The Winter Long Read online

  It was really a pity that I’d met her. “I need to touch her skin if I’m going to do this,” I said. “Can you open the coffin?”

  “Of course,” said Luna. The vines writhed again, this time twisting and grasping until they had somehow lifted the lid entirely off of Rayseline’s glass prison.

  I breathed in, tasting the strange mixture of her heritage under the floral scents that dominated the room. Then, after one last uneasy glance back at Tybalt, I climbed into the still-writhing morning glory vines and started to wade toward Rayseline.

  Luna might have wanted me to help her daughter, but the plants she controlled were nowhere near as sure about the idea. Vines tangled around my waist and legs, slowing my progress and threatening to send me face-first into the undergrowth. I gritted my teeth and forged on, trying not to break or uproot any of the individual tendrils as I made my way to the coffin.

  “That’s quite enough,” said Luna. The vines let go of me so abruptly that I wasn’t braced for it. I stumbled, falling forward, and caught myself against the coffin’s edge. I glanced back. Luna was looking at me coldly. “Fix her.”

  “I’m not a switch, okay? You can’t flip me on and off.” I straightened, pulling the knife from my belt. “This is going to hurt her. I don’t know whether people who’ve been elf-shot usually scream, but Gillian did, so there’s a chance Raysel might. Scream, I mean. If that happens, you need to stay where you are. Don’t try to touch her, and don’t use your plants to try to throttle me. I have to finish once I start.”

  “If I think you’re hurting her on purpose, you’ll never be seen again,” said Luna, and there was a coldness in her voice that I’d heard before from her mother, Acacia. It was impossible not to believe her.

  And I couldn’t let that matter. “You’re the one demanding I perform blood magic on your daughter while she’s unconscious and can’t consent,” I snapped. “Is it going to make her life better? Maybe. It’ll stop her blood from warring with itself, and that’s something anyway. But any pain she suffers is on you. Now are you sure you want me to do this?”

  For a moment—just a moment—Luna looked fragile and uncertain, and in that moment she was more like the Luna I had known for most of my life than she had been since Raysel poisoned her. Then the moment passed, the shutters on her face falling closed again, and she said, “Yes. She is my daughter. She is lost. Now save her.”

  I sighed. “Right.” I turned my back on her as I raised my knife and slashed the palm of my left hand in a quick, unhesitating gesture. Pain followed the blade, and blood followed the pain, welling up hot and red in my palm. I clamped my mouth over the wound, filling it before I could start to heal. The smell of my magic rose around me, cut grass and bloody copper overwhelming everything else.

  When I had changed the Queen of the Mists, she had been awake and fighting me. It had been the same with Chelsea. With Gillian, though, she had already been elf-shot before I started to work my magic. I kept that in mind as I swallowed the blood, leaned forward, and pressed my lips against Raysel’s forehead, starting to search for the tangled threads of her heritage.

  Choose, I thought. Tell me what you want, because I don’t want to make this decision for you. Tell me what comes next.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Raysel’s voice came from directly behind me. I opened my eyes. Her body was still in front of me, but the glass coffin was gone, replaced by a bier of roses. I straightened, turned, and saw two women standing there.

  Both of them were Rayseline.

  One was shorter than the Raysel I knew. Her skin was a delicate shade of rose petal pink, and her hair, while still the color of fox fur at the roots, shaded paler and paler until it was white at the tips. She was her mother’s daughter. The other was tall and pointy-eared, and there was a scowl on her overly perfect face. She had always looked predominantly Daoine Sidhe, but the edges of her had been . . . blunted, for lack of a better word. That softness was gone now, replaced by hard angles and a subtly altered bone structure that spoke with absolute clarity to her heritage.

  Tybalt and Luna were gone. We were standing in the middle of an endless riot of roses, real and unreal at the same time, until the two concepts ceased to have any meaning at all. There were three Raysels. This was going to be like Gillian, then: she was going to have a choice.

  “Well?” demanded the Daoine Sidhe version. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m here to offer you a choice,” I said, trying not to feel self-conscious about my bloody lips and borrowed sweater. “Your mother asked me to.”

  The Blodynbryd’s eyes widened. “Why would my mother ask you to do anything for me? I tried to kill her. I’ll probably try again when I wake up.” The statement was devoid of malice: it was just something she was going to do, whether she wanted to or not. It was inevitable. “She shouldn’t be doing me any favors.”

  “Uh, she sent me here, into your . . . I don’t know, dreams, whatever this is, so that I could pull you into a shared hallucination where I would ask you what you wanted to be. The end result is going to be a lot of pain.”

  “Way to candy coat things for me, Toby,” said the Daoine Sidhe, actually looking slightly amused. I must have looked nonplussed, because she continued, saying, “I think a little more clearly here. I think it’s because I’m not awake, so I can take my time figuring stuff out. You know how that is.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said, and held out my hand. “I don’t think we can stop being here if you don’t make a choice.”

  “What kind of choice?” asked the Blodynbryd, as both of them waded toward me through the roses. “Are you here to wake me up or something? Because I have to say, you’re not really my idea of Prince Charming.”

  I laughed despite myself. “No. I don’t think you’re going to be waking up for quite a while.” Admitting that out loud sobered me right back up again. “But your mother thinks you’ll have an easier road back to health if your blood isn’t warring with itself. She wants you to be either Daoine Sidhe or Blodynbryd.”

  “She didn’t just tell you what to turn me into?”

  “She sort of did,” I said, thinking back to Luna’s words to me in the garden. “But that was before I wound up here. Now that I can talk to you, I guess that means the choice is yours. What do you want to be?”

  “Eight years old and not broken yet,” said the Daoine Sidhe, without hesitation. She had finally reached me. She looked down at the version of herself who slumbered on the bier, and then turned, looking at the Raysel who was still struggling through the roses. “So that’s what I look like if I take after Mom, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m really . . . pink.” Raysel wrinkled her nose. “Like really, really pink. I thought that color was reserved for plastic toys. What’s it doing on my skin?”

  “Fae genetics are weird.”

  “I guess so.” The Blodynbryd was speaking now. She stared at her Daoine Sidhe self and said, “I look like my father.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “You still look like yourself.”

  “So I’m just one more Torquill.” She shook her head. It was starting to get hard to keep track of which one was speaking, impossible as that should have been. They were both her, and this was her dream, after all. “I don’t think he wants me to look like him. I don’t think he ever wanted me. You were the only daughter he needed.”

  “That’s not true, Raysel. Your father loves you. He always has. He just doesn’t know how to help you, and he’s a hero. He doesn’t deal well with not being able to fix things.”

  “I guess.” The two waking Raysels looked at each other before turning to me. The Blodynbryd asked, hesitantly, “Which would you choose?”

  I paused. “In your position?”

  She nodded.

  “Probably Daoine Sidhe. I’ve always been best at blood magic,
even when I didn’t want to be, so that would be the easier way for me to go. But that wasn’t my choice. It never has been.” I lost a little more of mortality every time I had to make one of these decisions for myself, and every inch I lost carried me closer to my Dóchas Sidhe heritage. There had never been a choice about that, not where I was concerned.

  “My mother loves me,” said Raysel thoughtfully. “She always will, I guess, if she was willing to send you here after I almost killed her. But I think if I were a Blodynbryd, we’d always be a little bit connected. I don’t know if I could take that. And I don’t know if the parts of me that are broken and the parts of her that are broken would be able to coexist.”

  “That’s definitely a risk,” I agreed.

  “My father doesn’t know what to do with me, but he always tried to let me find my own way. There are more Daoine Sidhe in our world. It might be easier to learn how to be whole.”

  “That’s true.” I felt like all I was doing was agreeing with her, offering meaningless sounds that couldn’t possibly simplify such an impossible decision. It was all I had.

  Raysel bit her lip, worrying it between her teeth for a moment before she asked, “If you were in my position . . . what do you think my parents would want me to be? The royal, or the rose?”

  “I’d say your parents both have their flaws, and you should be choosing for you, not for them. You’ll have an easier time of it if you’re Daoine Sidhe. There will be more people who can help you heal, and who’ll understand the way your magic works.”

  “I’ll have magic?” She sounded almost amazed, and I realized this, too, would be a big change for her: she’d never been trained, partially because her heritage was so strange that no one knew how to teach her, and partially because of her stolen childhood. She could disguise herself from human eyes, and that was about it. “Like my father?”

  “If you choose to be Daoine Sidhe.”

  “But I’ll be betraying my mother again,” she said reluctantly. “I’ll be leaving her alone.”

  I thought of Gillian, and the way she’d looked at me when we’d been standing together in her equivalent of this rose-strewn field. “You’ll never leave her alone, and she knows it,” I said. “Our mothers can betray us, and we can betray them, but they’ll always be our mothers. Nothing takes that away.”

  The two Raysels nodded, very slowly. The Blodynbryd turned her face away as the Daoine Sidhe offered me her hands. I took them, smelling blood on the air, coiling like smoke through the mingled perfumes of a thousand roses.

  “I choose Daoine Sidhe,” she said.

  I’d been expecting that. I still mustered a smile. “This will hurt,” I cautioned.

  “I know,” she said. “And Toby . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  There was no way I could answer that, and so I didn’t try. I just reached into the cool, thorny field of her heritage, grasping the roots of what made her Blodynbryd, and yanked as hard as I could.

  I was getting better with practice: I was able to keep going even when Raysel began to scream. Her blood didn’t fight me, which made things easier. She had come to terms with what I was here to do, and even if she had never been much of a blood-worker before, every inch of her that turned fully Daoine Sidhe added a sliver more strength to her power. She fed that power into me, and I took it greedily, turning it back on her in a continual, cleansing wave.

  The field of roses was blackening around the edges. The part of my mind responsible for keeping me alive noted dispassionately that it hadn’t been that long since I raised the dead, nearly drowned, and sobbed myself to the verge of dehydration, all without eating or sleeping or doing anything else that would allow my body to replenish its resources.

  This will hurt, I thought again, and then the last thin tendrils of Raysel’s Blodynbryd heritage snapped off in my hands, and I was falling down into the dark, and nothing particularly mattered anymore. Not even, I was relieved to discover, the pain.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE MIXED SCENTS of burning wood, warm fur, and roasting chicken assaulted my nose, drawing me up out of a sound sleep. I struggled to keep my eyes closed, dimly aware that as soon as I fully woke, I was going to have to start dealing with the world again—and given how long it had been since I’d slept, that wasn’t something I was in a real hurry to do. My head was throbbing, but nothing else hurt. That was a nice change.

  Even forming that thought was too strenuous to be safe. The shredded remains of sleep wisped away into a sigh as I pushed myself up onto my elbows and opened my eyes on the Court of Cats.

  This was one of the smaller bedchambers, and it was different from most of the others I’d seen in that it only contained a single bed. It was a huge, four-posted thing, with a clean, if moth-eaten, canopy stretching across the top of it. I was in the bed, naturally, covered by a thick patchwork quilt. The center of the room was occupied by a small dining table. A fireplace took up most of the far wall. Tybalt was crouched in front of it, prodding at a chicken on a spit.

  I took a breath and said the first thing that came to mind, which happened to be, “A chicken? A rotisserie chicken? Could you get any more Renfair cliché if you really, really tried, do you think?”

  “I’ve never actually been to one of your Renaissance Fairs. I think it would be an amusing, if frustrating experience,” said Tybalt, a relieved note in his voice. He twisted to face me without coming out of his crouch. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Sleeping Beauty—and before you protest the label, consider that I pulled you from a glass coffin in the midst of a riot of flowers. I believe a fairy-tale allusion or two is only fitting.”

  The last thing I remembered was holding Raysel’s hands and yanking the Blodynbryd out of her one drop at a time. I blanched. “Oh, Oberon’s balls, did I collapse on top of Rayseline?”

  “Yes, and her howling like a Banshee the whole time,” he said, twisting back to face the fire. He gave the chicken another experimental nudge with the fork in his hand. “There were a few moments where I thought you might actually awaken her from her enchanted sleep, simply because she was screaming so much. Alas, you did no such thing. That might have distracted her mother from the fact that you were lying on top of her like a sack of abandoned potatoes.”

  “That metaphor got a little mangled somewhere in the middle,” I said, closing my eyes. My stomach rumbled. I ignored it as I asked, “So what happened?”

  “Rayseline screamed, you collapsed, Luna shouted that you’d killed her daughter, I interceded before anything overly compromising could happen. I then stood between mother and coffin with you in my arms until she answered your questions.” There was a scraping sound as he presumably took the chicken off the fire. “Once I had the information I needed, I carried you to Etienne’s quarters, retrieved our charges, and brought you back here to the Court of Cats, where you would be safe.”

  Our charges . . . my eyes snapped open, staring up at the threadbare canopy. “Quentin and Raj. Where are they?”

  “They needed rest as much as you did,” said Tybalt. “They are in the room next door, enjoying the chance to slumber without fear of discovery. I’ll wake them after you and I have finished our conversation.”

  “Our—right.” I turned toward him. He was standing next to the table, holding the roast chicken on a platter. “What did Luna say?”

  “It’s not what Luna said that should concern you at the moment: it’s what I’m saying, and what I’m saying is that I’ll tell you what Luna said as soon as you can get out of that bed, come to this table, and eat.” His smile couldn’t hide his concern. “You’ve run yourself to shreds today, and I simply cannot have that.”

  “I’m not that tired,” I protested.

  “Then push off the blanket, rise from the bed, and come to the table. I have seen how much you’ve bled today: you’ll forgive me if I choose not to
believe you.” He took a seat, beginning to portion the chicken onto the plates he had already waiting—plates which appeared to contain potatoes and some sort of lightly dressed salad. He’d been preparing for me to wake up for a while.

  Glaring, I attempted to rise to his challenge . . . and failed as my jellied limbs refused to obey even the simplest commands. I tried again, with the same result.

  Tybalt observed all this before commenting mildly, “I have seen you accomplish more under worse circumstances, but only when there was an immediate threat to be dealt with, an ally to be rescued or a life to be saved. The situation in which we find ourselves is unpleasant to be sure, and doubtless dangerous, but it is not, at the moment, life-threatening. Your body knows its needs better than you do.”

  “You’re a jerk sometimes.”

  “I’m a cat, always,” he said, and smiled. “At least you sound on the road to recovery. Stop thinking of rising as a way to gain access to information that will cause you to put even more strain on your body’s ability to sustain itself, and think of it as a quick route to the sustenance I know you need.” He picked up his plate and waved his hand over it, wafting the smell of the chicken toward me.

  I was on my feet before consciously deciding to move, and my butt was hitting the polished bench across from where Tybalt sat before I had time to process what I was wearing. The growling of my stomach had become a roar. I shut it out for a moment as I looked down at my attire: black leggings, a white linen chemise that would need to be belted if I was going to wear it out of this room, and no shoes. No socks either. At least my bare feet were finally warm, courtesy of the bed and the fire.

  “Your previous clothing still exists,” said Tybalt. “It simply needed a good drying, and sleeping in it seemed mildly unsanitary.”

  “You know, there was a time when waking up to find that someone had changed my clothes would have been a surprise. When did I get used to this, exactly?” I finally reached for the plate that had been set in front of me, and asked a more important question: “Did you get my jacket from Bridget?”