Page 8 of The Brightest Fell

“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.”