The Winter Long Read online

  If Dean was alive, maybe Goldengreen hadn’t fallen quite yet. I still didn’t believe he was the one who had sealed the wards—not against his mother, not against me—but he was fighting, and that made a huge difference in his survival prospects. I sped up, taking the stairs as fast as I safely could, and wishing I dared to pull the “sliding down the banister” trick that had worked for me in the false Queen’s knowe.

  Then I came around the last curve in the stairs, and froze, staring at the scene beneath me.

  The receiving room was large enough to seem like it couldn’t possibly fit inside the knowe, with a redwood deck covering half the floor, while the rest gave way to sandy beach that yielded in turn to a small, private cove. The cliff wall extended down past the surface of the sea; I wasn’t sure what the seaward entrance actually looked like, and I didn’t want to know. Over a dozen of Goldengreen’s subjects were clustered together at the water’s edge, all but one standing as close behind their Count as they could. Dean stood at the front of the motley little group, a trident in his shaking hands, aimed at the person in front of him. Marcia was to his right, holding a butcher knife. Her hands weren’t shaking at all. She looked perfectly calm, and like she was ready for whatever was going to happen next.

  In front of them on the sand was a woman who couldn’t possibly have been there. Her skin was so pale that poets could have been forgiven for calling it “as white as snow,” and her dark hair wavered between black and purple, casting off wildflower highlights when the light struck it just so. Her hands were empty, but you wouldn’t have known it from the terrified expressions of the people standing in front of her.

  It was impossible. It was unbelievable. It had to be some kind of a trick. And yet . . .

  “Evening?” I asked.

  She turned, smiling at me with those familiar blood-red lips, looking somehow satisfied.

  “Hello, October,” said Evening Winterrose, once Countess of Goldengreen. “It’s been a long time.”

  THIRTEEN

  “BUT . . . BUT YOU . . .” I STAMMERED, BEFORE words deserted me and left me speechless, cold, and confused. Evening raised her eyebrows, giving me an impatient look as familiar as it was disorienting. This couldn’t be happening. None of this was even remotely possible. I seized on that fact and wailed, “You’re dead! You can’t be here, because you’re dead!”

  “That was the rumor, and yet.” Evening spread her hands. “Here I am.”

  She looked exactly like she had the last time I’d seen her, before her murder had yanked me out of my self-imposed exile and back into Faerie, like it or not. Her hair was down, falling to her waist in an inky wave, and she was wearing a dark brown velvet dress with a white lace accent panel down the front, cinched at the waist like something stolen from a production of Wuthering Heights.

  “Here you are,” I parroted numbly. Then I paused, eyes narrowing. “But this isn’t possible. Whoever hired you gave you the wrong face to borrow, lady.”

  Evening blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve had doppelgangers used against me before. If your employer wanted you to achieve your mission without attracting attention, they should have suggested you mimic somebody who’d been dead for a little less time. Like, I don’t know, no time at all.” I drew my knife, keeping my eyes on Evening as I called, “Dean? Everybody okay over there?”

  “I’ve had better days,” he said, almost laconically. “You’re all wet.”

  “Yeah, well, I stopped off to talk to your mother. She’s a little concerned about the locked wards on your knowe.”

  “The knowe is mine, not his, as well you know,” snapped Evening. “What’s more, the wards were closed by my hand, and because I needed to determine what had gone awry here in my absence. How did you get inside?”

  I frowned, looking past her to Dean. “Is she telling the truth? Did she close the wards?”

  “She came in through the cliffside entrance,” said Marcia. “She just walked in like she owned the place. We were in the courtyard, and . . . and . . .”

  “And I reacted to a home invasion—to vagrancy—as I saw fit,” said Evening. “The law allows me to defend my home.”

  “This isn’t your home!” snapped Dean. “I’m the Count here, and you’re a trespasser who is sorely trying my patience!”

  Evening started to turn toward him, the smell of roses and snow wisping through the air like the beginnings of a venomous prayer. I gasped. I couldn’t stop myself.

  Doppelgangers can steal faces. They can mimic a person to the point where that person’s loved ones would never know the difference. But the one thing no one can mimic is the scent of someone else’s magic. Even if they share an element—roses are common, for example—they’ll never be able to get the exact balance right. A person’s magic is a glimpse into their soul.

  “Oak and ash,” I breathed, everything else forgotten as I stared at the miracle in front of me. “Evening. How are you alive?”

  Evening stopped mid-turn and swiveled back toward me, a smug smile twisting at the corners of her lips. “Oh, now you believe that it’s me? What have I done to earn this honor?”

  “Your magic started to rise,” I said, taking a step forward. My waterlogged sneakers squelched unpleasantly. “Roses and snow. You’re you. There’s no one else you could be. But how . . . this isn’t possible. You died. You cursed me, and then you died.”

  “Did I?” She put a hand on her hip, Dean and the others apparently forgotten now that she had the opportunity to needle me. That, too, was familiar. Evening Winterrose had been the best enemy I’d ever had, always ready with a taunt or a harsh word that would still somehow manage to set me on the proper path. “I cursed you, yes, because I was afraid that ruffian Devin was going to try something, and I needed backup. If you’d been answering your phone that night, I wouldn’t have been forced to go so far. But I seriously doubt that I died.”

  “The night-haunts came for your body,” I said. “That constituted proof of death to me.”

  “The night-haunts can be bribed, if you know what they desire,” said Evening, dismissing my evidence with a wave of her hand. “As for the rest of it, I think it’s fairly clear that I’m alive. I was attacked in my apartment, and wounded to the point where the night-haunts came. It took me some time to recover. When I did, I returned to my knowe to finish the healing process, and found it infested with vermin. Perhaps now that you’re here, you can convince the vermin to leave.”

  “She means us, Toby,” called Marcia. Her voice was surprisingly steady, given the circumstances. “We’re the vermin, and she wants to kick us out of our home.”

  “Uh-uh, little girl,” said Evening, half-turning. “This is my home. You’re merely the raccoons that moved into the attic while I was away.”

  “Your curse nearly killed me,” I said. “You’re telling me you didn’t even mean to do that? That you were never really in danger?”

  “You know, October, it’s considered rude to carry on multiple conversations at one time,” said Evening, attention shifting back to me. “Yes, I was attacked, yes, I cursed you, yes, I lived. I’m terribly sorry if my brief convalescence has inconvenienced you in some way. It was only three years. Barely enough time for moss to grow, and yet I come back to find you puffed up on ideas of heroism, and these people living in my knowe. It’s enough to make me sick. Things are going to have to change around here, starting in this room.”

  “It’s not your knowe anymore, if it ever was,” said Dean.

  Evening sighed, tilting her head back until her face was pointed at the ceiling. “You see what I have to deal with?” she demanded. “Uppity changelings and mouthy mixed-bloods, and for what? To have the proper order of things restored? Faerie has become a madhouse, and I seem to be the only guard left on the asylum staff.”

  I frowned. Evening had never been particularly nice to me—“nice�
� wasn’t really in her vocabulary—but she’d never been this outright cruel before. She’d always looked down on me for being a changeling, of course. That was normal among the purebloods, and I’d barely noticed it at the time.

  Maybe my standards had improved since then.

  “He’s right,” I said. “This is his knowe. Actually.”

  Evening lowered her head, turning a blank-eyed look on me. “How do you reach that conclusion, October dear?”

  “Goldengreen is a fiefdom of the Kingdom of the Mists,” I said. “That has never been questioned, and you swear your fealty to the throne. When you died—and everyone believed you were dead, whether or not that was true—the County passed to me, as payment for services rendered. I passed the County to Dean Lorden, as part of a peace brokerage between the Kingdom of the Mists and the Undersea Kingdom of Leucothea. It was acknowledged by the then-Queen of the Mists, who was later found to be illegitimate, and then acknowledged again by Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists, after she officially took her father’s throne. So by any line of title you care to follow, this knowe is Dean’s. The High King might be willing to uphold your claim to the fiefdom, since you’re not dead and all, but you’d have to ask him.”

  “I see,” said Evening, sounding faintly stunned. Her eyes narrowed as she considered me. “You’ve changed a great deal in these past three years, October. I didn’t expect it of you, not at this late date. You seemed bent on a life of glorious mediocrity, like your mother.”

  “Yeah, well, I owe it all to you,” I said. My stomach was churning. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to laugh, cry, hug her, or throw my knife at her head. Evening was the one who’d helped me when I’d first returned from the pond. She’d been the one to take me to a motel and talk me through those horrible days when I didn’t know what year it was or whether I would ever see my family again. She’d forced me back into Faerie by getting herself killed, and I both loved and hated her for that. Now here she was, standing in front of me, and I had no living idea what I was supposed to do next.

  And then there was the body in the courtyard. Thinking of that pale, slightly curled hand reminded me of the sealed wards, and the feeling of being slapped out of the Shadow Roads by a stronger magic than that of a King of Cats running through his own domain.

  My fingers tightened on the grip of my knife.

  “I see,” said Evening, apparently picking up on the gesture. “If that’s how things are to be, then that’s how things are to be. A pity. I had hoped we could do this without fighting. I did so enjoy being your friend, October.” She raised her hand, the smell of snow and roses rising faster this time, until it filled the room.

  I braced myself, preparing to grab whatever spell she threw at me and fling it back at her. It had worked with Simon; maybe I could do it again. To my surprise, she simply turned, flicking out her hands like she was trying to dry them off. Dean wobbled. Then, without fanfare, he and all his subjects—except, inexplicably, for Marcia—fell backward, into the water. Marcia cried out, dropping to her knees and trying to lift her liege’s head out of the water.

  Evening turned back to me and smiled. “There we are. You can be angry with me, attack me even, for the crime of leaving you, but you’ll be leaving all these people to drown. Or you can play the hero, rush to their aid, and know that I will simply walk away unchallenged. The choice is yours.” She started walking calmly toward me.

  I gaped at her, unable to process what was happening. The Evening I’d known would never have—but as I was coming to learn, I didn’t know a lot of people as well as I’d always thought I did. Marcia was still crying, an increasing edge of hysteria coloring her voice as she struggled to keep Dean from drowning. No one was helping the rest of them. No one was going to help the rest of them if I didn’t do something.

  “Damn you, Evening,” I snarled, and ran past her to the water. Marcia was sobbing as I pulled Dean out of her arms and hauled him up onto dry land. “Get the next one!” I barked, pausing only long enough to check that he was still breathing before I splashed back out to grab the next of the floating bodies.

  I heard the sound of footsteps on the redwood deck behind me stop for a moment, and Evening’s voice said, “I’ll be back later, to discuss the matter of my missing property. If you survived my binding, you must have found it.” The footsteps resumed.

  I had other things to worry about. Evening’s spell seemed to have slowed the breathing of the people it affected, at least a little; that was the only reason no one drowned before Marcia and I could finish dragging almost a dozen unconscious fae back to safety. She bent forward, resting her hands on her knees as she struggled to catch her breath. I turned and looked back toward the stairs.

  Evening was gone. That wasn’t much of a surprise.

  I walked down the stretch of beach to Dean and nudged him with my toe. “Wake up,” I snapped. “I have no idea what’s going on, but you need to open the wards before your mother starts attacking the walls with a kraken or something.” I could feel the emotional collapse nudging around the edges of my consciousness, prodding me with the reminder of everything I’d paid to be standing here in shoes filled with water, trying to wake up a teenage Count. He was barely older than Quentin . . . I nudged him harder, trying to swallow the lump that was forming in my throat. “Wake up.”

  Dean groaned.

  “Guess that worked,” I said, and took a step back. “Hey. Count Lorden. Drop the wards, I need to talk to your mother.”

  “Wha’?” Dean opened his eyes, blinking at me. Then he bolted upright, feeling around in the sand until his hand hit his trident. He pulled it to his chest, virtually aiming it at me. “What happened? Who was that woman? Where is she?”

  “What happened was—don’t point that thing in my direction unless you want me to shove it somewhere that isn’t medically recommended—that woman was Evening Winterrose, former Countess of Goldengreen, and she . . . she left.” With no more fanfare than that, my knees gave out, dropping me onto my butt in the sand. My feet wound up back in the water. Somehow, that seemed like the least of my concerns. “She hit you all with some kind of knockout spell so that I’d have to choose between stopping her and saving you, and she left.”

  “Toby?” The voice was Marcia’s, but it seemed very far away. The numbness that had been protecting me since Dianda dragged me out of the water was finally cracking into pieces and falling away, leaving me feeling naked and exposed to the elements. “Are you okay?”

  “We fell, Marcia.” I looked down at the sandy beach in front of me, and considered the virtues of lying down on it, never to get up again. “She closed the wards, and we fell out of the sky. I couldn’t . . . their hands. I couldn’t keep hold of their hands.” A sob was threatening to rise and overwhelm me. I fought it for as long as I could, struggling to keep it contained, but it was too late. Too much had happened, and while maybe I could have stayed in denial for a little longer, the sight of Evening had broken some inherent part of my heart so quickly and so unexpectedly that everything else was tumbling uncontrollably downward. “They were gone so fast.”

  “I’m going to get my mom,” said Dean, sounding alarmed. The sound of splashing followed his words as he scrambled to his feet and ran off into the water. I didn’t raise my head.

  Then hands were on my shoulders, and Marcia was asking softly, “Who fell, Toby? Whose hands couldn’t you hold onto?”

  I closed my eyes. “Quentin. Tybalt. They . . .” The rest of the sentence wouldn’t come. I started to sob instead, great, unsteady braying sounds. Silent tears were for smaller losses. This was too much, it was too big; it was going to consume the entire world. I leaned against Marcia, letting her put her arms around me, and just cried.

  Evening was alive. Tybalt and Quentin were dead. The world made no sense anymore, and none of the places I should have been able to run were safe for me—not Shadowed Hills, not my mother’
s tower, and not home. All the work I’d done since I’d returned from the pond was for nothing. I was alone. I was always going to wind up like this: sitting in icy water and utterly alone, no matter how many people were standing around me.

  Marcia held me until the tears ran out. She didn’t try to make me talk after that first broken, half-comprehensible confession; she was too smart for that. Instead, she just knelt in the sand beside me and let me weep myself dry. I kept on sobbing after that. The sea could stand in for the tears that I could no longer produce. They were essentially the same thing, after all.

  “Aw, shell and stone,” said a new voice. I heard Dianda pull herself up onto the sand beside me, and Marcia unwound her arms from my shoulders. Her relatively gentle embrace was replaced by a rougher, wetter one as the Merrow’s strong arms pulled me to her. “Toby, I’m sorry. We didn’t find them. I’m so sorry.”

  I’d thought there were no more tears anywhere in my body. I was wrong. Dianda spoke, and suddenly I could cry again, doubling over until she was the only thing holding me upright. I had grieved before. I knew what loss felt like. But nothing, nothing, had ever felt like this.

  “The sea will rock their bones in the cradle of the currents,” said Dianda, with the sort of sweet, ritual lilt to her words that parents use when talking to children. It would probably have been comforting if I’d been a daughter of the Undersea, raised to that kind of loss and that kind of sea foam immortality. But I wasn’t, and so I cried harder, causing Dianda to make a wordless sound of frustrated confusion and hold me even tighter.

  Running footsteps on the deck caught my ear—some things can’t be ignored after you’ve lived the kind of life I have, no matter how much I might want to shut them out—but I didn’t raise my head or open my eyes. Dean had a security force, and he wouldn’t be caught off guard a second time in a single morning. Let him deal with whatever this was. He was the Count of Goldengreen, after all.