Page 25 of The Brightest Fell

“I never thought about it that way,” I admitted. Acacia—the Mother of the Trees, and Luna’s mother—has skin the color of flower pollen, and moth’s wings growing from her shoulder blades. She’s magnificent, but she doesn’t look anything like her children.

Amandine and Evening, on the other hand, look so much like their respective descendant races, and so much like each other, that they’d both been able to pass themselves off as Daoine Sidhe for decades, maybe longer.

“Wait,” I said. “How many people actually knew Mom was Firstborn?”

“Some,” said Simon. “I knew before I married her, as did Sylvester. Our parents told us when Amy was sent into Fosterage with our household. It was our job to help her pass for one of the Daoine Sidhe—we were her protective coloration. We moved as a mob of four, she, my brother, my sister, and I, and we seemed enough alike that when she couldn’t quite perform a trick as one of us would, we could cover for her. It was made very clear to us that we needed to maintain her masquerade until it was safe to do otherwise.”

“Who brought her to you?”

Simon shook his head. “That, I don’t know. I was a child when she arrived. To be honest, I can’t remember a time before Amy. She was always there, part of daily life, growing more beautiful with every passing night. It was inevitable that my brother and I should both fall in love with her—but that’s not the story you want to hear right now.”

“Not really,” I said, feeling slightly sick to my stomach. The thought that my entire life, my entire world had hinged upon my mother choosing between twin brothers was ridiculous enough to be difficult to swallow. “You were talking about the differences between Mom’s magic and mine.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure your magic is a match for your sister’s. You have different fathers, after all, and that could have changed things slightly. Not by enough to make you something other than Dóchas Sidhe, but enough for you to have different strengths. It’s happened before.”

“Faerie is weird, film at eleven,” I said. “What could August do that Mom couldn’t?”

“Magic has a scent,” said Simon. “It’s there for everyone. For most of us, though, it’s a whisper, a secret, a sigh. We’re better at picking up the magical scents of those we feel strongly about—family, lovers, close friends. For years, my best friend was a man who smelled of cranberries in bloom, but all Sylvester could say for sure about his magic was that it was some sort of small white flower. Magic adapts. For Amandine, the scents are secondary. She barely notices them. All her focus is on the bloodlines they identify. She could take one sniff of your squire and know how many generations removed he was from his First, where those generations branched, and how many of his ancestors had been Daoine Sidhe.”

“Uh, all of them,” said Quentin.

I said nothing. His mother, Maida, was born a changeling, the daughter of a human woman and a fae man. The mortality had been pulled out of her before she became High Queen; it had been long, long gone by the time Quentin was born. That didn’t change the fact that he had a direct human ancestor. I could see the watermarks in Maida’s blood when I looked at her closely. I could see their echoes in his.

“Maybe,” said Simon, with surprising charity. “Some of us carry secrets even we don’t know. A world where blood can be changed is a world where what’s beneath the surface is unknowable by many of us. August could see who someone was, not what their blood wanted them to be. She could follow the trail of a spell for miles. Amy couldn’t do that. Still can’t, I suppose, or she would have gone after our daughter long since.”

The forest was growing thinner. We stepped out of the trees, and the season shifted, melting from high summer into early spring. The meadow where we stood was an endless explosion of wildflowers, some familiar from my time in the mortal world, others bright and impossible and utterly fae. A patch of what looked like glowing poppies had attracted a swirling storm of moths, which danced above the light, not seeming to notice the predatory flock of pixies that was picking off the ones flying at the edge.

Simon grasped my arm and steered me around the glowing flowers. “There are a remarkable number of toxins native to the plants in this area. The pixies have no doubt taken advantage of them.”

“Right,” I said. I would heal quickly enough not to lose much time. Simon and Quentin wouldn’t.

The shape of Amandine’s tower appeared between one step and the next, rising white and pristine from the landscape. It looked almost organic, like it had grown rather than being built. I shivered. I couldn’t help myself. I might have lived there once, when I was too young and too eager to please to know better, but it had never been my home, not really. It had never been mine. It was only recently that I had started to understand all the reasons my mother had held herself apart from me, refusing to love me more than she was absolutely required to. As long as there had been anything fae about me, I had been nothing more than a pale reflection of the daughter I had been intended to replace. She didn’t want another August. She couldn’t understand how a child who shared her eyes could be anything else.

Simon’s hand touched my shoulder. I turned, startled, to find him looking at me with a surprising degree of understanding.

“Sometimes the places that should be home aren’t,” he said. “Sometimes there’s no one we can blame for that, and so we blame ourselves, because aren’t we the easiest targets? It’s not like anyone will come to our defense when all the loathing and finger-pointing is happening in the privacy of our own minds.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the bad guy here?” I asked.

Simon paused before taking his hand away. “My apologies,” he said. “I forgot my place for a moment.” He resumed walking, striding ahead toward the gate to Mom’s garden.

I stood where I was for a few seconds longer, trying to reconcile everything I knew about the man with the urge to apologize for hurting his feelings. “This was easier when I was allowed to hate him,” I finally muttered, and took off after him.

Quentin followed me, silent, wary. He’d had as much sleep as I had, which was to say, none, and the fact that he was still standing was a testament to how much he cared about protecting his family and standing by his knight. He wasn’t going to drop until I did.

When the hell did I wind up needing to do right by so many people? What could I have possibly done to deserve them?

Simon didn’t wait for us. He reached the garden gate, pushed it open, and stepped through, into Amandine’s world of springtime snow. Every flower she grew there was white. White roses, white daffodils, sprays of Queen Anne’s lace, and beds of snowdrops and white crocuses. There were even white violets, which seemed to defeat the purpose of having a flower named after a color. Some of the leaves and stems were green, but even they seemed less vibrant than the plants growing outside the garden walls.

We caught up with Simon at the center of the garden. He was crouched, sniffing a large, bell-shaped lily. Turning at the sound of our footsteps, he smiled, wry and sad and something else that I couldn’t put a name to, and said, “My mother, Oberon rest and keep her, always said a lady’s garden should be an ornament for the lady it contained. Amy grew everything white when we met, because she felt ashamed of how little color she had. She wanted to set herself against a blank canvas, so as to look like she existed.”

It made a certain amount of sense, especially since she’d been raised among the Daoine Sidhe. They don’t have a “look,” the way the Tylwyth Teg or the Tuatha de Dannan do. Instead, they tend toward bright, dramatic coloration, like Simon’s red hair and golden eyes, or Quentin’s brilliant blue eyes and bronze hair, complete with a razor’s edge of growing patina. I’ve met Daoine Sidhe with hair in every color the rainbow had to offer, and a few the rainbow would have rejected for being overly garish. Compared to all that, Amandine’s palely golden hair and virtually colorless eyes would have made her stand out, and not in a good way.

Thinking about my mother—who had always seemed like the most beautiful woman in the world to me when I was a little girl, the person I could aspire to be, but never become—as feeling like an outsider was a bit surreal.

“After I married her, I convinced her to add some color to her flowerbeds, for the accent it provided,” Simon said, and straightened. “And when August joined us, she planted such flowers . . . oh, October, you should have seen it.”

“I have,” I said quietly. “In your memories, remember? When you let me ride your blood.”