Page 46 of The Brightest Fell

“I’m his brother,” said Simon. “My name is Simon.”

“Interesting,” said Acacia. “The two of you could be buds from the same branch.”

“So I’ve been told,” said Simon. “We’re looking for my daughter.”

“Her name is August,” I said. “She would have come through here about a hundred years ago, via the Babylon Road, looking for a changeling boy that Michael had stolen on one of his Rides.”

“I remember her,” said Acacia, and frowned. “She crashed in as if she had every right, and she stole from my husband. He told me she was dust and bones. Did he lie?”

She didn’t sound like she’d be surprised if he had. My heart sank anyway. I had been more than half-hoping August had spent the last hundred years as a tree, growing peacefully in Acacia’s woods, waiting for me to come and take her home. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re trying to find her.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s my sister, and because our mother decided to take my lover as collateral against my bringing her back.”

Acacia’s eyes widened again. “Amandine spoke to you? A second child of Amandine’s line yet lives?”

“I don’t know, but I need to find her,” I said. “You said she stole from Michael. Did she find the changeling she was looking for?”

“Yes. Grabbed the boy out of the stables and vanished into the night.”

I did not want to go back to Blind Michael’s stable. More, I did not want to take Quentin there. This place was a nightmare walking for him, and he deserved more than the traumas I was heaping on his head. We didn’t really have a choice, considering the circumstances.

“I need to see where they disappeared from,” I said. “Can you take us there?”

“For the woman who murdered my husband?” asked Acacia, with a hint of amusement in her voice. “Anything. Please, follow me.”

She began to walk across the wastes, wings fanning at the air. Lacking any better options in the matter, the rest of us followed her, while the fog curled in to block the sky above us.

FOURTEEN

IF I HADN’T BEEN to Acacia’s lands when they still belonged to her husband, they might have seemed utterly bleak, without any hint of life or recovery. But I had been there before. I had fled across them when they belonged to her husband, when they were nothing but thorn and stone and suffering. Now . . .

The ground was still hard, stony, and unforgiving. It was also dusted in a thin layer of delicate green, weeds and grasses starting to take root as they found a way to thrive in a place that had never welcomed them before. The thorn briars were still thick, almost impenetrable knots dotting the landscape, but now they were dotted with the occasional white flower the size of my hand, almost—not quite—like blackberries in bloom. Life was coming to Blind Michael’s kingdom, and once it fully arrived, it wasn’t going to agree to leave again. Life so rarely did.

Acacia walked beside me, watching as I reacted to everything around us. Smiling a small and secret smile, she asked, “What do you think?”

“I think it’s going to be amazing.”

“I think it already is.” She tilted her head back, until she was sending her smile to the three pale and distant moons that dotted the blackness of the sky. “They’ve come so much farther than you can see from a distance. I’ve sent so many of them back to their people, and the ones who have chosen to stay—it was a choice for most of them, not the only option they had remaining.”

There was a word there that said everything: “most.” What Blind Michael had done to the children he stole was more than just a crime. It was a monstrosity. It was no surprise that some of them hadn’t been able to recover, either because his magic had bent them too far from what they had been, or because they had no longer been able to imagine themselves as anything other than what they had become. This was their home now.

“How have the families of the ones who’ve gone back received them?”

Acacia grimaced. “Some well; some not. It had been centuries for some of the Riders. Their families had . . . moved on, I suppose. It can be hard to bring someone back to something they left so long before.”

I glanced toward Simon. He was walking beside Quentin, looking around with calm curiosity, seemingly unbothered by the strangeness of his surroundings. This place didn’t hold any deep-seated nightmares for him.

“I get that,” I said.

Quentin was a lot less relaxed than Simon. That wasn’t a surprise. He kept looking around, eyes wide and a little wild, like he expected to be attacked at any moment. The occasional blast of a hunting horn in the far distance probably wasn’t helping any.

The land was malleable before the wishes of its mistress, even as it had once been malleable before Blind Michael’s wishes. We walked toward the stable, and the plains bent themselves to suit us, reducing the distance without changing the shape of it, so that we walked over the crest of a shallow hill and were suddenly confronted with the low, boxy shape of the hall and its outbuildings, like a child’s toys left carelessly scattered across the yard.

Quentin stepped closer to me, pale and a little shaky. I reached over and took his hand. He glanced at me and laughed uneasily.

“This was the first place I was taller than you,” he said.