The Winter Long

by Seanan McGuire

  Tybalt glanced at my expression and raised an eyebrow. “Something amusing?”

  “Just the kids,” I said. “I like teenagers. I never really thought I would.”

  “Ah,” he replied. “Well, I suppose that’s excellent luck on your part, as we’re stuck with them for the time being. Teenagers turn out to be surprisingly difficult to get rid of.”

  “I’m pretty good at it.”

  “I meant for longer than the duration of an action movie.”

  “Yeah, that’s harder.” I shrugged. “But they usually bring me back popcorn, so I’m okay with it.”

  Tybalt snorted. “You are too flippant for your own good,” he said. “October, what we are walking into . . .”

  “Is dangerous, I know.” I reached out and took his hand, lacing my fingers through his. “Luna sent me to face her father without telling me who she really was because she was scared. I know that. I also know that I haven’t trusted her since then, and that her daughter is in an enchanted sleep because of me. We used to have this really straightforward, sweet relationship, and now it’s like I’m afraid to be alone in a room with her.”

  “Growing up often comes at the cost of our heroes,” he said.

  I glanced in his direction, even though it was dark enough that all I could really see was the outline of his body. “So what does that say about my relationship with Quentin? I’m a hero of the realm now, remember?”

  “You’re his hero, but also his friend, and he idolizes you less than he used to,” said Tybalt, with patient thoughtfulness. “Perhaps if you had never become his knight you would have betrayed his sense of who you were one day—and perhaps it would have been as bad as the betrayal the Duchess Torquill offered you. But you removed yourself from any pedestals he could build as fast as he assembled them. I don’t think you’ll break his heart. Not in that manner, anyway.”

  “I’m not planning on breaking any hearts any time soon,” I said, giving Tybalt’s hand a squeeze. “I’m going to talk to Luna, she’s going to tell me what I need to know, and then we’re going to figure out what happens next. Hopefully, it involves punching. All this skulking around is starting to get on my nerves.”

  “It’s true, you’ve had few opportunities to bleed all over everything and ruin my best shirt.”

  “I can’t have ruined your best shirt every time.”

  “Ah, but you see, each time you ruin one best shirt, another must take its place, and your aim is impeccable.” Tybalt stopped walking. I stopped with him, dropping his hand as I reached out to feel the wall.

  The servants’ halls in Shadowed Hills are marked internally with wood carvings, little icons and patterns that identify where the nearest door will access the knowe. The carving here was of a stylized rose, with each of its petals made from a differently positioned crescent moon. I lowered my hand. We were standing outside of Luna’s private quarters.

  “I will wait for you here,” said Tybalt solemnly.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, reaching into the dark until I found his shoulder and pulled him to me for a quick kiss. The contact was reassuring, and all-too-quickly broken as I stepped back, put my hand against the rose of crescent moons, and opened the door into Luna’s quarters.

  The rooms she shared with Sylvester were simple, all plain wood and unbleached linens. This room was like walking into a dream about a greenhouse. The walls were glass, held together by veins of silver filigree. Beds of flowers I couldn’t identify by name were everywhere, filling the greenhouse with a riotous mix of scents and colors. I recognized each perfume, even when it belonged to a blossom I’d never seen in my life—the part of my mind responsible for identifying the scents of the magic I encountered was expanding its botanical database. That was a little bit disturbing.

  Luna herself was standing next to one of the nearby flowerbeds, a pair of silver shears in her hands, clipping blooms off a long vine of fist-sized morning glories. Her long pink-and-red hair was braided—a concession to the number of branches and thorns around her—and her clothing was the simple, practical kind I’d always associated with her.

  I paused, looking behind me. The wooden door I’d entered through was gone, replaced by seamless glass and silver. That was going to be a problem.

  “I’ve always been reluctant to allow the servants to come and go too freely here,” said Luna. I turned again. She wasn’t looking at me. All her attention seemed to be on the morning glories. “They might get ideas that could get somebody hurt. So I let them have their little doors, and let them think they can enter my spaces without my consent, but those doors never lead here unless I wish it. It seems a reasonable compromise, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” I said haltingly.

  Luna raised her head, finally turning toward me. Her pink-and-yellow eyes were shadowed, making her look older than the lines of her face. “Hello, October,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to come looking for me.”

  “What did you expect me to do?” I crossed my arms, feeling obscurely naked without my jacket. It wasn’t magical. There were no wards or protections built into the leather. It was still the armor I’d worn into almost every battle I’d fought in the last four years. “I need answers. They must have told you that when they came and said that I wanted to see you.”

  “Before that, I assumed that if you had any inkling of what was happening here, you would stay far, far away. But I suppose that was never an option, was it?” Her mouth twisted, expression going bitter as she turned away from me and went back to pruning her morning glories. “You came back to warn Sylvester. You’ll always come back to warn him, no matter how much danger it could put you in, no matter what it costs you, because he cared for you when you thought you were nothing. You were never nothing. That didn’t matter. Perception is everything in this world.”

  “I never wanted us to be enemies,” I said. The words felt weak and insufficient even as they left my lips. I couldn’t think of anything better to say. Luna had hidden her parentage from the world, wrapping it in the stolen skin of a Kitsune girl named Hoshibara. She had lost that borrowed skin and the safety that went with it, thanks to Oleander and Rayseline. I’d tried to stop them. I’d failed. That was on top of everything else I’d done to her, however accidentally.

  It wasn’t really a wonder she didn’t much care for me these days. The miracle was that she didn’t try to kill me every time I stepped into the knowe. “What you wanted doesn’t matter that much, October,” she said, stressing my name so hard I was almost afraid she would somehow snap it off. “What matters is what you did. That’s what matters for all of us. Intention is meaningless—the people you cut still bleed, whether you cut them for good or ill.”

  I stared at her, aghast. “Luna, I . . .”

  “Just ask whatever questions you have, will you? I’m tired.” She dropped her shears in the dirt of the planting bed as she whirled toward me again, and I found myself more than a little bit relieved by the fact that she was no longer armed. “It’s winter here, in case you hadn’t noticed, and most roses do not fare very well in the snow.”

  That was the opening I’d been waiting for. “That’s sort of why I’m here. Evening Winterrose is back from the dead.”

  “I am fully aware.” Each word was sharply bitten off, more a staccato series of syllables than a proper sentence. “I felt her enter, with Simon like a poisoned thorn beside her. They have the run of the knowe, and I am here.”

  I blinked. “Luna, she’s in Shadowed Hills right now. She has Sylvester wrapped around her little finger—oak and ash, she’s the one who ordered Simon to kidnap you in the first place! Why are you here in the greenhouse, and not out there getting between your husband and that . . . that bitch?”

  “Because I cannot touch her.” Luna tilted her chin up, looking at me flatly. “Maybe I could have, before Oleander finished the process of stripping my stolen sk
in away, but all I have now are a Blodynbryd’s charms, and those are not enough. You said it yourself: my husband is already hers to command. What would you have me do? Take up a sword and challenge her? My own true love would be her champion, and he wouldn’t know what he’d done until he’d cut me down. Maybe were my father still alive . . . but no. He would never have raised a blade for my defense. Only to prune me back into a shape he could allow.”

  It took me a moment to find my voice again. Finally, once I could get my mouth to move, I said, “I’ve been looking at some of the things that have happened over the last few years, and some of the things that haven’t happened—the ones that should have happened and didn’t. Was Evening ever really dead?”

  She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side, studying me. In most people I would have called the motion “birdlike,” but there was nothing avian about Luna. She was more closely related to her roses than she was to anything with a heartbeat, and she somehow made that simple motion into something alien. “That’s not really your question, is it?”

  “It is and it isn’t,” I said. “You say you don’t have the power to stand against her. Is it because she’s the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn?”

  Luna blinked, looking faintly taken aback by the bluntness of my words. Then she straightened, drawing herself up as tall as she could go—and I remembered a time when she was shorter than I was, when we were friends, when her welfare mattered to me almost as much as Sylvester’s did—and said, “If you want me to answer you, you’ll have to do something for me, first.”

  “What’s that?” I asked warily. I hate it when people start the game of “if you want me to do this, you’ll do that.” It always ends badly. Most fairy-tale clichés are snares in disguise.

  “She may have seized my husband’s will for now, but she can’t keep him forever. The roses will bring him back to me, even as they shield me here, out of her view. And while she plays her little games, my daughter is suffering.” There was real pain in those words, and there was nothing alien about them. Whatever else Luna was or had become, she was a mother, and she loved her child. “Even in her sleep, she suffers. Your little oneiromancer says—”

  “Wait,” I said, my own spine stiffening. “You sent Karen into Rayseline’s sleeping mind? She’s barely fourteen years old! You have no right to do something like that!”

  “I convinced her it would be useful in her training,” said Luna, apparently unmoved by my protests. “Oneiromancers are rare. The last one before her died centuries ago. I don’t know where she got such a wild talent, but there was no way I would let my daughter sleep for decades without at least finding an avenue into her dreams.”

  “And you didn’t like what you saw there,” I said, dropping my arms and glaring at her. “You sent Karen into a nightmare. You must have known.”

  “That my Raysel was suffering? I suspected. I had to know.” She began walking forward. I resisted the urge to take a step back. Tone level, she continued, “I never expected to have children, October. Unlike your mother and her Firstborn’s fecundity, I am a rosebush who dreams of being a woman. My offspring are rose goblins and prize-winning cultivars. It was only Hoshibara’s stolen skin that allowed me to bear my little girl, and I nearly lost her several times before she arrived. She has suffered more than enough in this life without my being able to save her. Do you understand me? What I did, I did for a mother’s love, and I’m not sorry.”

  “I do understand,” I said. “You forget I was a mother, too.”

  Luna sniffed. “Only for two years.”

  It was funny. She had betrayed me with her silence; she had tried to forbid me to love Connor because she’d felt it would be inconvenient; she had been the one who’d roped Connor into a loveless, dysfunctional marriage in the first place. But until that moment—until those four words—I had never actually believed that I could learn to hate her.

  “So what do you want from me?” I asked, balling my hands into fists to keep myself from going for her throat.

  “I want you to take me out of her. Or her father. It matters little, as long as one of us is removed.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I know what you did to the false Queen of the Mists. She was one thing, you put your hands on her, and she became another. I know what you did for Sir Etienne’s child. I’m asking you to do the same for Rayseline.”

  Oh, oak and ash. I had considered offering the Torquills this very thing, but I had never been able to figure out the way to word it. “Luna, this will hurt her.”

  “I know.”

  “It’ll hurt her bad, and it’s not going to wake her up. You know that part too, right? All it will do is change her, and it can’t be undone.”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Luna, waving my objections away as if they were of no consequence. “She’ll sleep until one of the alchemists finds a way to counter the specific blend they used on her, or until she’s slept enough to satisfy the elf-shot. Either way, she’ll wake up in a body where her blood is not at war with itself. She’ll wake up with a chance. That’s more than she has now.”

  When I first met Rayseline, she was a bright-eyed little girl who had yet to be kidnapped by her uncle. Her years of growing up in darkness were ahead of her, part of a dark and undreamed-of future. I loved her then. I would have done anything to protect her. Had that really changed, or had it just been buried under the bad blood and ill faith that stretched between us after she became an adult?

  “I want Tybalt to be here,” I said, before I could think better of it. “He knows how much blood magic takes out of me. And you have to tell me everything you know about Evening.”

  “But you’ll do it,” she said sharply. “Before you leave Shadowed Hills, you’ll do it.”

  “Evening—if she is what I think she is, using that much blood magic could lead her straight to me. It could put Quentin and Raj in danger.” I was less worried about myself and Tybalt. I was damn hard to kill, and he was more than capable of taking care of himself.

  Luna smiled slightly. “I don’t care about anything but my daughter. You’ll change the balance of her blood, and then I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  I bit back a curse. “Fine. Open the door to the servants’ hall. I want to tell Tybalt what’s going on.”

  “It’s behind you,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

  I turned, unsurprised to see the plain wood panel now set into the glass-and-silver wall. It slid open easily under my hand, revealing a distressed-looking Tybalt caught in mid-pace. He stopped when the light flooded into the hall, his head snapping up and his pupils narrowing to slits. Then he was through the opening and wrapping his arms around me, pulling me into an embrace as comforting as it was incomplete: his head stayed up the whole time, and I knew by the tension in his body that his eyes were fixed on Luna.

  “Hey.” I pulled away. He let me go, albeit reluctantly. The wooden panel was gone again, I saw, taking our only easy means of escape with it. “I have to do something before we can get the information we need. I’m sorry, but we’re going to be here a little longer.”

  “What does she want you to do, pick lentils out of a fire?” he asked.

  “Nothing so simple,” said Luna. “Although I suppose the concept is the same.”

  Tybalt’s eyes narrowed. “You must be joking.”

  “She’s not, and I already said I’d do it,” I said wearily. Maybe the confirmation of Evening’s identity wasn’t as important as I was making it out to be—but then again, if I was right, we needed to be prepared. There were only two ways to know for sure. This was one of them. The other involved trying to kill her and seeing if we could make it stick without using both silver and iron at the same time. For some reason, I wasn’t all that excited about potentially breaking Oberon’s Law again just to test a theory.

  “I’m coming with you,�
�� said Tybalt. He didn’t look happy, but to his credit, he didn’t tell me not to do it. He knew better.

  “I hoped that was what you’d say,” I said.

  Luna rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, you’re very sweet together, it’s lovely to see a relationship so stable. Perhaps if you’d pursued each other rather than ruining my daughter’s marriage, we wouldn’t be standing here now.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. Tybalt was not so restrained. “Much as I disliked the good Master O’Dell, his marriage to your daughter was dissolved, not through October’s actions, but through Rayseline’s. I believe she attempted to assassinate you, did she not?”

  “She wasn’t in her right mind when she did that,” said Luna, drawing the tatters of her serenity around herself until it seemed almost believable. “She hasn’t been in her right mind in a long time. Some of that is trauma, and will take a very long time to heal, but being what she is hasn’t helped her.”

  “Being part plant probably does a number on your sense of reality,” I agreed, trying to keep my tone neutral. “Where is she, Luna? If you’re going to make me do this, we need to do it now, before Evening comes looking.”

  “Didn’t my husband tell you I was in mourning?” She waved her hand, almost carelessly, and the vines she’d been pruning this whole time writhed, twisting and pulling back to reveal the glass coffin at the center of the growth.

  It was almost like a miniature greenhouse in its own right, designed to complement the architecture of the room. That said something about Faerie, right there: Luna had not only commissioned a coffin for her daughter, she’d made certain it wouldn’t clash with her décor. Rayseline was lying inside, her hands folded on her chest in the classical fairy-tale position, her fox-red hair spread out across the pillow that supported her head. She was wearing a gown that appeared to have been made entirely from goose feathers, adding to the fairy-tale quality of the scene. She looked like something out of a painting, serene and pure and untouchable.