The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  And he had done it all with the very best of intentions.

  There was regret in Simon’s eyes. He knew I was going to hate him for this, that I was never going to forgive him for saying the things he’d said to me . . . and he was saying them anyway, because of all the Torquills, he was the one who refused to lie to me.

  “I’m too tired for this bullshit,” I snarled, turning away from him. “Come on. We need to find your daughter.”

  I walked, and he followed, and the mist closed in around us, and everything else was gone.

  FIFTEEN

  WE WALKED UNTIL IT seemed like there was nothing to the world but walking. There was no time on the Babylon Road, not really: our candle was our clock, and it hadn’t started burning down yet. It wouldn’t, until we had reached our final destination, I asked it to do something other than playing GPS, or our deadline was drawing near. I wasn’t actually sure about that last one. The Luidaeg might let us wander in the fog for our entire supposed year of service, and then claim that what she’d really wanted us to do for her was go out and gather dust for later use. She could be tricky that way.

  The mist cleared occasionally, revealing glimpses of sky or the surrounding landscape, which changed from step to step. One moment it was mountains. The next, it would be plains, or forest, or a great, surging sea beating itself senseless against a rocky shore. The scent of the wind changed even more constantly, now smelling of heather, or blackberry flowers, or redwoods. The only constant was that it never smelled of people. I couldn’t always pick up traces of other fae when they weren’t bleeding or using magic, but there was a flavor to the air in inhabited places, like they moved it around more just by being there. This air was sweet and alive, but it was empty.

  “Toby.” Quentin stepped up next to me, lips thin, eyes anxious. “I think we’re walking into deeper Faerie.”

  “I think you’re right,” I agreed. I had been able to accomplish that particular trick once before, with Tybalt’s help. Luna had opened us a Rose Road, and we had walked along it until he had sensed the presence of his nephew. Once he was sure Raj was somewhere near, Tybalt had opened a Shadow Road between where we were and where we needed to be.

  Oberon might have locked the front doors and told his subjects to stay in the Summerlands until he came back, but that didn’t mean he had sealed all the secret ways in and out of the deeper realms. He’d just made it harder for people to get there.

  “I don’t want to go back to deeper Faerie.”

  “Sorry, kiddo. We have to go where the candle takes us.”

  “I know.” He shook his head. “I’m sort of surprised you’re staying so calm. If somebody took Dean, I’d probably lose my shit, and I don’t lo—I like him a lot, but I’m not planning to stay with him forever.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “You’re a teenager. You’re allowed to date and figure out what you want before you have to settle down to doing . . . other things.” Simon didn’t know Quentin was the Crown Prince of the Westlands—or at least I assumed Simon didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. That was information that he didn’t need. “I’m calm because if I weren’t, I’d start screaming and never stop again. My job has always been dangerous. I never thought it could put the rest of you in danger in our own home.”

  But I should have. Simon was proof of that. Sylvester was a hero, and being a hero had put him in the position to be my mentor. Being my mentor had gotten his wife and daughter kidnapped, passively tortured, and imprisoned for an unmeasurable period of time. Being a hero meant that sometimes the danger followed you home.

  I was a hero now, too. I hadn’t sought the position. It had been shoved on me one stolen child and broken promise at a time. That didn’t make it any less mine. The people around me—the people I cared about—were always going to be in danger.

  Quentin scowled. “Oh, no,” he said. “Stop it.”

  I blinked. “Stop what?”

  “Stop thinking we’d be better off without you.”

  “I wasn’t!”

  “You were. I could see it in your eyes, and you’re wrong. We’re better with you, just like you’re better with us. Wait until we get Tybalt and Jazz back safe and sound. You’ll see.” Quentin bumped his shoulder against mine. “You keep making yourself calm, and we’ll find her, and we’ll bring her home, and your horrible mother will give them back, and we won’t invite her to the wedding.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I said, with a weak smile.

  “Sure you were. She’s your mom. But nobody wants to sit next to her at dinner, so let’s just skip it, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The mist cleared.

  The three of us were standing at the top of a high, heath-covered hill. The air smelled of salt, peat, and the sea, which only made sense, since I could see bone-white cliffs in the distance, descending toward a black and restless sea. The beam of a lighthouse swept rhythmically across the water, warning the nonexistent ships of the hazards ahead.

  Once, those waters would have been alive with Cephali and Merrow. Selkies would have basked on the rocky beaches, cushioned by their folded sealskins. The docks would have teemed with sailors, coming in from the sea and setting their sails to chase down the horizon. This had been a seafaring realm. The castles on the hills, ramshackle silhouettes against the devouring dark, had been the places they returned to when the journey was done, but the whole focus had been on the sea.

  “Annwn,” I breathed.

  “Again,” muttered Quentin.

  Simon didn’t say anything. He just stopped, and stared, honey-colored eyes wide as he tried to drink in everything around us. The smell of smoke and rotten oranges rose around him, underscored with a surprising note of mulled cider as his magic flared in response to his surprise and dismay. He was swallowing hard, over and over again, like he was trying not to cry.

  Maybe he was. “Have you ever been here?” I asked, as gently as I could.

  “No.” Simon shook his head. “No, I . . . the deeper realms were sealed when I was still an infant, and my parents had intended to wait until my brother and I were older before they made such a journey. My sister, September, visited Mag Mell once. She said it was so beautiful it hurt her, and that she couldn’t imagine staying for more than a moment, because if she did, she would never be able to find it in her heart to leave.”

  Annwn didn’t call to me like that, but I wasn’t a pureblood. Part of me was still human, and still wanted the human world more than it wanted anything else. Maybe once that had been burned away by necessity and time, I would feel that way about Annwn and the other realms of deeper Faerie. Right now . . .

  Right now, I wanted to get out of here as quickly as I could. “So it looks like old home week is continuing, and we have a problem,” I said grimly.

  “What?” Simon looked at me, bemused. “How is this a problem? August was searching for Oberon. The Luidaeg said she had gone to look in the deeper realms. Annwn is a deeper realm. If she couldn’t come back without him, she might still be here.”

  There was undeniable hope in his tone, and I couldn’t hate him for that. The fields here grew lush with berries, and the trees were heavy with fruit. There were monsters—Faerie always has monsters—but they weren’t anything a healthy pureblood with her wits about her couldn’t have handled. Most of all, purebloods work differently than humans do. Lock a human or a changeling away, alone, for a hundred years, and they wouldn’t be recognizable when they came back. The human mind is too aware of time. Mortals get bored.

  Purebloods . . . don’t. Purebloods know how to disconnect themselves from the world around them, wandering in a dreamlike fog while their brain goes about the business of cleaning and organizing itself in the background. They forget things when they do that—the names of people they loved and lost hundreds of years before, where they grew up, the way their fi
rst pets died—but they come back refreshed and bright-eyed and emotionally hale. August might have had trouble finding enough safety to disconnect, but the fact that it had been a hundred years would not, in and of itself, have been enough to do her harm.

  No, the issue was Annwn itself. Of course we were in Annwn. It’s always easier to tear something that’s been torn before. Chelsea had ripped her way here in her panic, and been forced to repeat the journey over and over for Duchess Treasa Riordan of Dreamer’s Glass, a xenophobic noble who wanted to establish her own kingdom in the deeper realms, far away from anyone who might want her to do something silly, like sharing. But before Chelsea, a changeling boy whose name we still didn’t know had opened the way.

  For August.

  Simon was still looking at me, waiting for his answer. I sighed deeply.

  “We sort of . . . left some people here,” I said. “They may not be too thrilled to see us. By which I mean there’s a good chance they’re going to try to kill us, on account of how I sort of accidentally exiled them to Annwn with no way home to pick up the rest of their stuff.”

  Simon blinked. Several times. Finally, he said the only thing that made sense, under the circumstances: “What?”

  “Uh, you know Duchess Riordan?”

  “Yes, of course. She’s an unpleasant sort, but at least she’s reasonably straightforward. No knives in the back from that one. Treasa always preferred a good, straightforward frontal attack.”

  “Not helping,” I said. “She kidnapped Etienne’s daughter and used her to rip a hole to Annwn, intending to take the population of Dreamer’s Glass out of the mortal world and back into deeper Faerie, where she would presumably be the ruler of all she surveyed, and not have to deal with having neighbors anymore. Only Riordan was going to kill Chelsea in the process, so we rescued her and used her to get home. Stranding Riordan and about half of her people here.”

  “And half of her supplies,” said Quentin. “They hadn’t finished bringing their trains through. Also, she was going to keep me as breeding stock. I don’t like her at all.”

  Simon’s blink this time was slower, more like he was taking it all in than any marker of active confusion. Finally, he said, “No, I don’t expect you would.”

  I took a deep breath. August’s trail led away from the spot where the Babylon Road had deposited us, deeper into the moors. I sighed. “But we have to go that way,” I said, gesturing with my candle. “Let’s just hope we don’t run into any of Riordan’s people, or that if we do, they’re too busy trying to learn how to be an agrarian society to give us any shit.”

  “Next time let’s go someplace new, where you haven’t already pissed everybody off,” said Quentin.

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” I replied, and started walking.

  The last time I’d been in Annwn, Tybalt had been with me. It was strange, walking there without him. I had come to depend on him so much, for backup, for support, for the way he made the world seem . . . not kinder, but easier to tackle. I could handle anything, as long as he was there to keep me from falling over.

  He wasn’t here now. Mom had him, and while I trusted her not to actively torture him, she still had him locked in a cage, unable to transform or reach the Shadow Roads. Cait Sidhe are natural shapeshifters. For Tybalt, cat form was as natural as walking on two legs and having opposable thumbs. But that was when it was a choice, something he’d done to himself, and not a transformation forced on him by someone else. When Simon had transformed me into a fish, the magic had changed my mind as well as my body, adapting me to a life spent swimming through the watery depths of the pond, eating mindlessly, swimming toward the warmth of the sun. I’d been gone for years. It could have been hours, for all the awareness my fish’s mind had had of the passage of time.

  Maybe that would be a mercy. Or maybe I’d get him back and find that I had a feral tomcat on my hands, unable or unwilling to transform into his human form.

  Either way, I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Right now, I needed to focus on following the thin ribbon of August’s magic across the fields, toward the distant shape of one of the castles.

  As we drew closer, it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get at least one of my wishes: I wasn’t going to be avoiding Riordan today. The land around the castle had been worked, the fields cleared of brush and briar and planted with crops that looked something like rhubarb, something like corn, and something like an unholy hybrid of the two. Simon looked around us and nodded, apparently content with what he saw.

  “They’re settling in,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Annwn rhubarb,” he said. At my blank expression, he smiled, and said, “Roses change according to the soil they’re planted in. Apples, too. A Granny Smith is not a Honeycrisp, nor is either of them a Red Delicious. Plants have always adapted to suit the soil that nurtures them. I don’t know who decided to plant rhubarb here, but the result was a larger, sweeter crop. They used to use it for making wine, back when we had easy access to the fields. I remember drinking it at banquets when I was young, before the wine cellars were emptied and all we had was the memory of sweetness. If you wanted to pay for your impending wedding, you could do it with a scythe and a sack in this field. There are people—purebloods, older ones—who would pay anything you asked, for the chance to taste the fruits of their youth again.”

  “We’re not here to steal Riordan’s crops,” I said. “We just need to follow August’s trail until we find the next turn.”

  “Then we shall,” he said.

  The castle Riordan had claimed as her own was coming more clearly into view. She had been repairing it since I’d been there last—or more accurately, she had been instructing her people to repair it. There was a scaffold against one wall, and the battlements were no longer quite so raggedy. Simon stopped in mid-step, putting his arm out to signal for me and Quentin to stop as well. I did, only stumbling a little as I turned to frown at him.

  His eyes were on the sky, and he was smiling. Not happily. He looked like a man who had just had his worst fears confirmed, and was simply relieved to see that it was over.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Treasa has been busy.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  Simon gave me a sidelong look. “I forget, sometimes, that your strengths are not all the same as mine,” he said. “Ask your squire.”

  I looked to the side. “Quentin?”

  Quentin’s eyes were also focused on the sky, but he wasn’t smiling. Instead, he had gone pale, eyes wide and glossy in dismay. “It’s an illusion,” he said. “It’s all an illusion.”

  If I looked, I could see a faint glitter in the air, betraying the outlines of whatever Riordan was trying to hide. I couldn’t see the illusion itself, much less see through it. The Dóchas Sidhe may outpace the Daoine Sidhe when it comes to blood magic, but we can’t hold a candle to them where illusions are concerned.

  A candle. I lifted the candle the Luidaeg had given me, and murmured, “You can get there and back by a candle’s light.” I couldn’t get there if I couldn’t see where I was going.

  The flame leaped up, devouring at least an inch of wax in the process and sending the first hot line to dribble down and score the skin of my hand. I managed not to flinch, focusing instead on the increasing glitter in the air, which had frozen like frost on a windowpane. Then, bit by bit, in an almost fractal pattern, it began to dissolve, revealing what Riordan had really done to her chosen castle.

  The scaffold was gone, as was the need for it: the walls stood thick and strong, shored up by great slabs of white stone, no doubt carved from the distant cliffs. They had been rebuilt until they changed a simple barrier into a barricade, making the place into a fortress. The towers were twice as high as they had seemed from a distance. They were made of the same stone as the walls, spotted with the blind, narrow eyes of arrow s
lits and the larger, stained glass blooms of windows.

  The largest of the stained glass windows was set directly above the castle gates, where it could serve no useful purpose, since there was no way for anyone to stand on the other side and look out—not unless they were fifteen feet tall. It showed the arms of Dreamer’s Glass, the mirror split by a lightning bolt crack, with a spindle on one side and a lily on the other. The overall effect of the place was of a castle carved entirely from bone, cold and cruel and pristine.

  “I guess she’s made herself right at home, huh?” I said, stunned.

  “Maybe this means she’s not mad,” said Quentin.

  “Maybe it means she’s going to skin us alive and use us as part of her décor,” I said. He gave me a sidelong look. I shrugged. “Two can play the ‘maybe’ game.”

  “We’d best get on with it,” said Simon. He cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “Treasa! A word, if you please?”

  I turned to stare at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Getting us inside.” Simon lowered his hands, looking unconcerned. “Treasa and I aren’t friends, precisely, but she’s known me for years, and she hates my brother, which makes me one of her favorite people, inasmuch as she has favorite people. I try Sylvester’s nerves. That’s all it takes to stay in her good graces.”

  “Problem: she hates me, too,” I said.

  He sighed. “Yes, and I can’t hold a knife to your throat and claim you as my prisoner, thanks to Sylvester’s cunning idea of a binding ritual. Stand quietly and try not to anger her, if you could possibly be so kind.”

  There wasn’t time for arguing after that. The heavy castle gates swung open—surprisingly smoothly, given the level of tech visible around us. The supply wagons that had made it through before we’d ruined Riordan’s plan must have included some hinges, and maybe the equipment necessary to make more. And there, standing right at the middle of the entryway, like a queen preparing to receive her due tribute, was Duchess Treasa Riordan.