The Winter Long Read online

  “I honestly don’t know.” The Luidaeg shook her head. “She should still believe that she’s killed me, which is an advantage for us: having me walk in will throw her off balance, at least a little bit, and that can’t help but benefit us. At the same time, if she holds the knowe completely, she may be willing to do a little heavy lifting.”

  She didn’t need to explain her meaning. “I’ll fight her.”

  “It may not matter,” said the Luidaeg. “Oberon was her father. That gives her a blood connection to you, even if it’s not a strong one. That, in conjunction with your oaths to Sylvester, and the blood binding you once created between yourself and her, means there’s an opening that she can exploit.”

  “Wait . . .” I frowned. “Luidaeg, your parents . . .”

  “I am the oldest daughter of Oberon and Maeve,” she said. “Which makes me their first-born Firstborn, but that’s confusing, so we don’t usually put it that way.”

  “And Evening is . . . ?”

  “The oldest daughter of Oberon and Titania.”

  There it was again: the subtle sense that I was missing something. Frown deepening, I asked, “Who are my mother’s parents?”

  Much to my surprise, the Luidaeg smiled like I had just asked the five hundred dollar question on an afternoon game show. She leaned forward and tapped my chin with her thumb as she said, “Oberon’s her father, making her the youngest of my siblings, but her mother is not my mother, nor my father’s other bride. Who her mother is I can’t say, but if you go looking, you might find some interesting truths hidden under some equally interesting lies.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?” I asked.

  “Can’t, can’t, always can’t,” said the Luidaeg. “You should know the difference between those two words by now, especially as you’ve started wearing gold in your hair.”

  “I do, but—” The smell of pennyroyal drifted over on the wind. I stopped mid-sentence, turning to see Tybalt standing next to my car with a baffled expression on his face.

  “How did you beat me here?” he asked, walking over to us. “I came as fast as I might, and expected to spend no small amount of time lurking in shadows, watching to see that the way was clear for your arrival.”

  “You know us, we’ll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes,” I said airily. “Half the Bay Area in ten minutes is a piece of cake.”

  “I see,” said Tybalt. He stopped next to me, offering a half bow to the Luidaeg. “I appreciate the fact that I left my lady with you and returned to find her neither bleeding nor running for her life. It’s a charming change from what normally occurs when I turn my back.”

  “Don’t get too used to it,” I said. “We’re all here now.”

  “Yes,” said Tybalt. “I suppose we are.”

  We started up the hill, the Luidaeg in the lead. Getting into Shadowed Hills from the mortal side of things usually requires a complicated series of actions, all of them designed to be virtually impossible to perform by accident. The Luidaeg ignored them completely. She just climbed straight toward the summit of the hill, never turning, never looking back. We mimicked her. The worst that would happen was we would need to go back down and start over, but I didn’t think that was going to be a problem. The Firstborn have a way of shaping Faerie to fit their needs.

  When we reached the burnt-out old oak tree at the top of the hill, the Luidaeg stopped, sighed, and snapped her fingers. The sound was louder than it should have been, gathering echoes as it bounced off the trees around us and finally returned, remade by distance and the acoustics of the park into the sound of a key turning in a lock. The door to Shadowed Hills appeared in the hollow of the oak, swinging slowly open in silent welcome. The Luidaeg lowered her hand and smirked.

  “See? All you have to do is know how to talk to them.” With that she stepped through the open door and into the hall beyond. I followed her, and Tybalt followed me, both of us tensed against the potential for attack.

  The hall was empty. The air still smelled of roses—the air in Shadowed Hills always smelled of roses—but the floral perfume was underscored by a hard, frozen note, like it had snowed recently inside the knowe. That would be Evening’s doing. I could smell the traces of her magic everywhere, overlaid on the cleaner, less corrupt workings of Sylvester and his people.

  The Luidaeg turned back to look at us, all traces of levity gone from her expression. Her eyes were solid black again, like the eyes of a shark. “From here, we must be careful,” she said. “Remember what she is. Remember what she can do.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just nodded once, tightly, and walked past her as I started toward the throne room where Luna and Sylvester received their guests. It seemed like the most likely place to find a power-hungry Firstborn who had instructed her children to go off and acquire glory in her name. The Luidaeg and Tybalt walked behind me, forming the other two points of our small triangle. Having them there made me feel a little better—I wasn’t going into danger alone. Not this time.

  There were no guards at the vast doors to the throne room. That didn’t strike me as a good sign. I pushed the left-hand door open, trying to keep my arms from shaking under its weight, and started into the familiar vast, over-decorated space on the other side. My sneakers were silent against the checkerboard marble of the floor.

  And there, on the other side of the room, in the throne that was meant to belong to Sylvester Torquill, sat Evening Winterrose. The sight of her took my breath away. Even seeing her in Goldengreen hadn’t prepared me for this, for Evening in her element, strong and untouchable and restored to us, because even death couldn’t hold her, not Evening. I’d been foolish to think otherwise.

  A small part of me—the part that had struggled against the mists in Blind Michael’s lands and the sweet spell of love cast by my Gean-Cannah almost-lover—screamed that the floor wasn’t really falling away, that Evening wasn’t really the most breathtaking thing I’d ever seen. This was all trickery, treachery, the sort of illusions that I’d encountered before.

  She was wearing a red satin dress, the color of rose petals, the color of blood on the snow, the color of apple skins in the winter. It was a confection of floor-length layers and gathered falls. Her seamstress had been clever, because when Evening moved—even the slightest twitch—all that gathered cloth fluttered like feathers in the wind, revealing myriad small cuts and smaller dagger-points of deeper red silk, red as danger, red as dying. Against the cloth, her skin truly was as white as snow, and her coal-black hair seemed on the verge of bursting into flames. Then Evening looked at me and did the most terrible thing of all.

  She smiled.

  “There you are,” she said sweetly. “I was wondering when you’d find it in your heart to come and visit me. A little bird told me you’d stopped by the knowe and then left without even saying hello. Really, October, is that any way to treat someone who’s been your friend for as long as I have? It seems uncommonly rude. I always thought you were more polite than that. It seems I overestimated your mother’s teaching of you.”

  The urge to abase myself was strong. I dug my fingernails into my palms, bearing down until the pain allowed me to center myself and say, in a tense voice, “That’s Sylvester’s throne.”

  “What, this old thing? He said that I could borrow it for a time, since my own holdings have been closed to me.” A frown flitted across her face. “That was really most unkind of you, to help that half-breed stripling take my place as his own. What must his parents have been thinking? Land and sea together, it’s a mixture meant for disaster, don’t you agree?” Her words were directed to me, but her eyes went to the Luidaeg, making it clear who her message was really intended to reach.

  “That’s Sylvester’s throne,” I repeated. “He didn’t give it to you willingly. If you have to compel someone to give you what you want, it’s not really yours.”

  “Isn’t it? Because it se
ems pretty real to me.” She leaned back in the throne, resting her hands on the arms like she had been sitting there for years. “It doesn’t matter how you get the things you own. What matters is that you keep them.”

  There was something very wrong with her logic. I swallowed hard, and asked, “Why are you here, Evening? You weren’t dead, but you let everyone in the Mists believe you were. You left us. Why are you back?” Tybalt and the Luidaeg were a silently reassuring presence at my back. I wondered why they weren’t saying anything, but only distantly; the bulk of my attention was reserved for Evening. Even though my head felt heavy and stuffed with cotton, I knew that taking my eyes off of her would be a terrible idea.

  The smell of winter roses was so heavy in the throne room that it was cloying, worse even than the smell of the Luidaeg’s magic in the enclosed cab of my car had been. I dug my nails a bit deeper into my palms, trying to find that pure vein of agony that would grant me laser focus, even if it made me suffer later.

  “Come here, October,” said Evening. “Let me see you.”

  I had taken two steps before I realized I was going to move. “Why should I?” I asked, stumbling to a stop.

  “Because you don’t want to make me come to you,” she said.

  That was so reasonable that I started walking again. I tried to make my legs stop moving, and they refused me; they had listened once, and it wasn’t their fault if Evening made a better case than I did. My head was swimming, as much with the smell of roses and smoke as with the brute reality of her presence, and all too shortly I was standing on the dais in front of her, near enough that she could almost have reached out to touch me.

  “Oh, rose and thorn, you’ve changed,” she said, and stood, stepping forward so that we were almost nose to nose. It was startling to realize that we were virtually the same height. She had always seemed like she should have been taller than me when she was standing on her own. “Do you even know how much you’ve changed? Don’t answer that.”

  To my dismay, I found that I couldn’t. The Luidaeg had said that Evening would have to work hard if she wanted to have me; well apparently, I had been deemed worth the effort. Lucky, lucky me.

  Evening reached out and ran her hands down my hair, the fingers of her left hand lingering on the tip of one sharply-pointed ear. Her skin was cool and faintly silky, like the petals of a rose that had been blooming entirely in the shade. Whatever masks she’d once worn for my benefit, they were disappearing now, washed away and replaced by the simple reality of what she was. Firstborn. Fairest of them all. “Look at you,” she mused aloud. “I’d never catch you so easily now. Your arrogance is the same, but your blood . . . do you know what you are?”

  The feeling of her hands on my skin made me want to submit, to bow down and do anything she asked of me. I was no descendant of Titania; I shouldn’t have felt her presence that strongly, even through the bond of fealty I shared with Sylvester. Her blood, wailed that still, small place in my mind, the one that people like her never seemed to quite touch. You drank her blood, and that makes her hold on you stronger.

  The things that voice was saying made me wish, more than anything, that I had a time machine and the ability to go back and punch my past self in the nose. I swallowed hard to clear the dryness from my throat and said, “I’m me.”

  “You? What a charming statement of identity. What, precisely, are you?”

  The smell of smoke was getting stronger, setting off alarm bells that weren’t connected to any specific danger. I swallowed again before I said, “I’m Toby. October Christine Daye, Knight of Lost Words. Hero in the Mists.”

  “New titles won’t impress me, child. You’re telling me who you are—or who you think you are—but you’re not telling me what you are.”

  I took a hard breath. “Changeling.” I had to get away from her. I was drowning in her eyes. Obedience is a hard habit to break, and her hands had held my strings for much too long, even before I had tasted her blood and given her another way of controlling me. There had been a time when I enjoyed being her plaything. At least she’d treated me like a person, most of the time. I was coming to see that all of that had been a lie, and it was the real Evening who stood in front of me now, in this room that smelled like smoke and roses.

  Wait—smoke? Evening’s magic didn’t smell like smoke.

  But Simon’s did.

  “Changeling?” asked Evening mockingly, yanking my attention back to her. “Born of Faerie and human both? Is that what you are?”

  “Yes,” I managed.

  “Can you even remember what humanity felt like anymore?” she asked. The danger in her tone was impossible to ignore, and it triggered the part of me that was more interested in staying alive than anything else. I jerked away from her like I’d been stung, nearly falling off the dais.

  At least that got her hands off of my skin. “I’m still part human! I remember my humanity.”

  “How can you remember something you’ve never had? Humanity has never been your cross to bear, and as for the contamination in your blood, you’ve been giving it up freely, more and more with every day that passes.”

  I took another step backward, my eyes narrowing. “I didn’t give it up freely.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Her clear amusement made me pause. Had my humanity really been stolen from me, the way I told myself it was? The first time, when I was elf-shot and dying, maybe I hadn’t had much of a choice. When the options are “die” or “become a little harder to kill,” well. I’m not completely stupid. The second time, it had been to save myself from the goblin fruit that was eating me alive. I’d only changed to survive.

  Standing a little bit straighter, I said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m myself. That’s who I’ve always been and who I’ll always be, no matter what my blood says about me.” The universe could do whatever it wanted to me—it would anyway, whether or not I gave it permission. But I always knew who I was.

  Evening frowned sharply, and I fought back the impulse to cringe. She had always been commanding. Now, stripped of whatever illusions she’d used to make herself fade into the fabric of Faerie, she was terrifying. “Will you really be your own creature?” she asked.

  I forced myself to meet her eyes, and not flinch as I watched frost spreading across her pupils. “I am Amandine’s daughter, and I belong to no one.”

  “Things change, October. You belong to me. You used to be better about accepting that, but I suppose I left you without a leash for too long, didn’t I? I’m sorry about that. I know how confusing that sort of thing can be.” She smiled. “There’s no sense in fighting me. It won’t do you any good. Your fealty belongs to me, through the chain descending from your liege, and I have long since taught you to obey me.”

  Pain is the body’s way of telling you to stop doing something. I dug my nails still deeper into my palms, and felt that glorious moment where the skin gave way and the pain became ten times more intense. The smell of blood assaulted my nose an instant later, strong and hot and all the better because it was my own.

  I hate the sight of my own blood, and I’ve never been that fond of the taste, but when I brought my bleeding hand to my mouth, it tasted like freedom for the first time. I drank as deeply as I could before the wounds started closing, and then whirled, Evening still staring at me in slack-jawed disbelief as I flung myself from the dais—

  —only to freeze when I saw Simon Torquill standing behind Tybalt, his hands raised in a gesture that I recognized as a spell in progress. Tybalt’s back was rigid, his arms pressed down at his sides like they were held by some invisible rope, and he looked like he was choking. That explained the smell of smoke. What it didn’t explain was the Luidaeg standing only a few feet away, a snarl on her lips and her hands curled into helpless fists at her sides.

  I started moving again, running toward them with my bloody fingers outstretched. I’d ripped one of
Simon’s spells to pieces already. I could do it again, if I could just figure out how to begin. I never got the chance. One of those wind-ropes drew suddenly tight around my ankles, and I was moving too fast to stop myself; I lost my balance, and gravity carried me down to the marble floor. I tried to raise my hands to catch myself, and discovered that I couldn’t move my arms, either.

  That wasn’t as smart a move as Evening probably thought it was. My face bore the brunt of the impact, and I felt the squishy crunch as the cartilage in my nose gave way. Between that and my lips being smashed up against my teeth, there was suddenly more blood than I needed for any single spell right there where I wanted it: flowing into my mouth.

  “Really, October,” said Evening, her words accompanied by the soft sound of slippers on marble. “You do get so worked up over things. What good did you expect this little rebellion to do? You’re not going to save your friends. You can’t even save yourself.”

  Swallowing the blood that was seeping from my lips was easier than swallowing the blood running down the back of my throat from my battered nose: I almost gagged, but kept gulping. The pain was enough to keep me from falling back under Evening’s spell, at least for the moment. I knew it wasn’t going to last. I needed to gather my resources fast, and whatever I was going to do, I needed to do it before I stopped bleeding. Time to gamble.

  “You’re not allowed to move against the children of Titania, but you are allowed to come to the aid of the children of Oberon!” I shouted, lifting my head off the floor and focusing on the Luidaeg. Her eyes widened slightly, despite whatever spell Evening was using to bind her. Now I just had to pray that I was right. “He’s my grandfather! Help me!”

  Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

  I’ve never been a lip-reader. I took a split-second to think about what she might be saying, and then shouted again, “Help me!”

  The Luidaeg coughed. It was a small sound, almost obscured by Evening’s scoffing and the slap of her shoes against the marble. She was almost on top of me. I was running out of time.