AMANDINE’S TOWER isn’t a knowe: it isn’t anchored to the human world, and there’s no mortal way to get there. It’s a freestanding structure in the Summerlands, built of fae stone under a fae sky. The most mortal thing ever to exist there was me, and I fled as soon as I could, choosing the streets of San Francisco over a place that seemed determined to erase everything I knew to be true about who I was and who I was meant to be.
So not the most warm and fuzzy of childhood homes, is what I’m saying here. Walking back to it in the company of a man who had been my personal bogeyman for years didn’t particularly help. Worst of all, Simon chattered.
“I remember when this forest was all acorns and pinecones and other such rubbish,” he said grandly, indicating the trees around us. The fact that none of the trees were oaks or evergreens didn’t stop his cheerful misidentification of the seeds they’d sprouted from. “Sylvester was absolutely determined to have some sort of demarcation between his land and my lady’s. As if the fact that it was always high summer in Shadowed Hills, with the roses growing rampant, wasn’t enough? Luna refused to entertain the idea of any other season in those days.”
“What season was it at the tower?” I was ashamed of how eager I sounded for the answer. Amandine had done something terrible to me. We were here because of what she’d done. And yet, she was still my mother, and part of me yearned to know more about her, who she’d been before she had me, who she’d been when she was happy.
“Spring, usually, but my Amy has always been mercurial. Sometimes it would change overnight, from spring to the depths of winter, and we’d all put on our coats and grit our teeth against the chill.” He smiled fondly, distantly, like he was looking at a memory. “August preferred the fall. Amy used to say it was a consequence of her name. I think our girl enjoyed how calm it was. The growing time was over, and the gathering time was just beginning. For her, it was a chance to breathe.”
“Why are we starting at Amandine’s tower?” asked Quentin. “That’s the one place we know absolutely for sure that August isn’t.”
“Because that’s also the one place we know absolutely for sure that August was,” said Simon. “The walls will remember her. We can start to follow her trail from there.”
“You looked for years without finding her, and you were starting from the tower.” Quentin was making no effort to hide his distrust. That was actually sort of soothing. No matter what happened here, he had my back.
It was difficult to believe that less than six hours ago, I’d been laughing and happy, and feeling like the world was finally starting to go my way. That would show me not to relax. It was just an invitation for life to kick me in the teeth as hard as it could.
“I was starting from the tower, but I didn’t have October to help me.” Simon shook his head. “I was in a rare position for a long time: a man, married to one of the Firstborn, raising the first known daughter of her descendant race. Everything August did was a surprise and a revelation. Amandine’s magic was similar, of course—the First are always similar to the fruit their branches will bear—but it wasn’t exactly the same.”
“What do you mean?” asked Quentin.
“I mean that you are not just a watered-down copy of your parent and original. How could you be? The Dryad and the Blodynbryd descend from the same woman, and neither has wings. I’ve always wondered how the Mother of the Trees felt about that. For her children to not only be anchored to the earth, but bound to it, rooted to it . . . it was either a punishment or a reward, that they couldn’t be blown away by the wind.”
“I never thought about it that way,” I admitted. Acacia—the Mother of the Trees, and Luna’s mother—has skin the color of flower pollen, and moth’s wings growing from her shoulder blades. She’s magnificent, but she doesn’t look anything like her children.
Amandine and Evening, on the other hand, look so much like their respective descendant races, and so much like each other, that they’d both been able to pass themselves off as Daoine Sidhe for decades, maybe longer.
“Wait,” I said. “How many people actually knew Mom was Firstborn?”
“Some,” said Simon. “I knew before I married her, as did Sylvester. Our parents told us when Amy was sent into Fosterage with our household. It was our job to help her pass for one of the Daoine Sidhe—we were her protective coloration. We moved as a mob of four, she, my brother, my sister, and I, and we seemed enough alike that when she couldn’t quite perform a trick as one of us would, we could cover for her. It was made very clear to us that we needed to maintain her masquerade until it was safe to do otherwise.”
“Who brought her to you?”
Simon shook his head. “That, I don’t know. I was a child when she arrived. To be honest, I can’t remember a time before Amy. She was always there, part of daily life, growing more beautiful with every passing night. It was inevitable that my brother and I should both fall in love with her—but that’s not the story you want to hear right now.”
“Not really,” I said, feeling slightly sick to my stomach. The thought that my entire life, my entire world had hinged upon my mother choosing between twin brothers was ridiculous enough to be difficult to swallow. “You were talking about the differences between Mom’s magic and mine.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure your magic is a match for your sister’s. You have different fathers, after all, and that could have changed things slightly. Not by enough to make you something other than Dóchas Sidhe, but enough for you to have different strengths. It’s happened before.”
“Faerie is weird, film at eleven,” I said. “What could August do that Mom couldn’t?”
“Magic has a scent,” said Simon. “It’s there for everyone. For most of us, though, it’s a whisper, a secret, a sigh. We’re better at picking up the magical scents of those we feel strongly about—family, lovers, close friends. For years, my best friend was a man who smelled of cranberries in bloom, but all Sylvester could say for sure about his magic was that it was some sort of small white flower. Magic adapts. For Amandine, the scents are secondary. She barely notices them. All her focus is on the bloodlines they identify. She could take one sniff of your squire and know how many generations removed he was from his First, where those generations branched, and how many of his ancestors had been Daoine Sidhe.”
“Uh, all of them,” said Quentin.
I said nothing. His mother, Maida, was born a changeling, the daughter of a human woman and a fae man. The mortality had been pulled out of her before she became High Queen; it had been long, long gone by the time Quentin was born. That didn’t change the fact that he had a direct human ancestor. I could see the watermarks in Maida’s blood when I looked at her closely. I could see their echoes in his.