The Brightest Fell
Page 20
Agrarian living agreed with her. Like most Daoine Sidhe, she was gorgeous, tall and flawlessly curved, with red hair so dark that it verged on black. Every time she moved, it shattered the light into prismatic shards around her, creating a glitter in the air that had nothing to do with illusions. It was pulled back to reveal the sharp points of her ears and the long, swanlike sweep of her throat.
The first time we’d met, she’d been wearing a ruby choker that she had been using to control Chelsea’s movements. It had gotten smashed in the fight to get away from her, and she had replaced it with a net of black-and-purple pearls that was something like a necklace, something like a shawl, and something like a spider’s web. It covered her shoulders and traced the line of her collarbone before plunging toward her navel, where the amethyst-and-pearl pendant at its end dangled, drawing attention to her flat belly and strong thighs. Her dress was skintight and moved like water around her, colored like an oil slick, shifting constantly between black and purple and rainbow iridescence.
“I’m guessing you don’t do much of your own farming,” I blurted.
Simon didn’t quite cover his face with his hand, but he flinched, and that motion carried the same connotations. I was embarrassing him. More importantly, I was deviating from the script.
Riordan smiled, slow and thin as a razorblade. “October,” she purred. “I never thought I was going to see you again, after you ran off and left me here, you naughty little thing. And I see you’ve brought your squire. My, my.” She looked Quentin up and down, as if she were studying a particularly choice cut of meat. “He’s growing up nicely, isn’t he? I don’t suppose he’s meant to be my housewarming present.”
Quentin took a step back, putting himself behind me. Smart kid. I would have done the same, if I’d had the option.
“You’re looking well, Treasa,” said Simon, clearly trying to get the situation back under control. The poor man. “Annwn agrees with you.”
“Doesn’t it just?” Her smile for him was more sincere, if no less poisonous. “I’m a queen here, with none to challenge me or mine. I do wish your little companion there hadn’t taken it upon herself to break my supply chain—I was intending to have a much larger staff—but I suppose I can’t complain. I finally have the position I deserve. But you, Simon. What are you doing here? Last I heard, you were persona non grata among your family and their pets.” She glanced my way, making it clear what she meant by that last crack.
“I am,” he said mildly. “My brother has used a blood geas to compel me to assist Sir Daye in her quest for something that her mother misplaced. I am required to serve her until the item has been found.” He added a sneer to his voice, making it sound like this was the last thing he could possibly want to do with his time.
Part of me was impressed. The greater part of me wondered whether this was the lie, or whether everything else had been. He could have been playing with me this whole time, telling me whatever he thought I wanted to hear, waiting for the moment when he would be able to make his escape. He couldn’t raise a hand against me. He couldn’t, say, turn me into a fish or use his magic to make me look like more of a target than I already was.
But Sylvester had done nothing to bind his brother’s tongue. Simon could betray us if he wanted to, let Riordan take us and walk away clean, knowing that all the disaster he’d rained down upon our heads was technically at someone else’s hand. That’s the trouble with purebloods. They are always, always looking for the loophole, and when they find it, they’ll ride it all the way to hell.
Riordan’s eyes widened in a theatrical manner, drawing attention to the way her eyeshadow matched the delicate frosted lilac color of her irises. Nothing but the best for Treasa Riordan, the woman so afraid of being attacked that she had turned striking first into a way of saying “hello.”
“My, my,” she said. “Amandine is speaking to you again? I’ll be honest, Simon, I never thought I’d see the day. Not after you took that little mixed-blood to your bed.”
Oleander had been the daughter of a Tuatha de Dannan and a Peri. In the eyes of some purebloods, that made her virtually a changeling. It didn’t matter that she was as immortal as they were: all that mattered was that she wasn’t clean. Maybe more importantly, by having a relationship with Oleander—however coerced—while he was still married to my mother, Simon had been committing adultery. Amandine hadn’t. Because humans, naturally, didn’t count.
Sometimes the thought of punching every pureblood I meet as a matter of principle is difficult to resist.
“We’re working through our difficulties,” he said mildly. “I claim the hospitality of your house, Treasa Riordan, for myself and for those who travel as my entourage.”
“That’s us,” I said, gesturing between myself and Quentin. “We’re the entourage.”
Riordan sneered. “Oh, I would never have guessed that for myself. Are you quite sure, Simon? You could claim it for yourself alone, and have the great satisfaction of seeing the door slammed in the face of your wife’s bastard and her hick of a squire.”
Quentin bristled, but said nothing. I didn’t even bristle. We’ve been called worse.
“I could, but I’m not,” said Simon calmly. “We have need to come inside, Treasa. The night is very dark, and this place is unfamiliar to us. We are both of the Daoine Sidhe. By the bond of blood, and by the duties of the noble, I charge you to grant us the hospitality of your house, or know that you will have betrayed all that is good about our kind, and given stronger root to that which ails us.”
Riordan huffed. Actually huffed, like a child being told that Christmas had been canceled. “If you must,” she said. “Three days. That’s the standard. At the end of that, get out or get ready to spend some quality time in my dungeons. Agreed?”
“Absolutely,” said Simon, and bowed. Quentin and I hurried to emulate him. Manners matter more with the purebloods than they really should. They are the grease that keeps the wheels of our often dysfunctional society turning.
Riordan rolled her eyes before turning to stalk into her castle, leaving us to follow her or be left in the Annwn night. Simon didn’t hesitate, and so neither did we.
The doors slammed shut behind us.
SIXTEEN
NO ONE WAS EVER going to accuse Treasa Riordan of being understated. Her ducal knowe in Dreamer’s Glass had been a bordello-level confection of tapestries, impossible hanging lights, and velvet. Mostly white velvet, which seemed like an extra level of cruelty for the cleaning staff to deal with. Here . . .
Despite having been stranded in Annwn for less than a year and a half, Riordan had taken the time to decorate to her own standards. A thick carpet patterned with irregular cracks covered the floor, like we were walking over an inexplicably plush broken mirror. Tapestries covered the walls, even as they had in Dreamer’s Glass, showing Riordan taming Annwn one wolf and raging river at a time. Globes of greenish light bobbed along the ceiling, bright enough to lead the way.
Simon dropped back, falling into step beside me, and murmured, “None of this is real, of course.”
“What?” I gave him a sidelong look, trying to figure out what he meant.
“Oh, the castle is real: the candle showed us that. But carpet? Tapestries? That dress? Please. Treasa trades on illusion even more than most of our kind. She’s always felt entitled to live above her station. Some of the things around us will be spun from transformation spells. Others will be light and shadow, nothing more. Tread carefully.” Simon shook his head, the motion tight and restrained, like he was hoping it could go unnoticed. “She’ll be hungry for the real, after spending so much time surrounded by the fictional.”
“I can hear you, you know,” called Riordan, still walking ahead of us—far enough ahead to give Simon an excellent view of her butt, which might as well have been poured into her dress, while staying close enough that there was no chance we’d get away.
“It should be,” said Riordan. For a moment, the façade of calm cracked, and I could hear the strain that lurked beneath. “I’ve had to do almost all of it myself. My people are great at telling me what I want to hear, not so good at spinning a spell to convince a broken wall to play at being a complete one. But it doesn’t take much skill to hold a shovel.”
Luna would probably have said differently. I held my tongue, breathing in the scents surrounding us.
Dreamer’s Glass was like most modern demesne: mixed. The days of only Daoine Sidhe in one place and only Bridge Trolls in another have pretty much ended, although there are exceptions—Dryads still keep mostly to themselves, for example, since it’s difficult for them to remember that other people can’t just retreat into their trees when they don’t want to be seen. Riordan’s subjects included Daoine Sidhe, Tuatha de Dannan, Selkies, Satyrs, and a dozen more types of fae. I tasted them all on the air of her castle, along with a thick, constant overlay of Folletti, the sky fae she used as her personal guard.
Folletti are functionally invisible much of the time. I breathed in a little deeper to reassure myself that we weren’t surrounded, and stiffened as the scent of August’s magic hit me, harder than ever. She had been here. She had been right here.
“What made you choose this castle when there are so many?” someone asked—I asked. That was my voice, however distant it seemed. I was wrapped in the memories implicit in the air, in the taste of magic going back decades. August had been right here. Not just in Annwn. In this castle. My sister had walked these halls, exiled and alone, and no one had come to save her.
A thread of memory tickled the back of my mind: me, in these halls, looking for Quentin and Etienne after Riordan’s forces had taken us captive. I had breathed in then, and tasted Dóchas Sidhe on the wind. I had assumed I was detecting myself.
I had been wrong.
“Someone managed to stay behind when Oberon shut the doors,” Riordan replied easily. “When we came to scout the land, we found a couple of dozen old manor houses and castles with the roofs caved in and the floors unsafe, and then we found this place. There wasn’t anyone in it, or we might have had a fight on our hands, but whoever they were, they’d managed to keep the foundations sound while they waited for me. I’d love to give them a token of my appreciation, if you have any idea who that might have been.”
Simon glanced at me, his expression betraying the early signs of alarm. He might not have my ability to detect magic, but he knew who our mystery handyman was likely to have been, and he didn’t want me betraying her to Riordan. Which made sense. As far as Riordan knew, we were here looking for something my mother had misplaced, not for my living and self-misplacing sister.
Simon was good with his words. He might not have the Luidaeg’s practice at talking around the truth, but he knew how to say what he had to and not a syllable more. I could learn a lot from him, if I were willing to spend that much time in his company. So far, I wasn’t.
Riordan led us down a long hallway to a dining hall with vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows that shattered the ambient light coming from outside into a panoply of rainbows, beautiful and brilliant and surprisingly bright, given how dark it was.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll gather my people, and a feast will be held in your honor. It’s not every day we have visitors here in this impassable, inaccessible place.” She smiled like a throat being slashed, all vigor and violence, and she was gone, heading out the door and away.
Simon turned to Quentin and me. “Quickly, hide us,” he said, tone leaving no room for argument.
Quentin blinked and raked his fingers through the air, singing a lilting line from some folksong about dolphins swimming in a harbor. It was sweet. It was sad. It was accompanied by the smell of steel and heather, and by a don’t-look-here spell crashing down on us with such intensity that I flinched.
“Quentin, what the hell?” I asked, resisting the urge to rake the spell out of my hair like it was a veil of cobwebs.
“I don’t know!” he said, eyes wide.
“Every realm generates its own ambient magic, and Annwn is no exception,” said Simon. “Treasa and her people are waking the land by being here. It wants to help.”
“So the more fae there are, the stronger their magic will become?” I asked.
Simon shook his head. “If it were that simple, we might never go to war again. No: with none to use its magic, Annwn stagnated. Now that it has residents again, the land is waking, and putting forth the amount of magic that its entire populace once needed. As the number of residents rises, the strength of the spells will die back to more reasonable levels.”
“Let’s not stay here that long,” I said. The don’t-look-here would keep us from being caught as long as we were careful, but it wasn’t the same as true invisibility. Once Riordan realized that we’d disappeared, she’d call her guards. In fact . . . “Why the hell did she leave us alone? She had to assume we’d pull something like this.”
“That’s precisely why she left us alone,” said Simon. “Now she’ll have reason to rescind her hospitality and run us down like dogs. She needs more. More magicians, more hands to build her walls and work her fields—more bloodlines to mingle with the ones she already has. Which says nothing to what she would do if she understood some of the bloodlines she has with her already.” He gave me a meaningful look.
I felt sick.
Being part human means I’m potentially more fertile than the fully fae, since mortality yearns to reproduce itself. I could have a dozen babies for her, only to pull the humanity out of them with my own hands, leaving them pureblood, immortal, and ready to be raised by somebody else. Somebody who wasn’t me.
Simon nodded as he saw the realization on my face. “Even so. Treasa Riordan is a brilliantly practical woman. If she can use you to achieve her own ends, she will, and never understand why you might object. She knows what’s best, after all.”
“So we’re here why?” asked Quentin. “I could have cast this before we came inside.”
“But then we wouldn’t be inside, would we?”
It was difficult to refute the calm literalism of Simon’s words, even as I considered how pleasant it would be to punch him in the nose. “Okay, we’re here, and August was here, but I’m not picking up any traces strong enough to indicate that she was here recently.”
“When did she leave?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe someday I’d be able to develop this strange ability of mine to the point where I could tell just how old a faded trail was, but I wasn’t there yet. All I knew for sure was that August had been here—and that the trail had been fresher the first time I’d picked it up. I frowned. “I think she may still have been here when Riordan first arrived.”
“Which could mean . . .” prompted Simon.
I stared at him. “Which could mean she used Chelsea’s gating back and forth to get herself home. She may have been back in the mortal world this whole time.” But that didn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t she have gone running straight to the tower, and to our mother? Why would she still be lost, when she’d been given the perfect opportunity to be found?
Simon nodded, expression grim. “Precisely so. We need to be sure. Follow her trail, before Riordan comes back and our own journey comes to an end.”
“Right.” I closed my eyes and inhaled, digging down past the scent of Quentin’s spell, past the overlapping traceries of magic that made up the place—and there was so much magic, there was so much; what Riordan hadn’
t repaired magically, she had created magically, filling in the gaps in the walls with virtual silver and stone. Given enough time, she would probably go back and fix those spots for real . . . or maybe not. When she had this much raw power to throw around, why put any flesh behind the fantasy? It wasn’t like she ever intended to leave.
Only knowes built to last need to have any real foundations. The Tea Gardens had crumbled when Lily died, because her magic had no longer been there to shore them up. The false Queen’s beachfront knowe was still there, but it was fading a little every day. Eventually, it would return to the mostly formless shallowing it had been when I first found it for her, filled with potential, beautiful as only something that could become anything ever was.
Maybe, after it had lain fallow for a century or two, someone else would open it and allow it to become something new, something that wasn’t tainted by the legacy of what it had already been. I sort of hoped that would be the case. But it wasn’t going to be any time soon. Arden had her knowe, one that was more reality than lovely illusion, and she wasn’t going to set herself upon the pretender’s throne.
Under Riordan’s magic, under the magic of her subjects, under even Chelsea’s frantic and panicked magic, I found August’s. It was baked into the walls, almost as it had been back in Amandine’s tower. It was no wonder Riordan had been drawn to this specific castle. With as much work as August had done, this may have been the only livable spot in all of Annwn.
“This way,” I said, and started walking.
With Quentin beside me, I didn’t need to worry about walking out of the don’t-look-here; it moved with him, and hence it moved with me. Simon brought up the rear. I couldn’t watch him and where I was going at the same time, but he seemed nervous, like something about being here was putting him on his guard. Honestly, I couldn’t blame him for that.