The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  “Sure thing,” said the man, stripping off his gloves and moving toward the counter, even as Madden was stepping out from behind it and gesturing for us to follow him to the attached bookstore. That’s one of the nice things about small establishments: things can be loose enough to allow for a certain fluidity during the day, which is important when, say, you’re secretly a shapeshifting canine in service to the local fae monarch. To pick an utterly nonspecific example.

  No one seemed to think there was anything strange about Madden leading two people past the rope that cordoned the café off from the bookstore when their operating hours didn’t match up. Those people probably would have been a little surprised when, after leading us to the back of the store, Madden turned and bared his teeth at Simon. They were suddenly much larger, seeming to occupy too much real estate in his jaw. Saliva foamed around them, making him look on the verge of rabid.

  “I know you,” he snarled, eyes fixed on Simon. “I know what you did. What are you doing?”

  “I’m looking for my daughter,” Simon said. To his credit, he didn’t flinch away from the possibility that an angry Cu Sidhe was about to rip his throat out.

  It was almost a relief to have someone finally reacting to Simon Torquill the way I thought they should. It was also remarkably inconvenient. I needed Madden’s help, and I didn’t have time to go over the whole story yet again. Not with August still out there somewhere, needing to be found; needing to be saved.

  “My mother has taken Tybalt and Jazz as collateral against my bringing my older sister, August Torquill, home,” I said. “Sylvester agreed to wake Simon in order to help me find her, since she’s his daughter, too. Simon has been bound with a blood geas to keep him from acting against my interests in this matter.”

  “Blood geasa are only as good as their wording,” said Madden. “They can break.”

  “Maybe so, but I haven’t seen him making any effort to break this one,” I said. “We’ve been following August’s trail since the bachelorette party.”

  Understanding flooded Madden’s features. “That’s why none of you have been answering the phone!” he said. “Ardy was starting to get really worried. I think she was going to swing by tonight.”

  “The new Queen in the Mists makes house calls?” Simon looked genuinely amused by the idea. “How quaint.”

  Madden growled.

  “Let’s play a fun game,” I said. “It’s called ‘don’t bait the man who’s going to help us.’ Here’s how you play. Simon, stop being you.”

  “Would that I could, milady,” he said.

  There was genuine regret in his voice, enough that Madden and I both paused.

  Madden recovered first. “Well, that got dark fast,” he said. “What do you need?”

  “We’ve been following the Babylon Road for days,” I said, pulling the candle from my pocket and holding it up for him to see. “Long trip, long story, need a shower bad. Our last stop dropped us out on Valencia, and I lost the trail. I need to try to find it again, and then I’m probably going to need to cast a don’t-look-here, because the candle is sort of conspicuous.”

  “So you need privacy and maybe me to help you sniff somebody out,” said Madden. “Got it.”

  I offered him a wan smile, closed my eyes, and breathed in deeply, looking for the thin ribbon of August’s magic.

  Instead, the smell of smoke and roses punched me in the nose, thick and cloying enough that I gasped and staggered backward, dropping the candle. Simon was there to catch me, the line of his body so similar to Sylvester’s that some deep-buried instinct said safe and allowed me to go limp. He still grunted with the effort of keeping me from hitting the floor.

  “Toby?” Madden sounded alarmed. As well he should. The smell of my own magic was hanging in the air: cut-grass and copper and the faint, ashen scent of a spell that had been released too quickly, more charred away than dismissed. I might not be visible from the street, but anyone who came over to the bookstore side looking to surreptitiously use the bathroom was going to get an eyeful of pure, unadulterated Dóchas Sidhe.

  “Sorry.” I got my feet back under myself, coughing a little as I stood. This time, I breathed more shallowly. The scent of August’s magic was just as strong. I turned to Simon. His eyes were wide; he was staring at me. I stared back.

  “She was here,” I said. “August was here. Madden. Have there been any fae around recently that you don’t know? She’d have shown up . . . I don’t know, sometime in the last year. Red hair. Might have a funny way of talking, like she doesn’t really know what words mean anymore.”

  Madden shook his head. “No, no one,” he said.

  I paused.

  Madden is Cu Sidhe, a fairy dog, in the same way that Tybalt is a fairy cat. With the shapeshifters, there’s always a little bleed between their fae and animal natures. They seem oddly human in animal form, sitting up like people or using their paws to grasp objects like they’ve forgotten about their lack of opposable thumbs. They seem a little bit animal in human form. Tybalt’s tendency to curl his tongue when he yawns, for example, or the way he sometimes looks at me through sleepy, half-closed eyes, utterly feline, utterly content.

  Cu Sidhe have different mannerisms naturally. They’re a different breed of beast. With Madden, one of the big tells that he isn’t quite human is the way he moves his head. Humans—and people shaped like them—usually rotate from the chin, shaking or nodding in a way that’s difficult to describe with other words, but which reads as “normal.” Madden shook and nodded his head from the nose first, more like a canine than a man. It was a small thing, not enough to betray his fae nature under any ordinary circumstances. There are entirely human people out there with stranger affectations.

  But he was shaking his head from the chin. This wasn’t right.

  “Madden, do they still sell lemonade next door?” I asked carefully.

  He brightened, looking relieved to be back on familiar ground. “Oh, sure,” he said, with a bob of his head—a bob that originated, in the canine manner, with his nose. “Do you want me to get you some? Sugar’s good when you’ve had a shock.”

  “No, I’m good,” I said. “Have you seen an unfamiliar redheaded woman around here recently?”

  Again, he shook his head; again, the shake started with the chin, human-style. “No, no one,” he said.

  Simon looked between the two of us, eyes narrowing as he caught on. “Interesting,” he said. “October?”

  “Give me a second.” I focused on Madden, squinting as I looked for signs that he was under some sort of a spell.

  Illusions often manifest as a glitter in the air, but this wouldn’t be an illusion; illusions can’t make a person act in an abnormal way. Illusions can’t make people lie. Illusions are lies, pretty and static and unchanging. So there was no glitter, and that made sense, because this wasn’t an illusion. This was something else.

  The first time I’d seen someone else’s spell, I hadn’t been able to understand what I was looking at, because seeing magic meant I could manipulate it, and manipulating magic wasn’t part of the Daoine Sidhe skillset I’d been raised thinking was my own. Dóchas Sidhe turn out to work a little differently. So I squinted, and I squinted, and finally, there it was, a hairline web of knots and tangles in the air around Madden. It was made of a thousand tiny threads, smoky gray and pale, pale red, so that they should have been pink and yet somehow weren’t.

  “What do you see?” asked Simon, his voice so close to my ear that I nearly jumped.

  “Something,” I said. The spell was intricate and delicately woven. This was a masterpiece. Anything I did to it would damage the work of someone who had more power and more experience than I could dream of having.

  Which meant there was really no point in being delicate, if I was going to wreck the whole thing anyway. “This may sting,” I said, and reached toward Madden, hooking
my fingers in the air like I was preparing to do macramé. The spell should have been too far away for me to touch, but it responded to the gesture like it had been trained, surging toward my hand.

  I yanked.

  The spell unraveled in the smell of smoke and roses, filling the air around us until it seemed like the smoke alarms would start screaming, telling everyone in the next room that the building was on fire. No such thing happened. Instead, Madden gasped, clutching his chest as if in sudden pain, and turned wide, surprisingly canine eyes on me. His human disguise was slipping. Not as badly as mine had—his ears were still round and his hair was still blond, rather than red and white—but still. That was worrisome.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, shaking my hand in a vague effort to wipe away the last of August’s magic. It was clinging like bad perfume, refusing to let me go. “Madden, talk to me.”

  “I—you—she was here.” He had the presence of mind to lower his voice when he clearly wanted to shout. Every line of his body was tense; everything about the way he looked at me screamed dismay and violation. “The redheaded woman, the one who smells sort of like you but different, she was here. She came the same time you did. When you were looking for Arden? Remember?”

  “I remember,” I said gently.

  I remembered a woman in a white peasant blouse with hair that was an odd shade of silvery-red, like something that came from a bottle rather than growing from a human head. She’d been in the bookstore, making a purchase, sizing up Jude, the general manager. At the time, I’d assumed she was an ordinary customer, maybe one with an understandable if unlikely to work out crush on a pretty bookseller. There hadn’t been anything about her that screamed “fae” . . .

  But she’d held the door open a fraction of a second longer than she had to, giving me time to make it inside despite the don’t-look-here that should have concealed me from her. At the time, I’d written it off as luck. Maybe it had been something more.

  “She came—I think she came because she was looking for a place to hide. She followed the magic. Jude and Alan . . .” Madden’s cheeks flushed red with shame. “They’re good people, you know? Real good bosses. They’re not assholes at all. But they’re humans. They’ve already been pixie-led.”

  Which was another way of saying he and Arden had done their share of messing with Jude and Alan’s heads when they felt they had to, using magic to cover up the small slips that inevitably happen when humans and the fae were existing in close quarters. “It wouldn’t have been hard for her to piggyback on the spells that had already been used on them,” I said grimly. “Madden, what did she do?”

  “She . . . made them think she belonged here. That she’d always belonged here. They know Arden left, but they think she was a seasonal hire, that it was August who was supposed to be in the store. She doesn’t do any work, she doesn’t know how, but she’s always here.” Madden shuddered. “She made it so I couldn’t say anything about her being here, or anything about it being wrong. I wanted to.” He paused, eyes widening in horror. “She made me lie to Arden. Am I . . . is that treason? For a seneschal to lie to a queen?”

  “Not when you’re being magically compelled. You didn’t have a choice,” I said, hurrying to reassure him. “There was nothing you could have done. Where is she now?”

  He raised a shaking hand and pointed at the basement door. Of course. The Borderlands basement was where terrible things waited to happen to me. Sometimes those terrible things later turned out to be friends, but that didn’t make them any less terrible while they were happening.

  “Okay,” I said, and grabbed the lingering traces of August’s magic from the air, twisting them into a don’t-look-here as fast as I could before throwing it over myself and Simon. I didn’t bother with a new human disguise. It wasn’t like anybody would be able to see it.

  Madden kept his eyes focused on me so he wouldn’t lose track of where I was. When I was finished casting, he wrinkled his nose and said, “That spell smelled like one of hers.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “I mostly used her magic to cast it. Is the basement door unlocked?” Don’t-look-here spells aren’t true invisibility. Picking a lock would probably be unusual enough to get us noticed, if anyone happened to be looking.

  “It should be,” said Madden. He grabbed a fistful of air, expertly patching his human disguise. When he was done, he looked exactly like he had when we first came in. He glanced uncomfortably at the doorway. “Be careful, okay? I can’t come down to save you. Not while I’m in the middle of my shift.”

  “We’ll be fine,” I said. “She probably didn’t mean any harm. She’s been missing for a long time, and needed a place to stay while she figured stuff out. Arden leaving made a hole. She filled it.” That didn’t explain why she’d been playing house in a science fiction bookstore instead of finding our mother or presenting herself to the queen, but those were questions we’d be able to answer shortly, when we found her. Assuming she didn’t attack us on sight or anything else unpleasant like that.

  “Okay,” said Madden. “Please let me know you’re okay when it’s all done.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  He nodded—from the nose this time—and walked past us, returning to the café. I stayed where I was, counting slowly to ten, before motioning for Simon to follow me to the basement door.

  A good don’t-look-here spell makes you seem like part of the landscape, or like someone else’s problem. As long as we didn’t directly interact with any of the bleary-eyed morning customers on the other side of the rope, they would take no notice of us. Carefully, we crept across the bookstore to our destination. Madden was right: the door was unlocked.

  The light on the other side was off. Turning it on would definitely be a big enough change in the environment to attract attention. Silently thanking Oberon for fae night vision, I eased my way through the door and onto the steps beyond, descending a few paces before I turned and beckoned Simon to follow.

  He hesitated. For one terrible moment, I expected him to slam the door, turn, and run. Instead, he stepped through and closed the door behind himself, casting us both into darkness. It was strange. Being shut in a dark stairwell with Simon Torquill should have given me pause, or maybe a mild panic attack. All I could actually feel was relief. We had both made it this far. With as strong as the traceries of magic were upstairs, we didn’t have all that far to go.

  The basement had no windows, and the seal on the door was remarkably good: no light was making its way in. Fae eyes are good, but they’re not that good. “I’m going to turn the lights on,” I whispered, voice barely more than a breath.

  Simon didn’t respond, but there was a faint shifting sound, as if he had braced himself. Good. Having sensitive eyes is sometimes as much a curse as it is a blessing. I reached past him and clicked the switch. Light sprang into being, filling the basement with a soft white glow.

  I was looking directly at Simon’s face, pale and pinched, his eyes squinted tightly shut. He cracked one of them cautiously open before his face went slack, caution forgotten utterly as he opened both eyes in silent, staring shock.

  I started to turn. That was a bad idea. Changing positions meant that the fist caught me square in the nose, sending me reeling backward.

  Right.

  NINETEEN

  SIMON CAUGHT ME before I fell. At least, that was what I thought he was doing: as I struggled to stand upright, I realized he’d closed his hands on my shoulders, effectively pinning me in place. Sylvester had ordered him to raise no hand against me; maybe this didn’t count.

  The woman on the steps below us was pale enough to look sickly, like cream that had gone faintly out of true. Her hair was a washed-out silvery red, as if it had been painted with moonlight one day while she wasn’t paying attention, and her eyes were a gold so pale and so clear that they verged on white-gray, like my mother’s, like my own. She was barefoot, we
aring tattered secondhand jeans and a shapeless, oversized Borderlands T-shirt, and I would have known who she was even if I hadn’t known that she existed, because the family resemblance between us was terrifyingly strong. She even stood the way I did.

  Why shouldn’t she? August and I were both daughters of Amandine who had been partially raised by Torquill men. Everything about my childhood had been a strange parody of hers, and looking at her was like looking at a funhouse mirror, warped and strange and perfect.

  Her nose wrinkled. I realized she was tasting the air, rolling it on her tongue the way I did when I was trying to figure out what someone was.

  “Let me up,” I hissed, glancing back to make sure Simon knew I was talking to him. “I can’t do this if I can’t stand.”

  He didn’t let go. He was still staring at August, a man utterly transfixed, unwilling or unable to unlock his hands long enough to release me. I was probably as strong as he was—I definitely got more exercise—but the position and space we were in didn’t give me a lot of options for freeing myself unless I wanted to hurt him. August probably wouldn’t like that very much, him being her father and all.

  I turned my attention back to her. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Mom sent me to find you. She’s been worried.”

  August’s eyes narrowed. “I know you,” she said. Her accent was rounded and odd, like something out of an old movie; like something that had been shut away from the mortal world and its linguistic drift for a hundred years. “You were there, in Annwn, when the new people came. You were there when the walls of the world shredded, and I was finally free to step through. You did this to me.”

  “I—what?”

  That was all I had time to say before she launched herself up the stairs, grabbing me by the hair and yanking me out of Simon’s grasp. She was strong. She’d been living an agrarian existence in deep Faerie for longer than I’d been alive, and she had the sort of grip that comes from ploughing fields and breaking rocks.