Page 20 of The Brightest Fell

“Hey,” I said. “Did you get the stuff?”

Raj pulled a glass vial out of his pocket, holding it up for inspection. The liquid inside was pink, purple, and gold, like something a small child would think looked delicious.

“Good,” I said. “Bring it here.”

“You don’t get to give me orders,” he said, but he brought the bottle anyway, dropping it into my outstretched hand with a quick, sidelong glance at my face, like he was looking for my approval.

He already had it. I allowed myself the flash of a smile, holding it just long enough for him to see, and said, “Yeah, but I’m so good at it.” I looked around the room. There was no one here who was wholly unfamiliar to Simon. More importantly, there was no one here that he would see instantly as an enemy, except for maybe his brother—and he had to know that if his brother was there when he woke up, he was probably going to live. Sylvester could hate him. He couldn’t kill him, or watch while someone else did it. He wasn’t that kind of hero.

“Do you want me to do it?” asked Sylvester.

“It should be me; I’m the one who’s forcing you to let this happen,” I said, and turned to Simon, crouching down enough to put myself on a level with his prone form. He looked so much less dangerous like this, when he was unconscious and not in a position to ruin anybody’s day. And I was about to wake him up.

A hand landed on my shoulder. I glanced back. Sylvester was standing there, ready to defend me.

That helped. Gingerly, I raised the bottle to Simon’s lips and tipped it until the liquid trickled into his mouth. He swallowed, an automatic reflex not normally found in elf-shot victims. That was the magic in Walther’s work, already starting to reactivate the body.

I pulled the bottle away, stood, and waited. Not for long. By the time I had counted silently to ten, Simon’s breath had quickened, moving from enchanted sleep onto the borders of wakefulness. I counted five more, and he twitched, his previously injured hand opening and closing.

He opened his eyes.

Silence reigned for several more seconds before Simon said, in a perplexed tone, “Is this the old knowe? Root and branch, it looks like it’s going to collapse at any moment.”

No one answered him.

He pushed himself into a sitting position, moving easily, without any visible aftereffects from his enchanted nap. He was still looking at the ceiling, maybe because he didn’t want to see who else was in the room. I couldn’t blame him for that. He had to be half-wondering whether he was experiencing his last moments of freedom for another hundred years, before Sylvester had him seized and thrown into the nearest available dungeon.

“I think it is,” he said. “I remember doing the joins in that ceiling. Terrible work. I was never meant to be a carpenter. Anyone who said I was, well, they were lying. Hello—” He finally looked down, and his voice caught, hitching before he finished, barely above a whisper, “—brother. And October. October, what are you doing here?”

“Simon,” said Sylvester, and his voice was ice, his voice was a killing frost sweeping across the land. There was no love there. Listening to him, it seemed impossible that love could ever live there again. “Look at me.”

Simon went still, the brief animation draining from his face. He shifted until he was fully facing his brother, shutting me out. “Hello, Sylvester,” he said.

I flinched. Simon was a chameleon, in many ways. He was a man who had traded his freedom to his Firstborn for the chance to bring his daughter home, who had done things so terrible that they’d twisted and tainted the smell of his magic. But he was also the man who had loved my mother, who had loved his daughter, and who had tried, in his own misguided way, to save me from Evening. His methods were terrible. His intentions were, in their own way, pure. How did he contain that many contradictions without breaking himself?

By becoming someone else. The Simon Torquill who had taken an arrow to save me, even knowing that it would put him to sleep for a hundred years, at least remembered what it was to care. But the Simon who had turned me into a fish and left me was someone else, someone colder, who didn’t care about anything but himself.

It was the second Simon who was speaking now. He wasn’t going to beg for forgiveness or explain himself. If he was about to die, he was going to die with dignity, and if he had any regrets, he wasn’t going to share them with the likes of us.

“Your century is not up,” said Sylvester. “If it had been my decision, you would still be sleeping, and I would be hoping every hour of every night you lived was filled with the foulest of dreams.”

“My only nightmare in this moment is the quality of the mattress you saw fit to place me on,” said Simon. “Really, brother, have you never heard of lumbar support?”

“Kinda surprised you have,” I said.

Simon glanced my way, his icy demeanor cracking for an instant. Once again, I was struck by how similar the brothers were, and how different. He looked at me the way Sylvester did, like I was something he needed to nurture and protect. But while Sylvester’s protection had always been built on a foundation of love, Simon’s looked like it was built on regret. Odds were good that not all of it was for me. Whatever his motives, he had been a very bad man for a very long time.

“Literacy in the ways of mortals has been important this past century,” he said. “Things change so quickly where the humans are concerned that sometimes even they get lost. Unless I wanted to start disguising myself as one of their elders, I needed to maintain my understanding of current trends.”

“In lumbar support,” I said blandly.

Simon shrugged. “It was a factor.”

“Your vanity will be the end of you yet,” snapped Sylvester.

“No, brother.” Simon turned back to him. “If I make myself over to look like an eighty-year-old human man, and am forced to flee, to run, to do something physically beyond the reach of what I appear to be, what then? Vanity would be making myself the most beautiful of men. Sanity is preventing myself from betraying that I am something more than I appear by maintaining all aspects of a good disguise. Why am I awake?”

“Because Oberon has no mercy,” said Sylvester.