A Killing Frost Read online

  The water’s surface shimmered and broke as a head poked through the waves. Her dark hair was plastered down against the sides of her face, pointed ears poking through the sleek sheets of it, and her eyes were open much too wide to have just emerged from the stinging spray. The salt did not bother her the way it did me, or any other not born to the sea.

  I should have raised my hand. I should have waved, have let her approach while everything seemed normal. Instead I sat as a man frozen, looking on the face of my lady one last time while I could yet call her mine without breaking any confidences or betraying any rules.

  She was beautiful, my Dianda, not the pale, sculpted beauty of the Daoine Sidhe, but a rougher, more imperfect perfection. She was like the driftglass stones, rolled into a new shape by the deep water, and all the better for it. Her skin was the tawny shade of beach sand in the sunlight, darker than my own by several shades; her hair was black when not so weighted down with water as to make its color irrelevant, and her eyes were a deep and drowning blue. Compared to the Daoine Sidhe, most of whom are painted in fantastic colors, with hair in every color of the rainbow and some the rainbow has yet to conceive, she was ordinary, even drab, until she showed her scales.

  They gleamed in blue and purple, green and mother-of-pearl, iridescent and flawless, like the whole of the sea was painted on her tail, that she might never forget where she came from. When she wrapped that tail around my ankles to anchor me, when her flukes stroked the line of my calf in the night . . . I could believe the stories of sailors who had flung themselves from the side of ships for the privilege of drowning. I am told it is an unpleasant way to die. It might still be worth it . . . if one were to do so in her arms.

  “Patrick!” She waved, webs stretched tight between her fingers. I was here to spare her, not insult her, and so I waved back, watching as she swam closer.

  When she was close enough, the webs between her fingers disappeared, withered into nothing, and she grasped the wooden handholds I had long since carved into the body of the pylon supporting the pier, using them to pull herself bodily up onto the pier. She sat herself beside me, legs dangling, a shirt she hadn’t been wearing before transforming stretched down to her knees. Unlike the rest of her, it was perfectly dry, a piece of magic I had yet to understand, but was always willing to admire.

  She leaned in and bumped her shoulder against mine. “Hey. Why so gloomy and glum? You called; I came. I always come when you call.”

  “I know,” I said, and looked down at the water. It has always, always come back to the sea. “I was at Court the night before last. That dreadful King of Cats was in attendance, making cheeky comments to the house servants and insinuating that they had ideas above their stations because they allowed their children to roam the knowe as if they were born to it.” How smug he had sounded, how sanctimonious, as if he knew some deep secret the rest of us were to be denied.

  “Patrick? You’re making me nervous. I would appreciate it if you would look at me.”

  It went against all rules of civility to refuse such a reasonable request, but I could no more turn to face her in that moment than I could have turned my gaze directly to the sun. “I’m sorry. I cannot.”

  “I see.” The toes brushing my ankle disappeared, gone between one breath and the next, replaced by the slowly unfurling flag of a great, glossy fin. Sweet Oberon, but she was beautiful when she dropped her disguises. She was beautiful with them, but she was breathtaking without.

  I kept my eyes turned down though I slanted my gaze to the side so that I could see the sinuous sweep of her, serpentine and also . . . not, sea serpent and siren and mistress of the deeps.

  I was going to miss her so very badly.

  “He saw my disapproval of his censure written in my eyes,” I said. “Arden and Nolan are kindly children, for all that only their mother has ever claimed them, and I wonder, at times, if they might not favor their father, whomever he is.”

  Dianda scoffed. “Are you still allowing that pretty fiction that Gilad is not their father? They have his eyes, not their mother’s, and the boy carries his grandmother’s name with only the addition of a letter to obscure it, while the girl tucks her grandfather’s name inside her own. They’re the heirs to your Kingdom, and he allows you to treat them as if they were foundlings.”

  “After what happened to his parents, I can understand if the King is loath to claim them openly,” I said. “The fiction of their missing father protects them.”

  “You landers and your rules,” said Dianda. She sounded almost angry. “A lie is still a lie when it’s dressed in lace and presented for the ball. We don’t do things that way in the sea.”

  “No? How do you do them?”

  “Honestly, and in the open. I told you when we met that I went to a very violent school, and that I was extremely reasonable by the standards I was raised to. My patience is legendary beneath the waves. I’m considered the most even-tempered of the coastal rulers. I almost never kill anyone.” At my shocked look, she laughed. “Oberon’s Law only forbids us murder. It allows us war, and anyone who claims a high enough station can declare a war begun. The Undersea has been at war since before my grandparents were born. We’re always allowed to kill each other, and we do, because we’re honestly remarkably annoying. You haven’t spent time with very many of us, but the ones you do know, well, we’re troublesome.”

  “You have never been troublesome to me,” I protested.

  “That would sound sweeter if you hadn’t called me here because some mewling moggy who would have been better off drowned at birth somehow managed to convince you that you should stop keeping company with me.”

  Her words were like a slap, startling enough that for the first time I fully turned and faced her. She was looking at me, expression calm, eyes wide and bright in the moonlight, and she was so beautiful, and I loved her so much, and that was why I had to go through with this, little as I desired it.

  “I . . . I can never marry you.”

  She blinked. “Who said I would want to marry anyone? I’m Duchess of my own fiefdom. I answer to no one save the King in Leucothea, who never asks anything of me as long as his spies report that I’m continuing to do my job. No one shares my coronet or title, no one sits upon my consort’s throne. I never spoke of marriage because I have no need of it.”

  “You speak of your lands with love,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ll one day need an heir.”

  “So I’ll throw a grand brawl and all the eligible Merrow-maids and Merrow-men for leagues will swim to my halls, eat my food, and beat each other to the verge of death until the strongest rises up to challenge me.” She looked at me defiantly. “I have no need of a husband to protect me.”

  “Did your Firstborn not command you to tithe children to her?” My head was starting to spin.

  Dianda scoffed again. “If she had, we would have swarmed her and struck her dead, Firstborn or no. Before Amphitrite set her sails against the western wind, she bid that we follow our natures and find happiness. That was all. And as we are a naturally bloodthirsty lot, we’ve found happiness in war eternal, and in the keeping of the ones too shy or soft to fight. We protect what’s ours. It’s part of what makes us so aggressive toward anything or anyone that might present a threat.”

  The idea of raising hands against a Firstborn—or of a Firstborn who loved her children well enough to bid them happiness—was foreign to me. I stared at her, speechless.

  “And whether you like it or not, Patrick Twycross, you’re mine. You offered yourself to me like a rare jewel the night you fed me cake and treated me like a person, not a princess, and you kept offering, over and over again, until I accepted. You have two paths leading from this moment, and I always knew we’d walk one of them eventually, but thought we’d have more time. Remember that you brought us here.”

  I said nothing. It didn�
�t seem my place to speak, as yet.

  “I dive back into the sea, an enemy, and the waters are set evermore against you; or you accept my proposal as you feel unable to make your own.”

  Slowly, I blinked at her.

  “Proposal?”

  “You say you cannot marry me. Fine. I never asked to be a wife to any man, or any woman, for that matter. But your failings are not mine. So rather than you marrying me, allow me to marry you, and make of you my husband and consort—although not, I should be clear, my co-regent. The Undersea would never stand for a descendant of Eira Rosynhwyr leading one of our domains. We’re both children of Titania, so there would be no issues with reproduction.” I must have looked confused, because she shook her head and said, “Sometimes children of Titania and children of Maeve, when they lie together, beget monsters. I would prefer my descendants be the ordinary sort of monster, and nothing that requires the intervention of a hero.”

  “Custom—”

  “I could not leave my home for you even if I wished it, so you will have to come and live with me. That Andersen man did us no favors with his little ‘fairy tale.’ A mermaid may leave the water long enough to dance at a ball or court a man too foolish to understand that she matters more than the careless words of a King he doesn’t serve, but she cannot live on land. I would suffocate in my sleep.”

  “I can’t breathe water,” I protested. If this was a marriage proposal—and I was fairly sure it was, in its own twisting way—this was the way to end it.

  “Of course, you can.” Dianda reached into the pocket of her shirt, which had remained, although shorter, when she transformed, and withdrew a glass bulb, small and tightly corked and filled with a golden liquid that writhed like a thing living and glittered like starlight on the sea. “Sixty years of courtship, and you think I hadn’t set my court alchemists to finding a way to let you come home with me? But there are limitations. You’ll be able to breathe the water as I do, for an hour, and I can easily pull you along with me to Saltmist in that time. It’s not perfect. It won’t protect you from the cold or make your skin suited to the water as mine is. You’ll have to wait several hours between doses, and of course, once you’re in my chambers below, you won’t be able to leave on your own. You’ll have to trust me in a way I don’t know if you can.” She set the bottle on the dock between us, a trace of hurt coming into her expression for the first time. “I love you. I have loved you for years, have let you set the pace of this swim, when I would have raced to the finish long ago. But if your love for me is not enough to let you stand against what you still perceive as the wishes of your lost and unlamented Firstborn, who has no place in our relationship, and no right to dictate how we love each other, then you don’t trust me. You don’t trust me to protect you, to partner you, to defend the walls of our home and the hearts of our children against the world. And if you can’t trust me, then we may as well do what you desire, and part tonight, as enemies.”

  She touched my cheek, then leaned over and kissed me, delicately. Her lips were sweet as salt, either from the sea or from her unfettered tears.

  “You are the love of my life, Patrick Twycross. I know I may not be the love of yours, but please allow me a little more time to harbor hope.”

  Then she slid off the pier, striking the surface of the water with little more than a ripple, and was gone.

  I stared foolishly after her for several precious seconds—seconds which she could, I knew, use to carry herself far away from me, never to return. I had come here with the intention of ending things, not to be proposed to and then fled from as if I were some sort of monster. I stood, grabbing the bottle from where she had left it, and turned to walk away from the pier’s edge.

  Every inch of me was screaming that I was wasting time as I walked to the nearest building, a masonry shop that had closed at sundown, following the patterns of mortal-owned businesses. I began to load my pockets with bricks, fitting two into each side of my coat, and several handfuls of broken bits into my trousers. For the final touch I grabbed the largest stone I could hold in one hand and held it close to my body as I strode back down the pier.

  When I reached the end, I pulled the cork from the bottle with my teeth and downed its contents in a single long gulp. It tasted like salted strawberries. I had no idea whether it had worked. I could still breathe, after all.

  Then I stepped off the edge and let the rocks in my pockets and under my arm drag me down, toward the bottom of the bay.

  DIANDA

  My father would be so disappointed in me. “Never fall in love, Dianda,” he warned me, more than once, when I was still small enough to float on his flukes and be called his little pearl without any chance that it would undermine my authority with those who would be my subjects. Even in the Undersea, children are allowed to be pampered, at least for a time. “Never fall in love. Men will only break your heart, and women will only desert you. The sea is changeable, and so are anyone’s affections.”

  His were, certainly. In the end, he left me even as my mother had, although with less purpose. Both of them swam to find waters they preferred to those of Saltmist, which were sometimes cold, and always too close to the coastal kingdoms, with their unbearable assortment of land fae, whose concerns were alien and petty. And the humans! No one chooses a home near humans if they have another option. I wouldn’t love Saltmist as I do if I hadn’t been born to her and raised in the expectation that one day she would be mine.

  My father swam away and left me behind. My mother divorced him and untethered me from her family line long before that, taking my only living brother with her into distant waters. Loving someone has never once in my life been enough to make them stay.

  Foolishly, I had believed that things might be different for people of the land, that perhaps the reason so much of Faerie was centered there was because they were more skilled at loving one another without being cruel. And for a short time, it had seemed like that might be true. I had met a man who loved me for who I was, who didn’t care that our natures would always dictate a certain measure of separation, and somehow that had translated into loving me too much not to let me go. I didn’t want to be released. I had swum to his net willingly, and I had done so with every intention of staying there. Letting me go was a deeper cruelty than I had thought him capable of, and I did not approve.

  I swam away from the pier slowly, letting the kelp tangle around my flukes, resisting the urge to look back. If he was going to follow me, he would have done it already. He knew how fast I could move and had no reason to expect me to wait for him. No: his choice was made, and by making it, mine was made as well.

  I could stay in Saltmist for a few decades, until the Selkies carried news of his departure. We would be enemies after this, both because I had promised him so, and because to be anything else would be to harm my position in a way far worse than his mewling concerns about his Firstborn’s good regard. For me to love a man so far below my station was forgivable, and perhaps a sign that I was not as cold and heartless as rulers in the Undersea are often assumed to be. I could be reasoned with. See? I had found love with one of their own, had taken him to my bed and to my confidence. For me to be spurned by that same man? Unforgivable.

  It would mark me as weak and taint all my further dealings with the nobility of the Mists. I liked them little enough to begin with, I had no need to treat with them from a perceived position of inferiority, the one who’d been rejected, the one who had brought an entire Duchy to the table and still not been good enough to hold one of their precious sons of Eira.

  I breathed in deep, letting the cool waters of the Pacific soothe my throat even as they accepted my tears, and swam, still too slowly, but ever in the direction of home.

  There was a splash from behind me, as of something falling into the water. It was quiet compared to the sounding of the sea. It was loud enough to cause me to stop swimming and whip around, hair briefly c
louding my vision before the tide tucked it once again behind me.

  And there was Patrick, falling gracelessly through the water, still dressed in his heavy, ridiculous clothing, which might have been suitable on the land, but was in no way suited for the water. It was dragging him down, as was the large rock he was holding. He had gambled that I’d been telling the truth when I told him I loved him, and that the potion I’d left behind on the pier would protect him. Foolish man. Foolish, foolish, wonderful man.

  I flipped about in the water and swam back toward him as he continued to sink, making no effort to dawdle now. There was nothing keeping me from going as fast as I could, and I slammed into him shortly before his feet brushed the bottom. His eyes widened in clear surprise. The man had followed me into the ocean, and not expected me to be there when he arrived. Fool. Darling, dearest fool.

  I closed my own eyes as I kissed him, wrapping my tail around his legs and holding him to me, keeping him from sinking into the muck at the bottom of the bay. He was heavier than I expected him to be. His pockets must have been deeper than I thought they were, and he had packed every inch of them with stones.

  He kissed me back, kissed me like he was drowning, and I was all he knew of air. I pulled back a little, studying him as he blinked and then frowned, looking at me as if he was afraid he’d done something wrong. No; he wasn’t drowning. This wasn’t a disrupted suicide. He was a sensible man and had consumed my potion before consigning himself to the sea.

  I should probably have taken the time to warn him that the potion had yet to be tested on an actual land-dweller, and that we would need to be careful in our first trials, but I had been furious with him, and brokenhearted, and unwilling to explain. As it had worked out for the best, I might wait to tell him for a hundred years or so. Long enough for “I’m sorry I nearly got you killed” to pass into the distance and become amusing.