The Winter Long Read online

  “Oh, good, you’re not dead,” said a female voice. I started trying to sort through the options for who might have hauled me out of the ocean. I’d seen enough to know that I should know her, but the whole “nearly drowning” thing had put a bit of a crimp in my memory.

  Everything was wet, and my body was one big ache, bruised by its impact with the water. My headache had become virtually an afterthought when held up against the rest of the pain. My leather jacket was like a lead blanket encasing my upper body, so waterlogged that it had probably pulled me almost to the seafloor before I woke up. I tried to roll toward the person next to me, and as I did, I realized I was covered in sand. That was a natural result of lying wet on a beach, but it was going to mean getting wet again, and somehow that was the final indignity. I braced my hands against the beach, shoving myself into a standing position, and turned.

  Dianda was sitting on the beach a few feet away, her tail folded under her like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen story. She raised an eyebrow as she met my eyes, looking dubious. “Are you done with the barfing water and attempted suicide by ocean? I don’t mind dead bodies in the Pacific, but you were right next to Goldengreen. That means you were trying to get in. And don’t stress about my fins and your ears—I have the Cetacea maintaining a screen around this area, no one’s going to see you.”

  I took a quick, borderline frantic look around. There was a heavy fog covering the beach, leaving the two of us sitting in what appeared to be the only clear area. That must have been Dianda’s “screen” . . . and we were inside it alone. “Oh, oak and ash, Dianda, where are the others?”

  She frowned. “Others? You mean the Cetacea? They’re farther out from shore.”

  “I don’t mean your damn Cetacea, I mean Quentin and Tybalt!”

  Dianda’s frown slowly faded into an expression of blank neutrality. “October, you are the only one we found in the water. We wouldn’t have been able to find you at all if we hadn’t already been circling Goldengreen. I’m sorry. They’re not there.”

  “Look again!” I hadn’t been intending to scream at her, and yet somehow it happened anyway. My voice bounced off the nearby cliff wall and was swallowed by the sea.

  “My people are still out there, October,” said Dianda. “They’re moving through the waves, they’re looking for anything out of the ordinary, and if either of your friends are in the water, we’ll find them. But you were half-drowned, and—”

  “They’re not my friends. They’re my family.”

  “The sea doesn’t care.”

  I looked at her bleakly, trying to make those words make sense within the context of the world. The sea didn’t care. Tybalt, Quentin, and I fell out of the sky, and now only I was here, and the sea didn’t care. I turned my eyes toward the gunmetal-gray waves of the roiling Pacific. Once again, the water had taken everything away from me. Because the sea didn’t care.

  “Why did we fall?” There was no life in my voice; it was a dead thing that fell between us like an accusation. That seemed somehow exactly correct.

  “Because the wards of Goldengreen have closed,” Dianda said. She rose, scales falling away, and moved to stand beside me, putting her hand on my shoulder. I didn’t shrug it off. It would have been too much work. “Dean and most of his court are still inside, but all the doors are shut, and all the entrances are locked.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Mary. She started screaming, and said that if we wanted to save Dean, we needed to get to Goldengreen before the doors froze shut.” Grief rolled across Dianda’s face like a wave, there and gone in moments. “We weren’t fast enough. That’s good for you, though, since I wouldn’t have found you if we hadn’t been beating at the underwater doors.”

  Mary was a Roane woman attached to Dianda’s court. She had the gift of prophecy, even if she didn’t always make sense—like most soothsayers, she spoke in riddles and metaphors more often than she did in simple, declarative sentences. The last time our paths had crossed, she’d foretold Connor’s death. My eyes stung with salt that had nothing to do with the sea. I blinked the tears away, grasping instead for the burning ember of rage that was starting to burn in my chest.

  “Who locked the doors?” I asked.

  “Not Dean,” said Dianda. “No matter who he swears his loyalties to these days, he would never, never seal the wards against his mother.”

  Her logic made sense. Dean had always been a dutiful son, and even if he kicked absolutely everyone else out of his knowe, he would have left a door open for Dianda. The rage was growing brighter in my chest, becoming a fire that warmed me even as it left ashes in its wake. “We came here because someone gave me a warning about danger at Goldengreen. I guess we needed to be faster, too.”

  “You think so?” Dianda’s voice was frozen. I glanced at her. She glared at me. “You knew my son was in danger, and you didn’t come sooner?”

  “I didn’t know anything, Dianda. We left the minute we figured out what the warning meant, and while we stand down here arguing about it, no one’s getting in there to find out what’s going on.” I turned to face the cliff that stood between us and the mortal museum that housed the entrance to the knowe, so very high above us. “Do you have anyone who can get me up that cliff?”

  “We’re the Undersea. We don’t fly.”

  “Right. Make yourself useful, then, and get back in the water. Find my boys.” Anger has always made my illusions come easier. I grabbed a handful of fog out of the air and twisted it into a human disguise, draping it over myself as I said, “I’m going to go find out what the hell is going on in Goldengreen.”

  “October, if they’ve been in the water this whole time, they’re not—”

  “Find them.”

  The Undersea prizes strength above all else. Dianda had been fighting to hold her Duchy since the day she received it. She looked at me and didn’t argue. “All right,” she said. “But what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to remind the knowe that I had a valid claim to it once, and I didn’t abuse it,” I said. “And then I’m going to go inside. Whether the knowe likes it or not.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “If the wards are sealed, I don’t think I can talk it into letting two people inside. Find my boys. I’ll find your son.” I didn’t wait for her to reply. I just turned and stalked across the sand, walking through the bands of concealing fog until I reached the base of the cliff. It wasn’t quite sheer, and generations of San Francisco beachgoers had been able to find their way down. I walked along the rocky wall until I found a series of shallow steps someone had taken the time to hew out of the stone. That was as close as I was going to get to an engraved invitation. I brushed a little more of the sand off myself, and started to climb.

  It was a cold enough, foggy enough day that even the exertion of climbing wasn’t drying me off. My wet clothes got heavier and harder to carry with every step I took. I didn’t take any of them off. The most logical thing to lose would have been my leather jacket, and that was never going to happen. So I climbed, wet and cold and furious, pulling myself hand over hand where the steps became too shallow to be anything more than suggestions, until finally—after what felt like an eternity—the slope turned gentler, and the last ten yards became almost reasonable. I straightened as I walked up the last few steps, and then I was standing on level ground, with scrub brush and sticker-plants tugging at my calves and ankles. I turned. The San Francisco Art Museum was about two hundred yards away, sitting serene on the edge of the cliff I’d just climbed.

  I paused, turning again, this time to look at the water. There were no signs of Dianda and her people—or of my boys. If Tybalt and Quentin were out there, I couldn’t see them.

  Maybe I was never going to see them again.

  The thought was chilling, even in comparison to the cold seawater soaking through my clothes. I forced
it away as hard as I could, trying to bury it beneath the layers of my exhaustion and my determination to get into the sealed knowe. We fell because someone had locked the wards. That meant that everything which came after our fall—everything I wasn’t going to let myself think about—was that person’s fault. The more I focused on that, the easier it became to shut away the things I didn’t want to be true. Someone had done this to us. Someone was to blame. And whoever it was, they were going to regret messing with my family.

  I stalked across the stubby field behind the museum until I came to the ramshackle frame of an old storage shed. It had probably been intended as a place where tools and garden supplies could be kept away from the refined eyes of museum patrons, but the landscapers hadn’t used it in decades. Some of them even said it was haunted. Yet somehow it remained, even as they kept their rakes and weed killer in safe, well-lit closets. It should have been torn down as an eyesore. The same spells that birthed the rumor of its haunting kept that from ever happening.

  The door was locked, sealed with clever charms as well as a more mundane padlock. I produced a set of lock picks from inside my jacket, flicking through them until I found the pick and wrench I wanted. Holding the pick between the first two fingers of my right hand, I pressed that palm against the cool tin door.

  “You remember me,” I said quietly. “I never forced you to go against your nature, or tried to wrest you away from the owners you’d chosen, and when I couldn’t be the Countess you needed, I found you someone who could play the part. I’ve tried to be a friend, when I could, and I’ve tried to do no harm when friendship wasn’t possible. Now I’m here because I need a favor. I am begging you. If you have any power over the spells that hold your wards in place, let me in. I need to know what’s going on. I need to know why the doors are locked. Please.”

  The smell of my magic rose unsummoned in the air around me, and brought with it a stinging, subtle undertone that wasn’t a smell or a sound or any of the other impressions I would normally associate with magic: it was just magic, pure and simple and older than anything I encountered in my daily life. It was even older than the Luidaeg in its way, or maybe just more primal. It was the knowe.

  I pulled my hand away from the door, steadying myself as I knelt and started working at the lock. There was some resistance at first, and still that soft, stinging sensation filled the air around me, now laced with the distant sensation of a heart beating. I took a deep breath, trying to focus despite what I could only assume was the close attention of the knowe. I had been insisting for years that the knowes were alive; I had even received proof of various kinds, some more blatant than others. But this was the first time it had really felt like a knowe was looking at me—more than that, seeing me, and knowing me for something distinct and apart from the rest of Faerie. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation.

  The padlock clicked and came open in my hand. The sensation of being watched faded in the same instant, and the shed door swung open without my needing to touch it. I straightened, tucking the lock picks back into the waterlogged inner pocket of my jacket. “Thank you,” I murmured, and stepped through.

  The transition between the mortal and fae worlds has always been marked, for me, by a moment of disorientation. In those instants, up is down, hot is cold, and everything hurts and heals at the same time. Transitions like that used to be painful, back in the days when I was more human and further from Faerie. Since Mom spun the balance of my blood closer to Dóchas Sidhe, the pain had faded, although the disorientation remained.

  As I stepped through the door into Goldengreen, I felt as if I were suddenly human again. The disorientation was worse than it had ever been, spinning the world around me like a top and yanking away my personal gravity at the same time, leaving me in a state of vertiginous free fall that barely managed to distract from the pain freezing every nerve and burning every inch of my skin. My blood boiled and iced over at the same time, trapping me in a limbo of agony that felt like it would never end. I was going to die here, alone in the spinning, painful dark.

  It was the pain that allowed me to fight through the rest of what was going on around me. I’ve become very acquainted with pain over the course of the last few years, especially where my own body is concerned. This was external pain, being forced on me by someone else, and I refused to let that be what took me down. I fought against it, trying to feel my way through the waves of agony until I struck the cool bedrock of my own self.

  My hands hit the floor of Goldengreen’s entry hall a split-second later as I landed in an unsteady crouch. The vertigo popped like a soap bubble, leaving me winded and feeling like my skin had been scrubbed from the inside, but intact. Under the circumstances, I’d take it.

  Slowly, I raised my aching head and considered the dim, empty hall. No pixies clung to the rafters, and no many-legged shadows scuttled in the corners; the bogies were gone. There was no way that could be a good sign. None of Goldengreen’s usual inhabitants were coming to greet me. I straightened, one hand going to the knife belted at my waist, and listened.

  Every place is silent in its own way. I had been in Goldengreen when it was completely deserted, and I knew what its silence sounded like. This was quiet, but it wasn’t silent; not quite. Voices were coming from somewhere, so thinned out and diffused by distance that they might as well have been the whispers of the “ghosts” that haunted the entry shed.

  I took a careful step forward, still listening. The courtyard was the center of Goldengreen’s social whirl, and normally, if someone was talking but out of sight, I would find them there. The voices didn’t seem to be coming from the courtyard this time. I allowed that to embolden my steps, and sped up as I walked down the short span of hall between me and the courtyard doorway. When I got there I stopped, trying to let my eyes adjust, hoping that what I saw wasn’t really true.

  Shortly after I had become Countess of Goldengreen, my friend Lily, the Lady of the Tea Gardens, had been murdered by Oleander de Merelands. I had inherited Lily’s subjects, a motley assortment of changelings and purebloods with nowhere else to go. They’d promptly set about making the knowe a home, transplanting trees and flowers from Lily’s holdings to the indoor garden that had been established in the courtyard. They’d stayed with Goldengreen when I’d passed it on to Dean, partially because I’d vouched for him, but mostly, I knew, because they hadn’t wanted to move the trees.

  They weren’t going to have to worry about that anymore. The courtyard looked like it had been hit by a localized but powerful tornado. Trees were on their sides, roots sticking up in the air like accusing fingers. Flowers had been crushed, rosebushes uprooted and flung against the walls. I was still trying to take in the damage when I realized that the pale branches extending from beneath one of the fallen trees weren’t branches at all. They were fingers.

  “Oh, oak and ash,” I breathed, and bolted up the courtyard stairs until I reached the level where the fallen tree was splayed. It was one of Lily’s willows, old and grizzled with years of survival. As I drew closer, I could see the scales on the pale fingers, and on the soft skin of the hand that they were attached to. One of Lily’s former handmaids, a woman whose name I had learned and then forgotten, because we’d had nothing in common except for our love of an Undine who would never walk with either of us again. I tried to brace against the dirt and shift the tree off of her body, but it was no use; I didn’t have super strength, and all I could do was force her deeper into the soil.

  I dropped to my knees, following some half-formed instinct as I grabbed her wrist—not to check for a pulse, but to check the temperature of her skin. She was cool enough that I guessed she had been dead for at least an hour, maybe longer. So why was there still a body here for me to find? The night-haunts came for all the dead of Faerie. That was their purpose, and their one form of sustenance. They would never leave a body unclaimed for this long, and here—inside a knowe, where no human eyes would ever look—the
y wouldn’t have bothered leaving a replacement. The night-haunts should have come by now.

  Unless someone was keeping them out, along with the rest of us. I stood, looking uneasily around the darkened courtyard, which could easily hold another dozen bodies buried beneath the broken greenery. Was Dean in here? Or Marcia? Had I lost friends today?

  You mean apart from the obvious?

  Again, I pushed the thought down, burying it deep within my mind. If I started mourning, I was going to break. I could already feel the fissures forming, and when they gave way, I would be glad to fall into the abyss of my own grief. Right here, right now, I needed answers. I needed someone to blame.

  I wasn’t going to get any of that in the courtyard. Murmuring a quick farewell to the fallen handmaid, I turned and ran back down the steps to the door, heading into the hall and pausing only long enough to reorient myself to the distant sound of ghostly voices. They were coming from farther down the hall. I started toward them, slowly at first, and then breaking into a run that stopped only when I reached the door to what Dean called “the cove-side receiving room.” It hadn’t existed when Goldengreen was mine, but knowes can rearrange themselves. The current Count was a mermaid’s son. Of course there would be a seaside entrance.

  Opening the door brought light back into the world. The spiraling stone stairway that descended toward the receiving room was lit by glowing abalone shells, which might have seemed tacky under other circumstances, but here and now were a welcome change from the unyielding dark. The voices were louder now. Moving cautiously, lest I attract attention I didn’t want, I started walking down the stairs.

  The voices continued to get louder. I felt a small knot of tension in my shoulders give way as I realized that one of those voices belonged to Dean Lorden. He was shouting something I couldn’t make out, and he sounded every inch his mother’s son: imperious and angry, and ready to kick the world in the teeth until it started giving him what he wanted.