A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  Well, right now, they were doing a much better job of keeping us in. I took a step back, trying to see a way out of this. There wasn’t an obvious one. The fence ran all the way around the rose garden, the gates were locked, and even if they hadn’t been, they were made entirely of iron. I needed a way out of here. I’m pretty good at picking locks—it’s a skill I spent a lot of time developing when I was one of Devin’s stable of private street rats—but that wasn’t going to help if I couldn’t touch the bars without burning myself.

  Gingerly, I carried May back down to an oak tree that had been planted among the roses on the first tier. It probably wasn’t much longer for the garden, having grown and thrived until it cast a wide shadow visibly stunting the rosebushes around it. This wasn’t the Berkeley oak tree garden, and its success was going to be what inevitably condemned it to the ax. I settled May in the grass at the base of the tree, careful not to peel her out of the hide-and-seek spell I’d cast. Of the two of us, she was currently the bloodier, and the much less equipped to cope if we attracted the wrong kind of attention.

  The spell I’d spun was strong, but not subtle. It refused to split into two pieces. In the end, I peeled it off myself and settled the whole thing over May, letting her disappear from the world. I combed my fingers through my hair as I straightened, pulling it over my ears. From what I could feel of my face, I still looked enough like myself that anyone human who saw me wouldn’t jump straight to “call Tolkien, one of his elves got loose,” not when “pretty person thinks the laws don’t apply to her” was a much shorter leap.

  It’s funny that I still have trouble thinking of myself as pretty when I look so much like Mom these days. But Mom is beautiful according to any standard you want to use—delicate, refined, built on a scale humanity has never had access to—and if I look like her, I must at least qualify as pretty.

  It was an act of will to turn my back on May, especially since I knew that if anything capable of detecting her presence came along, I wouldn’t know she was gone until I came back and found my spell not covering anything at all. The fae versions of invisibility all have their issues.

  I began making my way deeper into the rose garden, looking for dancing lights where there shouldn’t have been any. It took longer than I’d expected, probably because of that wrought iron fence. Eventually, however, I saw specks of light, like a Christmas tree gone feral, buzzing and dancing through the air around a large lavender bush. I angled myself in that direction, relaxing when I confirmed that I’d found one of the local pixie flocks.

  “Hi,” I said, before I got too close. The pixies froze, some in the act of picking flowers, others hovering in midair. “I’m October Daye, and I need your help.”

  The pixies remained frozen for a few endless seconds, long enough that I began to worry they would attack me when they finally unfroze. I took a step backward, raising my hands in a defensive position. “Sorry to bother you, I’ll find another way to—”

  Wings chiming in joyous cacophony, they flung themselves at me and swirled around me in a bright spiral of glittering lights, every color of the rainbow dancing past my eyes. I tensed until I realized they weren’t attacking, only rejoicing in the movement and the moment and the wind that lifted them up and the gravity that bore them down. They began to settle on my head and shoulders, wings still chiming, and while I didn’t recognize any of them—not the way I recognized the pixies who belonged to Poppy’s original flock—they seemed pleased to see me.

  That was a nice change.

  “Hi, so, my Fetch and I are trying to get to campus,” I said. “But it’s after dark and the fence is locked, so we can’t get out of here. I can’t touch the lock long enough to pick it without burning my fingers. Do you have any ideas? I know this is an imposition, but I need your help.”

  The pixies listened solemnly, tiny faces grave, before they turned to each other and began to argue in their squeaky, high-pitched voices. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. The size difference between us was too great.

  The size difference. I stood up straighter, inspiration lighting up my eyes. I probably looked like I was having a stroke, when really I was having an epiphany. “I hate to ask this of you, and I’ll owe you, like, an entire Thanksgiving dinner prepared specifically for your flock if it’s something you can do, but you’re small enough to fit between the bars, and the flock that lives in the swamp beyond my mother’s tower used their magic to make me and my traveling companions pixie-sized once, when we stumbled into their territory uninvited. I know it’s a big request to make, but if I go get my Fetch, do you think you could make us both temporarily small enough to exit?”

  A series of loud, excited chimes followed my request as the pixies conferred among themselves, before a female pixie glowing the bright cherry-red of store-brand NyQuil launched herself off my shoulder and came to hang directly in front of my face, expression grave. She nodded, then raised her hands, palms outward. I took a quick step backward.

  “Wait!” The pixie lowered her hands, and ringed a perplexed chime. I smiled unsteadily. “I need to get my Fetch,” I said. “I left her by the big oak, and it would take too long for me to walk to her if I were your size.”

  The pixie chimed an inquisitive note. I started walking back the way I’d come, gesturing for the flock to follow. “Do you know Shade?” I asked. “She’s the local Queen of Cats. I bet she can help me find a safe place to lay out a whole Thanksgiving dinner for your flock, without attracting the attention of the mortal authorities.”

  The pixie chimed again, flying a lazy circle around my head as I walked. I took that as an affirmative. With our current communication barriers in place, it wasn’t like I could do much of anything else.

  “She isn’t a close friend or anything, but she knows who I am, and she knows I have ties to San Francisco’s Court of Cats; I think she’d be willing to help me out, if it’s for the sake of her local pixies.” I had reached the tree where May was sleeping. I reached down and felt around until my fingers hit something they tried to insist was a tree root, despite the fact that it was soft and yielding and tacky with blood. The spell I’d used to hide her was doing its best to keep her hidden, even from me.

  That’s the thing about magic. We can spin it, shape it, and put it into the world, but once it’s there, it’s going to do what it was made to do, not what we later decide we wanted. The spells are shaped by intention on the part of the caster. They aren’t changed just because we realized we were wrong.

  I hooked my fingers into the air and hissed a quick line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, focusing on how much I wanted the magic to unravel and return to its unshaped form, and let me have May back. There was a pause while the smell of cut grass and bloody copper rose around me, and I almost thought it was going to refuse. Then the spell burst like a soap bubble, taking the magic with it as it wafted back into the world around us, and May was revealed.

  As one, the pixies recoiled, their wings ringing a clarion chorus of alarm. I straightened, raising my hands.

  “Hey, hey, it’s all right! She’s alive, she’s just been elf-shot. And, you know, wounded.”

  Looking at May, it wasn’t hard to understand why the pixies reacted that way. She looked even worse now than she had before, partially because I’d had a few minutes away from the severity of her injuries. The hole in her stomach was gone, but her clothing and hair were drenched in blood, not all of which had dried. She looked like the result of a one-woman assault on an entire army, and it wasn’t clear whether she’d come out on the winning side.

  The pixies rang again, more cautiously this time, and the ones nearest to me were watching me uncertainly, like they expected me to reveal myself as a serial killer at any moment. I bent and scooped May’s body awkwardly into my arms, hefting the functionally dead weight of her as I straightened back up. Her arms dangled like the victim in a monster movie. I braced myself, fight
ing to keep us both upright, and breathed in through my nose.

  “There’s a neat little lass and her name is Mary Mac, make no mistake she’s the girl I’m gonna track,” I recited, as slowly and sonorously as I could. “Lots of other fellas try to get her on the back, but I’m thinking that they’ll have to get up early . . .”

  Magic rose, consolidated, and collapsed around me, crashing with such force that it was almost dizzying. My head gave another throb of pain, almost as an afterthought. The magic-burn from shifting my blood too quickly was still with me, but the problem now was that I didn’t know how hard to pull when I wanted to cast a simple spell.

  It didn’t matter in the moment. The magic drifted over both of us, leaving me still holding May in my arms, but leaving her entirely changed. The blood and tattered clothing were gone, as was the limp, boneless sweep of her body, replaced by a girl roughly Gillian’s age, her head propped against my shoulder, sleeping.

  I’d still have a problem if the police wanted to pick us up for her apparent public drunkenness, or if they wanted me to wake her up for some reason, but Berkeley is a college town. Students get blackout drunk sometimes, and then their friends have to carry them back to their dorms. This was cause and cover story all in one illusion.

  I turned my attention back to the pixies. “All right. We should be able to make it to campus now, if I can just get her out of here.” I walked toward the fence as I spoke, trying to get this over with faster. We’d wasted enough time already, and the urgency of the situation was starting to weigh on me.

  Simon had Quentin. Patrick might be in danger. All of us might be in danger, if Simon was able to remember enough about what was actually happening to find someone who’d have access to the elf-shot cure. This felt like a monster of my own creation, even though I knew that much of the blame for our current predicament could be laid firmly at the feet of the Firstborn, who needed to stop prowling around and trying to manipulate us all the damn time.

  Knowing something is true doesn’t make it feel true. If it did, we’d spend a lot less time pointing fingers at each other.

  The pixies looped and swirled around me, wings chiming. I offered them a smile, hoping it would look as sincere as I needed it to. “All right,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  The pixies swooped closer and closer, leaving glittering trails of pixie-sweat in the air behind them, and the ringing of their wings got louder until it sounded less like chimes than it did like the tolling of massive alarm bells, and I kept walking, but I didn’t seem to be making any progress, for all that the fence was so close that it seemed to have more than doubled in size, and I—

  Oh.

  The pixies began landing all around me, and some of them were taller than I was, their bodies glowing bright in the dim Berkeley evening. Many of them were armed, tiny knives and bows that I hadn’t been able to see well enough to notice before. I clutched May to my chest and tried to keep smiling.

  I had asked for this, after all.

  But no one ever accused me of being a genius.

  TWELVE

  THE NYQUIL-COLORED PIXIE who’d been sitting on my shoulder before gestured toward the fence as she stepped forward. “Our magic can only sustain you at this size for so long,” she said. She had a surprisingly pleasant speaking voice, low alto and sweet. It had sounded like the chittering of a chipmunk or some other small mammal when we’d been different sizes.

  We miss so much of the world around us. No matter how much attention we think we’re paying. We miss so, so much.

  “I appreciate this more than I can say,” I said, and started toward the fence again. The distance that had only seemed so reasonable before seemed like the length of a football field now. No matter. I could carry May a lot farther than that if that was what I needed to do.

  “My flock hasn’t had much interaction with you, but we’ve heard about you,” said the pixie, pacing me. “The changeling who thinks our lives are worth saving. You’re a story we’re happy to repeat. Although some of the things the other flocks say are ridiculous enough to be unbelievable.”

  “Well, that makes sense. My life can be pretty unbelievable sometimes.” I didn’t like the looks of one of the pixies who was walking with us, a hulking male with candy-pink wings and the expression of a professional wrestler getting ready to turn heel in order to win the match.

  “The Swampland flock says one of their number left them to go with you, and never returned,” said the NyQuil pixie. “They say she traded her home and harbor for the service of the sea witch and walks among the bigger people now.”

  Oh, swell. We were going to rehash this. Just what I always wanted. “Poppy felt she owed a debt to Simon Torquill for saving her flock when she was a child,” I said. “So when the magic her flock used to knock us out made him sick, she sold her own magic to the Luidaeg for a cure. She’s Aes Sidhe now, and Simon is . . .” I trailed off. How to explain what Simon was, without causing the pixies to rescind their willingness to help? “Simon is fine,” I concluded.

  The pixie blinked. “So they tell truly?” she asked, tone disbelieving.

  “I can’t say whether they tell truly about everything, since I don’t know everything they’ve been saying, but the broad strokes are probably true,” I said. “Most of the pixies I’ve known have been essentially honest.” It’s probably easier to be honest when no one understands what you’re saying. Not much benefit to falsehood. But maybe lying was just one of those habits the pixies never picked up.

  The pixie gave me a thoughtful look. “You’re not as I expected you’d be.”

  “I hope that’s a good thing.”

  “Everyone says you’re a hero. A kingbreaker. Heroes are supposed to demand, not ask. And certainly not offer to pay for what they need.”

  “Speaking of which, while I can understand you, are there any specific sides you want with your turkey dinner? I’ll make sure you get the standards, but I can’t predict anything I don’t know about.”

  “Can we have real cranberry sauce?” asked a pale blue pixie. “The kind you make yourself, not the kind that comes out of a can.”

  “You can, although it won’t be the kind I make myself, because I don’t know how to make cranberry sauce,” I said. We had reached the looming wall of the fence. The lowest bar was slightly below my waist. I’d have to climb over it. “But I can promise homemade cranberry sauce as a part of your payment, absolutely.”

  I stopped, looking at the fence, and adjusted my grasp on May. The NyQuil-colored pixie followed my gaze, smirked, and snapped her fingers. “Zinnia, get her over the fence,” she commanded.

  Most of Faerie follows a strict set of rules where names are concerned, doing our absolute best never to name anyone after anyone else, save by inference; I’m October in part because I’m technically a Torquill, and Simon and Sylvester’s sister had been a woman named September. Also because my mother’s first daughter was August, and I’d been born as part of a foolish attempt to patch the hole August’s absence had torn in the world. Pixies don’t follow those rules. Their lives are too short, on average; even when you’re a glowing, flying, magic-using person the size of a Skipper doll, you’re still the size of a Skipper doll, and the world is filled with terrible dangers, many of which can be traced back to fae my usual size. So they name their children after things the same color as their wings, keeping their rosters simple, and they never retire a name. They’d run out.

  The scowling pink pixie scowled even more before flinging himself into the air, swooping over, and grabbing me under the armpits, not pausing to ask if I was ready. I squawked, startled by the speed of his movements, but I didn’t lose my grip on May, not even as he carried us over the iron crossbar of the fence and set me—none too gently—on my feet at the edge of the sidewalk.

  “You may have convinced Rose that you’re our friend, but bigs aren’t for trusting, never,” he said, spinni
ng me to face him. “You’d best not be around here again in a hand of days, asking for more, or it’s going to end bad for you. Understand?”

  Pixie idiom can be hard to follow—their grasp of grammar is fluid at best—but I’ve spent enough time around Poppy to have a pretty decent idea of what’s being said, usually. “Understand,” I said. “I assume Rose is the red pixie who helped convince the rest of you to make us small? Please let her know I appreciate it, and I’ll arrange delivery of your promised dinner as soon as I can talk to Shade. Now, if you can just re-big us, we’ll get out of your hair, and you can have your evening back.”

  The pixie—Zinnia—scowled again before leaping into the air and returning to where Rose and the others waited. Rose smiled and clapped her hands, and I abruptly couldn’t make out the expression on her face anymore. It was too small, and she was too far away, a diminutive figure standing in the scrubby grass on the other side of the fence.

  I glanced around me as I straightened, checking to make sure no one had seen my amazing Alice in Wonderland impression. Pixies are protected from mortal eyes by their innate wild magic, which is less controlled than the magic of larger fae, but is older, and keeps them safely hidden. Fae like me or May lost that ability a long time ago. We can be seen.

  Fortunately, this time, there was no one else on the sidewalk, and if any of the people living in the nearby houses had security cameras pointed at the street, they would doubtless attribute my sudden appearance to a glitch in their software. Humans are predictable that way. At least we looked like we belonged to their number. I adjusted my grasp on May once again and began plodding toward campus.