Page 32 of The Brightest Fell

“My sister’s not a pixie,” I said. I hesitated, considering my next words carefully. This wood didn’t quite border on Amandine’s tower—we’d walked too far for that—but it was close enough that the odds were good the pixies would know who she was. Would invoking her name help me, or get me locked in the nearest toadstool for the next hundred years?

Caution isn’t normally my strong suit, and had I been weighing the risks for myself, I might have gone ahead and done it. I wasn’t. I was weighing the risks for Simon and Quentin, and more, for Tybalt and Jazz. I couldn’t take the chance of getting them hurt.

The woman seemed to take my silence for fear. She laughed. “Oh, look at you, all scared of a pixie,” she said snidely. “What’s your name, wingless?”

“October.”

Her eyes went wide, the tip of her spear dipping toward the ground—which was actually a tree branch, judging by the rough brown surface beneath our feet. “October?” she echoed.

I tensed. This was usually where the stabbing started. “Yes.”

“Once Countess of Goldengreen, who kept her word even to us, even where so many others would not? Who freed our captives, and filled our stocks?”

I blinked. Then, more slowly, I said again, “Yes.”

The woman dropped her spear and flung her arms around me, wings suddenly vibrating so fast that they became a blur of color. The rest of the pixies did the same, and I found myself the recipient of a pixie group hug, which was something like being trapped in the middle of a carillon of bells, all of them ringing at the same time in their own keys. It was surprisingly soothing, for being so incredibly loud.

A bright orange hand reached through the crowd and grabbed the collar of my jacket, dragging me out. I found myself in another hug, this one singular, but somehow even tighter.

“I thought I was going to die in there!” cried the hugger, a pixie woman whose body was lit up like a jack-o-lantern. She shoved me out to arm’s length, beaming in every sense of the word. “Hello!”

“Er, hi,” I said. “I’m . . . sorry. Have we met?”

“Not properly!” she said. “You let me out of a jar once!”

I blinked.

There was a trend among the purebloods at one time—or maybe more than one time; fashions have a lot of time to come and go when you live forever—for lights made of living pixies trapped in glass domes or stuffed into lanterns. No food or water, of course. Those would encourage excrement, and what kind of delicate, decorative lantern was covered in its own shit?

Pixies are considered somewhere between monsters and vermin by most people, which means they aren’t covered by Oberon’s Law. Killing them isn’t a crime, even though they’re intelligent beings. The end result of that loophole was a lot of dead pixies, left to starve in their glass prisons and then discarded when their lights went out. Oberon’s Law doesn’t cover changelings, either. If I ever meet Oberon, we’re going to have a long, long talk.

When I had accessed the shallowing at Muir Woods, following Rayseline, the kidnapped sons of the Duchess of Saltmist, and my own stolen daughter, the place had been lit by lanterns filled with captive pixies. I had freed them, choosing mercy over expediency, and the pixies had rewarded me by helping me save the missing children.

They hadn’t saved everyone. The face of the orange pixie fell as I watched, and she said, “I’m sorry about your friend. We couldn’t turn the arrow aside.”

Connor, who had died of elf-shot in front of me. I forced a sad smile. “It wasn’t your fault. You did more than I could have asked.”

“That you asked at all was a miracle to us. We still owe you life debts a hundred times over.” The pixie woman hugged me a second time before finally, mercifully letting go. “What are you doing here?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” I said. “I was following the trail of my sister’s magic when I kicked this big puffball mushroom, and woke up in a dark room with no doors.”

“Ahhh.” She smiled knowingly. “You triggered the sentries. Got yourself ensmallinated. Fun times!”

“Yeah, maybe, but I don’t have time for fun right now. I need to find my sister. Do you know where the other people with me were taken?”

She cocked her head to the side. “Don’t you want to explore? Most people don’t ever get to come here, and when they do, they don’t ever get to look around.”

August’s trail had led through here . . . I stiffened. “How long have you lived here?”

“Me, or everybody?”

“Both.”

“Me, I don’t know. A while. I go to Human sometimes, to hunt and scavenge, when it’s my turn, but mostly I stay here. Help with the kids, see my family, all that stuff you do when you’re not questing. The flock has been here for days and days and days.”

Right: this wasn’t getting me anywhere. I decided to try another approach. “Do you remember the big earthquake? The one where the old King died?”

“We don’t have a King,” she said. “You do, but we don’t.”