“Oh, yes.” She waved a hand, indicating Poppy. “This is where they come from. No Firstborn. Just a pixie and a promise. They’re related to the Piskies, actually—another family line without a true Firstborn. Some Aes Sidhe missed their families, went home to visit, got frisky, and wound up with size-changing babies. I think that may be part of why the Aes Sidhe died out. Why stick to your own kind when your offspring can be something better?”
I gaped at her, Poppy a warm weight against my shoulder. “She’ll be alone.”
“She’ll have friends, and this isn’t why you came to me. Why are you here, October?”
“We didn’t come to you.” I scowled. “You keep acting like we’re here on purpose, and we’re not. This is just where we wound up.”
“Even so. You must have been looking for something.”
“Amandine told me to find August.”
“I knew that part. You followed her trail.”
“Yes.” Poppy still wasn’t standing on her own. I gathered as much of her as I could into my arms and half-dragged, half-carried her to the couch, where Simon stood and helped me lower her down onto the cushions. We had to position her carefully, so as not to crush her wings. They twitched as we let her go. Still there was no sound of bells.
Light, and the sound of bells: those were the things that Maeve had given to the pixies when she made them, intending for them to make her happy. Light and the sound of bells. That was what the Luidaeg had taken away.
I turned back to her. “Is she going to be all right?”
“It depends on who you ask,” said the Luidaeg. “Ask your questions.”
I took a deep breath. “August walked the Babylon Road. Where was she going?”
The corner of the Luidaeg’s mouth twitched. “That’s not the right question. I already told you that I don’t know where she is or where she went. Ask the right question.”
“Luidaeg, why did my sister, August Torquill, ask you for a candle?”
“Now there’s the right question.” She stood a little straighter. “Amandine’s line—your sister, your mother, yourself—is responsible for the loss of our King and Queens, and there are those who say that only Amandine’s line can set right what they made wrong.”
“Are you one of the ones who says that?”
The Luidaeg’s eyes flashed black for a moment before returning to green. “I think there may be other ways, but your line is the cleanest of them. The fewest deaths will be lain at the root of the oak and the ash if you fix what once was broken. Your mother never wanted to be a hero. She hated what her mother’s actions and our father’s blood had lain upon her, hated the expectation that she would sacrifice herself for the sake of others. She wanted to be a rose in a walled garden, and not one growing wild by the side of some crumbling, half-forgotten well. So she refused. She could have ended this centuries ago, and she refused.”
“You can’t blame Amy for the actions of her mother,” said Simon, stepping up beside me. “It’s not fair.”
“Oh, and do you know who her mother was? Did she tell you, failure, when she took you to her bed and promised to be true?” Simon looked away. The Luidaeg laughed. The sound was bitter. “I thought not. She may have loved you—my sister is capable of love, even if she spends it like a miser—but she’s not so capable of trust. I don’t blame Amandine for what her mother did. I blame her for what she, herself, chose not to do. I blame her for leaving us to clean up her mess. And I blame her for not preparing her daughter for what had to be done.”
The Luidaeg turned to me. “August came to me and asked me for a candle. She asked to be set on the Babylon Road, because she’d heard Blind Michael had in his keeping a changeling child powerful enough to be capable of opening doors into the deeper realms. She was convinced that Oberon had sealed himself in Mag Mell. Had all the scraps of prose and prophesy to prove it to herself, to be certain she was on the right trail. Had the burning need to prove herself to her mother.”
“What did she pay you?” asked Simon.
The Luidaeg looked at him calmly. “She gave me her way home.”
“You—” His eyes widened, and he lunged.
Fortunately for him, he was positioned so that I was able to grab him and keep him from getting to her. He was taller than me, but he wasn’t stronger; he’d never been a fighter. I, on the other hand, have always had pretty good upper body strength, on account of all the stabbing.
“Let’s not attack the immortal sea witch today, shall we?” I said. “The Luidaeg has to give you what you’re willing to pay for. That’s the deal. She doesn’t have a choice.”
“When I asked for it, I didn’t think she’d give it up,” said the Luidaeg. “Sometimes my prices are set to serve as a deterrent. She was supposed to go home. You were supposed to have taught her never to undertake that sort of quest alone. You were supposed to have been clever enough to counteract my father’s heroism.”
“You took my daughter!” shouted Simon. “You left her with no way back!”
“If she’d managed to find Oberon, she wouldn’t have needed her own way home. His would have been strong enough for the both of them, and then I would have been allowed, by the law of the exchange, to return her own. Really, it was her failure that doomed her, and not me.” The Luidaeg sighed, looking briefly regretful. “I screwed up. I thought she’d go back to you and find another way.”
“Instead, she went into the woods, and she didn’t come back,” I said. “Luidaeg, we need to follow her.”
The Luidaeg frowned. “That’s not something I can give you for free.”
“I know.”
“It has to cost.”
“I know that, too.”
“You’re too deep in debt to be let off lightly; if I had a choice, I wouldn’t bargain with you at all. Think hard before you do this, October, or—”
“Are you kidding?” I cut her off, taking a step toward her. In that moment, it didn’t matter that she was the sea witch, or that she was Firstborn, or that she could probably have killed me with a flick of her wrist. I didn’t care. “Please tell me you’re kidding, because I can’t believe you would think I hadn’t already thought about this. My mother has Tybalt, Luidaeg. She has Tybalt, and she has Jazz, and she’s going to keep them until I bring August back. Me. So, yeah, I am going to do whatever is in my power to find August, because without August, I’m dooming two members of my family to eternity in a cage. Do you understand? I haven’t got a choice. I have to do this.”
“And I’m her squire, which means I have to do it with her,” said Quentin, stepping up next to me. His jaw was set. In that moment, there was nothing of the child I had mentored and worried about for all these years; I was looking at the man.
“I want my daughter back,” said Simon, stepping up on the other side of me.
The Luidaeg looked between us, focusing on each of us in turn, and finally said softly, “You’re fools, all of you. Fools and heroes, and I don’t know if there’s a difference.”