“Maybe,” said Simon, with surprising charity. “Some of us carry secrets even we don’t know. A world where blood can be changed is a world where what’s beneath the surface is unknowable by many of us. August could see who someone was, not what their blood wanted them to be. She could follow the trail of a spell for miles. Amy couldn’t do that. Still can’t, I suppose, or she would have gone after our daughter long since.”
The forest was growing thinner. We stepped out of the trees, and the season shifted, melting from high summer into early spring. The meadow where we stood was an endless explosion of wildflowers, some familiar from my time in the mortal world, others bright and impossible and utterly fae. A patch of what looked like glowing poppies had attracted a swirling storm of moths, which danced above the light, not seeming to notice the predatory flock of pixies that was picking off the ones flying at the edge.
Simon grasped my arm and steered me around the glowing flowers. “There are a remarkable number of toxins native to the plants in this area. The pixies have no doubt taken advantage of them.”
“Right,” I said. I would heal quickly enough not to lose much time. Simon and Quentin wouldn’t.
The shape of Amandine’s tower appeared between one step and the next, rising white and pristine from the landscape. It looked almost organic, like it had grown rather than being built. I shivered. I couldn’t help myself. I might have lived there once, when I was too young and too eager to please to know better, but it had never been my home, not really. It had never been mine. It was only recently that I had started to understand all the reasons my mother had held herself apart from me, refusing to love me more than she was absolutely required to. As long as there had been anything fae about me, I had been nothing more than a pale reflection of the daughter I had been intended to replace. She didn’t want another August. She couldn’t understand how a child who shared her eyes could be anything else.
Simon’s hand touched my shoulder. I turned, startled, to find him looking at me with a surprising degree of understanding.
“Sometimes the places that should be home aren’t,” he said. “Sometimes there’s no one we can blame for that, and so we blame ourselves, because aren’t we the easiest targets? It’s not like anyone will come to our defense when all the loathing and finger-pointing is happening in the privacy of our own minds.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the bad guy here?” I asked.
Simon paused before taking his hand away. “My apologies,” he said. “I forgot my place for a moment.” He resumed walking, striding ahead toward the gate to Mom’s garden.
I stood where I was for a few seconds longer, trying to reconcile everything I knew about the man with the urge to apologize for hurting his feelings. “This was easier when I was allowed to hate him,” I finally muttered, and took off after him.
Quentin followed me, silent, wary. He’d had as much sleep as I had, which was to say, none, and the fact that he was still standing was a testament to how much he cared about protecting his family and standing by his knight. He wasn’t going to drop until I did.
When the hell did I wind up needing to do right by so many people? What could I have possibly done to deserve them?
Simon didn’t wait for us. He reached the garden gate, pushed it open, and stepped through, into Amandine’s world of springtime snow. Every flower she grew there was white. White roses, white daffodils, sprays of Queen Anne’s lace, and beds of snowdrops and white crocuses. There were even white violets, which seemed to defeat the purpose of having a flower named after a color. Some of the leaves and stems were green, but even they seemed less vibrant than the plants growing outside the garden walls.
We caught up with Simon at the center of the garden. He was crouched, sniffing a large, bell-shaped lily. Turning at the sound of our footsteps, he smiled, wry and sad and something else that I couldn’t put a name to, and said, “My mother, Oberon rest and keep her, always said a lady’s garden should be an ornament for the lady it contained. Amy grew everything white when we met, because she felt ashamed of how little color she had. She wanted to set herself against a blank canvas, so as to look like she existed.”
It made a certain amount of sense, especially since she’d been raised among the Daoine Sidhe. They don’t have a “look,” the way the Tylwyth Teg or the Tuatha de Dannan do. Instead, they tend toward bright, dramatic coloration, like Simon’s red hair and golden eyes, or Quentin’s brilliant blue eyes and bronze hair, complete with a razor’s edge of growing patina. I’ve met Daoine Sidhe with hair in every color the rainbow had to offer, and a few the rainbow would have rejected for being overly garish. Compared to all that, Amandine’s palely golden hair and virtually colorless eyes would have made her stand out, and not in a good way.
Thinking about my mother—who had always seemed like the most beautiful woman in the world to me when I was a little girl, the person I could aspire to be, but never become—as feeling like an outsider was a bit surreal.
“After I married her, I convinced her to add some color to her flowerbeds, for the accent it provided,” Simon said, and straightened. “And when August joined us, she planted such flowers . . . oh, October, you should have seen it.”
“I have,” I said quietly. “In your memories, remember? When you let me ride your blood.”
That wasn’t all I’d seen. I had seen August herself, wearing a dress the color of corn husks and holding a white candle mottled in calico patches of black and gold, walking into a forest. I had seen those trees before. I couldn’t remember where, but it would come to me; I was sure it would come to me.
“Oh, yes,” said Simon, looking pleasantly surprised. “I had forgotten all about that. Come on, then.” He started for the front door, steps light, stride almost casual.
It hurt to watch him. Not because he was supposed to be my enemy, and he was walking toward my childhood home: because he was a man whose entire family was gone, one way or another, and he was walking toward his own home, the one he had lost through a combination of bad luck and his own actions. Through his own failures. Based on what little I understood of what had happened after August disappeared, it wasn’t so much that Amandine had objected to the methods he’d resorted to in trying to recover their daughter: it was that they hadn’t worked.
Simon Torquill had been carefree once, the sort of man who would no more turn a person into a fish and walk away from them than he would go outside without his trousers on. Here, in the shadow of my mother’s tower, the ghost of that man still lingered, and it made me ache for what he had become.
To my surprise, he didn’t walk straight in, but raised his hand and knocked, waiting patiently on the steps as Quentin and I caught up with him.
“She hasn’t been home in ages,” I said.