Connor, who had died of elf-shot in front of me. I forced a sad smile. “It wasn’t your fault. You did more than I could have asked.”
“That you asked at all was a miracle to us. We still owe you life debts a hundred times over.” The pixie woman hugged me a second time before finally, mercifully letting go. “What are you doing here?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” I said. “I was following the trail of my sister’s magic when I kicked this big puffball mushroom, and woke up in a dark room with no doors.”
“Ahhh.” She smiled knowingly. “You triggered the sentries. Got yourself ensmallinated. Fun times!”
“Yeah, maybe, but I don’t have time for fun right now. I need to find my sister. Do you know where the other people with me were taken?”
She cocked her head to the side. “Don’t you want to explore? Most people don’t ever get to come here, and when they do, they don’t ever get to look around.”
August’s trail had led through here . . . I stiffened. “How long have you lived here?”
“Me, or everybody?”
“Both.”
“Me, I don’t know. A while. I go to Human sometimes, to hunt and scavenge, when it’s my turn, but mostly I stay here. Help with the kids, see my family, all that stuff you do when you’re not questing. The flock has been here for days and days and days.”
Right: this wasn’t getting me anywhere. I decided to try another approach. “Do you remember the big earthquake? The one where the old King died?”
“We don’t have a King,” she said. “You do, but we don’t.”
The question of whether pixies were part of the Divided Courts seemed like it was best left for another day. “Okay,” I said. “But do you remember when my King died?”
“It was bad,” she said. “Lots of things burned, and it even shook here, in Faerie, not just in Human.”
“In . . . wait. You call the mortal world ‘Human’?” It was oddly charming.
She looked at me like I’d just said something unbelievably stupid. “What else should I call it? The wingless call this ‘Faerie,’ so of course we’d call that other place ‘Human.’ The names go together.”
“They do,” I agreed. “But you remember the earthquake.”
“Yes. Why?”
“Did someone like me—one of the wingless—come here around that time? She would have had red hair, but looked a lot like I do, otherwise. She might have been wearing a yellow dress.” August, in her dress like corn husks, walking into the woods by the light of a candle.
To my surprise, the pixie woman shied away. “We saw her, we saw her, but we didn’t take her, no, we don’t have her, not then and not now, we’ve never had her, I promise. Tell the sea witch we didn’t interfere.”
“The sea—what are you talking about?”
“We saw her, yes, we saw her. I was here, helping to hold the walls up while the world fell down, and she had just gone by, walking down our paths, in our place. Some of us wanted to interfere, until they saw the candle in her hand. You know about the candle?”
I nodded. “I do.”
“She was already on the Babylon Road, following it to somewhere that wasn’t here, and if she was on a road to a place that wasn’t here, she wasn’t ours to take. You understand? You see? We knew someone else held claim, and so we let her pass us by. We didn’t interfere.” She grabbed for my hands. I let her. “We didn’t.”
“I believe you,” I said.
Relief flooded her features. “I knew you would. You were kind when you didn’t have to be. Of course you would be kind now.”
“But I need to find her. My lover and my sister’s lover have been taken by someone who will only give them back if I can find my other sister.” Explaining the actual structure of my family tree would take too long and complicate matters too much. This was the bare bones of it. It would serve. “Please. Can you convince whoever’s in charge here to give my people back and let us go?”
The orange pixie looked disappointed. “You really won’t stay.”
“Look, I’ll—I’ll come back, okay? You have my word. I will come back and stay for a couple of days. I’ll let you show me around, introduce me to your friends—honestly, if I didn’t have to do this, I would be really interested. I didn’t even know for sure whether pixies could speak English before tonight. Today. What time is it?”
“It’s after moonrise in Human, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. She grinned. “The sentries picked you and your friends up hours and hours and hours ago, and you’re the first to wake. Sleep must have wanted the lot of you very badly.”
I went cold. Simon had only been awake for a few hours. Walther’s elf-shot countercharm would still be in his blood. Who knew how it was going to interact with whatever the pixies had used to knock us out?
“Can you take me to them?” I asked.
She nodded. “Follow,” she said, and started walking.
Her pace was quick but not too fast. She walked like she was accustomed to it, which made me think that pixies must not fly much when they were at home. Which reminded me . . . “I don’t actually know your name,” I said.
“You’re the first of the wingless to ask a pixie’s name in days and days,” she said, slanting a smile in my direction, like light cutting through clouds. “Should be a monument to say it happened.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling vaguely responsible for the rest of the people built on my scale.
“Oh, don’t be. Not your fault. I’m Poppy.” She waved a hand, indicating some of the other pixies watching us from nearby paths and rooftops. “That’s Dandelion, Parsnip, Lilac, and Stoplight. His mother flew into one while she was carrying, and it was green at the time, and he’s green, so . . .” Poppy shrugged, the gesture made somehow more expressive by her wings.
“Huh,” I said. “Some of those are pretty common flowers.”
“Makes for pretty common names,” she agreed easily. “There’s a Poppy in near every flock within two days’ flight of here, and probably more beyond that.”
“Wingless fae—not that we’re all wingless, although I guess most of us are—tend to frown on reusing names. So it’s just unusual, is all.”
“Wingless fae live longer,” said Poppy matter-of-factly. “Lilac’s the only one left who was little when I was who still has her parents living, all three of them, and they’ve made it this far because they used to have a wingless patron who’d give them good things when they needed. Set them up solid, kept them out of danger until she was big enough not to need keeping, and then they brought their luck home. Sometimes only way to remember our dead is by naming babies after them, to keep flying when they’re gone.”
Pixies are fae, which means they’re immortal. But they’re also small, and relatively delicate, and people think of them as pests and thieves and nuisances. Even I did, before I got to know them better. Shame swept through me like bleach, leaving everything washed-out and pale.