The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  Elliot had been January’s seneschal long before she saved me from oblivion. He had been with her before she had met, courted, and married Li Qin. He could have sought a place in a grander, more traditional Court. But he had stayed, in part out of loyalty and in part because she refused to dictate his choices for him. When he and Yui had begun their courtship, my mother’s only response had been to give him a raise, saying that she wanted him to take his lady-friend “someplace nice.”

  He had taken her quite a few nice places. The last place he had taken her was to a cot in the basement, where she slumbered still, unchanging, no longer alive.

  “I think you are the one who told me dead was dead and gone was gone, and that I needed to focus on being the best Countess I could possibly be, rather than mourning for a mother who would never return for me, but who would have been very proud of me for accomplishing as much as I have,” I said carefully. “I also think you would sacrifice anything in your possession to restore Yui’s life.”

  “Yes,” said Elliot. To which, he did not specify. He did not really need to.

  “What do you think I should do?” My voice was a child’s whine, younger than the rest of me: the voice of a little girl who still direly needed her mother.

  “I think you should hear what she has to say.”

  I paused, looking at him carefully before I asked, “Do you believe she can do this? Do you believe she can restore the fallen?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “And no, I don’t.”

  He didn’t have to explain the reason for his contradictory answers. Yui had been uploaded to Gordan’s experimental server. If Li Qin could accomplish what she claimed to be able to do, Yui could come back. My mother hadn’t been uploaded. No matter what Li Qin did, my mother was never going to open her eyes again. She didn’t even have eyes to open. After she had been killed, Duke Torquill had commanded her body burned. She was gone.

  I was gone once. When the humans cut my tree down. When I went offline—when I died—for the first time, and then again and again, as she worked to save me.

  Why had I never worked to save her? She was the one who had taught me that death was a negotiation. I had been a bad daughter. I hadn’t even tried.

  “I have to talk to Li Qin,” I said, and vanished—but not before I saw Elliot smile.

  FOUR

  Li Qin was waiting in the cafeteria, sitting down with a mug of hot cider in her hand and a patient expression on her face. That expression didn’t change when I appeared in the chair across from her. She nodded toward my empty hands.

  “You might feel better with a beverage,” she said.

  Meaning she might feel better if I seemed to have something to hold onto. I chose not to argue. Physical people have physical needs, and however much time they spend in my company, they never quite get past the idea that I must have them, too. I flickered, and a cup of light and pixels appeared in my hands, filled with something that resembled hot chocolate. I thought the bunny-shaped marshmallows were a nice touch.

  Li Qin apparently agreed, because she offered me a small, relieved smile, and said, “I assume Elliot found you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew . . . April, you knew I was hoping to be able to do this. One day. That I thought I might be able to put them back together again.”

  “Yes,” I repeated. Of course I’d known. Nothing entered on our company servers was a secret to me, although I allowed my employees the pretense of privacy—when someone slipped and admitted they had called in sick to attend a concert, or spent a little extra time on their social media accounts, I did not intervene. A certain amount of relaxing naughtiness seemed required for them to continue operating at peak efficiency.

  Li Qin’s email went through our company servers. January had set them up that way, to make it possible for Li Qin to receive email while traveling in the Summerlands. I saw every piece of it. When I thought of things in those terms, I felt foolish for ever assuming she was courting someone. She had never shown any signs of keeping secrets. She would occasionally include the line “April, please don’t read the rest of this message” when she was discussing things she thought might distress me, but she still sent those emails through the usual channels. She could never have concealed a new lover from me.

  “So why do you look so upset?”

  I went still, allowing the outlines of my material form to crackle and turn hazy as I gathered my thoughts. Pulling them—and myself—back together, I said, “I do not know.”

  Li Qin sighed. “That’s not true. You know that’s not true. You understand yourself better than you like to admit. Why are you so upset?”

  I wanted to disappear. I wanted to return to the comfortable isolation of the code, where no one could bother me with questions that I didn’t want to answer. But Li Qin was my mother. She wasn’t the one who had saved me, but she was the one who had worked the hardest to make me a part of the new world in which I had been marooned. If January had been my Prospero, Li Qin was my island, and she had always been determined to see me bloom.

  “I suppose . . .” I began, and stopped, reaching for the words. They didn’t want to come. They remained just out of my grasp, flickering like lightning, like the smell of ozone hanging captive in the inside air.

  Like my mother’s magic, which I was never going to smell again.

  “I miss my mother.” The words were soft, and plain, and they hit her like knives. She winced, smile fading, although the understanding in her eyes never wavered. “I don’t like that she isn’t here. I don’t like that she went offline and didn’t come back. She’s supposed to take care of me. October said that I have to take care of myself now, and I’m trying, but it’s hard, and it’s wrong. Mama is supposed to be here. She’s supposed to be here.”

  My voice cracked on the last word. I felt my outline fuzz, and to my deep shame, I blinked between my adult form and the more childish mien I had worn when January was still with us, still taking care of me.

  Li Qin sighed, casting her eyes down, toward the surface of her cider. “I know,” she said quietly. “I do my best, but I know how much you loved her, and I know how much you miss her. I miss her, too.”

  “I know bringing the others back is the right thing to do, if it can be done. But . . .”

  “But you don’t want them to come back when she can’t.”

  I was silent. She had said it; I didn’t have to. I knew the words were wrong. I knew I should be ashamed of feeling that way. It was small and petty and selfish of me, and Li Qin needed me to be better than that. January would have wanted me to be better than that.

  Both of them had spent so much time trying to make sure I knew how to be a person—that the intersection of tree and circuit board would form a functioning individual, and not a broken mass of contradictory impulses—and they had succeeded: I was definitely myself.

  Sometimes I wondered whether that was a good thing.

  A hand touched mine. I glanced up. Li Qin was looking at me, lips drawn downward, dark eyes sad.

  “Some days I miss her so much I feel like I’m forgetting how to breathe,” she said softly. “She was air to me. Do you understand? When I went away, I would kiss her until my lungs were full, and then I’d go, but only for as long as it took me to exhale. As soon as I felt like I was going to drown, I would come back. Only this time, I came back, and she had gone ahead, down a path I’m never going to be able to find or follow. She left me. She left you. It doesn’t matter whether she did it on purpose. You’re allowed to be angry, and you’re allowed to be hurt, and I’m going to be angry and hurt right here with you. It’s not fair. It’s awful, and it’s cruel, and it’s unfair.”

  “You should hate me,” I said. Her eyes were like mirrors, so dark that they offered me nothing but my own reflection, faintly glowing and ashamed. “I killed her.”

  “You didn’t kill her, my
little rabbit, my moon-girl.” Li Qin reached out and smoothed my hair away from my face, not seeming to mind when it crackled with static. “You were used by someone who should have known better than to take advantage of an innocent, and because of that, she died. That isn’t the same as killing her. Your hand didn’t hold the knife.”

  “It might as well have.”

  “April . . .” Li Qin sat back, frowning. “How long have you been carrying this?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You didn’t kill her. Gordan killed her. You were a child.”

  “Because I chose to be, and now you’re going to bring all the rest of them back, and she’s still going to be dead. If it weren’t my fault, you’d be able to bring her back, too, because that would be fair. That would be right, if this weren’t happening because of me. If—” I stopped. I looked sharply at Li Qin. “How are you going to bring them back?”

  “There is an old blood magic ritual. I had to pay . . . well, never mind what I had to pay to find it. It was worth the cost.” Li Qin met my eyes without flinching, her chin raised stubbornly. Whatever the price had been, it had been dear enough to do her harm. That made me uncomfortable. I only had one mother left. No one was supposed to hurt her.

  “I got the idea from Alex,” she continued. “If October was able to resurrect the half of him that was still inside his body, it should be possible to bring the rest of them back—even Terrie, who was transferred to the server. As long as the night-haunts haven’t been called to claim the essential spark of magic in the blood of the fallen, it should be possible to put spirit and bone together again, and wake them all. If I could find the right ritual. If a powerful enough blood-worker was willing to help. I had to know. Now that I know, I have to try.”

  “October,” I said. “That’s why you are asking her to return here.”

  “Yes,” said Li Qin.

  “That’s why you bent the luck for her, even knowing how it might rebound. That’s why you offered her so many favors. Because you were looking toward this moment, when you would need her to assist you.”

  “Yes.”

  “She may refuse.”

  “She could,” Li Qin admitted, “but I don’t think she will. If there’s anyone who feels worse about what happened here than you, it’s her. She was sent to save the day. All she saved was ashes.”

  I nodded. “How can you be sure this will work?”

  “I can’t. It could be one more false hope in a long chain of them—and since this time, we’ll be extracting the captive data from your backups, this could be our last hope. If it doesn’t work, it might be time to talk about burning the bodies.” Li Qin allowed her shoulders to slump. “We bring them back, or we let them go. Either way, this ends. Don’t you want it to be over?”

  I did. Very much. But not if it meant that they returned while my mother remained lost forever. “I must see this ritual you claim to have found. I need to understand it.”

  “You’re not a blood-worker.”

  “Neither are you. If you can learn to understand it, so can I.” I stood. “You are a Duchess by proxy, Mother, but I am a Countess in all ways, and the people you would seek to save are my responsibility. I must be sure that it is safe before I can permit it.”

  A flicker of dark amusement crossed Li Qin’s face. “They’re dead, April. I’m not sure safety is their primary concern.”

  “Dead, yes, but still intact, and still possessed of possibilities.” I stood as straight as I could, trying to channel my mother. January was never the most rigid of purebloods, but she had been born to the nobility, and her manners had been impeccable, when she had needed them to be. Elliot used to say she could stare down a wall, and there had been respect in his voice. Such arrogance was to be desired, even cultivated, in those who held command. “I will not allow those possibilities to be redacted without sufficient hope of success.”

  “I see.” Li Qin actually smiled. As she rose, it was difficult to shake the feeling that I had been in some way manipulated into my current position.

  It was not a pleasant feeling. She was not meant to outmaneuver me in my own halls, however much of those halls she had once constructed.

  “I’ll have my notes transferred onto the company file server at once,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll find them fascinating, and if you have any questions, I’ll be available via text or phone.”

  Li Qin kissed my cheek before turning and bustling out of the cafeteria, leaving me speechless in her wake. What had just happened?

  And why, in light of her concession, did I feel as if I had somehow lost?

  FIVE

  January was fond of ambling through life, allowing it to happen as it happened, never rushing toward her destination. In contrast, Li Qin has always been prompt, a trait I both share and admire. By the time I shook off my shock and allowed myself to dissolve into the safe embrace of the electronic branches of the network, her notes were waiting for me, glowing softly red in a file labeled “confidential.”

  Cautiously, I touched its edges, testing the security settings. It was password protected and set to read-only, precautions that might stop a member of my staff, but which had never been intended to stop me. I allowed the idea of my fingers to sink deeper into the code, looking for hidden triggers and unseen traps. Li Qin would never intentionally harm me. She loved me too much for that. But she might accidentally leave a file locked down hard enough to bruise, and I wished to avoid that if I could.

  The code rippled around me, allowing me to pass unhindered. My presence was the password, and I had only come to read. Altering the ritual would serve no purpose. I pulled myself farther forward, and dove into the files.

  The world lurched. For a moment, it was the comforting ones and zeroes of my second infancy, when I was more child of the computer and the code than daughter of January O’Leary and Li Qin Zhou. They blurred, and I was standing in a library, surrounded by mahogany bookshelves and leather-bound books. The floor was polished oak, softened by a rug patterned with hibiscus flowers and twining clematis. A fire crackled in the fireplace, only its pixelated edges betraying the virtual nature of the environment.

  Closing my eyes, I cast my awareness outside my surroundings until I located the small file containing Li Qin’s description of the environment. Her code was crude, inoperable; it would never have been able to run independent of my presence. With me standing in her research, it was sufficient to shape my surroundings, tailoring them to her desires. She disliked me spending too much time in pure code. She said it allowed me to learn as a machine, and not as a Countess of the material realm.

  She was right, of course, for all that I rarely allow myself to tell her so. She needed to let me make my own choices. Still, it was nice to be reminded that she cared.

  “Mother,” I said fondly, and walked toward the fireplace, where a stack of files waited for me on the arm of an overstuffed chair. I sank into it, curling my virtual legs beneath myself as I opened the first of them and began to read.

  It was a fairy tale, of sorts: the tale of a woman who had died and been frozen in stasis before the night-haunts could collect her body. Her lover had waited for them to arrive and, when they did, had somehow managed to strike a bargain via which they would leave their prize unclaimed, providing the woman could be restored to life within a sennight’s time. I paused to check my dictionary. A sennight was a week: an archaic term which nonetheless made perfect sense, given the endurance of the term “fortnight” among the elder purebloods. I filed it away as a useful translation, and continued to read.

  The lover, granted a reprieve from the finality of death, had thrown themselves upon the mercy of the nearest blood-worker, a Daoine Sidhe renowned for their skill with a needle and a geas. Together, they had been able to somehow heal the dead woman’s wounds and trick her body into forgetting it was no longer alive, and as the night-haunts had not come fo
r her, she had seen no reason not to open her eyes. She had returned from the dead, shrugging off its grasp as if it were nothing.

  The blood-worker, exhausted, had collapsed into a sleep that lasted the better part of a decade. I somehow doubted Li Qin was intending to share that portion of the story with October. October did not seem the type to voluntarily take a multi-year nap for the sake of resurrecting a group of virtual strangers. Some of them were literal strangers. Barbara and Yui had been dead before October’s arrival.

  Quentin wouldn’t like it if we put his knight to sleep for years. His displeasure was more of a concern for me than October’s inconvenience. He and I had been the same age for a time, and I was still fond of him, even if we were no longer peers. It would be unpleasant to make him that unhappy.

  It was probably also unpleasant being dead while the part of you that should have become a night-haunt was trapped in a flawed computer simulation. I was confident the people in the basement would have prioritized their happiness over Quentin’s. As they were my subjects, if only on a technicality—normally, the living cannot claim authority over the dead, but normally, the living are not looking to resurrect them—I was probably expected to take their side.

  I sighed, briefly glad of Li Qin’s artfully tailored environment. There is something satisfying in the act of sighing, and it is not possible in untextured code. I would have had no body there, while her virtual library made it a requirement.

  I have been very fortunate in my mothers. Both of them have loved me as well and as truly as they could, and any failures in my character are my own, and not their fault at all.