Page 41 of The Brightest Fell

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.

Simon opened his eyes.

The Luidaeg smiled, showing him a full mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. “Hello, failure,” she purred.

Sensibly, Simon recoiled, slamming himself up against the arm of the couch. When he couldn’t go any farther, he froze, eyes wide, as still as a mouse confronted with a cat.

“You know, if it were up to me, I might have left you as you were,” said the Luidaeg. “The Davies boy concocted a clever counter for my sister’s work, but he didn’t account for the brute simplicity of pixie magic. The two were battling for dominion in your blood, and your body elected to go back to what seemed safest: sleep. I don’t know whether elf-shot’s protections would have kicked back in and kept you from withering away. You could have died and taught me something at the same time, but someone was willing to ransom you. Earn this second chance, failure.”

“October, what have you—” began Simon, turning to face me. Then he froze, eyes going even wider, which should have been impossible. “No.”

I followed his eyes to Poppy. The light had almost stopped falling. The orange glow of her skin wasn’t fading anymore: it was gone. Her hair was still orange, the color of maple leaves in the fall, as were her eyes. Her wings had changed shape, becoming longer and thinner, more equipped to her current size. They were no longer transparent, but had taken on a dozen shades of sunrise, so that if she spread them against the light, they might mimic a little of the glow she’d given away.

“Yes,” said the Luidaeg. “This is what it costs when you’re not careful. When you fail again.”

“Luidaeg, what did you do?” The last drop of light fell from Poppy’s finger. She wobbled. I rushed to catch her and hold her up, keeping her from falling. It felt like the bones had gone out of her legs, leaving her limp and unresponsive.

The Luidaeg met my eyes over Poppy’s head. “What she asked me to do,” she said. “Simon needed to wake, but Simon was under a pixie charm. The only way to dispel it was to unmake it, and unmaking it required unraveling it at the root. I would have needed to take apart a pixie no matter what. I just happened to have a volunteer.”

“What did you do?” This time the question came from Quentin, and was underscored with a wounded confusion that hurt my heart.

The Luidaeg was a monster to me for years before the first time I realized I could see her as a friend. She was a story that local fae parents told their children. “Better watch it, or the Luidaeg will get you.” Quentin, though. He had been born in Toronto, where they had other monsters to warn their kids about. He had made his first bargain with her when he was little more than a child, and she had always treated him fairly, and with kindness, and with her own strange brand of love. She was one of the people he trusted most in the world.

This wasn’t the first time he had seen her be monstrous, but it was the first time he had seen her do something that could be construed as cruel.

“We say every kind of fae has a Firstborn, because it’s easier than explaining that the truth is complicated and sometimes things aren’t what they seem,” said the Luidaeg. There was a new hurt in her eyes. She was reading Quentin’s discomfort as clearly as I was, and she didn’t like it. “My mother made the pixies because she was lonely and sad. She didn’t count on the fact that anything made will start wanting a life of its own. Will want to be more than a drop of blood and an idea. So she told them ‘come to me if you want more, and I will give it to you.’” She switched her attention to me. “Remember the Aes Sidhe?”

“They all died,” I said automatically. Then I blinked. “No.”

“Oh, yes.” She waved a hand, indicating Poppy. “This is where they come from. No Firstborn. Just a pixie and a promise. They’re related to the Piskies, actually—another family line without a true Firstborn. Some Aes Sidhe missed their families, went home to visit, got frisky, and wound up with size-changing babies. I think that may be part of why the Aes Sidhe died out. Why stick to your own kind when your offspring can be something better?”

I gaped at her, Poppy a warm weight against my shoulder. “She’ll be alone.”

“She’ll have friends, and this isn’t why you came to me. Why are you here, October?”

“We didn’t come to you.” I scowled. “You keep acting like we’re here on purpose, and we’re not. This is just where we wound up.”

“Even so. You must have been looking for something.”

“Amandine told me to find August.”

“I knew that part. You followed her trail.”

“Yes.” Poppy still wasn’t standing on her own. I gathered as much of her as I could into my arms and half-dragged, half-carried her to the couch, where Simon stood and helped me lower her down onto the cushions. We had to position her carefully, so as not to crush her wings. They twitched as we let her go. Still there was no sound of bells.

Light, and the sound of bells: those were the things that Maeve had given to the pixies when she made them, intending for them to make her happy. Light and the sound of bells. That was what the Luidaeg had taken away.

I turned back to her. “Is she going to be all right?”

“It depends on who you ask,” said the Luidaeg. “Ask your questions.”

I took a deep breath. “August walked the Babylon Road. Where was she going?”