The Winter Long

by Seanan McGuire

  “Tybalt!” I shouted, running back over to him and dropping to my knees. The few spots on my jeans that hadn’t already been saturated with blood soaked through. I was too panicked to care. He was lying facedown and not moving, but when I fumbled for his neck, I found a strong, if somewhat irregular, pulse. Shock and blood loss, then, and not anything more serious. I breathed a sigh of relief . . .

  ...and froze as the point of what felt like a spear was pressed against the back of my neck.

  “Speak and explain,” said Grianne, her voice like the creak of a rusty gate in the still air. One of her Merry Dancers zipped past my face, the globe of animate light circling us once before it rose to hover somewhere overhead.

  “Grianne.” I relaxed a little, although not completely. “Evening’s gone. Her hold on you is broken. That’s fantastic. Where is Sylvester? I need him to ask Luna to open a Rose Road for me, and I need Jin to take a look at Tybalt.” I kept my tone level and reasonable through all of this, as if I were making my requests while standing and facing her, and not while kneeling in a pool of blood.

  “What?”

  The Candela didn’t talk much: for her, that single word was virtually a speech, especially coming on the heels of her demand for an explanation. I rolled Tybalt onto his back, stroking his hair away from his face as I said, “Evening Winterrose is the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn. She used your fealty to Sylvester to make you do what she said, which is why I went to get the Luidaeg and see if we could somehow interfere with Evening’s ability to control her descendants. Only Evening brought Simon as backup and he used a nasty choking spell to nearly kill Tybalt, hence the blood everywhere—although most of it is mine, as per usual—and then she got away while I was dealing with him. Tybalt said they were somewhere ‘else’ before he collapsed, and the Luidaeg and I used a shortcut to get here, so I’m hoping that Luna can somehow open me a Rose Road that goes where I need to be and seriously, Grianne, I don’t mean to nag or anything, but my boyfriend is hurt and needs medical assistance, and Evening is just getting farther away while I sit here explaining myself to you. Please, can you just go get Sylvester for me?”

  “I’m already here,” he said wearily.

  I turned my head, the point of Grianne’s spear scraping against the back of my neck and adding a fresh line of blood to the coagulated mess around me. My liege was standing next to his faintly glowing knight, his hands dangling by his sides and a weary expression on his face.

  “Hi,” I said. I twisted back toward Tybalt, bending to kiss his forehead, before I climbed to my feet and turned to face Sylvester. I was all too aware of his pristine condition, and how it contrasted with the bloody mess I had become. I was starting to feel like I’d been bleeding on his behalf for much too long. “Uh. How much of that did you hear?”

  “All of it,” he said. His expression didn’t change.

  For one heart-stopping moment I was afraid I had gotten one thing wrong: that Evening’s control hadn’t snapped when she left the knowe, and I was about to be forced to choose between fighting my liege and abandoning Tybalt while I ran for my life. Sylvester was the man who taught me how to use a sword. He’d mop the bloody floor with me without even breaking a sweat. And if he came at me, I’d stand my ground.

  Then he sighed, weariness growing even more pronounced, and asked, “Can you forgive me for being so easily swayed?”

  “She’s your Firstborn, Sylvester, and she’s a blood-worker. I don’t think there’s any way that you could have resisted her.” I ached to throw myself into his arms and be held, even if it was only for a few seconds. But there wasn’t time, and touching me would have ruined his clothes—and also, I was more and more aware that the part of me that needed his reassurance was small, and weak, and frightened. She was the girl I’d been, not the woman I had finally become. “I need to talk to Luna. I need her to open a door for me.”

  “A door won’t do you much good without a map,” he said, before turning to Grianne and saying, “Go tell my lady she is needed here. Then go to Jin, and tell her the King of Cats is injured, and to Ormond. Tell him . . .” He glanced to the pool of blood around me. “Tell him to bring several mops, and more hot water than he expects to need.”

  Grianne nodded. Then she jumped into a small fold of shadow that had been formed by the intersection of his foot and the floor, and was gone.

  “They didn’t leave me a map,” I said, bending to retrieve my bloody knife. As I bent, something in my right pocket dug into my hip. I reached in, intending to adjust whatever it was, and stopped as my fingers hit a familiar curved shape. I straightened, still holding my knife in one hand, and pulled the twisted metal key out of my pocket. It caught and bounced back the light when I held it up for examination. “Okay, I stand corrected,” I said. “They did leave me a map after all.”

  “What is that?” asked Sylvester.

  “A key. Evening gave it to me, although I think she expected to get it back when she returned; the Luidaeg took it from me almost as soon as I got it. And now I have it again. The Luidaeg must have put it in my pocket when we were in the car.” She’d known we were going to be separated, and that I was going to have to follow her. She’d known, and she’d done nothing to stop it. We were going to have words about that.

  After I got her home safely. I crouched down next to Tybalt, the key held loosely in one hand, and watched Sylvester to see what he was going to do next. He watched me, expression remaining tired and grave.

  Finally, he took a breath and said, “I’m sorry. I have not been a proper liege to you.”

  My head snapped up. “You’ve been a great liege,” I said fiercely. “You defended me when I needed defending, and you’ve given me enough rope to hang myself when I asked you for it. You’ve been a resource without being a hindrance. We both know that you could have put a lot more demands on me than you have these past few years. I give you a hundred percent in the liege category. It’s the friend category where you’ve been falling down a little.” I looked down at the blood obscuring the checkerboard marble floor, and sighed. “It’s where you’ve been falling down a lot.”

  “October . . .”

  “The Luidaeg not telling me things I can sort of understand. She’s Firstborn, she’s under all these geasa, and she didn’t meet me all that long ago. I like to think we’re friends now, but I didn’t grow up with her. You, on the other hand . . .” I raised my head again, meeting his eyes. “Why do you keep secrets from me, Sylvester? You’ve been the closest thing I’ve had to a father for most of my life. I would have died for you. I almost did die for you, more than once. And you kept things from me, and those things keep getting the people I care about hurt. Hurt bad, in some cases. Why?”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  I waited almost a minute before I realized he was done: that was all he intended to say. My eyes widened. “That’s it? You’re sorry? Nothing else? No reasons or justifications or explanations? Just ‘I’m sorry’ and we’re done?”

  “Yes,” he said, raising his chin. “I’m sorry I hurt you. It was never my intent. But I don’t feel any need to justify myself.”

  I stared at him. “Maybe you don’t,” I said finally. “Maybe that’s the only answer you have to give me. But oak and ash, I’d hoped for more.”

  The doors swung open, saving me from needing to hear his response, and Luna walked into the room. She was moving with a calm sort of serenity that made me want to shake her and demand to know why she was wasting my time when she knew that I needed her help. Jin came in after her, and she was running: the petite Ellyllon was moving as fast as her legs allowed, which was almost comic, given her 1940s pin-up girl looks and the gauzy mayfly wings on her back. They buzzed constantly, speeding her along.

  “I need to introduce you to my friend Mags,” I said when Jin got close enough to hear me. I straightened up, stepping aside. “Tybalt got blasted with a
spell that tried to choke the life out of him. I managed to cut it off, but he suffered some minor wounds in the process, and—”

  “What do you mean, ‘cut it off’?” she demanded, even as she sank to her knees in the puddle of semi-coagulated blood and began ripping Tybalt’s shirt off. Normally, I took great interest in things that involved removing Tybalt’s clothing. Under the circumstances, I moved aside and let her work.

  “I used my knife to slice the knots holding the spell together, and then I ripped the rest of it away with my bare hands,” I said, aware as I spoke that my words probably sounded like absolute nonsense. My headache wasn’t helping.

  “Was he still wrapped in the spell at the time?” asked Jin. Her wings snapped open, sending a spray of pixie-sweat over the three of us.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He’s got magic poisoning. Back away and let me work.” The way she turned her head made it clear that she was done talking to me: Tybalt was her patient and her first priority, and the rest of us could go hang.

  I closed my eyes for a split-second, allowing myself a silent moment of gratitude, before opening them and turning toward Luna. She was standing next to Sylvester, as pristine and untouched by the chaos around her as he was, while Tybalt, Jin, and I were surrounded by blood. There was probably something about the symbolism there that I should have caught on to sooner.

  Live and learn, I guess. “I need you to use this key and open me a road,” I said, thrusting it toward her. “I think your Rose Road can get me there, if you follow the map.”

  Luna blinked, her pink eyebrows rising toward her hairline. “Opening roads is difficult,” she said. “I’ve done it for you before, but never without cost. Why would I do this for you now? I owe you nothing.”

  “You owe me nothing but your life,” I corrected harshly. “When I saved you from the salt poisoning—you remember the assassination attempt that your daughter thought was a good idea—I didn’t ask for any reward, because Sylvester is my liege and it was the right thing to do. Well, that assumed that everyone was playing fair. Turns out no one here was playing fair but me. I saved your life, Luna Torquill, and more, I killed your father. I set you free. Now open this door for me, or I will make you sorry that you even considered refusing my request.”

  She looked at me for a moment with those strange, pollen-colored eyes, and in that moment I could almost see the Luna who had loved me, once, before things got so complicated between us. Then she extended one bone-white hand and said, “Give me the key.”

  I straightened, walking away from Jin’s murmuring and Tybalt’s silence. Every step I took left another bloody smear on the ballroom floor, and that seemed somehow exactly right. I held the key out in front of me; Luna took it, turning it over in her hand.

  “This belonged to my grandmother,” she said.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  Luna’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing for some reason. Then, with no further fanfare, she shoved the key into the air between us. The bottom half vanished, like it had been placed in a lock I couldn’t see.

  “My debts are paid,” she said, and turned the key sharply to the left, pulling at the same time.

  What opened wasn’t exactly a door, but it wasn’t exactly a portal either: it was a hole in the world. Through it, I could see darkness. Not blackness—blackness would have implied an absence—but darkness, green, wet, living darkness, where things could slither unseen by the eye and unknown by the heart.

  “You asked for this,” said Luna. “Now go.”

  I held out my hand.

  She narrowed her eyes as she pulled the key out of the air and slapped it into my open palm. “I hope this is everything you think it’s going to be, because it has cost you more than you can know.”

  “If you mean I’m no longer in your good graces, Your Grace, I’ve known that for a while.” I pocketed the key. “Love you can spend like currency isn’t really love. Take care of him, Jin.” I glanced back over my shoulder to Jin and Tybalt. “I’ll be back soon.”

  There was no way of knowing what the air would be like on the other side of the not-a-door still hanging open in the air. I took a deep breath, shoving the key into my pocket, and jumped through into darkness.

  TWENTY-TWO

  MY FALL WAS shorter than I expected; I’d only been dropping through space for what felt like a few seconds when my feet hit the spongy ground and I fell, rolling out of control until I slammed up against what felt like a stone retaining wall. The impact knocked the wind out of me, something that even my accelerated healing couldn’t prevent. Wheezing, I used the wall to pull myself back to my feet and peered into the dark, trying to see what was around me.

  At first, I couldn’t see anything. Then, as I blinked and strained, the darkness seemed to pull back, growing lighter and lighter until it had achieved a sort of midnight quality, still unlit, but somehow bright enough to let me see. There was no color in the world. I would have needed to be less human to rate color, given the circumstances.

  The forest around me was overgrown, the trees fat with sap and dripping with moss, creeping vines, and thorn briars of a type I’d never seen before. Some of them had spines more than two inches long, making them look less like plants and more like torture devices waiting to be used. The air—and there was air, breathable and ripe with the smell of the growing world—was hot and humid. For the first time, I found myself glad not to be wearing my leather jacket. It would have been unbearable, and I would have been afraid to take it off. I had the feeling that when things were lost in this forest, they tended to stay that way.

  For a moment, I held perfectly still, breathing in deep and trying to filter through the myriad scents of this unfamiliar place, looking for the familiar smells of marsh and ocean breeze, of snow and roses. Evening had no way of knowing that I’d followed them here. The Luidaeg had been counting on it. They wouldn’t be hiding themselves from me.

  Standing frozen in a place I didn’t know, where I had previously been instructed not to slow down my car for any reason, was not the easiest thing that I’ve ever done. I breathed in even deeper than before, trying to ignore the fact that I could be eaten at any moment. This place used to belong to the Luidaeg’s sister. The Luidaeg was a fabulous monster and, unlike most of Titania’s children, she at least tried to play fair. She wouldn’t have left me the key if it was just going to get me eaten.

  I hoped.

  It helped that we were in a place that wasn’t the sea, and that was definitely not in the middle of its own private winter. The native scents of the land around me were hot and green and growing. Life scents, decay scents, but not sea scents or snow scents. So when the smell of roses addressed my nose through the tangled perfume of the land, I knew I was on to something. My eyes snapped open, and I turned, sniffing as I tried to determine the direction the smell was coming from.

  West. I don’t know how I knew which way was west, but I did—I just knew—and Evening’s magic was coming from the west.

  “Hold on, Luidaeg,” I murmured, and broke into a run.

  Running through an unfamiliar forest filled with thorns is half an exercise in masochism, and half an obstacle course from the deepest reaches of Hell. I kept one arm up to block my face, letting it take the brunt of anything sharp that dangled overhead, and kept the other arm out in front of me, fingers spread to find the trunks of surrounding trees before I ran straight into them. The smell of snow and roses urged me onward, ebbing and surging with the force of whatever spells she was casting, but always there, a thin ribbon of poisoned sweetness to urge me onward into the dark.

  Unfortunately for me, no amount of positioning my hands to reduce my potential danger could level out the ground under my feet. I was running down what I had taken for a slight incline when everything dropped out from beneath me, and I was plummeting like a rock. I had time to squeak my surprise and wrap my arms around
my face. Then I hit the tree line, and developed a whole new set of problems to worry about—like how to keep myself from getting hung up in the high branches, forcing me to fall even further after I recovered.

  My right arm hit a tree trunk on the way down. There was a loud “crack” followed by shooting pain. I’d broken at least one bone, if not more than one. I made a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a scream, and then finally landed on the ground in an untidy heap. My broken arm was pinned beneath the rest of me, making sitting up more difficult than it should have been. Eventually, I managed to roll into a position where I could use my unbroken left arm to push myself to my feet.

  “Shit,” I muttered, folding my right arm to my chest. I could feel the bones starting to knit back together. I just prayed that they were healing straight, and that I wasn’t going to need Jin to rebreak my arm when I made it back to Shadowed Hills. At least I wasn’t bleeding all over everything for a change. Something told me Evening would be able to pick up on blood that was shed in her presence the way that I could follow the scent of a person’s magic through dark forests that would have been better left abandoned. And I did not want to give her any more warning than I had to.

  I hurt myself a lot, but I don’t tend to break many bones, and I didn’t know how long my arm would need to heal. I moved forward more slowly now, feeling out the ground with my toes before stepping into shadows. I would probably survive breaking my neck. I would probably even recover from it. But it would slow me down even more than my broken arm already had, and I didn’t have time for that.

  The smell of snow and roses was stronger now, interlaced with the smell of cold wind blowing over an open sea. I could probably have followed it with my eyes closed. I was glad I didn’t have to—anything that would make this a little bit easier was good, especially given that I was injured and relatively unarmed. You need iron and silver to kill one of the Firstborn.

  The signs really had been there from the beginning. I’d been a fool not to see them: a fool blinded by my own preconceptions of the world and my place in it. It was the same blindness that had prevented me from seeing that Tybalt loved me, or that I wasn’t what my mother had always told me I was. You’d think I’d know better by now.