Simon went still, the brief animation draining from his face. He shifted until he was fully facing his brother, shutting me out. “Hello, Sylvester,” he said.
I flinched. Simon was a chameleon, in many ways. He was a man who had traded his freedom to his Firstborn for the chance to bring his daughter home, who had done things so terrible that they’d twisted and tainted the smell of his magic. But he was also the man who had loved my mother, who had loved his daughter, and who had tried, in his own misguided way, to save me from Evening. His methods were terrible. His intentions were, in their own way, pure. How did he contain that many contradictions without breaking himself?
By becoming someone else. The Simon Torquill who had taken an arrow to save me, even knowing that it would put him to sleep for a hundred years, at least remembered what it was to care. But the Simon who had turned me into a fish and left me was someone else, someone colder, who didn’t care about anything but himself.
It was the second Simon who was speaking now. He wasn’t going to beg for forgiveness or explain himself. If he was about to die, he was going to die with dignity, and if he had any regrets, he wasn’t going to share them with the likes of us.
“Your century is not up,” said Sylvester. “If it had been my decision, you would still be sleeping, and I would be hoping every hour of every night you lived was filled with the foulest of dreams.”
“My only nightmare in this moment is the quality of the mattress you saw fit to place me on,” said Simon. “Really, brother, have you never heard of lumbar support?”
“Kinda surprised you have,” I said.
Simon glanced my way, his icy demeanor cracking for an instant. Once again, I was struck by how similar the brothers were, and how different. He looked at me the way Sylvester did, like I was something he needed to nurture and protect. But while Sylvester’s protection had always been built on a foundation of love, Simon’s looked like it was built on regret. Odds were good that not all of it was for me. Whatever his motives, he had been a very bad man for a very long time.
“Literacy in the ways of mortals has been important this past century,” he said. “Things change so quickly where the humans are concerned that sometimes even they get lost. Unless I wanted to start disguising myself as one of their elders, I needed to maintain my understanding of current trends.”
“In lumbar support,” I said blandly.
Simon shrugged. “It was a factor.”
“Your vanity will be the end of you yet,” snapped Sylvester.
“No, brother.” Simon turned back to him. “If I make myself over to look like an eighty-year-old human man, and am forced to flee, to run, to do something physically beyond the reach of what I appear to be, what then? Vanity would be making myself the most beautiful of men. Sanity is preventing myself from betraying that I am something more than I appear by maintaining all aspects of a good disguise. Why am I awake?”
“Because Oberon has no mercy,” said Sylvester.
A hand grabbed my arm and yanked. I glanced to the side. Raj was standing there, eyes narrowed, looking like he was about to start biting people. It would have hurt, too. He was currently sporting the kind of dentition a tiger would envy, and when he spoke, it was with a faint lisp, words distorted by the size of his teeth.
“Make them stop talking and start finding,” he snarled. “My uncle is missing.”
“I am the last person in the world who is going to forget that, believe me,” I said, voice low. “I’m letting Simon get his bearings back. If we rush this, he might refuse to help.”
“Excuse me?” The voice was Simon’s. I turned. He was looking at me, a small frown on his face. “I’m right here. I can hear you both, and as my brother seems intent on being the least pleasant conversationalist in the room—and that includes you, Sir Etienne, don’t think I can’t see the way you’re looking at me, like you’d enjoy nothing more than the chance to crop my ears—I’m inclined to listen. What’s going on?”
“I was thinking more of gelding you,” muttered Etienne.
I took a deep breath, ignoring him. Ignoring everyone except for Simon, because he was the one I needed to convince. “Mom came to see me,” I said.
Simon’s eyes lit up. “Amandine is here? My Amandine?”
He sounded . . . younger, or less tarnished, at least, when he said my mother’s name. There was a light in his eyes that I’d only seen in memories of him, like he suddenly believed the world was a kinder place.
“No,” I said, and watched that light go out again. “She didn’t come to Shadowed Hills: she came to my house. You remember, the house where you attacked my friend?”
Simon grimaced, looking abashed. “I am sorry about that. I needed to make my exit without being delayed, and I knew you would be able to care for her. Is she well?”
“Care for her how, by putting her in a bucket?” demanded May, shoving her way forward. I remembered belatedly that the memories she’d taken from me when she was “born” included my transformation—our transformation, since we both remembered it like we were there—and abandonment. What Simon had tried to do to Jazz was even more personal for May than it was for me. “You tried to turn her into a fish, you sick asshole!”
“It’s a spell I’ve woven enough times that I don’t have to prepare it,” he said, not flinching away from May’s rage. Maybe he wasn’t afraid of her. Or maybe he thought he’d earned it. “I said I was sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t good enough,” she said, and burst into tears.
Oh, this was going well. I put my arm around her, pulling her against me, and said, “Simon, Mom has asked me to find August, and she’s taken our loved ones as collateral against her request. Please, will you help me?”
Simon sighed heavily. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for this,” he said.
SEVEN
FOR A MOMENT, everyone froze. It felt like the room was holding its breath. Just as quickly, the moment passed, and I had my hands full keeping May from lunging for Simon’s throat, while Quentin fought a similar battle with Raj. If the Prince of Cats transformed into his feline form, he could escape my squire, but he seemed to be too angry to think of that: he twisted and spat, held back by a solid arm-lock and Quentin’s greater mass.
Simon put a hand over his eyes. “Oh, sweet Titania. I apologize. I was not intending to say it was time for Amy to kidnap your friends. I can see why you would take insult at the insinuation.”
“If you’d ever learned to watch your words, you would spend less time apologizing,” said Sylvester.