The Brightest Fell

  “A lot of people seem disinclined to forgive you,” I said.

  “I know, and I agree with them,” said Simon. “What I did, I did for the best of reasons. That doesn’t forgive it. If anything, that makes it worse, that a good man might become a villain thinking himself a hero in his heart. Take care, October. Your current quest . . . this is the road that broke me.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” I said, trying not to show how much his words struck home.

  Amandine had Tybalt. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do to get him back. If she had asked me to kill someone instead of sending me to find my sister, would I have considered it? Would I have agreed to do the things Simon had done? All she had asked me for so far was something I would have been willing to do anyway—but what if this wasn’t the end? What if I found August, brought her back, and was greeted with a smug “for your next task . . .”?

  I didn’t know. That scared me.

  “We are the sum of our actions,” said Simon. “When desperation sets our course, those actions can blacken with remarkable speed.”

  “I know this place,” said Quentin.

  I stopped walking.

  The forest had closed in around us completely, obscuring the moors. Many of the trees around us had probably been people once. The lady of this land, Acacia, had attempted to transform me into one of them the first time we met, stopping only when I revealed that I knew her daughter, Luna Torquill. The last time I’d checked, Acacia had been in the process of rehabilitating and restoring the victims of her husband’s Rides . . . but Blind Michael had been almost as old as the Luidaeg, and his Rides had spanned centuries. He had stolen hundreds of children. Some of them had died. Others had been broken so completely that their only peace had been found in the forest.

  I wasn’t sure whether all of those children could be brought back to their original forms, or whether they would have any place to go if they were. Sometimes lost is lost, even in Faerie. Maybe especially in Faerie.

  “This is where we ran,” said Quentin, the color draining slowly from his face. He began, almost imperceptibly, to tremble. “They were following us, and we ran.”

  “Hey.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. Blind Michael is dead. I killed him. He’s never going to hurt you again. You understand? You’re safe.”

  A hunting horn sounded somewhere in the distance, like the world was trying to make a liar out of me. I flinched. So did Quentin. Only Simon, who had never been on the receiving end of one of Blind Michael’s Rides, remained calm, looking toward the sound with a speculative expression.

  “August came through here,” he said. “Do you think she lingered?”

  “I think she ran like hell, if she knew what was good for her,” I said. “Lingering is not a good plan when those horns are sounding. Come on.”

  I started walking faster, following the flickering light from my candle. It hadn’t gotten any shorter since this journey began. The Luidaeg might have to charge for her help, but she didn’t cheat: when she said she would do something, she did it. This candle was good for fourteen days of travel, and as long as the Babylon Road could get to where we needed to be, it would take us there.

  The Babylon . . . “Oh, hell,” I said, and blew the candle out.

  Quentin’s eyes went wide. “Toby . . .”

  “Why did you do that?” asked Simon, voice suddenly low and dangerous.

  “Because we can’t keep walking the Babylon Road without a destination,” I said. “The Luidaeg said she sent August here because there was a changeling who was punching holes in the world. We’ve seen that before, and I’ve heard about that changeling.” Not by name, but when Chelsea had been manifesting the same uncontrolled magic, he had been referenced as part of the reason she needed to be stopped.

  The Luidaeg had told me about how my mother had been involved in sealing the hole that changeling made before it could grow wide enough to destroy Faerie. August had been looking for him. I glanced uneasily at Simon.

  Suddenly, a lot of things were starting to fall into place, and I didn’t think he was going to like the picture they made when they finished.

  “He died,” said Quentin. “The Luidaeg said he died.”

  “Right. But if August isn’t in the forest here, it might be because she had him open a door for her.”

  “Then all is lost,” said Simon. “We can’t walk up to Oberon and ask him to please unlock the doors, sir, my daughter is on the other side and I need to bring her home. Finding him will be the work of far more than a fortnight.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “If Acacia knows something, though—the Rose Road got us to the deeper lands once. I’m willing to bet that the Babylon Road can do the same, if that’s really where we need to go.”

  The hunting horn sounded again, closer this time, startling me into flinching.

  That was the last straw for Quentin. He’d been holding himself together as well as he could, and he was a brave kid—but he was still, for all that he was tall and broad-shouldered and clever, a kid. This place, that sound, they were the things that haunted his nightmares. I flinched, and he bolted into the forest, running as hard as he could to get away from the sound of everything going wrong again.

  “Quentin!” I shouted, and plunged into the trees after him, not bothering to tell Simon to follow. He would, or he wouldn’t. Either way, we were all going to wind up in the same place. I just needed to catch up with Quentin before my squire ran off a cliff or fell down a hole or something equally unhelpful.

  The branches tore at my clothes and hair as I ran, slowing me down. They seemed to put themselves into my path on purpose, moving with a slow, malicious intent. That wasn’t as far-fetched an idea as it might seem. Acacia was the Mother of Trees, Firstborn to the Dryads and the Blodynbryd. In her presence, even ordinary trees might have more of a consciousness than the usual.

  Quentin was somewhere up ahead, and I could hear Simon crashing through the branches behind me. At least we were staying together.

  “Quentin!” I shouted. “Come back!”

  The horns sounded a third time, so much closer that it felt like I should have been able to turn around and see the Riders bearing down on me. Which didn’t make sense. The Riders avoided the forest. When Blind Michael had been alive, they had steered clear because it was Acacia’s territory. Even now that he was dead and everything was her territory, there were good reasons to stay out of the trees. It was virtually impossible to ride a horse there, for one thing. The branches blocked too much of the light, making it hard for even fae eyes to see what was going on.

  Would the Riders even have horses now? The ones they’d had originally had been transformed children, mortal and changeling kids who hadn’t been suited to join the Ride as anything other than transportation.

  The forest ended abruptly, sending me stumbling as I ran onto the open plain. Quentin was less than ten yards ahead of me, backing up, his hands raised in a useless gesture of defensiveness.

  Around him, in a loose semicircle, were Blind Michael’s Riders.

  They were hulking figures, dressed in mismatched leather-and-silver armor, sitting astride vast, strong-legged horses that pawed at the ground and snorted as they waited for the signal to run. None of the Riders belonged to any clear and obvious fae race: they were as patchworked as their armor, blending claws and talons and scales and fur. Some of them had horns. Others had fangs that barely fit inside their mouths, leaving trails of drool to run down their misshapen chins. All of them had weapons: spears and swords and crossbows.

  “Quentin, get back here,” I said quietly, hand going to the knife at my belt. It wasn’t enough. It could never have been enough, not against this nightmare army. But if we were going to go down, I was going to go down swinging, protecting the people I loved.

  Tybalt, I’m sorry, I thought. Maybe someday Amandine would hav
e mercy and let him go.

  The Riders looked toward me. One of them raised a horn and blew, sending a long, loud note cascading across the waste. It gained strength and volume as it traveled, seeming to feed off of its own echoes, until it was loud enough to fill the entire world. Quentin clapped his hands over his ears, legs shaking as if they were on the verge of buckling.

  That was the last straw. I bolted forward, stepping in front of him, knife already drawn, like one silver blade the length of my hand could hold off the Riders for more than a fraction of a second.

  “Back off!” I snarled. “If you want him, you’ll have to go through me!”

  “You never change, do you, October?”

  The voice was Acacia’s. I whirled, and there she was, Blind Michael’s widow, the Mother of the Trees, standing between us and the forest. Simon was somewhere behind her, a pale smear at the edge of the shadows. I couldn’t spare him much attention. Acacia was a much more pressing issue.

  Her skin was daffodil-yellow, and her hair was a rootlike mass of green-and-yellow strands that snaked over her shoulders and continued down her body, vanishing in and out of her clothes. She no longer wore a cloak, and her wings were exposed, enormous and green, marked with bright yellow circles like eyes. The scar that ran down the side of her face kept her from smiling with both sides of her mouth, but still, she looked kind.

  “When I felt the Babylon Road seeking an anchor, I’ll admit, you’re not who I expected,” she said. “You know my doors are always open to you. But it would have been a good idea to call first.”

  “Tell your people to stand down, Acacia,” I said, voice tight with adrenaline. Quentin was still shaking, still terrified. I needed that to stop.

  Acacia blinked, looking genuinely surprised. Then she shook her head and said, “They were looking for the Road. They’re not here to hurt you.”

  “Could’ve fooled me,” mumbled Quentin.

  “My apologies,” said Acacia. She looked to the Riders. “Go home. I’ll be there soon, and you’ll be rewarded for your work.”

  The Riders lowered their weapons and their horns, some quickly, others looking like they had been hoping for a fight. Then they turned their horses and rode away across the waste, kicking up dust and debris in their wake.

  Quentin relaxed further, head hanging. I turned to face Acacia, putting a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Turns out Quentin and I still have issues with the sound of that horn. I thought you were going to help them recover.”

  “I am,” she said. “Some of the horses refuse to return to any other form. They’re too broken to want to go back to what they were. They’re treated kindly now. Fed and watered and rested. I’m looking toward acquiring Kelpies or Each Uisge for the Riders to use after these horses are gone.”

  “Oh,” said Quentin, and shivered under my hand.

  Acacia looked at me calmly. “Can you tell your friend to leave my trees? It’s hard to believe you come in peace when you keep someone at my back.”

  “Sorry,” I said. Raising my voice, I called, “Simon, it’s safe now. You need to come out.”

  “I doubt that most sincerely,” he said, and emerged from the trees, walking slowly across the open ground to stand at my other side.

  Acacia tilted her head, looking at him. “You are not my daughter’s husband, but you look like him,” she said. “Are you his Fetch? Is my Luna to be a widow?”

  “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.

  Quen
tin 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.

  “I thought you didn’t really remember that,” I replied.

  He swallowed hard.

  “I lied,” he said.

  I gave him a sidelong look. There were lines in the skin around his mouth and eyes, drawn deep and cruel by an unseen hand. He was terrified. That wasn’t so unreasonable. This was the first place that hadn’t cared who he was or what he wanted—only what it could do to him.

  There are days when I honestly wish I could kill Blind Michael all over again. Murder is wrong, but what he spent centuries doing to children . . .

  Acacia was still walking. We followed her, rapidly catching up with Simon, who still looked like he was taking a casual walk in the park.

  “Fascinating,” he said, not looking at us. “Building an islet of this size while the deeper lands were sealed must have taken an incredible amount of power. Building it well, so that it would endure past the life of its creator—it’s almost unbelievable.”

  “My husband was a clever one; he knew the power of ritual,” said Acacia. “There are so many bones buried here that the islet will never crumble. It’s been bought and paid for with the blood of the innocent, every inch of it. If you were considering the virtues of becoming a lord in your own land, I recommend you find a better way. Stronger men than you have been corrupted by the lure of empire.”