Page 31 of The Brightest Fell

I was swallowing my third mouthful of the gag when the part of my mind that was constantly cataloging and storing away the labels for magical scents finally decided to come to the party, and informed me that I was chewing on a violet. That made sense, as far as flavor went, while simultaneously making no sense at all. The gag was exactly that—a gag, a single strip of material pulled tight around my head. It wasn’t a mash of pressed flowers, or anything ridiculous like that. Although I supposed it could be the petal from a gigantic violet, turned to a unique and somewhat antisocial application.

There was another option there, one that probably made a little bit more sense, but I didn’t want to think about it until I had myself unstuck. All it would do was upset me. That was bad no matter what I was currently chewing on; I needed to keep my wits where they were.

One nice thing about getting knocked out: it substitutes pretty well for sleep a lot of the time. I felt more alert than I had in a while. Eating my gag, bizarre as that sounds, was also helping. My blood sugar had not been in a good place.

I took a last hard bite, swallowed a last sugary mouthful, and felt the gag drop away. Good: that was step one. I still couldn’t see anything, which was unusual. Fae have excellent night vision. We’re like cats, able to see in the slightest trace of light. For it to be this dark, there had to be no light at all—that, or something had been done to my eyes. The thought caused a brief spike of panic, until I blinked several times and confirmed that I could still feel my eyes. No one had removed them or sealed my eyelids shut.

It says something about my life that this was a concern.

If my gag had been edible and organic, maybe whoever tied me up had made the same mistake with whatever was tying my wrists. I twisted them inward as much as my bones allowed, until I could get the nails of my right hand against the bonds. Holding that position ached but didn’t actually hurt, which was a pleasant surprise. Gritting my teeth against the strain, I began digging my nails into the “rope.” It definitely wasn’t rope. It tore like an organic thing, yielding under my hand until I began to feel like this was some sort of perverse joke. Maybe whoever it was who had tied me up didn’t have much experience, or maybe they hadn’t actually been intending to hold me; maybe they just wanted to slow me down.

The world narrowed to my nails against the vines—I was almost sure they were vines—and the sticky green smell of sap that rose from them. Sweet pea, murmured the cataloging part of my mind, not as an endearment, but as an identification. Someone had gagged me with a violet and tied me up with sweet pea runners. This day just kept getting stranger and stranger.

When the last vine broke, I pulled my hands from behind my back, massaging my wrists for a second before bending and feeling for whatever was covering my feet. To my dismay, if not surprise, my questing hands encountered what felt like the largest glob of hardening pine resin in the world. It hadn’t reached the “hard enough to shatter when you hit it with a hammer” stage yet, but it was well on its way. Swell.

Pine resin is sticky, viscous, and greedy, if such a thing can be said about an inanimate substance: what it catches, it likes to keep. Still, it’s a liquid until it hardens, and it’s possible to pull things free, if you move slowly and don’t yank. Yanking is bad. Yanking increases the resistance of the stuff, and increased resistance means increased hardness. I would recover if I broke half the bones in my foot, but it would hurt, and it would slow me down. Better a little slowness now than a lot of slowness later.

Carefully, I began to pull my knees to my chest, tugging against the sap. It tugged back, but as it wasn’t alive, and didn’t know what I was doing, it couldn’t fight as effectively as I could. It was like challenging a sleeping giant to a slow-motion wrestling match—and honestly, I would have been a lot more comfortable with an actual sleeping giant. At least then I could have screamed until it woke up and turned things into a more standard sort of fight. As it was, I had to keep pulling steadily but constantly, never varying the amount of pressure I was putting on, until finally my left foot came free, quickly followed by the right.

Both my feet were covered in a thin layer of pine resin, all the way up to the middle of my calves. I scraped as much of it off as I could before standing.

My head hit the ceiling.

“Oof,” I said, without much vigor. The ceiling, low as it was, was also soft and spongy, like it was made of foam rather than wood or stone. I reached up with sap-sticky fingers and pushed against it. It yielded. A faint, earthy smell pervaded the room. I closed my eyes for a moment, out of sheer frustration. It wasn’t like having them open changed anything. The room was still totally dark.

The room was also carved out of the living body of some enormous fungus. The urge to make terrible jokes about mushrooms was strong, and born at least partially out of panic. I don’t have issues with claustrophobia, but I don’t think you need to have issues with claustrophobia to be unhappy about being encased in a living structure with no windows or doors.

Sometimes violence really is the answer. I punched the wall, feeling it break under my hand. It was like punching foam: bloodless, painless, and remarkably cathartic. I opened my eyes, smiled, and went to work.

On the fifth punch, my fist went through the wall. When I pulled it back, moonlight poured through the hole I’d created, warm and bright as day in comparison to the dark. I stopped punching and started rending, ripping away great fistfuls of mushroom, until I had created a hole large enough for me to walk through. I burst triumphantly into the moonlight—

—and stopped as the woman in front of me leveled her wickedly pointed spear at the tip of my nose. Weapons tend to have that effect on me. Normally, my freeze would only have lasted for a few seconds. Normally, the person holding the spear wouldn’t have been glowing. Everything about her, from skin to hair to long gossamer wings, radiated a bright shade of lilac. It was like she’d swallowed a basket full of Christmas lights.

Or like she was a pixie.

Once I had the thought, the evidence became impossible to ignore. Her hair was dark purple under the glow: her ears, while pointed, didn’t match any breed of fae I knew, maybe because I wasn’t used to seeing them at this scale. Maybe most tellingly, her clothing appeared to have been made from enormous flower petals, held together with cobweb stitches. There was even a fishbone in her hair, holding her messy bun in place. The spear, while dangerous, was made of a sliver of glass glued to a pine twig. She was a pixie.

She was also taller than I was. Oh, this was bad.

I raised my hands, palms outward, in what I hoped would be taken as a gesture of peace. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Sorry about your, uh, toadstool.” I would not call it a mushroom, I would not. If I said the word, I would start making architecture jokes, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop. “I don’t like closed spaces.”

“Make no moves, prisoner,” she said, wings vibrating as she spoke, like they were amplifying her voice. That wasn’t as surprising as the fact that I could understand her. Normally, the speech of pixies was like the high ringing of bells, fast and shrill and impossible to follow.

My surprise must have shown. She scowled and said, “Oh, didn’t think pixies could talk, did you? Maybe it’s because you don’t know how to listen, do you? Ears the size of a grown man, and they can’t hear a damn thing but themselves jawing on for nights without end.”

“It’s less you talking and more me being the same size as you that has me a little off-balance,” I said, lowering my hands. She didn’t seem inclined to stab me at the moment, although Oberon knew, that could change. I have a gift for making people want to see me bleed. “I had two men with me before I passed out. Where are they?”

“Making demands already? Cheek.” The pixie woman waved her spear in a threatening manner. Lights were beginning to appear at the edges of my vision, daffodil yellow and clover green and a surprisingly violent shade of blue. More pixies were coming. Because what I always needed was to be shrunk, menaced, and then surrounded by hostile people who could fly.

“Not cheek, concern,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “They’re my responsibility.”

“You should’ve been somebody’s responsibility,” said the woman. “Then you might’ve known not to go walking in our woods.”

The giant mushrooms. Naturally. I should have taken them as the warning they were, but I fell into the trap of thinking “I’ve seen this before, in movies intended for human children, which means it can’t be true.” It’s easy to forget that those human legends and stories were based on real things they had encountered and somehow survived, back in the days when Faerie and the human world collided more often. When the deeper realms linked straight onto the mortal world, and not just the Summerlands. Things like the pixie fondness for mushrooms, and for shrinking intruders when they thought they could get away with it.

“I apologize,” I said sincerely. “I didn’t know this was your territory. I’m just trying to find my sister.”

“She’s not here, unless you’ve got wings strapped under that leather jacket,” said the woman. The other pixies laughed. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound. Being reduced to their size had taken the shrillness from their voices, dropping them to a register I could deal with.