Page 18 of The Brightest Fell

May looked even shakier than I felt. Her eyes were red, and she flinched from every sound like she no longer had the ability to process danger. She’d lived for uncounted centuries as a night-haunt, feeding on the memories of others, her face and thoughts ever-changing to fit the parade of Faerie’s dead. I had no doubt that she had loved before, but always secondhand, always borrowed from someone else’s life and death. In many ways, Jazz was her first love. I was as scared as she was—maybe more, because I had lost lovers; I knew that I could fail and they could die—but I at least had the cold comfort of knowing this wasn’t the end of the world, no matter how much I might wind up wishing it had been.

Only Quentin looked halfway like himself. Sad, yes, withdrawn, yes, but still himself. He was going to have to be the levelheaded one through what came next . . . and I was the one who’d done most of his training.

May Oberon have mercy on us all.

Etienne and Grianne brought up the rear. Neither had said anything about the fact that we were on our way to wake Simon, who had betrayed Shadowed Hills and Sylvester more conclusively than anyone else in the world. Maybe they didn’t feel it was their place. Or maybe they just understood that making this harder than it had to be wasn’t going to do anyone any good, and might lead to me breaking somebody’s nose.

Sylvester opened another door. The hallway on the other side looked like something from a haunted house, all rickety, splintering wood and cobwebby corners. The floor was scuffed, a threadbare runner rug stretching down the center like a pathway to doom. I blinked.

“I honestly thought Melly would skin anyone who let part of the knowe get this bad,” I said.

“The staff is not allowed in this area,” said Sylvester stiffly. “I don’t know how much you know about how a knowe is built.”

“Not much,” I admitted.

He walked through the door. We kept following.

“It begins with intent,” he said. “Intent and power. The maker must convince the Summerlands to yield, as a gardener convinces the soil to yield before the seed. That was part of what drew me to Luna, when we met. I was building my garden walls, and she already had the spade in her hand. She seemed perfectly suited to understanding what I would face—and she did. Oh, she did. She didn’t know much about the process of construction, but she forgave me when the foundations took me away from her. She tended her roses, and she waited for me.”

This seemed to be less about knowe construction and more about his relationship with Luna. I didn’t say so. We were still moving, and he wasn’t stalling; he was just filling the silence, an impulse I understood all too well. The instinct to whistle past the graveyard is standard to everything I’ve met with enough intelligence to understand what it is to dread the consequences of their actions.

“You walk into the Summerlands, you find the place you’re going to stake your claim, and you mark it. You go into the mortal world, and you find the place where you want the intersection to occur. You gather your magic and your strength, and you cut a hole between the worlds for the sake of what’s to come. Then you build. You build a beginning. So much of the beginning has to come from your own hands.” He touched a wall, trailing his fingers along it as he walked. “I was never a carpenter.”

Suddenly, the shoddiness of the hall made a lot more sense. “You built this?”

“With my own two hands, and with the help of the man I loved most in all the world.” We had reached a small door. Sylvester pushed it open.

The room on the other side was as shabby as the hall. The walls were papered in lilac brocade that peeled in places, revealing the plaster beneath. The window had no glass; instead, the panes held sheets of oiled paper, no doubt enchanted to stand up to the elements, turning the world outside into a blobby impressionist painting. A single twin bed was pushed up against the wall, and in the bed was Simon Torquill, my old enemy, my last hope.

Asleep, with all the hard lines and worry eased from his face, he looked more like Sylvester than ever. They had the same bones: it was the way they wore them that differed. They were even dressed similarly, although Sylvester’s clothes were faintly medieval, while Simon’s were more “I stopped keeping up with mortal fashions somewhere in the 1920s.” He was wearing shoes. I guess when there’s no chance the sleeper will roll over, it’s less about dressing them for comfort, and more about dressing them for display. Like a funeral.

His cuffs were frayed. I realized that every time I’d seen him without Oleander there to put on a show for, his cuffs had been frayed. He was holding on tightly to the few things he had, mending them when he had to, never letting go.

That was his problem, really. He’d never figured out how to let go.

I turned, looking to Etienne. “You know where we are now,” I said. “Can you go check the grounds for Raj? He’s supposed to be coming with the countercharm.”

Etienne frowned. “I thought the stuff was too delicate to be exposed to magic.”

“Walther’s still tinkering with it. Every batch is more stable than the last, and cold is good for it. Helps it settle. According to him, carrying it through the Shadow Roads is actually beneficial—the magic may do a little damage, but the cold repairs all that, and more.”

“Fine,” said Etienne. He looked to Sylvester, who nodded minutely, granting permission. With that formality observed, Etienne turned, sketched a portal in the air, and was gone.

Grianne remained behind. Her Merry Dancers spun around her, betraying an unusual degree of agitation.

“Is he not to be bound?” she asked.

Ah.

For Grianne, that was a speech—she doesn’t talk much, and when she does, it’s always to make a point. Unlike the rest of us, who will probably go to our graves yammering wildly away. This time, her point was a valid one: Simon, for all that I needed him, and for all that I was embarking on a quest that was to his personal benefit, had run away before. He’d betrayed everyone in this room, to one degree or another, at least once. What was going to stop him from doing it again?

“He will be,” said Sylvester. He looked at Simon as he spoke, and his words were filled with a mixture of regret and longing that hurt my heart to hear. “His punishment does not end because I must wake him. For what he’s done, his suffering has just begun.”

Oberon’s Law forbids us to kill each other. That’s it: that’s everything. The rest of the crimes we commit, the rest of the times we transgress, there’s no law to describe what happens next. There’s tradition, and there are punishments, but the basic judicial system of Faerie is “I do what I want.”

Simon Torquill was a landless Count who had committed crimes against a landed Duke in his own home. He had committed treason by kidnapping his brother’s wife. He had imprisoned Luna and Rayseline for years, in a place we had yet to identify or find. He had assaulted another noble’s vassal by transforming me against my will. No one would question Sylvester for taking his revenge, whatever form that revenge might take.

Sometimes, revenge could take some pretty vicious forms. The former King of Silences had been using his rivals for spell components, cutting them apart one piece at a time. While he had been elf-shot for his crimes against the Crown, he wasn’t specifically being punished for that. In the eyes of fae law, he had done nothing wrong. Also in the eyes of fae law, Queen Siwan—who was now back in her rightful place as ruler of Silences—would be doing nothing wrong if she ordered him sliced to bits, as long as he didn’t die.