“Right,” I said faintly. Because a human-sized pixie in need of shoes was exactly what this quest needed.
There was no sense in arguing with her, and she was right about one thing: it was unreasonable to expect her to let us walk off with her magic. But if Simon was his usual size, there was no way we’d be able to transport him.
Sighing to myself, I walked over to where he was lying in the dirt and picked him up as gingerly as I could, all too aware of the size difference between us and how fragile his body was in comparison to mine. If I accidentally crushed his rib cage he wouldn’t recover; he’d just die.
“You want as for me to carry him?” asked Poppy blithely. I turned to blink at her. She offered me an understanding smile. “We don’t big ourselves up too often, because it’s hard and it hurts and we need to small somebody down to do it, but I know what it feels to have somebody lots bigger carrying you. I know how to hold.”
“That would be great,” I said, and let Simon’s body slide into her waiting hands. She made him vanish into the bodice of her dress—where, I realized, pockets had been stitched to almost every seam. It made sense. Pixies are scavengers, taking whatever they could get their hands on. Of course they would need as many pockets as they could fit into their clothes.
We had wasted enough time. I stepped away from Poppy and closed my eyes, trying to filter through the myriad scents surrounding me until I found the campfire smoke and climbing roses trail of August’s magic.
The fact that it was still there for me to find said something about how long the pixies had been alone here. Under normal circumstances, all traces of August would have long since been buried under the magical trails of a hundred other spells, a hundred other passing fae. But pixie magic is different. It manifests as sparkling, scentless dust, and it hadn’t obscured her passage.
I opened my eyes. “This way,” I said, and started walking.
Behind me, I heard Poppy ask, “We just follow?”
“We just follow,” confirmed Quentin.
They did.
The ground grew marshier under our feet, until we were picking our way around the edges of a swamp, surrounded by trees that looked something like mangroves, and something like magnolias, and something like nightmares given vine-encrusted branches and leaves that blocked the sky. Sometimes those vines seemed to slither, implying the presence of snakes. I hurried on, not looking around more than I absolutely had to. If something attacked us, then I would care about it. If not, we could live and let live.
There was a path in the mud if I watched for it carefully. It bent and twisted, all but tying itself in knots, and August’s scent was all along it. She had come this way. So long ago that time had smoothed her footprints from the mud, but still—my sister had walked here, and now I was following her. Something about it seemed inevitable, almost, like life was always going to bring me to this point eventually.
A grassy mound rose out of the swamp ahead of us. Turtles in impossible colors, crystal blue and pine green and daisy white, basked on the shallow sides. They didn’t slide away at our approach, only looked at us with slow, curious eyes.
The mound had a door, rough-hewn, sunk into the earth alongside a circular window holding panes of thick, bubbly glass. I looked back. Quentin shrugged. Poppy, busy goggling at the strange turtles, said nothing.
“Right,” I said, and raised my hand, and knocked.
The door opened.
The woman on the other side looked barely old enough to deserve the title: she was sixteen at best, with the ghosts of old acne scars still haunting her cheeks, and long, dark hair that fell over her shoulder in a profusion of semicombed curls. She was wearing a blue tank top and jeans, and she looked wearily unsurprised to see me standing on her doorstep.
“All right, you found the back door,” said the Luidaeg. “I suppose you might as well come in.”
TWELVE
“LUIDAEG.” QUENTIN PUSHED past me and threw his arms around the sea witch, first among Firstborn, monster under the collective bed of Faerie, in a way that would have been suicidal coming from virtually anyone else. From him, it was nothing more than a genuine expression of relief at seeing a friendly face. “You’re here.”
“You found the back door,” she said again, ruffling his hair. Her hand came away faintly glittery. She looked at it, then at Poppy, who was doing her best to disappear behind me.
It might have been easier if Poppy hadn’t still been lit up like a Christmas tree. The normal pixie glow is reasonably bright. On a pixie the size of a human being, it was virtually blinding.
“Toby, why is Quentin covered in pixie dust, and why is there a giant pixie behind you?” Somehow the Luidaeg made that question sound almost reasonable. She has a gift for that sort of thing.
“We met the local pixie colony,” I said. “They knocked us out. Didn’t you invite us in?”
“I wondered if you were going to remember that,” she said, and stepped to the side, disentangling herself from Quentin in the process. Eyes on Poppy, she said, “Enter and be not afraid, for you have been invited.”
“You’re never that formal with me,” I said.
“You’re rarely invited,” she replied.
I smiled wearily and stepped inside.
There was no sense of transition between one side of the door and the other; we were still in the Summerlands. We were also standing in the Luidaeg’s apartment, which I knew for a fact was located in the mortal city of San Francisco. The illusions that sometimes made the place look like an EPA disaster zone were down, revealing clean walls, a sparse, vaguely nautical décor, and a carpet the color of fresh kelp. The air smelled like the sea, the clean, sweet sea, when the tide was high and all the darker aspects of it were safely out of sight beneath the waves.
The Luidaeg waited until Poppy was through to close the door. Her attention on the transformed pixie, she said, “I am the sea witch. I am the maker of bargains and the granter of dreams. Speak carefully to me, if you must speak at all, because if you put yourself into my debt, you will have to pay. Do you understand?”
“Might be,” said Poppy, sounding dazed. “Never thought I’d meet you proper. Normally too small to notice.”
“I notice everything,” said the Luidaeg wearily. She turned to me. “How’d you find the back door?”
“I followed the trail August left when she came to see you.”
The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “You followed a hundred-year-old trail no one else has been able to find? You’re good, but you’re not that good. How did you even know where to start?”
“Simon showed me.” I looked to Poppy. “Can I have him back, please?”