The Brightest Fell

  The trouble was the time. It was after four. That’s late for anything short of a Kingdom-wide emergency, and if it had been a Kingdom-wide emergency, someone would have called.

  “Let May handle it,” said Tybalt, hands moving to encircle my waist. “The hour is late. You need your rest.”

  “This isn’t my definition of ‘rest,’ exactly,” I said, and leaned in for another kiss.

  The doorbell rang again. This time, the sound was followed by footsteps—May’s, from the tempo of them. I resumed my lean.

  My lips were about to touch Tybalt’s when I realized the house had gone silent. May wasn’t saying anything. The doorbell had stopped ringing; I’d heard her open the door. She should at least have said hello. But she hadn’t said anything.

  Tybalt met my eyes and nodded. As quietly as I could, I climbed off him, wishing my knives weren’t upstairs in my room and my sword wasn’t in the trunk of my car. Only a few minutes before, going unarmed in my own house had seemed like the most reasonable thing in the world. Now, it felt like the sort of oversight that could get me and the people I cared about killed.

  The hallway ran in a straight line down the length of the house. As soon as I stepped out of the living room, I turned to get a look at the visitor who had silenced May so conclusively.

  May was between me and the open door, giving me an excellent view of her pink denim jacket and the bright red steaks in her otherwise colorless brown hair. My Fetch never met a garish color combination she didn’t want to put to use. She was standing rigid, her shoulders locked into a hard line, and every inch of her radiated fear and confusion.

  The smell of pennyroyal and musk drifted from the living room. Tybalt had stepped into the shadows. If I knew him as well as I thought I did, he was using the Shadow Roads as a shortcut to my bedroom, and my knives. He didn’t like leaving me undefended. He liked me being functionally defenseless even less.

  “May?” I called. “Everything okay?” I started toward her, doing a quick inventory as I went. Tybalt would be back in a few seconds. In the meantime, there was an aluminum baseball bat in the umbrella stand. Sometimes blunt-force trauma is a girl’s best friend.

  May didn’t reply. May didn’t move. This was bad.

  Anyone who could freeze my Fetch like that either wasn’t human or wasn’t going to live to see the morning. I didn’t bother recasting my illusions as I hurried down the hall, nudging her to the side in order to face our unexpected guest. “Can I help—” I began.

  The words turned to ashes in my mouth. Serene to the end, my mother tilted her head, accenting the swanlike line of her neck. Everything she did was beautiful. Every move was designed to show her to her best advantage. I loved her. I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to be proud of me.

  I wanted her to go away.

  She wasn’t wearing a human disguise; she didn’t care whether my neighbors saw her. There was no car on the street. I had no idea how she’d reached the house. It didn’t really matter—she was there, whether I wanted her to be or not. Amandine of Faerie, Last among the First, on my doorstep.

  There’s a reason humans called the fae “the Fair Folk” back when they admitted we existed. Some of us take beauty to the kinds of extreme that can be painful to look at. My mother put most of them to shame. She stood a few inches shorter than either me or May, her figure lithesome and flawless. Time had no hold over her: she was as beautiful now as she’d been when I was a little girl. I hadn’t seen her much since then. She had been slipping away from me for a long time before I’d disappeared, and even my return hadn’t been enough to bring her back. When my mother didn’t want to be found, no one found her.

  She wore a dress spun from flower petals and sweet drifts of Queen Anne’s lace, still blooming and perfuming the air around her. Her hair was a cascade of white gold tumbling to her hips, held out of her eyes by a pair of thin waterfall braids that started at her temples and ran along the crown of her head, finally meeting at the back. Her skin was so pale that I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear she hadn’t seen the sun since her disappearance. Her face was still somehow accented by a faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. They weren’t imperfections: they were a reminder that she was real, and hence proof that no one else would ever be as flawlessly constructed as she was.

  Her eyes were a foggy shade of gray-blue, like mist in the morning rolling across the San Francisco Bay. They weren’t human eyes. They never could have been. And they were so much like mine that it hurt. Without those eyes, it might have been possible to pretend I was a changeling in all senses of the word: not just part-human, but someone else’s child entirely, foisted on Amandine when she failed to prevent it. Those eyes . . . there was no way I could have belonged to anyone else.

  There was a soft sound behind me, accompanied by the scent of pennyroyal and musk. Tybalt was back. Tybalt was back, with my knives, which she might take as either an insult or an attack, depending on what kind of mood she was in. Amandine was Firstborn. She could hurt him. I needed to stop this.

  “Hello, Mother,” I said, loudly enough for Tybalt to hear.

  Amandine’s perfect lips twitched at the corners, in what might have been the beginnings of a smile.

  “Hello, October,” she said. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  THREE

  THE URGE TO SAY “no” and close the door was so strong that I had to bite my lip to keep from blurting it out. My mother and I haven’t had a good relationship since I was seven years old and chose Faerie over the mortal world—not knowing, as a changeling child who just wanted my mother to love me, that choosing the other way would have meant her killing me on the spot. Apparently, choosing to live, however accidentally, was a crime in her world.

  She’d been pulling away from me ever since. Oh, she fed me, housed me, and clothed me when I was a little girl and an adolescent. My adolescence had lasted well into my twenties, since we’d been living in the Summerlands. Time runs oddly there under the best of circumstances, and its oddness tends to become concentrated in changelings, who age slowly in Faerie, or in reverse, or not at all.

  I suppose I was one of the lucky ones. I’d grown up enough to run away to the mortal world, where I could try to make a life for myself. Whether it had been a good life, or the right life, was irrelevant. It had been mine, and Amandine had had no part in it. She hadn’t wanted any part in it. Once I’d run away from her, I might as well not have been her child.

  But the first time someone had decided to use elf-shot to get me out of the way, I had still been mostly mortal, and fully capable of dying from the poison. The arrow had pierced my skin and I’d fallen where I stood. My heart had stopped. Technically, I had died, maybe for the first time. And Luna Torquill’s rose goblins had run to find my mother and bring her to Shadowed Hills, so she could save me. She had saved me. I could still remember the way she’d smiled and called me her darling girl, and maybe it had all been an illusion and maybe it hadn’t, but she could have let me die, and she’d chosen to come when I needed her most.

  Maybe she was ready to be a mother after all. Who was I to blame her for needing a few years to think it over? It wasn’t like she was running out of time, being immortal and all.

  “Come on in,” I said, stepping to the side.

  She stayed where she was. I blinked. She lifted one eyebrow, and I realized what she was waiting for. I fought to suppress a groan. Leave it to my mother to be the one person in Faerie who expected me to stand on protocol.

  “By the root and the branch, you are welcome here; by the rose and the thorn, no harm will be offered to you while you stand beneath my roof,” I said. “Our weapons are bound, our hands are spread, and our hospitality is open to you. By oak and ash and rowan, I swear.”

  This time, the twitch blossomed into a proper smile. “Your form is poor and you forgot to require the same promises of peace from
me before swearing, but at least you haven’t forgotten everything I ever taught you,” said Amandine, and she stepped inside.

  The air in the hallway seemed to chill and change with her arrival, like the house didn’t know what to do with her. That made two of us. I made a quick review of the available rooms. The living room was a mess, as always, and the TV was still on; the dining room was mostly okay, except for the part where Jazz was doing one of her big decoupage projects on the table, and Amandine had never shown much appreciation for construction paper. That left . . .

  “Follow me, Mother,” I said. “The kitchen’s this way. I can make us something to drink, and you can tell me why you’re here.”

  “Your manners are lacking,” she said. “Hopefully, your selection of teas is not.”

  She fell into step behind me, leaving May frozen by the door. I was starting to worry that she’d thrown some sort of whammy on my Fetch when May shivered like she was shaking off some deep enchantment and turned to follow us. Tybalt was next to her. He had hidden my knives somewhere, probably inside his jeans or the burgundy Oregon Shakespeare Festival sweatshirt he was wearing.

  A pang of irritation lanced through me. A modern, casual Tybalt is something I don’t get to see very often. Mom’s arrival suddenly felt like a robbery. I quashed the feeling as quickly as I could. I hadn’t spent any real time with my mother in years. The fact that she was getting in the way of my morning make outs really shouldn’t matter.

  Jazz was in the kitchen when we stepped inside, standing at the stove, stirring a pot of hot chocolate. She turned toward the sound of the door opening, a smile on her face. It froze when she saw my mother, turning puzzled. I realized that she had no idea who Amandine was.

  “Mother, I’d like you to meet Jasmine Patel, my housemate,” I said.

  “My girlfriend,” said May. Her voice was shaky, but there was steel at its core.

  As a Fetch, as my Fetch, she remembered Amandine as her mother, even though Amandine had no reason to remember her. That had to feel like rejection, however blameless my mother was in the situation. For once. If we were looking for things to actually blame Amandine for, I was sure we could find plenty. Starting with “why have so many of the Firstborn I know called you ‘the Liar’ like it was your title?” and going on from there.

  “A Raven-maid? How quaint.” Amandine looked around the kitchen, a small frown on her lips. “Really, October, when you rejected your mortality, I didn’t expect you to turn around and embrace it quite so enthusiastically. This place is positively shameful.”

  “We like it,” I said, tamping down my annoyance again. Amandine was Firstborn. Amandine was a pureblood, centuries old, who didn’t have as much contact with the mortal world as most of the purebloods I interacted with. Of course, her standards were going to be different. Losing my temper wasn’t going to do any of us any good.

  Maybe if I told myself that enough times, it would somehow magically stop me from getting angry. I didn’t think so, though.

  “Would you like some hot chocolate?” asked Jazz hesitantly. “I made it myself. It’s quite good.”

  “Is the cream from the Crodh Sith?” asked Amandine.

  “No, Mom, we don’t travel all the way down to Golden Shore to get our milk,” I said. “It’s ordinary milk, from ordinary cows, bought at the ordinary store.”

  “Actually, it’s from Whole Foods,” said Jazz.

  Amandine sniffed. “Remind me, October: why, when Sylvester came to you, did you not choose a mortal life? Since that’s so clearly what you’re trying to create for yourself here. You could have saved us both ever so much trouble.”

  “You were the one who tried to choose mortality for me, Mom,” I said, before I could think better of it.

  Silence fell, broken only by the soft bubbling of Jazz’s cocoa. Then Amandine smiled.

  “Yes, exactly,” she said. “When I had the chance, I tried to choose mortality for you. If Sylvester had arrived to find a human child, he wouldn’t have offered you the Changeling’s Choice, because there would have been nothing to choose. He would have walked away. I could have been with you every day of your life, the best and most loving of mothers, until I laid you to bed in a blanket of earth, with a pillow of stones for your head. I tried. You tied my hands. To have you going back on your choice now, it’s . . . well, it’s shameful, October. You should at least have the courage of your convictions.”

  I stared at her for a moment, stunned into silence. Tybalt moved to stand behind me, not looming, not threatening my mother, but lending what support he could through his sheer presence.

  Finally, I took a deep breath and asked, “Why are you here, Mother? I’m assuming it isn’t to criticize my interior decorating.”

  “I’ve been informed that you’re continuing to play at being a detective.” Amandine sniffed. “It seems an odd thing to spend your time doing, as we both know you have no native talents in the area, but if you will persist, then it seems you are equipped to do me a boon.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I wish to hire you.”

  This time, the moment of silence lasted a lot longer. Then, almost despite myself, I started to laugh. Once I started, I discovered that I couldn’t stop. I bent forward, one hand pressed against my stomach, trying to make the laughter end. It refused.

  Tybalt put a hand on my back, steadying me. May looked alarmed. And Amandine . . .

  Amandine looked resigned, like she had expected nothing better from me, her changeling daughter. That killed my mirth right quick. I stopped laughing and straightened, taking some small comfort in the weight of Tybalt’s hand against my spine. I wasn’t a child anymore. Amandine might be my mother, and one of the Firstborn, but so what? I’d stood up to Firstborn before. I’d killed one of them. I didn’t want to kill my mother, but it helped to know that she wasn’t invincible.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It sounded like you insulted my profession and then said you wanted to hire me.”

  “Yes, because that’s exactly what I did.”

  “Mom . . .” I reached up and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Okay, what do you want to hire me to do? Did you lose something?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Your sister.”

  I lowered my hand, staring at her once again. It felt like the air had just been sucked out of the room, replaced by something hot and stale and difficult to breathe.

  “What?” I finally squeaked.

  “Your sister. I know you know about her. Your foolish father is bound to have told you, when he was struggling to make his amends.” She sniffed again. “I married him for many reasons. His brains were not among them. Be more careful, should you ever decide to marry. Choose a man who can think for himself, and not be led astray by every dainty dame who comes walking down the lane.”

  “My . . . father?” The blows just kept coming.

  Amandine waved a hand dismissively. “Your legal father, not the man who sired you. Humans have no claim over any part of Faerie. Simon may not have been in my bed when I got you, but he has the responsibility for you in our world. Given your seeming determination to shed as much of your mortal blood as possible, it won’t be long before he becomes the only father you have.”

  The thought made my stomach turn. Simon Torquill is my liege’s twin brother, and the man responsible for my fourteen-year disappearance. Without him, my life would have been very different. Not better, maybe . . . but in some ways, absolutely, because without him, I would never have lost my little girl.

  I can like everything else about my new life better than I like the memory of my old one. Not that. Losing Gillian will haunt me until I die—and there’s so little mortality left in me that I’m going to live for a long, long time. Long after my daughter is dust, I’ll still be here, and still mourning for the fact that I never got the chance to be a parent to her. I gave her life. Other peop
le gave her everything else.

  Simon is also my mother’s husband. Since Faerie doesn’t acknowledge the validity of marriages between humans and the fae, she wasn’t even cheating on him when she went off to spend a decade in the mortal world. To have a daughter. In the eyes of our law, such as it is, he’s my father and always has been.

  Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to have a normal family. Not that anyone I know actually has one.

  “Mom . . .” I paused; took a breath. “Yes, Simon told me about August. He told me she disappeared decades before I was born, and that he wound up working for Evening because he was trying to find her. He’s a pureblood. Evening’s Firstborn. If the two of them working together couldn’t find her, what makes you think I can?”

  “You have a gift for doing the impossible,” she said airily. “The things they tell me you’ve done! You killed Blind Michael. You brought his stolen children home. You stopped Oleander de Merelands, after everything she’s done. You found the lost Princess in the Mists, and chased a pretender from the throne. They tell me you’re a hero now, my October, and who am I to question the word of what seems to be all of Faerie? Heroes undertake impossible quests. Heroes complete them. I want my child back. You stole yourself from me when you chose wrongly. The least you can do is return the daughter I lost before I had you.”

  I stared at her again. Our conversation had been more defined by silences than by sentences, in part because every other word out of her mouth made me want to turn around and leave the room. She was my mother. She would have been good at insulting and belittling me even if she wasn’t my mother—that seems to be a trait shared by all the Firstborn—but because she was, she knew exactly what to say to cause me pain.

  “Mom . . .”

  “Do this for me, and you will be forgiven.”

  “Forgiven? Forgiven for what?”

  “For refusing to be the child I needed you to be,” she said. “I tried to save you, my father knows I tried. I tried to do it without hurting you because you fought me when I went too quickly. I had already unwound more than half the damage I had done to you when my foolish brother-in-law came to carry you away. If you had been less recalcitrant, if you had been willing to let me have my way, when I knew better for you than you knew for yourself, you would have been human by the time he arrived.”