Page 24 of The Brightest Fell

May pulled away, sniffling. “No,” she said, voice thick with tears. “He’s right. I can’t help. I can’t fight, I can’t pick locks, all I can do is get between you and anyone who wants to stab you, and you don’t really care if you get stabbed.”

“I’m getting used to it,” I said dryly.

She laughed, voice unsteady. “See? You’ll be all right. Let me be the anchor, so we can find you if things get bad. Can I do that?”

“You can.” I leaned in and kissed her forehead, murmuring, “I will find them,” before turning back to Simon. “All right. Do what you need to do.”

“Fortunately, I do not need to enchant you directly; my brother’s binding recoils at the very thought,” said Simon. He took a step forward, holding out his hands. “If my brother and the Lady Fetch would be so kind?”

Sylvester narrowed his eyes before sliding his hand into Simon’s. After a pause for breath, May did the same with Simon’s other hand. Simon smiled. It was not a kind smile. It wasn’t a cruel one, either. He looked sad, almost, like he understood the enormity of what they were both doing, and regretted that they couldn’t trust him more.

“We begin,” he said, and started chanting in a language I vaguely recognized as Irish Gaelic. The smell of candle smoke and rotten oranges swirled through the room, underscored by Sylvester’s daffodils and dogwood and May’s cotton candy and ashes. Simon kept chanting. The air thickened, growing heavy—and then the spell burst, sending the unmingled perfumes skittering into the corners.

Simon stopped chanting and dropped their hands.

“It’s done,” he said. “If harm comes to either one of us, you’ll know it. You’ll know where we are. It’s down to you to find a way to reach us, if we are beyond this realm.”

“I’ll find a way,” said Sylvester.

Simon looked at his brother, and this time there was no disguising the sorrow in his expression. He looked like a man who had never been able to count on the ground beneath his feet, but who had set his own anchors against that instability, only to have them all crumble in the first stiff wind.

“I wish you had been able to say the same when it came to saving me,” he said softly. He turned away before Sylvester could reply, focusing on me. “Well, Sir Daye? Are you ready to save my daughter?”

“I’m ready to save Tybalt and Jazz,” I said. “Everything else is secondary.”

Simon grimaced. “I can understand why you would feel that way, but I’ll need you to rein in your tongue, at least until we’ve finished with our first stop.”

“Why?” I asked warily. I already had some idea of what he was likely to say. I was hoping to be wrong.

“We’ll be starting at your mother’s tower.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Of course.” Well. Crap.

EIGHT

AMANDINE’S TOWER isn’t a knowe: it isn’t anchored to the human world, and there’s no mortal way to get there. It’s a freestanding structure in the Summerlands, built of fae stone under a fae sky. The most mortal thing ever to exist there was me, and I fled as soon as I could, choosing the streets of San Francisco over a place that seemed determined to erase everything I knew to be true about who I was and who I was meant to be.

So not the most warm and fuzzy of childhood homes, is what I’m saying here. Walking back to it in the company of a man who had been my personal bogeyman for years didn’t particularly help. Worst of all, Simon chattered.

“I remember when this forest was all acorns and pinecones and other such rubbish,” he said grandly, indicating the trees around us. The fact that none of the trees were oaks or evergreens didn’t stop his cheerful misidentification of the seeds they’d sprouted from. “Sylvester was absolutely determined to have some sort of demarcation between his land and my lady’s. As if the fact that it was always high summer in Shadowed Hills, with the roses growing rampant, wasn’t enough? Luna refused to entertain the idea of any other season in those days.”

“What season was it at the tower?” I was ashamed of how eager I sounded for the answer. Amandine had done something terrible to me. We were here because of what she’d done. And yet, she was still my mother, and part of me yearned to know more about her, who she’d been before she had me, who she’d been when she was happy.

“Spring, usually, but my Amy has always been mercurial. Sometimes it would change overnight, from spring to the depths of winter, and we’d all put on our coats and grit our teeth against the chill.” He smiled fondly, distantly, like he was looking at a memory. “August preferred the fall. Amy used to say it was a consequence of her name. I think our girl enjoyed how calm it was. The growing time was over, and the gathering time was just beginning. For her, it was a chance to breathe.”

“Why are we starting at Amandine’s tower?” asked Quentin. “That’s the one place we know absolutely for sure that August isn’t.”

“Because that’s also the one place we know absolutely for sure that August was,” said Simon. “The walls will remember her. We can start to follow her trail from there.”

“You looked for years without finding her, and you were starting from the tower.” Quentin was making no effort to hide his distrust. That was actually sort of soothing. No matter what happened here, he had my back.

It was difficult to believe that less than six hours ago, I’d been laughing and happy, and feeling like the world was finally starting to go my way. That would show me not to relax. It was just an invitation for life to kick me in the teeth as hard as it could.

“I was starting from the tower, but I didn’t have October to help me.” Simon shook his head. “I was in a rare position for a long time: a man, married to one of the Firstborn, raising the first known daughter of her descendant race. Everything August did was a surprise and a revelation. Amandine’s magic was similar, of course—the First are always similar to the fruit their branches will bear—but it wasn’t exactly the same.”

“What do you mean?” asked Quentin.

“I mean that you are not just a watered-down copy of your parent and original. How could you be? The Dryad and the Blodynbryd descend from the same woman, and neither has wings. I’ve always wondered how the Mother of the Trees felt about that. For her children to not only be anchored to the earth, but bound to it, rooted to it . . . it was either a punishment or a reward, that they couldn’t be blown away by the wind.”