The Winter Long Read online

  Voices drifted through the wall of thorns ahead of me. I stopped where I was, barely daring to breathe, as I strained to hear what they were saying.

  “—the only one who’s suffered? You’re very wrong about that, sister.” Evening’s words were punctuated by the sound of wood stiffening and breaking off with a crack. A gust of frozen roses washed over me. I fought the urge to sneeze.

  “No one had to suffer at all,” countered the Luidaeg’s voice. “This has always been on you, Eira. You were the one who couldn’t be patient, who couldn’t see the value of waiting on the greater good.”

  “I’ve killed you once since I came back,” spat Evening. “Don’t think you can stop me from doing it again.”

  That was it: I’d heard enough. I shoved my way through the thorns with my good arm, ignoring the way they pierced and tore my skin—now that I was revealing myself to Evening, a little blood could only help me—and into the clearing on the other side of the wall.

  I found myself standing at the middle of a large clear space in the forest. Not naturally clear, if the broken trees and shattered stumps were anything to go by, but that wasn’t the worst problem currently facing me. No, that honor was reserved for the two angry Firstborn who were now flanking me. The Luidaeg was to my left, her clothing torn to reveal the dark green scales that were now covering her skin. Evening was to my right, her red dress dyed even darker by sweat and water and blood.

  “Uh, hi,” I said.

  “What are you doing here?” Evening spat, eyes narrowing as she took in my bedraggled appearance and motionless right arm. “You can’t reach this place. It is forbidden to your kind.”

  “You’re a little off the mark there, Eira,” said the Luidaeg. She actually sounded like she was enjoying herself. That made one of us. “The Thorn Road wasn’t forbidden when Annis died, it was sealed. There’s a difference. If someone can open the doors, they’re welcome to commit suicide by walking through them.”

  Evening’s head whipped around, her narrow-eyed glare transferring to the Luidaeg. “Stay out of this, Antigone.”

  “I would, if you hadn’t dragged me here and kept trying to kill me.” The Luidaeg folded her arms. “That’s what you always do, you know. Drag me places and try to kill me. You should really get a new routine. Something more interesting and modern than sororicide.”

  I blinked. The Luidaeg could be hard to deal with sometimes, and I’d never known her to take a challenge lying down, but she didn’t sound like herself. The way she was mouthing off to a greater power made her sound more like, well, me.

  She caught me looking at her and winked broadly before adding, “Maybe you could take up needlepoint. You know, a nice handicraft that wouldn’t leave bodies scattered everywhere when you were finished.”

  Evening made an incoherent sound of rage as she whirled and hurled a blast of ice at the Luidaeg. The Luidaeg didn’t dodge: she just raised her crossed arms, and the blast rebounded off the air in front of her, freezing the nearest patches of thorn solid. I blinked again, this time with understanding. Whatever fight they’d been having before I arrived, it had changed when I entered the scene. The Luidaeg was trying to protect me, and if there was one thing my method of dealing with a greater threat was good at, it was drawing focus.

  Too bad I couldn’t let her die again for my sake. “Evening, stop,” I said. “Just stop. I don’t understand why you’re doing this, but I know that you’re not a bad person. You’re just . . . I don’t even know. You’re my friend. Friends don’t do this sort of thing.”

  “Your friend?” Evening turned back to me, an astonished look on her face. “Is that really what you think, October? That we’re friends? We were never friends. I wouldn’t lower myself to form that sort of bond with someone like you.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Someone like me?”

  “You’re a half-breed. A mongrel. You should never have existed, in this world or any other. I knew Amandine was perverse, but I had no idea she would lower herself to lying with a human before the day that news of your birth was brought to me. As if it were something to celebrate! As if I should have rejoiced in a new niece who carried the stink of mortality in her veins.” The air around Evening’s hands began to crackle with cold. “You should have been killed in your cradle, rather than allowed to live and taint our bloodline with your filth.”

  “Huh,” I said. “That’s funny, because I mean, you had the hope chest. The whole time, you had the hope chest. You could have pulled the human out of me while I was still a baby, and I would never have known any better. But you didn’t. You left me the way I was, and you let Mom have me. It seems weird.”

  Evening’s lip curled in a snarl. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

  “What, the hope chest? I understand it. I’ve used it, several times. It knows me.” I held out my good left hand, fingers spread. “This is not the skin I wore when you left me, Evening. You really should have made sure I was dead. You should have killed me yourself, if that was what it took.”

  “She can’t!” crowed the Luidaeg, her joy coloring her words until they were like fireworks in the dark forest night.

  I turned toward her. “What?”

  “She can take you, if you let her, but she can’t touch you. Can you, Eira?” The Luidaeg began walking toward us. She was limping slightly, although she was working hard to conceal it, much as I was trying not to show how badly my broken arm still hurt. “Our father made sure of that before he left, because he recognized that maybe leaving a sociopath in a position to wipe out the competition was a bad idea.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She can’t touch Amy either,” said the Luidaeg.

  “Shut your mouth,” spat Evening.

  “She doesn’t like being limited,” said the Luidaeg.

  “I said be quiet!” Evening whirled, hurling another blast of ice at the Luidaeg. Again, the other woman deflected her attack—but this time it seemed to take more out of her, leaving her shoulders drooping while Evening began to fill her hands with cold for a third time. “You are not a part of this. You should have stayed dead.”

  “I’ve never been good at ‘should haves,’” said the Luidaeg.

  “I’d like a time-out here,” I said. “Does someone want to explain what’s going on? Because this whole situation is getting damned difficult to follow, and I’d really appreciate some footnotes.” I drew the silver knife from my belt with my uninjured hand, shifting so that I was holding it behind my back. I wasn’t sure what good it would do me—no matter what I did to Evening, I couldn’t kill her—but holding it made me feel a little better.

  “She’s sowing dissent, that’s what, the same as she always has,” said Evening. She turned to face me, a cool wind blowing between us and carrying the scent of snow and roses. Roses. That was another clue I should have caught. When I believed that my mother was Daoine Sidhe, the fact that they both smelled of roses made perfect sense. Once I learned that Mother was something else entirely . . . but ah, Evening was speaking, and I needed to pay attention to that. I always needed to pay attention to her.

  “My sister is the sea witch,” said Evening, taking a step toward me. The skirt of her torn and dirtied dress swayed around her legs, and I felt a pang at seeing such beauty disturbed. “She is the darkness under the waves and the bargain you fear to make. Of course she’s a troublemaker. Of course she wants to turn you against me, October, can’t you see? I’ve been your friend for years. I’ve always been your friend.”

  The Luidaeg can’t lie and this woman just said in so many words that she could never be your friend, whispered the part of my mind that was distant enough from Evening’s spell to hold itself separate. Sadly, that part of me was outweighed by the sweet, cloying scent of her magic as it rose around me.

  “I was the one who came for you when you returned from the pond,” s
aid Evening, taking another step toward me. “I was the one who told you how your human family would react to your return. I tried to save you so much pain. Don’t you remember?”

  I frowned, trying to find the line between what she was saying and what I knew her words actually meant. It had been so clear only a few seconds before, but now it was blurred and difficult to see. She had been my friend for so long. She had allowed me to enter her presence and treated me like I was almost worth something, despite my human heritage. She had hired me to do the things she didn’t want to do herself. She had . . .

  She had ordered Simon Torquill to kill me. She had orchestrated the kidnapping of Luna and Rayseline Torquill, tearing wounds in the fabric of their family that would never really heal, just scab over and fester. She had treated me like dirt and, because I was a changeling, desperate for any sign of acceptance, I had allowed her to do it.

  “You’re not my friend,” I mumbled.

  “What’s that?” asked Evening.

  “I said, you’re not my friend.” I forced my right hand into a fist, sending bolts of clarifying pain through my broken arm. It cleared the fog out of my thoughts as I raised my head, forcing myself to look at her. The air around her head crackled with the power she had gathered around herself, splintering and refracting the faint light until it seemed like she almost glowed. “You were never my friend. You were just using me until you didn’t need me anymore. I don’t know if you still need me. But I don’t need you.”

  Evening smiled languidly. “You will,” she said, and let all that gathered power go, directing it straight at me, and at the thin cord of my fealty. What had been a faint glittering in the air exploded into true light, virtually blinding me. She was perfect, she was untouchable, she was above reproach, she was undying, she was everything I had ever wanted to be and everything I could never approach, she was—

  —she was casting a spell, she was casting a spell on me, and spells could be broken—

  Shaking from the effort, I forced my hands up, one balled into a fist and coated in my own dried blood, one holding Dare’s silver knife. My broken arm howled in protest. The pain was still helping me focus, no matter how much damage I might be doing to myself. I squinted into the brilliance, finding the individual threads of Evening’s compulsion. Then, before I could think about it too hard, I opened my right hand, grabbed a fistful of threads, and yanked them tight, slashing my knife down across them in the same gesture.

  Evening shrieked with pain and surprise. The spell snapped, casting the clearing back into its previous darkness. And the faint smell of smoke drifted out of the trees across from me. That was my only warning before Simon Torquill stepped out of the tree line, a longbow in his hands, and fired the arrow that he had been aiming during our confrontation.

  It flew straight and true, and would have embedded itself solidly in Evening’s back, had she not turned as fast as a striking snake, raising her hand in an imperious gesture. The arrow froze in midair, becoming completely motionless.

  Simon’s eyes widened and he dropped the bow, turning to run. Not fast enough. With a small gesture, Evening sent the arrow flying back to him. He yelped with pain as he fell. I didn’t see the arrow strike, but I didn’t need to.

  I could smell his blood.

  “Simon!” He’d tried to kill Tybalt. He’d nearly killed me. But he was also Daoine Sidhe, and I had seen firsthand just how hard it was for Evening’s descendants to tell her “no.” When the chips were down, he’d tried to change sides. In that moment, in that place, that was good enough for me.

  I ran across the clearing, heedless of the fact that I was putting an angry Firstborn behind me. Let the Luidaeg distract her; Simon needed me.

  He was facedown in the brush when I reached him. The arrow protruded from the top of his left arm. I dropped to my knees, pushing him onto his side with my left hand. “Simon? Simon, look at me.”

  “October.” His eyes were closed when I first rolled him over, but he opened them, offering me the most honest smile I had ever seen on his face. “Even now you’re trying to be a hero. Let it go, and run. Save yourself.” His eyes drifted closed again.

  A horrible certainty stole over me. “You were trying to hit her with elf-shot, weren’t you?”

  “Mmm,” he said. “I’d been meaning . . . to rest . . .”

  “Simon!” I shook him. “Don’t go to sleep. You have to fight this.”

  He chuckled. “As if elf-shot can . . . be ignored. You are your mother’s daughter. Too stubborn . . . by half.” He yawned again. “You should have been mine,” he murmured, and went limp. The elf-shot had him. He’d wake in a century, if he woke at all.

  I stayed frozen where I was for a few precious seconds, trying to make sense of things. Then, moving slowly and methodically, I reached forward and shoved the arrow through his arm, causing the already-crowning arrowhead to break out into the open air. A literal gush of blood accompanied the motion. I let go of the arrow and washed my hands with it, covering my fingers in as much of the wet redness as I could. Then I wiped them on my knife, until both my hands and my blade were completely covered. My arm throbbed. I ignored it.

  “Sleep well, Simon,” I murmured, and stood, turning back to Evening. “He’s gone.”

  She had gathered the shreds of her glamour while I was distracted: she was once again beautiful, perfect, untouchable, so much better than me that it was a wonder I was allowed to look at her at all. I locked my eyes on her face as I started across the clearing, noting the small, smug smile that she wore.

  “Good,” she said. “That means it’s just us, at last. You’ve been very bad, October, but I can forgive you, if you’ll let me.”

  “I’ve been very bad,” I agreed. I cheated my eyes to the side. There was the Luidaeg, standing apart, bound by the injunction that she not harm Evening. At least she could defend herself now. I returned my attention to Evening before she could start to question, and said, “He was yours.”

  “He was flawed,” said Evening. “You can be better.”

  “I can be better,” I agreed. There were only a few feet between us. Could it really be this easy? Was she really that sure of herself?

  “But first, put down the knife,” she said.

  Apparently not. Damn. “Right,” I said, and lunged for her.

  I expected a bolt of ice to catch me in the chest. Instead, she danced backward, trying to evade me. There was what looked like genuine fear in her eyes.

  Several things suddenly started making sense. “Luidaeg!” I shouted. “What you said before, about her not being able to touch me. Is she allowed to hurt me?”

  “No,” called the Luidaeg. She sounded almost smug. “She can’t.”

  “Good,” I snarled, and lunged again. This time, I didn’t let fear of reprisal hold me back. I slammed my shoulder into Evening’s stomach, bowling her to the ground. She screamed. I shoved her down, straddling her, and raised the knife covered in Simon’s elf-shot-riddled blood in my left hand.

  “Don’t,” she begged.

  “Sorry,” I said, and stabbed her in the shoulder.

  It wasn’t a mortal wound, but Evening stiffened all the same, eyes going wide with shock and pain before they clouded over in what looked very much like exhaustion. “You can’t kill me,” she said, punctuating her words with a yawn. “I’m . . . the First . . .”

  “I don’t need to kill you. I just need you out of the way.”

  “. . . be back . . .”

  “Promises, promises.”

  Evening closed her eyes.

  I stayed where I was until her breathing leveled out, becoming deep and slow. Then I crawled off of her, watching warily for some sign that she was going to wake up. The Luidaeg walked over to stand beside me, and we watched her together.

  Finally, after several minutes, the Luidaeg said, “You can pull your knife out now.”


  “Soon,” I said.

  She put an arm around me, pulling me close. I let myself be pulled, sagging against her as my own pain and nonmagical exhaustion threatened to overwhelm me. We stood there, watching Evening sleep, and I had never been so tired in my life, and I had never felt so far away from home.

  TWENTY-THREE

  WE LEFT HER THERE, naturally. What else were we supposed to do? She was Firstborn; there was no telling how long the elf-shot would keep her under, and not even the Luidaeg was powerful enough to bind her. The best we could hope was that being stranded on a road that had been intended for use by Maeve’s children would slow her down when she finally woke up and decided to come after us. It wasn’t a good solution. Under the circumstances, it was the best one that we had.

  Sylvester was waiting in the ballroom when the Luidaeg and I stepped back through the hole in the air, Simon carried limp between us. He didn’t say a word. He just put his arms around me while Grianne and Etienne took Simon and carried him away into the knowe. Another glass coffin for the collection; another sleeper to wait for. I hoped the brothers would be able to make peace when Simon finally did wake up. I hoped they could forgive each other.

  I wasn’t sure I could forgive them—either one of them, even as Sylvester led me to Jin and held my hand while she broke and reset my arm. The pain was bad. The fact that I didn’t want to be with my liege was worse. There was a chasm between us that had never been there before, and I didn’t know how to cross it. From the way he was looking at me, neither did Sylvester.

  I was Jin’s last patient of the night. Tybalt was already patched up and waiting for me in the Garden of Glass Roses. When he saw me, he laughed and said, “To the last, covered in blood. Now I know we’re on track to solving the world’s problems.” I’d managed to smile at that, only somehow my laughter had turned into tears, and he’d had to hold me until they stopped. And then he, the Luidaeg, and I left Shadowed Hills, and walked back down the hill to my car, and went home.