The Winter Long Read online

  She had known there weren’t going to be any.

  “We’re so screwed,” I said again, softer this time. Tybalt looked at me with concern. I shook my head. “Evening was there when I was knighted. She knows too much about me and the way I react to things. We can’t surprise her.”

  “Yes, we can,” said Raj. “She won’t have expected you to come here. No one expects anyone who isn’t Cait Sidhe to come here, because our doors are generally sealed against all others. I don’t care whether she’s the Firstborn of the Daoine Sidhe or the Queen of France; she’s not going to be able to follow us. You’re safe as long as you stay here.”

  “The Cait Sidhe had three Firstborn where most races had only one,” agreed Tybalt. “Our First worked together with Oberon himself to make this place a sanctuary for our kind. This Eira, no matter how powerful she may be, will not have the power to overcome a spell woven by three of her equals and one of her superiors.”

  “That would be swell if we were staying here, but we’re not,” I said. Tybalt frowned at me. So did Raj. Quentin was looking away, watching the fire, expression blank. I shook my head. “Look: you can’t pull everyone I give a damn about into the Court of Cats while we wait to see what, if anything, Evening is planning. May and Jazz are still at Arden’s Court. The Luidaeg is still asleep. Sylvester doesn’t know why his brother is . . . oh, root and branch.” I stopped mid-sentence, a wave of bitter understanding washing over me.

  “October? What’s wrong?” demanded Tybalt.

  “Simon admitted to me—admitted—that he was responsible for kidnapping Luna and Rayseline, but he said he did it because he was hired to by the person who’d geased him. She offered him something he said he ‘couldn’t resist,’ and so he agreed. But whoever hired him also wanted me dead.” I raked my hair away from my face with one hand, feeling strangely numb. “She wanted me killed. That was part of the deal. And Sylvester doesn’t know. He knows Simon did it, but he has no idea that it was Evening who hired—we have to get to Shadowed Hills. We have to warn him.”

  “We don’t even know that Evening is going there,” said Tybalt. “And even if you’re sure, can’t we call? Sylvester will listen to you. He’s learned the value of your words, even when what you say is a seeming impossibility.”

  “Yes—yes!” I seized on the suggestion, digging my phone out again and dialing the number for Shadowed Hills. It was ringing when I raised it to my ear. And it kept ringing, and ringing, until dread gathered in the pit of my stomach, whispering to me of disasters and double-crosses. We didn’t know where Simon was. He could have doubled back, he could have—

  The ringing stopped. “Hello?”

  The voice was Sylvester’s, and wasn’t Sylvester’s, all at the same time. The dread solidified into a hard ball of anger. “Simon. Why are you answering this phone?”

  “Why hello, October. It’s lovely to hear from you. I was hoping you would call. You don’t call nearly as often as I would like. You should really move back home.”

  I hesitated. I’d identified him by name. If it had been Sylvester on the phone, he would have corrected me, and probably been horribly offended. So why was he talking to me like I didn’t know who he was? “What the fuck, Simon?”

  “Yes, I’d really like it if you could bring Quentin to lunch next week. That seems like a fair compromise.”

  “Simon . . .” The anger was thawing back into fear. It wasn’t an improvement. “Are you in trouble? Is Sylvester in trouble?”

  “Yes, absolutely.” His tone didn’t waver, remaining absolutely genial. It was the sort of tone someone would use if the threat was in the same room.

  “Okay. Got it. We’ll be right there.” I hung up the phone, looking back to the others. “Simon’s answering the phone at Shadowed Hills, and for whatever reason, he can’t speak freely. It could be a trap. I have to go anyway. We need to get to Sylvester.”

  “Next time you have need to choose a liege, I beg you, select one closer to your place of residence,” said Tybalt. He rubbed his face with one hand. Then he nodded. “All right. We stay together. We’ll travel through the Court for as long as we can, to shorten the time spent in shadow.”

  “I don’t think we can walk from San Francisco to Pleasant Hill,” I objected.

  “You won’t need to,” Tybalt said. “If the Summerlands are smaller than the world they encircle, the Court of Cats is smaller still. Those who walk here may as well be wearing seven league boots, for all the distance we will cover.”

  “How far can we get?” I asked bluntly. “Name a place, please.”

  Tybalt sighed. “There is very little poetry in precision.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a lot of accurate risk assessment. How far?”

  “To the coast. My Court ends at the water—but from there, we should be able to use the Shadow Roads with less strain. Even if it’s only a few miles, those miles are ones where we will not be running through the darkness, unprotected.”

  I paused, really looking at him for the first time since I’d hung up. “This is about protection. You don’t want to leave the Court until we have to.”

  “I’ve lost you once today,” he said quietly. “Please forgive me, but I’m in no hurry to repeat the experience.”

  “No forgiveness needed,” I said. “Lead the way.”

  So far as I know, there’s never been a real map of the Court of Cats: it’s an essentially impossible place, made up of pieces of so many other places that you’d need a genius cartographer to devote his life to mapping the Court as it is now, and you still wouldn’t have a map of the Court as it will be tomorrow. Tybalt and Raj pulled slightly ahead, scouting as they made sure that we were walking into stable hallways, places that were firmly connected to where we needed to go. Tybalt walked with the tight-shouldered prowl that I recognized from all the times I’d upset or annoyed him over the years. He was worried. I couldn’t blame him.

  Quentin lagged, bringing up the rear of our little procession. I caught Tybalt’s eye before jerking my chin very slightly back toward my squire. Tybalt nodded understanding, and I slowed my steps enough to let Quentin catch up to me.

  We walked side by side like that for several minutes, falling into the easy rhythm of one another’s steps, before Quentin abruptly said, “She brought me here.”

  “What?” I glanced at him, sidelong, as I kept walking.

  “The Countess Winterrose. She’s the reason I’m in San Francisco.”

  I frowned. “But you were fostered at Shadowed Hills. Evening’s never been connected directly to Shadowed Hills. She and Sylvester have known each other for centuries, and he thought of her as a friend, but she was an ally at best, and a political opponent at worst.”

  “I know. Sir Etienne told me about her when I showed up on Duke Torquill’s doorstep—not literally, the fosterage process takes longer than that—but she was the one who started the process. My father had decided I needed to be fostered in order to make me a better king,” he stumbled slightly over the word, which had only recently entered our shared vocabulary, “someday, and in order to protect me and Penthea. I was declared his heir before they sent me away. That way there was no point in somebody threatening or subverting her if they couldn’t find me.”

  I whistled. “Okay, I know your parents are pretty cool and everything, but that? That is cold.”

  Quentin shrugged. “That’s kingship. I’m not in any hurry to start taking up my duties as the Crown Prince . . . although I wouldn’t wish those duties on my sister, either.”

  “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. I get that,” I said. “What did Evening do?”

  “She contacted my father,” Quentin said, eyes fixed on the hall ahead of us. His accent grew stronger, like he was remembering a time when everyone around him sounded like home, and not like the California coast. “She came to our court. I’d never seen her before, and
then one day there she was, during private audiences, standing in front of the dais.”

  “Are you sure it was Evening?” I hated to question my squire’s memory, but under the circumstances, I would have questioned my own.

  Quentin seemed to understand that, because he didn’t look annoyed. He just nodded, and said, “I’m sure. She was like something out of a story, you know? I was a fairy prince being raised in a castle hidden on an island outside of Toronto, and she still looked like something out of a story to me. I kept expecting wildflowers to grow in her footsteps. But not pretty ones, not daisies or poppies or anything like that. Poisonous ones. Hemlock and blooming wolfsbane and other things that can hurt you.”

  “That sounds like Evening,” I agreed. “What happened?”

  “She told my father that rumors of my impending fosterage had reached her, and that while she wouldn’t reveal her sources, she had come to plead the case for her home kingdom of the Mists. She told him Goldengreen wasn’t really an appropriate place to foster a child, but that the Duchy of Shadowed Hills was an excellent place to learn humility and service.” Quentin shook his head, frowning. “He should have told her ‘no.’ He should have said that if she knew I was going to be fostered, she was a danger to the line of succession, and refused to let me go anywhere near her. I was only a kid, and I knew that.”

  “That clearly didn’t happen, since you’re here,” I said.

  “That’s my point. My father is a good king and a good man and he loves me. He sent me away because he loves me. So why would he send me somewhere that had already heard rumors about the Crown Prince being sent into blind fosterage?” Quentin turned to look at me, still walking. “As soon as she said ‘send him to us,’ he should have replied ‘get out of my court,’ and instead he asked his Seneschal to contact the Duke of Shadowed Hills and start arranging my fosterage. I was in Pleasant Hill, presenting myself at the old oak tree, less than a month later.”

  I frowned. “Evening wanted you here.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked back to the hall. “I was sad when she died, because I remembered her coming to my father’s court, but it never seemed important, somehow. It was like it had all happened in backstory, and now the story had actually started.”

  “That’s a really weird way of putting it,” I said.

  “I know,” said Quentin, sounding frustrated. “That’s the problem. It’s like I always knew how strange it was for me to be a blind royal foster placed in a Duchy that was in the process of recovering from horrible tragedy. Duke Torquill was barely speaking to anyone when I arrived at the court. Duchess Torquill was a ghost, and some nights, Rayseline wouldn’t stop screaming . . . why would my parents have sent me there? They had no good reason to banish me to a Duchy that was both provincial and chaotic, but they did.”

  “Because Evening told them to,” I said slowly. I had never wondered overly hard at the exact timeline of Quentin’s arrival in Shadowed Hills. Maybe I should have: he’d been fourteen when I met him, and he’d been there roughly two years. Luna and Rayseline Torquill had been released from their own captivity two years before I came back to the Duchy. “How did she get Sylvester to agree?”

  This time, Quentin’s chuckle was almost bitter. “Toby, when the High King tells you to do something, you do it. Even at his absolute worst, Duke Torquill was never so divorced from reality that he forgot that.”

  “Apparently, reality has taken out a restraining order on me,” I grumbled. Putting a hand on Quentin’s shoulder, I asked, “Are you okay? Are you sure you want to stay with us if we’re going to be potentially facing your First? You could stay here with Raj while Tybalt and I go on ahead. I wouldn’t think any less of you.”

  “I’m your squire,” he said, with the note of familiar stubbornness that I’d long since become accustomed to hearing in his voice. “Where you go, I go.”

  “Then perhaps you should both prepare yourselves for a long, cold transit,” said Tybalt. I looked up. He and Raj had stopped in front of a plain oak wall, decorated only by a line of hardwood molding along the upper edge. It didn’t match the hallway around us, or either of the rooms that it connected to.

  I didn’t know how anyone could lose a single wall out of their home, and I didn’t really feel like taking the time to ask. “This is the border?”

  Tybalt nodded. “My Court extends no further.”

  “Raj seemed pretty tired after just bringing me from Goldengreen . . .” I said.

  “He was running alone,” said Tybalt. “It will be different when he runs the roads at the same time as I do. My presence holds the shadows open as his does not, as yet. I can help him.”

  That made me feel a little better about allowing Raj and Quentin to run separately—and after our encounter with the wards at Goldengreen, I wasn’t sure that running in a line was any safer. “I’ll trust you on that,” I said, moving away from Quentin and stopping next to Tybalt. He held out his hand. I took it, holding on as tightly as I could without hurting either one of us.

  “I’ll never tire of hearing you say that you trust me, little fish,” he said, and glanced to Raj. “This will be a fair journey. Do you know the way?”

  Raj nodded. “Run for Albany, come up for air. Do the same in Orinda. Then dive down into the Summerlands, so that we come up on the grounds in Shadowed Hills, instead of in the mortal world.”

  “Good,” said Tybalt approvingly. “We shall take a similar route. When you arrive, if you somehow manage to beat us there, wait among the trees. Do not approach anyone, even if you know them.”

  “And if you need to take more breaks than that, do it,” I said. “I don’t want anyone else getting hurt today.”

  Tybalt smiled at me. For just a moment, nothing else mattered, not Evening, not Simon, not the confusing snarl of overlapping threads that my life had become. Tybalt and Quentin were alive, and we were all together, and we were going to find a way to get through this, because that was what we did. We were unstoppable, as long as we were together.

  “Take a deep breath,” he said.

  I did as I was told, and he stepped into the shadows, pulling me with him into the dark.

  We ran in silence and in cold, as we always did, but this time, the trip was broken with flicker-flash impressions of the mortal world, cities flickering into view around us as Tybalt pulled me out of the shadows long enough to catch my breath and lose some of the thin coat of ice that was trying to form on both of us. I recognized the first city we ran through—Alameda, whose ports backed on the San Francisco Bay, making it the perfect target for a short hop. The second could have been any one of the genteel suburbs that thrived in the East Bay, where bedroom communities had become a way of life. It hadn’t been that way when I was younger; Lafayette, Walnut Creek, and San Ramon had all started out as farming towns, filled with livestock and with hunger. Now they had housing developments named after the orchards that used to thrive there, and I couldn’t tell them apart.

  The third city we ran through wasn’t technically a city at all. One second we were in the dark, cold reaches of the Shadow Roads, and the next we were running across the interstate, with cars zooming all around us. Horns blared as motorists reacted to our sudden appearance. I gasped, seeing headlights bearing down on me, and Tybalt yanked on my arm—

  —and we were back among the shadows, racing toward a destination that I couldn’t see, but which hopefully wouldn’t come with semis trying to turn me into changeling paste.

  We didn’t run long after that, thankfully. I was tired, and I didn’t imagine Tybalt was that much better, since he was the one providing most of the motive force behind our journey. We tumbled out of the darkness and into the light, landing in a snowbank with me sprawled half on top of him. I sat up with a gasp as snow managed to infiltrate the few parts of me that hadn’t felt like they were ha
lf-frozen.

  Beneath me, Tybalt groaned. I rolled away from him, and he pushed himself upright, glowering through ice-crusted lashes. The look didn’t seem to be directed at me, and so I raised an eyebrow, beginning to scrape ice sheets off the outside of my leather jacket.

  “That was thoroughly unpleasant, and I apologize most profusely for nearly getting us both killed,” he said.

  “The highway was a nice trick,” I said agreeably, leaning over to brush the snow out of his hair. “How are you feeling? Heart still beating, not going to drop dead on me again?”

  “No, I think not,” he said. There was a thudding sound, accompanied by a yelp, as if two teenage boys had just been dropped into the same snowbank. Tybalt’s glower faded, replaced by amusement. “It sounds as if our respective charges have also arrived safely.”

  “Thank Oberon for that,” I said fervently, and stood, scanning the snow-choked landscape for a sign of the boys.

  We had clearly landed in Sylvester’s demesne: the snow was proof enough of that, since no one else I knew was currently hosting a winter wonderland. Trees stood all around us, gray-trunked with translucent blue leaves that looked like they would melt if I so much as touched them. There was a heap of snow near the base of one of the nearby trees. As I watched, two heads poked up out of it, both frosted with snow, one bronze-topped and one russet. I waved. Quentin pulled his arm out of the snow and waved back.

  “We’re not far from the knowe,” I said, turning to offer Tybalt my hand. He took it, pulling himself easily out of the snow. “We should be able to walk to the back door from here, which is good, since I’m freezing.”

  “Perhaps the household staff can equip you with something better suited to the season, or at least warmer,” said Tybalt.