The Winter Long (31 page)

There were no guards at the vast doors to the throne room. That didn't strike me as a good sign. I pushed the left-hand door open, trying to keep my arms from shaking under its weight, and started into the familiar vast, over-decorated space on the other side. My sneakers were silent against the checkerboard marble of the floor.

And there, on the other side of the room, in the throne that was meant to belong to Sylvester Torquill, sat Evening Winterrose. The sight of her took my breath away. Even seeing her in Goldengreen hadn't prepared me for this, for Evening in her element, strong and untouchable and restored to us, because even death couldn't hold her, not
Evening
. I'd been foolish to think otherwise.

A small part of me—the part that had struggled against the mists in Blind Michael's lands and the sweet spell of love cast by my Gean-Cannah almost-lover—screamed that the floor wasn't really falling away, that Evening wasn't really the most breathtaking thing I'd ever seen. This was all trickery, treachery, the sort of illusions that I'd encountered before.

She was wearing a red satin dress, the color of rose petals, the color of blood on the snow, the color of apple skins in the winter. It was a confection of floor-length layers and gathered falls. Her seamstress had been clever, because when Evening moved—even the slightest twitch—all that gathered cloth fluttered like feathers in the wind, revealing myriad small cuts and smaller dagger-points of deeper red silk, red as danger, red as dying. Against the cloth, her skin truly was as white as snow, and her coal-black hair seemed on the verge of bursting into flames. Then Evening looked at me and did the most terrible thing of all.

She smiled.

“There you are,” she said sweetly. “I was wondering when you'd find it in your heart to come and visit me. A little bird told me you'd stopped by the knowe and then left without even saying hello. Really, October, is that any way to treat someone who's been your friend for as long as I have? It seems uncommonly rude. I always thought you were more polite than that. It seems I overestimated your mother's teaching of you.”

The urge to abase myself was strong. I dug my fingernails into my palms, bearing down until the pain allowed me to center myself and say, in a tense voice, “That's Sylvester's throne.”

“What, this old thing? He said that I could borrow it for a time, since my own holdings have been closed to me.” A frown flitted across her face. “That was really most unkind of you, to help that half-breed stripling take my place as his own. What must his parents have been thinking? Land and sea together, it's a mixture meant for disaster, don't you agree?” Her words were directed to me, but her eyes went to the Luidaeg, making it clear who her message was really intended to reach.

“That's Sylvester's throne,” I repeated. “He didn't give it to you willingly. If you have to compel someone to give you what you want, it's not really yours.”

“Isn't it? Because it seems pretty real to me.” She leaned back in the throne, resting her hands on the arms like she had been sitting there for years. “It doesn't matter how you get the things you own. What matters is that you keep them.”

There was something very wrong with her logic. I swallowed hard, and asked, “Why are you here, Evening? You weren't dead, but you let everyone in the Mists believe you were. You left us. Why are you back?” Tybalt and the Luidaeg were a silently reassuring presence at my back. I wondered why they weren't saying anything, but only distantly; the bulk of my attention was reserved for Evening. Even though my head felt heavy and stuffed with cotton, I knew that taking my eyes off of her would be a terrible idea.

The smell of winter roses was so heavy in the throne room that it was cloying, worse even than the smell of the Luidaeg's magic in the enclosed cab of my car had been. I dug my nails a bit deeper into my palms, trying to find that pure vein of agony that would grant me laser focus, even if it made me suffer later.

“Come here, October,” said Evening. “Let me see you.”

I had taken two steps before I realized I was going to move. “Why should I?” I asked, stumbling to a stop.

“Because you don't want to make me come to you,” she said.

That was so reasonable that I started walking again. I tried to make my legs stop moving, and they refused me; they had listened once, and it wasn't their fault if Evening made a better case than I did. My head was swimming, as much with the smell of roses and smoke as with the brute reality of her presence, and all too shortly I was standing on the dais in front of her, near enough that she could almost have reached out to touch me.

“Oh, rose and thorn, you've changed,” she said, and stood, stepping forward so that we were almost nose to nose. It was startling to realize that we were virtually the same height. She had always seemed like she should have been taller than me when she was standing on her own. “Do you even know how much you've changed? Don't answer that.”

To my dismay, I found that I couldn't. The Luidaeg had said that Evening would have to work hard if she wanted to have me; well apparently, I had been deemed worth the effort. Lucky, lucky me.

Evening reached out and ran her hands down my hair, the fingers of her left hand lingering on the tip of one sharply-pointed ear. Her skin was cool and faintly silky, like the petals of a rose that had been blooming entirely in the shade. Whatever masks she'd once worn for my benefit, they were disappearing now, washed away and replaced by the simple reality of what she was. Firstborn. Fairest of them all. “Look at you,” she mused aloud. “I'd never catch you so easily now. Your arrogance is the same, but your blood . . . do you know what you are?”

The feeling of her hands on my skin made me want to submit, to bow down and do anything she asked of me. I was no descendant of Titania; I shouldn't have felt her presence that strongly, even through the bond of fealty I shared with Sylvester.
Her blood
, wailed that still, small place in my mind, the one that people like her never seemed to quite touch.
You drank her blood, and that makes her hold on you stronger.

The things that voice was saying made me wish, more than anything, that I had a time machine and the ability to go back and punch my past self in the nose. I swallowed hard to clear the dryness from my throat and said, “I'm me.”

“You? What a charming statement of identity. What, precisely, are
you
?”

The smell of smoke was getting stronger, setting off alarm bells that weren't connected to any specific danger. I swallowed again before I said, “I'm Toby. October Christine Daye, Knight of Lost Words. Hero in the Mists.”

“New titles won't impress me, child. You're telling me who you are—or who you think you are—but you're not telling me
what
you are.”

I took a hard breath. “Changeling.” I had to get away from her. I was drowning in her eyes. Obedience is a hard habit to break, and her hands had held my strings for much too long, even before I had tasted her blood and given her another way of controlling me. There had been a time when I
enjoyed
being her plaything. At least she'd treated me like a person, most of the time. I was coming to see that all of that had been a lie, and it was the real Evening who stood in front of me now, in this room that smelled like smoke and roses.

Wait—smoke?
Evening's magic didn't smell like smoke.

But Simon's did.

“Changeling?” asked Evening mockingly, yanking my attention back to her. “Born of Faerie and human both? Is that what you are?”

“Yes,” I managed.

“Can you even remember what humanity felt like anymore?” she asked. The danger in her tone was impossible to ignore, and it triggered the part of me that was more interested in staying alive than anything else. I jerked away from her like I'd been stung, nearly falling off the dais.

At least that got her hands off of my skin. “I'm still part human! I remember my humanity.”

“How can you remember something you've never had? Humanity has never been your cross to bear, and as for the contamination in your blood, you've been giving it up freely, more and more with every day that passes.”

I took another step backward, my eyes narrowing. “I didn't give it up freely.”

“Didn't you?”

Her clear amusement made me pause. Had my humanity really been stolen from me, the way I told myself it was? The first time, when I was elf-shot and dying, maybe I hadn't had much of a choice. When the options are “die” or “become a little harder to kill,” well. I'm not completely stupid. The second time, it had been to save myself from the goblin fruit that was eating me alive. I'd only changed to survive.

Standing a little bit straighter, I said, “It doesn't matter. I'm myself. That's who I've always been and who I'll always be, no matter what my blood says about me.” The universe could do whatever it wanted to me—it would anyway, whether or not I gave it permission. But I always knew who I was.

Evening frowned sharply, and I fought back the impulse to cringe. She had always been commanding. Now, stripped of whatever illusions she'd used to make herself fade into the fabric of Faerie, she was terrifying. “Will you really be your own creature?” she asked.

I forced myself to meet her eyes, and not flinch as I watched frost spreading across her pupils. “I am Amandine's daughter, and I belong to no one.”

“Things change, October. You belong to me. You used to be better about accepting that, but I suppose I left you without a leash for too long, didn't I? I'm sorry about that. I know how confusing that sort of thing can be.” She smiled. “There's no sense in fighting me. It won't do you any good. Your fealty belongs to me, through the chain descending from your liege, and I have long since taught you to obey me.”

Pain is the body's way of telling you to stop doing something. I dug my nails still deeper into my palms, and felt that glorious moment where the skin gave way and the pain became ten times more intense. The smell of blood assaulted my nose an instant later, strong and hot and all the better because it was my own.

I hate the sight of my own blood, and I've never been that fond of the taste, but when I brought my bleeding hand to my mouth, it tasted like freedom for the first time. I drank as deeply as I could before the wounds started closing, and then whirled, Evening still staring at me in slack-jawed disbelief as I flung myself from the dais—

—only to freeze when I saw Simon Torquill standing behind Tybalt, his hands raised in a gesture that I recognized as a spell in progress. Tybalt's back was rigid, his arms pressed down at his sides like they were held by some invisible rope, and he looked like he was choking. That explained the smell of smoke. What it didn't explain was the Luidaeg standing only a few feet away, a snarl on her lips and her hands curled into helpless fists at her sides.

I started moving again, running toward them with my bloody fingers outstretched. I'd ripped one of Simon's spells to pieces already. I could do it again, if I could just figure out how to begin. I never got the chance. One of those wind-ropes drew suddenly tight around my ankles, and I was moving too fast to stop myself; I lost my balance, and gravity carried me down to the marble floor. I tried to raise my hands to catch myself, and discovered that I couldn't move my arms, either.

That wasn't as smart a move as Evening probably thought it was. My face bore the brunt of the impact, and I felt the squishy crunch as the cartilage in my nose gave way. Between that and my lips being smashed up against my teeth, there was suddenly more blood than I needed for any single spell right there where I wanted it: flowing into my mouth.

“Really, October,” said Evening, her words accompanied by the soft sound of slippers on marble. “You do get
so
worked up over things. What good did you expect this little rebellion to do? You're not going to save your friends. You can't even save yourself.”

Swallowing the blood that was seeping from my lips was easier than swallowing the blood running down the back of my throat from my battered nose: I almost gagged, but kept gulping. The pain was enough to keep me from falling back under Evening's spell, at least for the moment. I knew it wasn't going to last. I needed to gather my resources fast, and whatever I was going to do, I needed to do it before I stopped bleeding. Time to gamble.

“You're not allowed to move against the children of Titania, but you
are
allowed to come to the aid of the children of Oberon!” I shouted, lifting my head off the floor and focusing on the Luidaeg. Her eyes widened slightly, despite whatever spell Evening was using to bind her. Now I just had to pray that I was right. “He's my grandfather! Help me!”

Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

I've never been a lip-reader. I took a split-second to think about what she might be saying, and then shouted again, “Help me!”

The Luidaeg coughed. It was a small sound, almost obscured by Evening's scoffing and the slap of her shoes against the marble. She was almost on top of me. I was running out of time.

Then, voice almost inaudible, the Luidaeg said, “Ask me again.”

I smiled, showing bloody teeth. Third time's the charm, especially in Faerie. “Help me,” I said.

And the Luidaeg moved.

There was nothing violent about the way she crossed the marble floor; she didn't descend like an avalanche or strike like a thunderstorm, but there was something so primal about it that for those few seconds, she didn't look like flesh—she looked like nature itself coming to life and stepping in to intervene. She was a wave on the ocean, she was a ripple on a pond, and it only seemed to take the blink of an eye before she was in front of me, leaning down and offering her hand.

“You are my niece, and I am your aunt, and when you ask my help, it is within my power to give it,” she said, smiling. Her teeth weren't bloody, but they were sharper than they had any right to be, more like the teeth of some deep and unspoken sea beast than anything that should be allowed to wear a human shape and walk in human cities. She spread the fingers of her outstretched hand a little wider. “All you have to do is let me.”