Or like she was a pixie.
Once I had the thought, the evidence became impossible to ignore. Her hair was dark purple under the glow: her ears, while pointed, didn’t match any breed of fae I knew, maybe because I wasn’t used to seeing them at this scale. Maybe most tellingly, her clothing appeared to have been made from enormous flower petals, held together with cobweb stitches. There was even a fishbone in her hair, holding her messy bun in place. The spear, while dangerous, was made of a sliver of glass glued to a pine twig. She was a pixie.
She was also taller than I was. Oh, this was bad.
I raised my hands, palms outward, in what I hoped would be taken as a gesture of peace. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Sorry about your, uh, toadstool.” I would not call it a mushroom, I would not. If I said the word, I would start making architecture jokes, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop. “I don’t like closed spaces.”
“Make no moves, prisoner,” she said, wings vibrating as she spoke, like they were amplifying her voice. That wasn’t as surprising as the fact that I could understand her. Normally, the speech of pixies was like the high ringing of bells, fast and shrill and impossible to follow.
My surprise must have shown. She scowled and said, “Oh, didn’t think pixies could talk, did you? Maybe it’s because you don’t know how to listen, do you? Ears the size of a grown man, and they can’t hear a damn thing but themselves jawing on for nights without end.”
“It’s less you talking and more me being the same size as you that has me a little off-balance,” I said, lowering my hands. She didn’t seem inclined to stab me at the moment, although Oberon knew, that could change. I have a gift for making people want to see me bleed. “I had two men with me before I passed out. Where are they?”
“Making demands already? Cheek.” The pixie woman waved her spear in a threatening manner. Lights were beginning to appear at the edges of my vision, daffodil yellow and clover green and a surprisingly violent shade of blue. More pixies were coming. Because what I always needed was to be shrunk, menaced, and then surrounded by hostile people who could fly.
“Not cheek, concern,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “They’re my responsibility.”
“You should’ve been somebody’s responsibility,” said the woman. “Then you might’ve known not to go walking in our woods.”
The giant mushrooms. Naturally. I should have taken them as the warning they were, but I fell into the trap of thinking “I’ve seen this before, in movies intended for human children, which means it can’t be true.” It’s easy to forget that those human legends and stories were based on real things they had encountered and somehow survived, back in the days when Faerie and the human world collided more often. When the deeper realms linked straight onto the mortal world, and not just the Summerlands. Things like the pixie fondness for mushrooms, and for shrinking intruders when they thought they could get away with it.
“I apologize,” I said sincerely. “I didn’t know this was your territory. I’m just trying to find my sister.”
“She’s not here, unless you’ve got wings strapped under that leather jacket,” said the woman. The other pixies laughed. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound. Being reduced to their size had taken the shrillness from their voices, dropping them to a register I could deal with.
“My sister’s not a pixie,” I said. I hesitated, considering my next words carefully. This wood didn’t quite border on Amandine’s tower—we’d walked too far for that—but it was close enough that the odds were good the pixies would know who she was. Would invoking her name help me, or get me locked in the nearest toadstool for the next hundred years?
Caution isn’t normally my strong suit, and had I been weighing the risks for myself, I might have gone ahead and done it. I wasn’t. I was weighing the risks for Simon and Quentin, and more, for Tybalt and Jazz. I couldn’t take the chance of getting them hurt.
The woman seemed to take my silence for fear. She laughed. “Oh, look at you, all scared of a pixie,” she said snidely. “What’s your name, wingless?”
“October.”
Her eyes went wide, the tip of her spear dipping toward the ground—which was actually a tree branch, judging by the rough brown surface beneath our feet. “October?” she echoed.
I tensed. This was usually where the stabbing started. “Yes.”
“Once Countess of Goldengreen, who kept her word even to us, even where so many others would not? Who freed our captives, and filled our stocks?”
I blinked. Then, more slowly, I said again, “Yes.”
The woman dropped her spear and flung her arms around me, wings suddenly vibrating so fast that they became a blur of color. The rest of the pixies did the same, and I found myself the recipient of a pixie group hug, which was something like being trapped in the middle of a carillon of bells, all of them ringing at the same time in their own keys. It was surprisingly soothing, for being so incredibly loud.
A bright orange hand reached through the crowd and grabbed the collar of my jacket, dragging me out. I found myself in another hug, this one singular, but somehow even tighter.
“I thought I was going to die in there!” cried the hugger, a pixie woman whose body was lit up like a jack-o-lantern. She shoved me out to arm’s length, beaming in every sense of the word. “Hello!”
“Er, hi,” I said. “I’m . . . sorry. Have we met?”
“Not properly!” she said. “You let me out of a jar once!”
I blinked.
There was a trend among the purebloods at one time—or maybe more than one time; fashions have a lot of time to come and go when you live forever—for lights made of living pixies trapped in glass domes or stuffed into lanterns. No food or water, of course. Those would encourage excrement, and what kind of delicate, decorative lantern was covered in its own shit?
Pixies are considered somewhere between monsters and vermin by most people, which means they aren’t covered by Oberon’s Law. Killing them isn’t a crime, even though they’re intelligent beings. The end result of that loophole was a lot of dead pixies, left to starve in their glass prisons and then discarded when their lights went out. Oberon’s Law doesn’t cover changelings, either. If I ever meet Oberon, we’re going to have a long, long talk.
When I had accessed the shallowing at Muir Woods, following Rayseline, the kidnapped sons of the Duchess of Saltmist, and my own stolen daughter, the place had been lit by lanterns filled with captive pixies. I had freed them, choosing mercy over expediency, and the pixies had rewarded me by helping me save the missing children.
They hadn’t saved everyone. The face of the orange pixie fell as I watched, and she said, “I’m sorry about your friend. We couldn’t turn the arrow aside.”