The Winter Long (33 page)

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.

M
Y 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.

Voices drifted through the wall of thorns ahead of me. I stopped where I was, barely daring to breathe, as I strained to hear what they were saying.

“—the only one who's suffered? You're very wrong about that,
sister
.” Evening's words were punctuated by the sound of wood stiffening and breaking off with a crack. A gust of frozen roses washed over me. I fought the urge to sneeze.

“No one had to suffer at all,” countered the Luidaeg's voice. “This has always been on you, Eira. You were the one who couldn't be patient, who couldn't see the value of waiting on the greater good.”

“I've killed you once since I came back,” spat Evening. “Don't think you can stop me from doing it again.”

That was it: I'd heard enough. I shoved my way through the thorns with my good arm, ignoring the way they pierced and tore my skin—now that I was revealing myself to Evening, a little blood could only help me—and into the clearing on the other side of the wall.

I found myself standing at the middle of a large clear space in the forest. Not naturally clear, if the broken trees and shattered stumps were anything to go by, but that wasn't the worst problem currently facing me. No, that honor was reserved for the two angry Firstborn who were now flanking me. The Luidaeg was to my left, her clothing torn to reveal the dark green scales that were now covering her skin. Evening was to my right, her red dress dyed even darker by sweat and water and blood.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“What are
you
doing here?” Evening spat, eyes narrowing as she took in my bedraggled appearance and motionless right arm. “You can't reach this place. It is forbidden to your kind.”

“You're a little off the mark there, Eira,” said the Luidaeg. She actually sounded like she was enjoying herself. That made one of us. “The Thorn Road wasn't forbidden when Annis died, it was sealed. There's a difference. If someone can open the doors, they're welcome to commit suicide by walking through them.”

Evening's head whipped around, her narrow-eyed glare transferring to the Luidaeg. “Stay out of this, Antigone.”

“I would, if you hadn't dragged me here and kept trying to kill me.” The Luidaeg folded her arms. “That's what you always do, you know. Drag me places and try to kill me. You should really get a new routine. Something more interesting and modern than sororicide.”

I blinked. The Luidaeg could be hard to deal with sometimes, and I'd never known her to take a challenge lying down, but she didn't sound like herself. The way she was mouthing off to a greater power made her sound more like, well, me.

She caught me looking at her and winked broadly before adding, “Maybe you could take up needlepoint. You know, a nice handicraft that wouldn't leave bodies scattered everywhere when you were finished.”

Evening made an incoherent sound of rage as she whirled and hurled a blast of ice at the Luidaeg. The Luidaeg didn't dodge: she just raised her crossed arms, and the blast rebounded off the air in front of her, freezing the nearest patches of thorn solid. I blinked again, this time with understanding. Whatever fight they'd been having before I arrived, it had changed when I entered the scene. The Luidaeg was trying to protect me, and if there was one thing my method of dealing with a greater threat was good at, it was drawing focus.

Too bad I couldn't let her die again for my sake. “Evening, stop,” I said. “Just stop. I don't understand why you're doing this, but I know that you're not a bad person. You're just . . . I don't even know. You're my friend. Friends don't do this sort of thing.”

“Your
friend
?” Evening turned back to me, an astonished look on her face. “Is that really what you think, October? That we're
friends
? We were never friends. I wouldn't lower myself to form that sort of bond with someone like you.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Someone like me?”

“You're a half-breed. A mongrel. You should never have existed, in this world or any other. I knew Amandine was perverse, but I had no idea she would lower herself to lying with a human before the day that news of your birth was brought to me. As if it were something to celebrate! As if I should have rejoiced in a new niece who carried the stink of mortality in her veins.” The air around Evening's hands began to crackle with cold. “You should have been killed in your cradle, rather than allowed to live and taint our bloodline with your filth.”

“Huh,” I said. “That's funny, because I mean, you had the hope chest. The whole time, you had the hope chest. You could have pulled the human out of me while I was still a baby, and I would never have known any better. But you didn't. You left me the way I was, and you let Mom have me. It seems weird.”

Evening's lip curled in a snarl. “Don't talk about things you don't understand.”

“What, the hope chest? I understand it. I've used it, several times. It knows me.” I held out my good left hand, fingers spread. “This is not the skin I wore when you left me, Evening. You really should have made sure I was dead. You should have killed me yourself, if that was what it took.”

“She can't!” crowed the Luidaeg, her joy coloring her words until they were like fireworks in the dark forest night.

I turned toward her. “What?”

“She can take you, if you let her, but she can't touch you. Can you, Eira?” The Luidaeg began walking toward us. She was limping slightly, although she was working hard to conceal it, much as I was trying not to show how badly my broken arm still hurt. “Our father made sure of that before he left, because he recognized that maybe leaving a sociopath in a position to wipe out the competition was a bad idea.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She can't touch Amy either,” said the Luidaeg.

“Shut your mouth,” spat Evening.

“She doesn't like being limited,” said the Luidaeg.

“I said
be quiet
!” Evening whirled, hurling another blast of ice at the Luidaeg. Again, the other woman deflected her attack—but this time it seemed to take more out of her, leaving her shoulders drooping while Evening began to fill her hands with cold for a third time. “You are not a part of this. You should have stayed dead.”

“I've never been good at ‘should haves,'” said the Luidaeg.

“I'd like a time-out here,” I said. “Does someone want to explain what's going on? Because this whole situation is getting damned difficult to follow, and I'd really appreciate some footnotes.” I drew the silver knife from my belt with my uninjured hand, shifting so that I was holding it behind my back. I wasn't sure what good it would do me—no matter what I did to Evening, I couldn't kill her—but holding it made me feel a little better.