Page 39 of The Brightest Fell

“I wondered if you were going to remember that,” she said, and stepped to the side, disentangling herself from Quentin in the process. Eyes on Poppy, she said, “Enter and be not afraid, for you have been invited.”

“You’re never that formal with me,” I said.

“You’re rarely invited,” she replied.

I smiled wearily and stepped inside.

There was no sense of transition between one side of the door and the other; we were still in the Summerlands. We were also standing in the Luidaeg’s apartment, which I knew for a fact was located in the mortal city of San Francisco. The illusions that sometimes made the place look like an EPA disaster zone were down, revealing clean walls, a sparse, vaguely nautical décor, and a carpet the color of fresh kelp. The air smelled like the sea, the clean, sweet sea, when the tide was high and all the darker aspects of it were safely out of sight beneath the waves.

The Luidaeg waited until Poppy was through to close the door. Her attention on the transformed pixie, she said, “I am the sea witch. I am the maker of bargains and the granter of dreams. Speak carefully to me, if you must speak at all, because if you put yourself into my debt, you will have to pay. Do you understand?”

“Might be,” said Poppy, sounding dazed. “Never thought I’d meet you proper. Normally too small to notice.”

“I notice everything,” said the Luidaeg wearily. She turned to me. “How’d you find the back door?”

“I followed the trail August left when she came to see you.”

The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “You followed a hundred-year-old trail no one else has been able to find? You’re good, but you’re not that good. How did you even know where to start?”

“Simon showed me.” I looked to Poppy. “Can I have him back, please?”

Poppy dipped her hand into the pocket of her dress, coming up with the diminutive, still-sleeping form of Simon Torquill. She held him out to me, a goofy smile on her face. “He’s cute when he’s this much smaller’n me,” she said. “Pixies seem this cute to you?”

“When they’re not trying to stab me, yes.” I put my cupped hands under hers, and she gently tipped Simon into them, careful not to shake him too much. I turned back to the Luidaeg, presenting him like a trophy. “Simon Torquill.”

The Luidaeg’s eyebrows made a valiant attempt to climb to her hairline. “So it is. I’m assuming he swapped sizes with your pixie friend because . . . ?”

“Because I woke him up using Walther’s countercharm, and it was still in his system when Poppy’s colony knocked us out. I think the magic is fighting. I can’t keep him conscious.”

“I . . . see.” The Luidaeg gave Simon a dubious look. “What do you expect me to do about it? He can’t make a deal with me. He’s not awake. You have to be awake before you can promise me anything.”

“To be fair, I wasn’t looking for you,” I said. “I didn’t even know you had a back door. As far as waking Simon, I could—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” The Luidaeg shifted her gaze to me, and her eyes were green as the shallow edge of the sea. A person could drown there. “You’re already so deep in my debt that there’s no seeing the surface from where you are, and you weren’t careful when you acquired it. I’m not saying I blame you for that—you had people to save—but you may never finish paying me back. I’m not letting you go any deeper before you’ve started working it off.”

“I can do it,” said Quentin.

This time, I was the one to shake my head and say, “No. You’re not going into debt over Simon Torquill, not if there’s any other way.”

“Then you’ve got a problem, Toby, because this isn’t one I can give you for free.”

“Pardon.” We all turned to Poppy, who was twisting her hands in front of her, watching us anxiously. “Pardon, but why not do debts over Simon? He’s good folks. You’re good folks. Shouldn’t good folks help each other?”

“It’s not that simple.” Simon was a hero to the pixies. The sentence still felt strange, but there it was. “Simon did . . . some things, after he stopped coming to see you. Things he probably shouldn’t have done, that I don’t think he’d want me to tell you about.”

Poppy blinked. “Why not?”

“Because you’d look at him differently if you knew.”

“Oh.” Poppy frowned for a moment before she turned to the Luidaeg and said, “I don’t know the things you won’t tell me. I don’t look at him differently. So I’ll do debts for him. Can you do what needs done to wake him up, for please?”

The Luidaeg’s frown was slow and serious. “You understand that I will take payment from you for doing this, and you may not like what I decide to claim.”

“He was awake before we made him not to be,” said Poppy. “We didn’t know hitting him with our sleeping would mean he slept for longer than he should. Simon helped us once. He helped us so much. The only people who’ve helped as much as him are Patrick and her,” she pointed to me, “and now we’ve hurt two from the three of them, because she needs him and we took him away. So please, let me do debts. Wake him up.”

“Pixies,” said the Luidaeg—but there was a note of fondness in her tone, like she couldn’t believe she was dealing with this. She tilted her head, attention now fixed on Poppy. “Do you know where you come from?”

“Um,” said Poppy. “There was Maeve, and there was some sad, and she wanted some happy where she could see it. So she cut some of the happy out of herself, and she made it into pretty stones that sparkled in the sun. All different stones, blue and red and green and silver. Only they weren’t stones, they were eggs, and when they hatched, they were pixies.”