the candle,” I said, holding fast to the traceries of August’s magic. I didn’t want to let go. If I did, I might not find them again.

  “Coming,” he said, and then he was beside me, pushing the candle into my waiting hand.

  The flame began to smoke, wreathing me in gray. “Simon!” I shouted. “I think we’re leaving!”

  “You found her?” He was suddenly beside me, looking at me with wide, anxious eyes. “Where are we going?”

  “No idea,” I said. The Babylon Road is a path between two points. It could get us there and back by the candle’s light, but where “there” was going to be was anybody’s guess. “Wherever August went.”

  “Come back when you can,” called Acacia, from somewhere in the fog. I couldn’t see her anymore. Maybe that was a kindness. “I’m always happy for your company.”

  “I’ll try,” I called, and I didn’t hear anything from her after that. The fog was too thick, obscuring the stable walls entirely.

  But it didn’t obscure the path that seemed to unspool beneath my feet, leading off into the distance. I started walking, cautiously at first, and then—when I didn’t slam face-first into the stable wall—faster, Simon and Quentin following behind. Quentin looked eager, relieved even. We were on an adventure, and we were leaving his nightmares behind. Simon looked distant, his face settling into an expression of neutral contemplation.

  I glanced at him. “I thought you would have seen Blind Michael’s lands before.” It was as close as I could come to accusing him of using some forgotten, forsaken corner of the islet as a prison, back when Luna and Raysel had been in his custody.

  Simon jumped a little, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “It was too dangerous to tempt the attention of two of the Firstborn. I shared my bed and my heart with the youngest of their number, the one who understood the least about her own strength, and there were times I thought Amandine might kill me by mistake. I avoided them whenever I could.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I would have thought that if anyone would understand the inability to keep out of the path of the Firstborn, it would be you,” he said, and attempted a smile. It fell flat. He could tell, because he gave it up quickly, and said, “My . . . eventual employer was always there, watching, but as she seemed content to maintain her personal masquerade, I felt it was safe to go about my business, despite the proximity of two of my wife’s sisters. Had I brought Blind Michael and the Mother of Trees into the matter, I might have expired from sheer nervousness.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  He sighed. “You’ll have to ask me eventually. You might as well stop dancing around the topic and have your answers given to you.”

  “I don’t want to hate you more than I already do when I still need to work with you,” I said.

  Quentin said nothing, but he stepped a little closer to me, matching his steps to mine, so that it was clear that whatever Simon said next, I wasn’t going to be dealing with it alone. That was a good thing. Simon had been bound not to act against me, but there was nothing that was going to stop me from breaking his nose if I thought it was necessary.

  Simon sighed. The sound carried through the fog, seeming to echo across whatever landscape we were now walking through. The light from our candle was the only constant, and it wasn’t strong enough to give us any sense of presence or place. We were somewhere, and we were in the process of transitioning to someplace else. Everything around us was inconsequential. Or maybe it was very consequential, and a dragon was going to come charging out of the fog to devour us all. We wouldn’t know until it happened.

  “Everything I did, I did for August,” he said. “I lacked your skill at asking the right boons of the sea witch—or perhaps I merely lacked her goodwill. I was the brother-in-law she never asked for, the failure who had married her youngest sister when Amandine deserved so much better than a landless younger son whose only aspiration was to own the nicest vest in the Westlands. When I asked her to aid me, she said she could do it, but that the price would be more than I could bear. I would have done it anyway, if she had been able to promise August would be safe. The woman I wound up pledging myself to, she was willing to make that promise.”

  “Yeah, well, the woman you went to work for lied.”

  Simon grimaced. “I know that now.”

  The Luidaeg can’t lie. She’s incapable of it. Everything she says is carefully considered and sounded out, to avoid possible contradictions. Evening, on the other hand, is a liar born and bred, and she had probably been willing to tell Simon whatever she thought he wanted to hear, especially if Oleander—her favorite pet—had been asking to keep him. Upset Amandine, make sure August stayed lost, and placate Oleander, all at the same time. It was elegant and efficient, two things Evening loved.

  “At first, I was trying to find a way to open the doors,” said Simon softly. “I was learning alchemy and mixing potions and making deliveries. I was transforming her enemies. It all started so small, and everything we did seemed to take us a step closer to finding the door August had walked through, to prying it open and reaching the other side. Amandine had her own ways of looking. She wanted nothing to do with me. She blamed me, and my brother, for giving August the example of heroism. With time, it became less about the immediate results, and more about keeping my mistress happy—and keeping Oleander happy, of course. I doubt our mutual owner would have been more than mildly annoyed if Oleander had slit my throat one day. She would have made Oleander clean up the mess, but Oleander was always the more productive of the two of us. I was a prize. The fallen Torquill, the bad brother, the one she’d lured astray. Oleander, she made things function.”

  Quentin started to open his mouth. I shook my head, cutting him off. Simon’s voice dripped with bitterness and loathing, almost all of it self-directed. If we interrupted him now, he wasn’t going to resume.

  “I am . . . very sorry for what I am about to say,” said Simon slowly. “When my mistress saw that Sylvester had taken an interest in the latest scion of Amandine’s line, when she saw that there was going to be another chance for the prophecy to be fulfilled, when she understood that being partially mortal didn’t make you harmless, she decided the best way to act without breaking her own bindings, which forbid her to directly harm the children of Amandine’s line, was to task me to destroy my brother. And I am so sorry, but I went along willingly, because he hadn’t been there for me when I lost my daughter, when I lost my wife as a consequence. I hated that he was happy and I wasn’t. I wanted him to suffer. I thought that after you disappeared, presumed dead, she would let me bring them home. I was wrong.”

  I stopped walking to stare at Simon. “You’re telling me you kidnapped them because of me? Because you didn’t want Sylvester to be there to take care of me?”

  “She wanted you gone and believed my brother might present an obstacle to your own self-destruction; she wanted him distracted before you were removed from the board,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “I’m so sorry, October. I would lie to you, if I didn’t think you were tired of being lied to.”

  There were no words. I stared at him, unable to decide whether I was more furious with him or with Evening. In the end, he won the coin toss. He was there for me to rage at, and Evening was still asleep, sealed off in a forgotten Road, where she could rot for all I cared.

  “You stole them because of me,” I hissed. “You destroyed your own brother’s life—you destroyed my life—you shattered Ra
yseline’s mind, and you did it because Evening told you to.”

  Simon flinched when I said Evening’s name, actually flinched, like he’d been slapped. “Please don’t help her find us.”

  “What did you do to them? Where did you leave them?”

  “I made a bubble,” he said. “I made it the same way Blind Michael made his lands, the way Gilad anchored his knowe. I forced magic into the space between worlds, and then I placed them inside it. They wouldn’t starve, there. They wouldn’t get sick, they wouldn’t die—”

  “No, they’d just sit in absolute darkness until you came back to get them, and also, by the way, you fucked up how time ran there. Rayseline grew up. I was gone for fourteen years, and when I got back, she was an adult who hadn’t seen the sun since she was a little girl! You destroyed her, and you did it because what? You thought there was a chance that maybe, if you were a good boy someday, Evening would stop jerking you around and give you back your daughter?”

  “Yes,” he said levelly, looking me in the eye. “That’s exactly why I did it. August meant more to me than anyone else in the world. She still does. You can consider me your enemy if you like, even though I mean you no harm, now or later, but I did what I did for the sake of your sister, and if you told me to do it again, and I believed that by doing so I could bring her home a moment faster, I would raise my hand in your service. The best of intentions for me can be the worst of consequences for someone else.”

  I couldn’t find the words to reply to him. I just stared, the Babylon candle in my hand, the mist eddying around us, and wondered when things had gone so wrong for me that a moment like this one could even be possible. Quentin was standing a few feet away, close enough not to get lost, silent. There was nothing for him to say. This was between me and the man who had ruined my life—and no matter how much better things were for me now, he hadn’t known that then. Even if he had, that would have been no excuse. He had made my choices for me. He had taken one future away and substituted it with another.