The Brightest Fell

  “What about your natural magic?” asked Quentin. Pixies normally have a sort of passive “you can’t see me” field that keeps them from being noticed by mortals. It’s handy. Sometimes I wish I had one.

  Poppy shook her head. “Not that neither, which is why we don’t do it for much anymore. Used to be, someone kicked our mushrooms and squished our children, we’d small them right down for a while, maybe let a cat bat them about. Teach them a lesson and send them back to their parents not believing. Ha! But now, looking like we do . . .” She indicated herself, glowing skin, wings, and all. “If I smalled somebody down out in Human, I’d get found straightaway, and taken for a freak, or arrested by the wingless for endangering us all. I can’t hide myself from human eyes when I’m the same size as they are.”

  “Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “This is a very big favor, Poppy. I won’t forget it.”

  “’Course you won’t, because I’m coming with you,” she said blithely. She laughed at my blank look. “You don’t think I’d be letting you walk off with all my magic, do you? I’ll want it back as soon as he’s awake, no mistake of that. But this is an adventure, and we don’t have so many of those.”

  “Right,” I said faintly. Because a human-sized pixie in need of shoes was exactly what this quest needed.

  There was no sense in arguing with her, and she was right about one thing: it was unreasonable to expect her to let us walk off with her magic. But if Simon was his usual size, there was no way we’d be able to transport him.

  Sighing to myself, I walked over to where he was lying in the dirt and picked him up as gingerly as I could, all too aware of the size difference between us and how fragile his body was in comparison to mine. If I accidentally crushed his rib cage he wouldn’t recover; he’d just die.

  “You want as for me to carry him?” asked Poppy blithely. I turned to blink at her. She offered me an understanding smile. “We don’t big ourselves up too often, because it’s hard and it hurts and we need to small somebody down to do it, but I know what it feels to have somebody lots bigger carrying you. I know how to hold.”

  “That would be great,” I said, and let Simon’s body slide into her waiting hands. She made him vanish into the bodice of her dress—where, I realized, pockets had been stitched to almost every seam. It made sense. Pixies are scavengers, taking whatever they could get their hands on. Of course they would need as many pockets as they could fit into their clothes.

  We had wasted enough time. I stepped away from Poppy and closed my eyes, trying to filter through the myriad scents surrounding me until I found the campfire smoke and climbing roses trail of August’s magic.

  The fact that it was still there for me to find said something about how long the pixies had been alone here. Under normal circumstances, all traces of August would have long since been buried under the magical trails of a hundred other spells, a hundred other passing fae. But pixie magic is different. It manifests as sparkling, scentless dust, and it hadn’t obscured her passage.

  I opened my eyes. “This way,” I said, and started walking.

  Behind me, I heard Poppy ask, “We just follow?”

  “We just follow,” confirmed Quentin.

  They did.

  The ground grew marshier under our feet, until we were picking our way around the edges of a swamp, surrounded by trees that looked something like mangroves, and something like magnolias, and something like nightmares given vine-encrusted branches and leaves that blocked the sky. Sometimes those vines seemed to slither, implying the presence of snakes. I hurried on, not looking around more than I absolutely had to. If something attacked us, then I would care about it. If not, we could live and let live.

  There was a path in the mud if I watched for it carefully. It bent and twisted, all but tying itself in knots, and August’s scent was all along it. She had come this way. So long ago that time had smoothed her footprints from the mud, but still—my sister had walked here, and now I was following her. Something about it seemed inevitable, almost, like life was always going to bring me to this point eventually.

  A grassy mound rose out of the swamp ahead of us. Turtles in impossible colors, crystal blue and pine green and daisy white, basked on the shallow sides. They didn’t slide away at our approach, only looked at us with slow, curious eyes.

  The mound had a door, rough-hewn, sunk into the earth alongside a circular window holding panes of thick, bubbly glass. I looked back. Quentin shrugged. Poppy, busy goggling at the strange turtles, said nothing.

  “Right,” I said, and raised my hand, and knocked.

  The door opened.

  The woman on the other side looked barely old enough to deserve the title: she was sixteen at best, with the ghosts of old acne scars still haunting her cheeks, and long, dark hair that fell over her shoulder in a profusion of semicombed curls. She was wearing a blue tank top and jeans, and she looked wearily unsurprised to see me standing on her doorstep.

  “All right, you found the back door,” said the Luidaeg. “I suppose you might as well come in.”

  TWELVE

  “LUIDAEG.” QUENTIN PUSHED past me and threw his arms around the sea witch, first among Firstborn, monster under the collective bed of Faerie, in a way that would have been suicidal coming from virtually anyone else. From him, it was nothing more than a genuine expression of relief at seeing a friendly face. “You’re here.”

  “You found the back door,” she said again, ruffling his hair. Her hand came away faintly glittery. She looked at it, then at Poppy, who was doing her best to disappear behind me.

  It might have been easier if Poppy hadn’t still been lit up like a Christmas tree. The normal pixie glow is reasonably bright. On a pixie the size of a human being, it was virtually blinding.

  “Toby, why is Quentin covered in pixie dust, and why is there a giant pixie behind you?” Somehow the Luidaeg made that question sound almost reasonable. She has a gift for that sort of thing.

  “We met the local pixie colony,” I said. “They knocked us out. Didn’t you invite us in?”

  “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.”

  “One drop of blood for each of you,” said the Luidaeg. “That’s why your magic works the way it does. That’s why it’s so all-or-nothing. Because you’ve never had the size to master anything larger. My mother made you to make herself happy, and you did your jobs very well.”

  “Sorry, but I wasn’t there,” said Poppy, with what sounded like genuine regret. “I didn’t start for generations after that.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You still get the credit for making my mother smile. I’ll be right back.” The Luidaeg walked out of the room, heading for the kitchen.

  I knew what came after the kitchen. Usually, it was a lot of blood, and we hadn’t even gotten to the question of August’s candle yet. I turned to Poppy.

  “If you want to change your mind, this is when you run,” I said. “Take your magic back, return to your real size, and fly away as fast as you can, because when the Luidaeg makes a bargain, you pay what she asks of you. Do you understand?”

  “We owe him,” she said gravely. “The whole colony, we owe him. I wouldn’t even have been living long enough for you to save if not for Simon. How can I repay you for what you’ve done if I don’t start with the repayment of him?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. I wasn’t sure there was one.

  Footsteps from the hall told me that the Luidaeg was returning before she stepped into the room. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have an answer, because there was no longer time.

  “We like to talk about the Firstborn and the Three like there was always a clear chain of creation through Faerie, even though five minutes in the real world will tell you there wasn’t.” The Luidaeg walked to the middle of the room, stopping when she reached the coffee table. She knelt, placing three objects atop it: a shallow bowl made from an abalone shell, a long bone needle, and a glass flask filled with something that twisted and swirled like captive moonlight. “Maeve created pixies with no Firstborn to call their own. Acacia gave birth to the Blodynbryd, and when they cut their hair, rose goblins are sown. The Selkies were born in slaughter, the Raven-mays in sacrifice. Sometimes the rules break. Poppy.”

  “Yes?” said Poppy, in a hushed voice.

  “Do you agree to pay whatever I ask in exchange for my removing the magic your people placed in the body of Simon Torquill? Do you understand that I am the sea witch, the mother of nightmares, and once I have taken what I want from you, you may never be able to buy it back, no matter how hard you try?”

  “Yes,” said Poppy.

  The Luidaeg looked at her gravely. “Do you understand that I cannot refuse you, but I cannot give this to you for free?”

  “Yes,” said Poppy, more confidently.

  “Then here we go. Toby, put Simon on the couch and step away.”

  “Right.” I walked over to the couch and rolled Simon’s sleeping form onto the cushion. I didn’t think I’d broken him. It was hard to tell, with him refusing to wake up.

  “Quentin, go stand against the wall,” said the Luidaeg.

  He looked startled. “Why?”

  “Because I said so.” She grinned, showing a mouthful of viciously pointed teeth. “Move.”

  Quentin moved. I moved to stand next to him. When the Luidaeg needed me to bleed, she’d call me. She always did.

  “Mother didn’t leave room for anything but herself when she made the pixies. That’s part of why you’re so small. She was never good at allowing things to become complicated. Poppy, give me your hand.”

  Poppy, not yet aware of the danger of listening to the Luidaeg when she said that sort of thing, stuck out her hand. The Luidaeg picked up the bone needle and drove it into the tip of Poppy’s index finger.

  The oversized pixie yelped and tried to jump back. The Luidaeg grabbed her wrist before she could, moving it so that her fingertips were positioned above the shell bowl.

  “You promised,” said the Luidaeg, and squeezed.

  Poppy didn’t bleed. Instead, something as thick and viscous as maple syrup began dripping from her finger—assuming maple sy
rup was bright orange and glowed like it was radioactive. She made a soft squeaking sound, half surprise and half dismay. Her wings rustled, but they didn’t chime.

  “Keep your hand exactly where it is,” said the Luidaeg, and let go of Poppy’s wrist. She reached for the glass flask, pulling out the stopper. The smell of blood wafted from the silvery contents. It was . . . thin, diffuse, impossible to identify, except in the sense that I knew I couldn’t identify it. Whatever it was, it was something I had never encountered before.

  “I don’t feel good,” said Poppy. The glow from her skin was starting to dim, leaving her pink and pale, save for the high spots of hectic color in her cheeks.

  “Drink this,” said the Luidaeg, forcing the flask into her other hand. “You’ll feel better.”

  Poppy looked grateful, too innocent or too confused to sense a trap when one was springing shut on her—or maybe she just didn’t care. Maybe she had already accepted that this was going to happen, and saw no sense in fighting. Whatever her reasons, she raised the flask to her lips and drank its contents without hesitation, gulping them down in three long mouthfuls.

  Her eyes widened. Her jaw went slack. The flask fell from her fingers and landed on the floor with a sound like a single bell chiming. The stream of orange light was falling faster and faster, until it should have overflowed the shallow bowl. Somehow, the bowl seemed to keep expanding, growing broader, deeper, becoming wide enough to hold every drop.

  The couch springs groaned. I shifted my attention to Simon, who was suddenly back to his original size. Still asleep, but no longer small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. That was almost a pity. He would have been so much easier to deal with if he’d stayed portable.

  “Simon Torquill, whatever am I going to do with you?” The Luidaeg picked up the glass flask and walked over to him, crouching down and bringing the lip of it to his mouth. “Exhale,” she commanded.

  Simon did. A glittering swirl of pixie dust filled the flask.

  “Good boy,” she said, and slid the stopper home before slapping him, hard, across the face.