A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  “We’re pretty much always in mortal danger. When is the time to be mean to you?”

  “How about next Tuesday?”

  Simon, who had been glancing back and forth between us through this whole exchange, scowled and pulled his bowstring back a little further. “Both of you, be quiet,” he snarled. “You’re not taking me seriously. I hate it when people don’t take me seriously. My lady takes me seriously. She would silence you forever if she were awake.”

  “Wait a hundred years,” I suggested. “You have the time. In the meanwhile, I’d appreciate it if you’d take a trip with us. Not a long one. But it will help clear some things up for you.”

  Simon blinked. “What?”

  “I just need to take you to see the Luidaeg, so we can discuss a tiny little insignificant spell you’re currently laboring under. Once that’s cleared up, you can come right back here and sit by your lady’s side until she wakes up and lays waste to Faerie in Titania’s name. Won’t that be nice? Just put down the bow and come with us.”

  Simon narrowed his eyes. “Is that why you’ve come seeking me? To convince me I should leave my lady undefended? I won’t be tricked by my brother’s dog, however much he might believe I can be.”

  “Oh, oak and fucking ash, Simon, will you get over yourself?” I snapped. “Sylvester didn’t send me. He’s barely speaking to me right now, and that’s mostly because of you, so if you could cut me a little slack, I’d appreciate it. I know you’re a bastard, and right now that’s all you can even conceive of being, but you were a good person once, and I hope he’s still in there. The man who saved Patrick Lorden’s pixies wouldn’t shoot me just for talking back.”

  “Patrick . . . ?” Simon hesitated before doing something I would have considered inconceivable.

  He lowered his bow.

  “How do you know that name?” he asked.

  I blinked. “He and his wife are friends of mine. And my squire is courting his son.” I wasn’t sure Simon had had enough recent interaction with the human world to have picked up on the concept of “dating,” and I didn’t want to confuse the matter when we were finally getting through to him. “Dean’s a good kid. A lot like his dad, thankfully, since I’m not sure San Francisco is set up for a land-dwelling version of Dianda.”

  “You’re lying,” said Simon, sounding more than a little lost. “Patrick Lorden has stopped his dancing.”

  “What?” asked Quentin, sounding baffled.

  “What?” echoed May.

  “No, he isn’t,” I said, a horrible picture starting to form. Simon had been absent, presumably mourning Oleander, when Patrick and Dianda had come to the land courts for the first time in my lifetime. It was Rayseline who’d kidnapped Dean, Peter, and Gillian. Simon hadn’t been involved. Evening had been, but why would she have felt the need to tell one of her toys what another of them had been tasked to do? Especially after Simon had failed to kill me, his estranged wife’s daughter, how could he be trusted to know that the children of his former friend were in danger?

  Simon was titled but not landed, and he hadn’t been a part of the political structure of the Mists for at least a hundred years, if he’d ever been one before. Evening had been controlling where he went and what he did since August’s disappearance, and there had never been any indication that she’d sent him to the Undersea.

  How much had he lost in the earthquake? How much had he allowed her to take away? And how much more had the Luidaeg taken when she took his home out of his chest, leaving his heart an empty hall? He’d known Patrick was alive when we’d walked together through my mother’s lands. But Patrick was part of his home, and it would have been far too easy to excise him from memory.

  “I swear, Patrick’s alive,” I said. “If you’ll come with me, you can see him for yourself.” He owed me, after the stunt he’d pulled at dinner. A little quality time with his former bestie was really the least that he could do.

  “You would take me to him?” he asked dubiously. “Me, who is your enemy?”

  “I know you’re my enemy right now, Simon, but I assure you, I’ve never been your enemy. Not before today, and not now.” I quirked a shadow of a smile. “This is a one-sided rivalry, and I’m not planning to start playing along.”

  He adjusted the aim of his arrow, keeping it trained firmly on me. That was better than aiming it at Quentin.

  “Dude, if you shoot me, no one’s going to take you to Patrick,” I said. “May and Quentin certainly aren’t going to do it. I’m telling you, Patrick and Dianda are alive. They’re in Saltmist. They have two sons, and they’re happy. Patrick misses you. I think your lady told you a few fibs to make sure your loyalty would remain focused on her and her alone.”

  His obsession with finding August would have been a useful tool for her to use. His isolation from Amandine would have been a lever. But his attachment to Patrick, a genuinely nice person who wouldn’t have approved of the things Simon was being manipulated into doing, would never have been anything but a barrier to complete control.

  “Keep my lady from your lips,” said Simon, but his aim was wavering. He wanted to know what I was offering to show him. He wanted it more badly than I had ever seen him want anything.

  Slowly, I raised my hands, palms up, in the traditional gesture of surrender. “So come with us,” I said. “Let me take you to him.” And if we happened to make a little pit stop at the Luidaeg’s first, well, that was only to be expected, really. It didn’t make me his enemy.

  “I don’t think so,” said Simon. “I have a better idea.” He relaxed his grip on the bowstring, allowing it to return to neutral without firing the arrow, and dipped his hand into his pocket, pulling out half a dozen rose thorns and scattering them on the ground between us.

  I tensed immediately. It’s never a good thing when the magic-users start throwing random bits of natural debris around. “What are you—”

  That was all I had time to say before thick rose vines erupted from the ground, growing rapidly until they were several inches in diameter. They whipped out and wrapped themselves around the three of us, pinning my arms to my sides without breaking my skin. May and Quentin were similarly cocooned, and I didn’t smell blood. Thankfully. Simon was being careful.

  He smiled a little as he walked toward me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t trust you not to attack me, or to tell me truly what I need to know. Words deceive. Only one thing tells the complete and honest truth.”

  I fought the urge to struggle against the vines. I couldn’t break free, and hurting myself wasn’t going to make this any easier. “I pinky promise that none of us was planning to attack you!” I protested. “My squire’s unarmed, and my Fetch is currently hard at work growing herself a new liver. How’s the regeneration going, May?”

  “Slow but steady,” she said, sounding utterly unconcerned about our current predicament. The break to argue with Simon seemed to have done her some material good; her color was better, and while I couldn’t be positive, what I could see of the hole in her abdomen through the vines looked like it had gotten smaller. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t have the strength to rush you, and I’m not the stabby one. That’s October’s job.”

  “I’m not worried about any of you now that you’re properly secured,” said Simon as he lowered his bow and walked toward me. His steps were slow and deliberate, and it would have been easy to read them as arrogant, but as I watched, I saw them for something else:

  Simon was afraid. He was afraid that if he left us with the freedom to move, we’d attack him. He was afraid we were setting him up for some sort of ambush, and it hurt my heart to watch him. He was like this because he’d cared more about saving his daughter than anything else in the world. When things got bad, he’d been unwilling to give up on family.

  I didn’t know when it had happened, and I didn’t entirely understand how it had happened, but somewher
e along the way, he’d become the Torquill brother I felt safer trusting. That didn’t mean I was actually going to do it, especially not when he had me wrapped in rose vines and held immobile, but unlike Sylvester, he had never betrayed me without good reason, and that made all the difference in the world. As Simon approached, I tensed, but forced myself not to start fighting against the vines. If I cut myself on the thorns, I’d heal almost immediately. That was the good part.

  Since he didn’t believe I was my mother’s daughter, the speed with which I healed might convince him I was lying about everything, and that I was actually a Toby-shaped thing trying to trick him.

  Given that I had always been reasonably sure he was one of the people responsible for sending a Doppelganger to my doorstep shortly after my escape from the pond, the idea had a certain beautiful irony to it. Not enough to force my hand, but enough to make me smile a little. Everything was silent as he made his way toward me. Even Quentin and May were biting their tongues for once, while Spike huddled against my vine-wrapped ankles.

  The rose goblin had an excellent sense for when I was in danger. If this had been Simon trying to trick me, Spike would have been rattling wildly. The fact that he wasn’t made me relax still further, until Simon was right in front of me, superficially cocky expression doing nothing to blunt the fear in his eyes.

  “Only one thing tells me the truth,” he said again, and made a complex gesture with his hand. The vines around me immediately constricted, thorns piercing my skin.

  Only my skin. Neither May nor Quentin made a sound. Interesting. He was trying to do as little harm as possible.

  It was hard to give him much credit for that under the circumstances. I winced as the thorns ripped into me, ripping holes in my tank top and bringing blood bubbling to the surface of my skin almost everywhere. I coughed, forcing myself not to struggle, and met his eyes as I said, “You don’t have long. I heal fast. Drink. See what you need to see, believe me, and let me take you home.”

  That last word made him wince, as if on some level he knew and understood what he had allowed the Luidaeg to do to him. But he reached into the briars around me with his free hand and grasped my wrist, pulling it through a gap in the thorns and closing his lips around my thumb.

  There was a brief jolt of magic in the air, smoke and rotten oranges and a hint of spice, like the mulled cider and sweet smoke scent that was his by right was trying to reassert itself. It was quickly washed away by the scent of blood, and a narrow ribbon of my own cut grass and copper. It did at least still smell somewhat like metal, and not entirely like a slaughterhouse. That was enough to let me relax a little.

  Not completely. He was drinking my blood and with it my memories, and there’s no way to control what a blood-worker sees when they ride the blood—at least not any way I know of; Eira has demonstrated the skill to edit her blood memories in a way I would have sworn was impossible. For all I know, I could do that also, if someone trained me. But I know that thinking too hard about the things you don’t want someone to see can cause them to rise to the surface and become the focus of the memory. So I didn’t think about all the complicated reasons I had for reaching out to Simon, or how horrified I was by this assault, or how much I hated Evening. I thought about Patrick instead. Frustrating, glorious Patrick, and his disastrous danger of a wife.

  If someone had told me a couple of years ago that a mermaid and a man who thought marrying a mermaid was a good idea would be two of my most trusted allies, I would have laughed in their face. But however mad I was at them, the Lordens were good people. Confusing, sure, and subject to a set of laws that was just different enough from the laws I had to follow that we didn’t always align, but good.

  I thought about Dean and Peter, and about the pixies in the swamp between my mother’s tower and the Luidaeg’s back door. I thought about Poppy—and maybe that was my mistake. Poppy was a member of the pixie colony Simon protected on Patrick’s behalf when Patrick married Dianda and moved under the sea. She isn’t anymore, because she gave up her pixiehood for Simon’s sake, to save him. She’s Aes Sidhe now, one of only two that I know of in the entire world.

  Simon pulled my thumb out of his mouth, blood crusting around his lips, and stared at me, honey-colored eyes gone wide and disbelieving. “Poppy?” he breathed. “You let her hurt herself to save me?”

  “She seems happy,” I said. “The Luidaeg is teaching her things. I don’t know exactly what things, because I’m not the Luidaeg’s apprentice, but Poppy’s safe and taken care of, and figuring out how to move in the world of larger fae.”

  Simon shook his head. “You should have stopped her.”

  I blinked. “Yeah, no, I needed you awake, and she’s a big girl. Bigger now than she was then, sure, but either way, she had the right to make her own choices. Wait—does this mean you remember?”

  “Remember, no; none of what I saw in your blood is a memory to me, and I don’t feel them as memories,” he said, before reaching up to wipe his mouth self-consciously with one hand. “But it was a memory to you, and as I know of no method through which you could manipulate your own memory, either you speak truly, or you are the most cunning trap that has ever been set to capture me. If the latter proves true, I would like to know, for my own sake and for the sake of my lady, who has the skill to do such things with blood.”

  “So you’ll come with us, and not threaten to elf-shoot anyone?” I asked, trying to mask my eagerness. We had a cure for elf-shot, but given the strength of what he’d supposedly brewed, I didn’t want to test it.

  “I suppose I must, if I want to know the truth of the matter,” said Simon. He stepped back, expression turning wistful. “Even if your memories lie, I believe you’re speaking truly when you tell me Patrick is . . . when you say the man I knew survived the earthquake. Your memory could have been modified and gilded like the proverbial lily. No one could have made a vision of him intimate enough to fool me. Of all the people in this world, I would always know him.”

  I wanted to ask what else he’d seen, if he knew now what we were and what we had been to one another, if he could see my mother in my face. I didn’t. Getting him to come with us was miracle enough for right now, and I didn’t want to push us too close to bringing him home.

  He snapped his fingers. The vines uncoiled from around all three of us and pulled back into the ground, leaving us free to stand on our own feet. My wounds were already healed. My shirt was still ruined.

  “You have my word that this is not some sort of trick to leave your lady unguarded, and since right now, you have my blood,” I gestured toward the red streaks on the back of his hand, “you know I’m not lying to you.”

  “I do,” he said. “And I had hoped you wouldn’t notice that.”

  “I’ve learned to pay really close attention to where my blood is going. Self-preservation,” I said. I looked down at my feet. “Spike, can you get us out of here?”

  The rose goblin rattled assent and trotted deeper into the forest, presumably to a place where the Rose Road would open. Simon watched it go.

  “That is one of Luna’s goblins, is it not?” he asked.

  “No, it’s mine,” I said. “But it was hers, before I named it. I didn’t realize when I did that rose goblins took names as a claim of ownership.” The longer I spent with Spike, the less comfortable that made me. It was intelligent enough to understand me when I spoke to it, making it at least as smart as a mortal dog, and it had access to some reasonably impressive magic tricks. Was it really right for it to be owned, by anyone?

  But it had chosen me of its own free will, and I had little doubt that if it wanted to go back to Shadowed Hills on a permanent basis, it would. I was just where it wanted to be right now.

  Sometimes being where you want to be is the most important thing of all.

  May pushed away from her tree, and Quentin fell into step behind me as Simon and I started to walk,
following the rose goblin into the gloom, leaving the slumbering form of Eira Rosynhwyr behind.

  ELEVEN

  CONVENIENTLY ENOUGH, Spike’s door back onto the Rose Roads had been tucked away in a grove overrun by roses, their flowers blooming broad and bright and perfuming the air with a scent almost identical to Evening’s magic. Simon had paused to pluck one of them and tuck it into the pocket of his shirt, a wistful look on his face. He was still her creature. He might be willing to come with us and hear what we had to say, but he was hers, because he didn’t remember how to be anything else, and we couldn’t afford to forget that.

  The new stretch of Road was carpeted in white-and-yellow roses, their petals ranging from pale cream to a shocking sunset orange so bright it probably glowed in the dark. Their perfume was brighter and fresher than the roses along the last stretch had been, and while it was still cloying, it was oddly easier for me to breathe.

  “Did you really ride Dianda down a hill?” asked Simon abruptly. When I nodded, he chuckled, and said, “I would have liked to have seen that. Your memory of the moment is of necessity less impressive than actually watching you ride a shrieking mermaid into the Bay.”

  “She didn’t enjoy it very much, no,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. He’d taken my blood by force, and I had no way of knowing what all he’d seen in my memory. I needed to be cautious with him. He was still under the Luidaeg’s spell, and I didn’t fully know what that had done, either. He hadn’t just lost his way home: he was still losing it, over and over, forever. If he started to truly believe that I was leading him to safety, he could forget everything that had happened in an instant, turning on us without remorse.

  “It had probably been decades since anyone had thought to take such liberties with her,” said Simon. “A Duchess of the Undersea is not someone to toy with, especially not one who’s been able to hold onto her domain for a full century. That long without being deposed will have shaped the already-fearsome woman I knew into a force to be reckoned with. Anyone with sense would dread her wrath.”