Page 27 of The Brightest Fell

“Yeah, well, she stole my fiancé in order to blackmail me into doing my chores, so I don’t like her very much either right now,” I said, and stepped inside.

Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see Simon scattered all through the décor of the tower, which hadn’t changed since I was a child—or, I suspected, since the first time Amandine had walked away from it, fleeing out into the mortal world to escape the shadows which haunted this place. The floor was polished stone, smooth enough to be pleasant underfoot, rough enough not to become slippery when wet. There was a fireplace in one wall. It shared a flue with the other fireplaces in the tower, one to a floor, all their smoke combining to emerge from the same chimney. The furniture was simple but elegant, rustic and timeless, and chosen with a care that my mother had never shown when dealing with material possessions.

Simon stopped at the middle of the room, drinking it all in with hungry eyes. Amandine was gone. So were Tybalt and Jazz, if she had been keeping them here at all. I looked around, finally spotting a single black feather on the floor near the rear door. They had been here. She had taken them away.

“What room did she give you?” Simon asked, turning toward me.

“Fourth floor,” I said.

“That makes sense,” he said. When I raised an eyebrow, he explained, “We slept on the sixth, where she could watch the moonrise from our window. It soothed her. August’s room was a floor below ours.”

I blinked. “That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because the tower only has five floors.”

Simon looked almost amused. “Ah. Because of course, one of the Firstborn, in her own home, would not be able to manipulate the architecture to her own ends.”

I resisted the urge to groan. Of course Amandine could change the place around to suit herself. I had always known she had the capability: she had expanded my room at least once, when I was a child, and had outgrown my available space. I just hadn’t expected her to erase an entire floor. Instead, I asked, “How are we supposed to get there?”

“Unless she’s changed the place more than I expect she has, I know the way,” said Simon, and started for the stairs with me and Quentin at his heels.

The stairs wound around the body of the tower in a gentle curve, never steep enough to become a strenuous climb. I kept looking around with new eyes, imagining this place full of life and laughter, occupied by a family, not a woman and the daughter she had never intended to save. It was hard. It hurt. That didn’t matter, because I couldn’t stop myself.

We climbed past my old bedroom, until we were halfway up the stairs leading to my mother’s chambers. Simon stopped, crouching and studying something on the floor. He pointed.

“See that?” he asked.

I squinted. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” said Quentin, sounding faintly bemused. “What is it?”

“It’s the edge of the fold Amy made when she sealed August’s room away,” said Simon. “It’s no wonder you can’t see it, October; this is an illusion, a powerful one, and the Dóchas Sidhe have nothing of Titania in them. You’ll never be the illusionist your mother is, and only the fact that she was Firstborn allowed her to pass for Daoine Sidhe.”

My illusions have never been my strong suit. There have been times when I had to lose my temper before I could even raise the magic necessary to cast a human disguise. It still rankled to hear him dismiss my capabilities so cavalierly.

“Look,” he said, focusing on Quentin. “If you want to dispel this sort of illusion, it helps to have a tie to the person who cast it—in this case, Amy is my wife, and so I am familiar with the way she spins a spell. Every illusion is different. I could punch through the center of this one, but that would be difficult, and it might do me harm, as she can work quite a bit of power into a casting. So what I want to do is find the thread, and pull.”

What he was saying made sense, especially when I compared it to the way I perceived other people’s spells. I tilted my head, watching intently as Simon twisted his fingers through the air, finally hooking them over some invisible thread and beginning to pull. The smell of blood and roses, faint, like it had been bottled up and was only now being released, began to permeate the air. The stairs wavered, shimmering, before there was a distant shattering sound, and they seemed to extend, growing longer.

Simon sat back on his haunches, clearly winded. “Oh, she meant for that to last,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Best get up and move along, before she comes to ask why I’ve started breaking her things.”

He didn’t need to tell me twice. I started moving, pausing only long enough to offer him a hand and help him up. I wanted to see what was up this new flight of stairs, what my mother had hidden from me in my own home for my entire childhood. And I called myself a detective.

There was a new landing. At the new landing was a new door, closed but not locked, like the occupant of the room on the other side had expected to be back soon. I opened it, gingerly.

August’s room was a mirror image of mine, and nothing like mine at all. Her furnishings were of the same school, all oak and ash and princess canopies, but they were visibly mended in some places, like they’d been used hard and repaired by an unpracticed hand. One wall was devoted to bookshelves, stretching from floor to ceiling, and there was a cartographer’s desk under the window, with a half-finished map still weighted down at the center of it, waiting for August to come back and resume sketching the lines of its terrain. It didn’t feel like a place that had been shut off for a century. It felt like it had been shut off for less than a day. Good. That meant Simon’s plan just might work.

I moved to the center of the room, closed my eyes, and breathed in deep.

Everyone’s magic is different, but everyone’s magic takes something from their parents. I inherited the copper in my magic from Amandine, which I suppose is why the less mortal I become, the less it smells like metal, and the more it smells like blood. The cut-grass . . . I can only think that’s my magic interpreting what I got from my father, because it didn’t come from her. Quentin’s magic was steel and heather, and his father smelled of heather and celandine poppies, while his mother smelled of fresh-cooled steel and dry hay. We carry our past in our veins, and we reflect it in our magic.

August’s room smelled, at first, like any other lived-in bedroom: clean, but with a faint undertone of sweat, the smell of hot days and tangled sheets, of striving for sleep when it didn’t want to come. That smell has been baked into the walls of every bedroom I’ve ever occupied, no matter how clean the house was, no matter how often we bleached the sheets or repainted the walls. It’s the smell of being alive, and while it’s normally a welcome one, I couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy. We didn’t know whether August was alive or dead. We wouldn’t know for a long time yet . . . and if she was dead, I didn’t know what Amandine was going to do.

Focus. I needed to focus. My own magic was trying to rise in response to my distress, and I damped it down again, refusing to let it complicate matters more than they already were. I needed to find old magic, not new.

Amandine was the first person I identified. Her magic was the strongest, as befit a Firstborn, and it was everywhere, touching and tracing every surface. She had spent so much of her time here, with the daughter she actually wanted, never dreaming that one day, a daughter she didn’t know what to do with would sleep one floor below.