Page 62 of The Brightest Fell

SIMON CAUGHT ME before I fell. At least, that was what I thought he was doing: as I struggled to stand upright, I realized he’d closed his hands on my shoulders, effectively pinning me in place. Sylvester had ordered him to raise no hand against me; maybe this didn’t count.

The woman on the steps below us was pale enough to look sickly, like cream that had gone faintly out of true. Her hair was a washed-out silvery red, as if it had been painted with moonlight one day while she wasn’t paying attention, and her eyes were a gold so pale and so clear that they verged on white-gray, like my mother’s, like my own. She was barefoot, wearing tattered secondhand jeans and a shapeless, oversized Borderlands T-shirt, and I would have known who she was even if I hadn’t known that she existed, because the family resemblance between us was terrifyingly strong. She even stood the way I did.

Why shouldn’t she? August and I were both daughters of Amandine who had been partially raised by Torquill men. Everything about my childhood had been a strange parody of hers, and looking at her was like looking at a funhouse mirror, warped and strange and perfect.

Her nose wrinkled. I realized she was tasting the air, rolling it on her tongue the way I did when I was trying to figure out what someone was.

“Let me up,” I hissed, glancing back to make sure Simon knew I was talking to him. “I can’t do this if I can’t stand.”

He didn’t let go. He was still staring at August, a man utterly transfixed, unwilling or unable to unlock his hands long enough to release me. I was probably as strong as he was—I definitely got more exercise—but the position and space we were in didn’t give me a lot of options for freeing myself unless I wanted to hurt him. August probably wouldn’t like that very much, him being her father and all.

I turned my attention back to her. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Mom sent me to find you. She’s been worried.”

August’s eyes narrowed. “I know you,” she said. Her accent was rounded and odd, like something out of an old movie; like something that had been shut away from the mortal world and its linguistic drift for a hundred years. “You were there, in Annwn, when the new people came. You were there when the walls of the world shredded, and I was finally free to step through. You did this to me.”

“I—what?”

That was all I had time to say before she launched herself up the stairs, grabbing me by the hair and yanking me out of Simon’s grasp. She was strong. She’d been living an agrarian existence in deep Faerie for longer than I’d been alive, and she had the sort of grip that comes from ploughing fields and breaking rocks.

What she didn’t have was training. Faced with an opponent who had already punched me once and was now jerking me toward her, I did the only thing that made sense: I brought my knee up and slammed it into the meat of her belly, knocking the air out of her with a loud gasp. She fell backward. She didn’t let go, and so I fell with her, two Dóchas Sidhe tumbling end over end to land in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

There was a loud crack as we fell, the sort of meaty sound that spoke of broken bones, rather than broken woodwork. There was no accompanying bolt of pain. For once, the broken bone wasn’t mine. August shrieked, the sound still thin and reedy from where I had knocked the wind out of her. What were a few broken bones between newly united siblings?

When the siblings were the pair of us, a few broken bones were virtually nothing. August was a pureblood, maybe the only pureblood of our shared kind, and she healed even faster than I did. By the time I had disentangled myself from the knot of limbs that we had become, she was already bouncing to her feet and lunging for me again, the smell of smoke and roses crackling in the air around her. Did healing raise her magic? Was it that way for both of us, and I had just never noticed, because my own magic was internal to me?

I had so many questions. There were so many things I wanted to ask her, things about our magic and the way it worked, things about our mother, things about her search for Oberon. And none of those questions were going to get answered until she stopped trying to flat-out murder me. August lunged, grabbing for my wrists, like she thought she could subdue me by holding my hands.

Wait. Maybe she could. If I wasn’t fighting back, maybe she’d stop—and it wasn’t like I couldn’t take a little pain. I let her grab my wrists, smothering the instincts that told me to back up, to pull away, to get out of her range before she did something I couldn’t live with. Simon was still on the stairs, neither coming to her aid nor asking her to stop. The geas he was under had to be warring with his parental instincts, and I almost felt bad for him. Almost; not quite. I had other things to worry about at the moment.

August locked her fingers around my wrists, jerking me toward her, and snarled, “Let’s see how good you are at binding what isn’t yours now.”

I had time to open my mouth and take a quick breath, intending to ask her what the hell she was talking about. I had less than a second. Then the pain slammed down on me, hot and intense and biting as if I were bathing in acid, like every nerve in my body was suddenly, electrically on fire. I screamed. The smell of smoke and roses was everywhere, cloying, choking me, until I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t stand—

When I was a child, Amandine tried to turn me human. She wanted me to die a human death, natural and mortal and inevitable. But it hurt. Oh, how it hurt. If she moved at anything swifter than a snail’s crawl, it was too painful for even the most devoted daughter to stand, and she had quickly learned that if she didn’t want me to flinch every time she came near me, she needed to go slow and easy.

For years, I’d blocked out how she had hurt me, refusing to think about it, refusing to even remember that it had happened, because if she was Daoine Sidhe, as everyone told me, over and over, there was no way her hands could have been enough to cause that sort of pain. When my own daughter had been born, I’d been afraid to touch her, because what if that sort of feedback loop was just how things worked among the fae, and no one had ever wanted to say anything in front of a flawed, mixed, mortal changeling?

My mind might have blocked out the pain, but my body remembered. It knew what August was doing, and it howled on a cellular level, fighting back as hard as it could. It didn’t matter. August was stronger, and she was better at using our shared magic, and as hard as I pulled away, she pulled me toward her twice as fiercely.

Don’t-look-here spells don’t make it impossible for someone to notice you. They just make it harder. With the way I was screaming, someone was going to notice me.

Then Simon was there, grabbing my shoulders, dragging me away from August. She let go with surprising readiness once it was her father pulling me out of her grasp. I stopped screaming and gasped, unable to speak as I struggled to get my equilibrium back.

It wasn’t coming easy. I didn’t even need the lock of colorless brown hair that had fallen to cover my eyes to know what she had done: it was singing in my veins, in the suddenly shifted watermarks of my mortality. Like our mother, like me, August knew how to change the blood of the people she touched. It was clear that unlike me, she’d had plenty of opportunities to practice. I was a blunt instrument and she?

She was a scalpel.

My heart was beating too hard and my body felt like it had been replaced by a hundred pounds of clay as I staggered to my feet, struggling to keep my balance in the force of too many changes, too quickly. Simon had his arm around my shoulders, sheltering me from August, whose eyes were still bright with magic and rage.

“That is enough,” he snapped, and his voice was the crack of a whip, the edict of a king: disagreeing with him would be impossible. August froze. Only for a moment. Long enough for him to let me go and move to her, grabbing her arms and restraining her.

My knees went weak, trying to force me to kneel. He was so beautiful. How had I never seen how beautiful he was? I didn’t even have the right to look at him.

The part of me that was still fae raged and wept at the same time, stunned into silent fury. There’s something in the human DNA that wants to bow before the fae, seeing them as too perfect, too beautiful to truly exist. It’s an old instinct, left over from the days when the purebloods hunted humans for sport, running them up and down the hills before putting arrows in their hearts and leaving them for their lovers to find. Bow, and maybe you won’t be transformed into a deer, or a tree, or a particularly interesting stone. Bow, and maybe your betters will let you pass in peace.

Bow, and live to see the morning.

The false Queen used to raise those responses in me. She was one of the only fae I knew who actually rejoiced in being punishingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that never did anyone any good, but could do them a world of hurt. I had hated the feelings she sparked in me then, when I thought they were an unavoidable part of being who and what I was. As my blood had shifted and those feelings had faded, I had been relieved. That was a part of my mortality I had never wanted back.