Page 16 of The Brightest Fell

For a moment, I couldn’t think of a reply.

There was a time when it felt like I was driving to Shadowed Hills every ten minutes, looking for answers, looking for help, or just looking for a hot meal. Sylvester was my liege. His wife, Luna, had been my friend once, before things had gotten so strained between us. But they were just the tip of the iceberg. I’d grown up running around the knowe, giggling with the household staff, sleeping in the guest rooms. This had been my home during a period of my life when I’d felt like I didn’t deserve to have one, and I had walked away from more than just Sylvester when he’d broken my heart by lying to me.

My heart was healing. The bridges between me and my liege were in the process of being mended. And once again, I needed help.

“I don’t know how many times I can tell this story without losing it, and I need to ask Sylvester for a favor,” I said, all too aware of May and Quentin at my back. May was in even worse shape than I was. I had always known that Tybalt lived a dangerous life. Jazz ran an antique store. She wasn’t supposed to be a target. “Is he up?”

“For you, he will be,” said Etienne. “I’ll fetch him. I trust you can find the receiving room on your own?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

He nodded, traced a circle in the air with his hand, and vanished through the portal of his own making, leaving the smell of limes and cedar smoke hanging once more heavy in the air. I didn’t wait for it to dissipate before I started walking again.

Quentin pulled up next to me. I glanced at him.

“Does Raj know how to get around the wards?” I asked.

“He can’t come straight into the knowe, but there’s a spot in the woods we always use when he needs to meet me here,” he said. “He can walk from there.”

“Because Raj will be thrilled that we made him walk,” I said.

Quentin smirked.

Raj was a Prince of Cats, but he wasn’t a King yet. Once he was crowned, his power would expand, making him the anchor to the Shadow Roads in San Francisco, and—more importantly, in some regards—opening the wards of the local knowes to him. It’s considered incredibly bad form to ward against Kings and Queens of Cats, just like it would have been considered bad form to ward against Arden. Princes and Princesses are fair game, but the monarchs? They can come and go as they pleased.

Would Tybalt still be a King when he stepped down? It seemed likely. Power doesn’t like to let go once it has hold of someone. Tybalt would be a King without a throne. An enviable—and dangerous—position to be in.

It helped a little to think about the future. What he was going to be after I got him safely back from my mother, after he’d recovered from whatever she did to him, and most importantly, after he’d been able to step down from his throne. Abdication was a funny wedding gift, but under the circumstances, I’d take it.

The receiving room doors were unguarded. Another sign of how late, or early, it was. The people who would normally have been standing by to let us in were probably already in bed. I was grateful that Etienne hadn’t felt the need to wake them just so they could stand on ceremony. Fatherhood really was mellowing him.

The doors were heavy, but Quentin and I were able to get them open, revealing the spacious cavern of a room on the other side. We started across the black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, toward the dais on the far side. Everything smelled of roses. Not my mother’s roses, thank Maeve; these were cultivated things, pampered garden flowers, trained and raised up by a loving hand. Luna is one of the best gardeners in the Westlands, and she specializes in roses, which makes sense, since technically she is a rose. She’s of the Blodynbryd, a form of rose Dryad, and where she walks, flowers bloom.

That wasn’t always how I’d known her. Luna is Blind Michael’s youngest daughter. When we’d met, she had been claiming to be a Kitsune, wrapped so tightly in the stolen skin of one of her father’s victims that the change had run all the way down to the bone. The magic she used to make the change was similar to the spell the Luidaeg used to create the Selkies, but unlike the Selkies, Luna had never been able to put her Kitsune skin aside. She’d been trapped, wrapped in hot, mammalian emotions and biology, until her own daughter tried to kill her and, in the process, stripped the stolen skin away.

The Torquills are a complicated family. I’m still not sure how I feel about being legally one of them.

A door opened behind the dais, and Sylvester rushed out. He was wearing tan pants and a white muslin shirt, and nothing else: for a Duke, he was barely presentable. I didn’t care. Relief washed over me, coupled with a sudden hope that maybe, just maybe, we could find another way. Sylvester had loved his brother, once. Who was to say he hadn’t truly known his brother’s daughter?

“October,” he said, hurrying toward us. “What’s wrong?” He scanned our small group, and frowned. “Where’s Tybalt?”

There’s no love lost between my liege and my lover, but he still noticed when Tybalt wasn’t there. That made me feel even more hopeful. Sylvester noticed things.

“Is Etienne coming back?” I asked. “I don’t want to repeat this more than I have to.”

“I’m here,” said a voice behind me.

I turned. There was Etienne, with a yawning Grianne standing next to him, her Merry Dancers bobbing sleepily in the air to either side of her head. I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t even noticed the scent of his magic. That wasn’t good. This was not the time for me to start losing my focus. Not if I wanted to bring them home alive.

“Good,” I said, and looked back to Sylvester. “Amandine came to my house and demanded I find August for her. She took Tybalt and Jasmine as collateral against my doing what she says. The Luidaeg can’t help me. I need someone who knew August to help me figure out where she could have gone, before my mother does something that can’t be undone. Can you help me?”

“I . . .” He stopped, looking stricken. “I don’t know where my niece is. I’m so sorry. I tried to find her when she disappeared. I was still a hero then, I thought I could save her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but watch my brother break himself against walls that I couldn’t even see. I tried to help him. He pushed me away. He said it was my fault his family had been broken, that if I . . . if I hadn’t encouraged August to heroism, she would never have wandered from the path he had charted for her. I don’t know where she went. I don’t even know if she’s alive.”

Everything seemed to freeze. My breath caught in my throat as I stared at him, absorbing the true enormity of his final words.

What if August was dead?

What if she hadn’t just disappeared, all those years ago: what if she had died, and was no longer out there to be found? Would Amandine take proof of death as my bringing her daughter home, or would she say that I’d failed to do the one thing she had ever asked of me? Would she punish Tybalt and Jazz because I couldn’t raise the dead?