The Winter Long

THIRTEEN

“BUT . . . BUT YOU . . .” I STAMMERED, BEFORE words deserted me and left me speechless, cold, and confused. Evening raised her eyebrows, giving me an impatient look as familiar as it was disorienting. This couldn’t be happening. None of this was even remotely possible. I seized on that fact and wailed, “You’re dead! You can’t be here, because you’re dead!”

“That was the rumor, and yet.” Evening spread her hands. “Here I am.”

She looked exactly like she had the last time I’d seen her, before her murder had yanked me out of my self-imposed exile and back into Faerie, like it or not. Her hair was down, falling to her waist in an inky wave, and she was wearing a dark brown velvet dress with a white lace accent panel down the front, cinched at the waist like something stolen from a production of Wuthering Heights.

“Here you are,” I parroted numbly. Then I paused, eyes narrowing. “But this isn’t possible. Whoever hired you gave you the wrong face to borrow, lady.”

Evening blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve had doppelgangers used against me before. If your employer wanted you to achieve your mission without attracting attention, they should have suggested you mimic somebody who’d been dead for a little less time. Like, I don’t know, no time at all.” I drew my knife, keeping my eyes on Evening as I called, “Dean? Everybody okay over there?”

“I’ve had better days,” he said, almost laconically. “You’re all wet.”

“Yeah, well, I stopped off to talk to your mother. She’s a little concerned about the locked wards on your knowe.”

“The knowe is mine, not his, as well you know,” snapped Evening. “What’s more, the wards were closed by my hand, and because I needed to determine what had gone awry here in my absence. How did you get inside?”

I frowned, looking past her to Dean. “Is she telling the truth? Did she close the wards?”

“She came in through the cliffside entrance,” said Marcia. “She just walked in like she owned the place. We were in the courtyard, and . . . and . . .”

“And I reacted to a home invasion—to vagrancy—as I saw fit,” said Evening. “The law allows me to defend my home.”

“This isn’t your home!” snapped Dean. “I’m the Count here, and you’re a trespasser who is sorely trying my patience!”

Evening started to turn toward him, the smell of roses and snow wisping through the air like the beginnings of a venomous prayer. I gasped. I couldn’t stop myself.

Doppelgangers can steal faces. They can mimic a person to the point where that person’s loved ones would never know the difference. But the one thing no one can mimic is the scent of someone else’s magic. Even if they share an element—roses are common, for example—they’ll never be able to get the exact balance right. A person’s magic is a glimpse into their soul.

“Oak and ash,” I breathed, everything else forgotten as I stared at the miracle in front of me. “Evening. How are you alive?”

Evening stopped mid-turn and swiveled back toward me, a smug smile twisting at the corners of her lips. “Oh, now you believe that it’s me? What have I done to earn this honor?”

“Your magic started to rise,” I said, taking a step forward. My waterlogged sneakers squelched unpleasantly. “Roses and snow. You’re you. There’s no one else you could be. But how . . . this isn’t possible. You died. You cursed me, and then you died.”

“Did I?” She put a hand on her hip, Dean and the others apparently forgotten now that she had the opportunity to needle me. That, too, was familiar. Evening Winterrose had been the best enemy I’d ever had, always ready with a taunt or a harsh word that would still somehow manage to set me on the proper path. “I cursed you, yes, because I was afraid that ruffian Devin was going to try something, and I needed backup. If you’d been answering your phone that night, I wouldn’t have been forced to go so far. But I seriously doubt that I died.”

“The night-haunts came for your body,” I said. “That constituted proof of death to me.”

“The night-haunts can be bribed, if you know what they desire,” said Evening, dismissing my evidence with a wave of her hand. “As for the rest of it, I think it’s fairly clear that I’m alive. I was attacked in my apartment, and wounded to the point where the night-haunts came. It took me some time to recover. When I did, I returned to my knowe to finish the healing process, and found it infested with vermin. Perhaps now that you’re here, you can convince the vermin to leave.”

“She means us, Toby,” called Marcia. Her voice was surprisingly steady, given the circumstances. “We’re the vermin, and she wants to kick us out of our home.”

“Uh-uh, little girl,” said Evening, half-turning. “This is my home. You’re merely the raccoons that moved into the attic while I was away.”

“Your curse nearly killed me,” I said. “You’re telling me you didn’t even mean to do that? That you were never really in danger?”

“You know, October, it’s considered rude to carry on multiple conversations at one time,” said Evening, attention shifting back to me. “Yes, I was attacked, yes, I cursed you, yes, I lived. I’m terribly sorry if my brief convalescence has inconvenienced you in some way. It was only three years. Barely enough time for moss to grow, and yet I come back to find you puffed up on ideas of heroism, and these people living in my knowe. It’s enough to make me sick. Things are going to have to change around here, starting in this room.”

“It’s not your knowe anymore, if it ever was,” said Dean.

Evening sighed, tilting her head back until her face was pointed at the ceiling. “You see what I have to deal with?” she demanded. “Uppity changelings and mouthy mixed-bloods, and for what? To have the proper order of things restored? Faerie has become a madhouse, and I seem to be the only guard left on the asylum staff.”

I frowned. Evening had never been particularly nice to me—“nice” wasn’t really in her vocabulary—but she’d never been this outright cruel before. She’d always looked down on me for being a changeling, of course. That was normal among the purebloods, and I’d barely noticed it at the time.

Maybe my standards had improved since then.

“He’s right,” I said. “This is his knowe. Actually.”

Evening lowered her head, turning a blank-eyed look on me. “How do you reach that conclusion, October dear?”

“Goldengreen is a fiefdom of the Kingdom of the Mists,” I said. “That has never been questioned, and you swear your fealty to the throne. When you died—and everyone believed you were dead, whether or not that was true—the County passed to me, as payment for services rendered. I passed the County to Dean Lorden, as part of a peace brokerage between the Kingdom of the Mists and the Undersea Kingdom of Leucothea. It was acknowledged by the then-Queen of the Mists, who was later found to be illegitimate, and then acknowledged again by Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists, after she officially took her father’s throne. So by any line of title you care to follow, this knowe is Dean’s. The High King might be willing to uphold your claim to the fiefdom, since you’re not dead and all, but you’d have to ask him.”

“I see,” said Evening, sounding faintly stunned. Her eyes narrowed as she considered me. “You’ve changed a great deal in these past three years, October. I didn’t expect it of you, not at this late date. You seemed bent on a life of glorious mediocrity, like your mother.”

“Yeah, well, I owe it all to you,” I said. My stomach was churning. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to laugh, cry, hug her, or throw my knife at her head. Evening was the one who’d helped me when I’d first returned from the pond. She’d been the one to take me to a motel and talk me through those horrible days when I didn’t know what year it was or whether I would ever see my family again. She’d forced me back into Faerie by getting herself killed, and I both loved and hated her for that. Now here she was, standing in front of me, and I had no living idea what I was supposed to do next.

And then there was the body in the courtyard. Thinking of that pale, slightly curled hand reminded me of the sealed wards, and the feeling of being slapped out of the Shadow Roads by a stronger magic than that of a King of Cats running through his own domain.

My fingers tightened on the grip of my knife.

“I see,” said Evening, apparently picking up on the gesture. “If that’s how things are to be, then that’s how things are to be. A pity. I had hoped we could do this without fighting. I did so enjoy being your friend, October.” She raised her hand, the smell of snow and roses rising faster this time, until it filled the room.

I braced myself, preparing to grab whatever spell she threw at me and fling it back at her. It had worked with Simon; maybe I could do it again. To my surprise, she simply turned, flicking out her hands like she was trying to dry them off. Dean wobbled. Then, without fanfare, he and all his subjects—except, inexplicably, for Marcia—fell backward, into the water. Marcia cried out, dropping to her knees and trying to lift her liege’s head out of the water.

Evening turned back to me and smiled. “There we are. You can be angry with me, attack me even, for the crime of leaving you, but you’ll be leaving all these people to drown. Or you can play the hero, rush to their aid, and know that I will simply walk away unchallenged. The choice is yours.” She started walking calmly toward me.

I gaped at her, unable to process what was happening. The Evening I’d known would never have—but as I was coming to learn, I didn’t know a lot of people as well as I’d always thought I did. Marcia was still crying, an increasing edge of hysteria coloring her voice as she struggled to keep Dean from drowning. No one was helping the rest of them. No one was going to help the rest of them if I didn’t do something.

“Damn you, Evening,” I snarled, and ran past her to the water. Marcia was sobbing as I pulled Dean out of her arms and hauled him up onto dry land. “Get the next one!” I barked, pausing only long enough to check that he was still breathing before I splashed back out to grab the next of the floating bodies.

I heard the sound of footsteps on the redwood deck behind me stop for a moment, and Evening’s voice said, “I’ll be back later, to discuss the matter of my missing property. If you survived my binding, you must have found it.” The footsteps resumed.

I had other things to worry about. Evening’s spell seemed to have slowed the breathing of the people it affected, at least a little; that was the only reason no one drowned before Marcia and I could finish dragging almost a dozen unconscious fae back to safety. She bent forward, resting her hands on her knees as she struggled to catch her breath. I turned and looked back toward the stairs.

Evening was gone. That wasn’t much of a surprise.

I walked down the stretch of beach to Dean and nudged him with my toe. “Wake up,” I snapped. “I have no idea what’s going on, but you need to open the wards before your mother starts attacking the walls with a kraken or something.” I could feel the emotional collapse nudging around the edges of my consciousness, prodding me with the reminder of everything I’d paid to be standing here in shoes filled with water, trying to wake up a teenage Count. He was barely older than Quentin . . . I nudged him harder, trying to swallow the lump that was forming in my throat. “Wake up.”

Dean groaned.

“Guess that worked,” I said, and took a step back. “Hey. Count Lorden. Drop the wards, I need to talk to your mother.”

“Wha’?” Dean opened his eyes, blinking at me. Then he bolted upright, feeling around in the sand until his hand hit his trident. He pulled it to his chest, virtually aiming it at me. “What happened? Who was that woman? Where is she?”

“What happened was—don’t point that thing in my direction unless you want me to shove it somewhere that isn’t medically recommended—that woman was Evening Winterrose, former Countess of Goldengreen, and she . . . she left.” With no more fanfare than that, my knees gave out, dropping me onto my butt in the sand. My feet wound up back in the water. Somehow, that seemed like the least of my concerns. “She hit you all with some kind of knockout spell so that I’d have to choose between stopping her and saving you, and she left.”

“Toby?” The voice was Marcia’s, but it seemed very far away. The numbness that had been protecting me since Dianda dragged me out of the water was finally cracking into pieces and falling away, leaving me feeling naked and exposed to the elements. “Are you okay?”

“We fell, Marcia.” I looked down at the sandy beach in front of me, and considered the virtues of lying down on it, never to get up again. “She closed the wards, and we fell out of the sky. I couldn’t . . . their hands. I couldn’t keep hold of their hands.” A sob was threatening to rise and overwhelm me. I fought it for as long as I could, struggling to keep it contained, but it was too late. Too much had happened, and while maybe I could have stayed in denial for a little longer, the sight of Evening had broken some inherent part of my heart so quickly and so unexpectedly that everything else was tumbling uncontrollably downward. “They were gone so fast.”

“I’m going to get my mom,” said Dean, sounding alarmed. The sound of splashing followed his words as he scrambled to his feet and ran off into the water. I didn’t raise my head.

Then hands were on my shoulders, and Marcia was asking softly, “Who fell, Toby? Whose hands couldn’t you hold onto?”

I closed my eyes. “Quentin. Tybalt. They . . .” The rest of the sentence wouldn’t come. I started to sob instead, great, unsteady braying sounds. Silent tears were for smaller losses. This was too much, it was too big; it was going to consume the entire world. I leaned against Marcia, letting her put her arms around me, and just cried.

Evening was alive. Tybalt and Quentin were dead. The world made no sense anymore, and none of the places I should have been able to run were safe for me—not Shadowed Hills, not my mother’s tower, and not home. All the work I’d done since I’d returned from the pond was for nothing. I was alone. I was always going to wind up like this: sitting in icy water and utterly alone, no matter how many people were standing around me.

Marcia held me until the tears ran out. She didn’t try to make me talk after that first broken, half-comprehensible confession; she was too smart for that. Instead, she just knelt in the sand beside me and let me weep myself dry. I kept on sobbing after that. The sea could stand in for the tears that I could no longer produce. They were essentially the same thing, after all.

“Aw, shell and stone,” said a new voice. I heard Dianda pull herself up onto the sand beside me, and Marcia unwound her arms from my shoulders. Her relatively gentle embrace was replaced by a rougher, wetter one as the Merrow’s strong arms pulled me to her. “Toby, I’m sorry. We didn’t find them. I’m so sorry.”

I’d thought there were no more tears anywhere in my body. I was wrong. Dianda spoke, and suddenly I could cry again, doubling over until she was the only thing holding me upright. I had grieved before. I knew what loss felt like. But nothing, nothing, had ever felt like this.

“The sea will rock their bones in the cradle of the currents,” said Dianda, with the sort of sweet, ritual lilt to her words that parents use when talking to children. It would probably have been comforting if I’d been a daughter of the Undersea, raised to that kind of loss and that kind of sea foam immortality. But I wasn’t, and so I cried harder, causing Dianda to make a wordless sound of frustrated confusion and hold me even tighter.

Running footsteps on the deck caught my ear—some things can’t be ignored after you’ve lived the kind of life I have, no matter how much I might want to shut them out—but I didn’t raise my head or open my eyes. Dean had a security force, and he wouldn’t be caught off guard a second time in a single morning. Let him deal with whatever this was. He was the Count of Goldengreen, after all.

“Toby!”

My head snapped up, eyes opening. The bright light of the cove room nearly blinded me for a few seconds. By the time it cleared, I had found the source of the voice, and the blurriness faded to reveal Raj, Tybalt’s adopted nephew and future King of Cats, standing just outside the reach of the water. His glass-green eyes were wide, and his narrow chest was heaving from the exertion of his run. My heart sank. I was going to have to tell him. I hadn’t even reached the point of fully telling myself, and I was going to have to tell him, because I was his friend and he was Quentin’s friend, and I owed him the news from my own lips.

“Raj.” I pulled away from Dianda, noticing distractedly that she was in her natural form, the jeweled sweep of her tail curled underneath her like a cushion, and staggered to my feet. The ritual words that should have been used to announce a death to a member of the family weren’t there, they wouldn’t come; they had fled into some dark and hallowed place where I was not allowed to follow. So, instead, I took a step toward him, and trusted the bleak, broken look on my face to say all the things that my lips couldn’t.

Raj blinked at me, eyes widening briefly. Then, to my enormous surprise, relief washed across his features and he dove forward, risking the water in order to throw his arms around my waist and shout, “You’re okay! You’re—all right, you’re soaking wet and that’s horrible, but you’re not hurt! I’m not going to get skinned when I come home without you!” There was a note of forced joviality in his voice, barely concealing real, concrete relief. “Are you done doing whatever it is you’ve been doing here? Because I’m supposed to take you back to the Court of Cats.”

My stomach sank as I realized I had no idea what the funeral rites of the Cait Sidhe entailed. Maybe Raj was here to take me back to the Court of Cats for his coronation, since I was technically Tybalt’s consort. “I . . . Raj, I don’t think I can . . .”

“What?” Raj pulled away, frowning at me. He left his arms clasped around my waist, like he was afraid I was going to run away if he let go for even a second. “Are you doing something here that’s too important to leave? Because it looks like you’re going wading with mermaids, and you can do that later. You know, for somebody who hates fish, you spend a remarkable amount of time with them socially.”

I stared at him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What?” Raj frowned, gathering his princely imperiousness around himself like a cloak—although he still didn’t let me go. “What do you mean, what’s wrong with me? You’re the one sitting in the water and refusing to come to the Court of Cats like a sensible person.”

“I’m not Cait Sidhe, Raj,” I said, frustrated. “I had no way of getting there, even if I’d wanted to.”

“I know, which is why they sent me to find you.” His princely stoicism wobbled, revealing first relief, and then something deeper, something he probably hadn’t intended to ever let me see: grief, raw and bleeding like an open wound. “You couldn’t get to the Court of Cats on your own, and we were so scared, Toby. They said you all fell into the water together, and then you were just gone.” He lunged into another hug, burying his face against my sternum. I would have slapped most teenage boys for trying that, but the gesture was so feline that I couldn’t view it as anything but what it so clearly was: a request for comfort.

I put my arms around him, lowering my face until my cheek touched the top of his head. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I just . . . I can’t, Raj. I can’t go there yet. I don’t know if I ever can.”

“October.” A hand touched my back. I raised my head to find Marcia standing next to me, a concerned look in her eyes. “I don’t think you’re listening to each other. You’re both scared and shaken, and you aren’t really paying attention to what’s happening. You’re too busy paying attention to what you’re afraid of.”

“What do you—”

“Tell Raj why you don’t want to go to the Court of Cats.” There was a note of command in her voice. I’d grown accustomed to taking orders from her during the time we spent together at Goldengreen: she might be thin-blooded and only a quarter fae, but she pretty much always knew what she was talking about.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go to the Court of Cats because I’m not ready to see someone else sitting on Tybalt’s throne,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady, maybe because I was speaking the absolute truth for once. The Luidaeg must feel like this all the time, I thought, and continued, “I love you very much, and you’re going to be a great King, but you’re not him, and I’m not ready.” And then there was Quentin. Losing him was going to hurt even more, and for a lot longer. Tybalt was the man of my dreams. Quentin was the son I’d never been given the chance to have.

This time when Raj pulled away, it was to stare at me with disbelief that shaded slowly into understanding. “You think . . . when you lost hold of them, when you fell, you thought they drowned, didn’t you? You thought you were the only survivor.”

“Dianda found me,” I said. Hope was trying to awaken in the pit of my stomach, and I forced it to be still, refusing to let it come fully alive until Raj actually said the words that I could feel him dancing around. “Raj, what are you saying?”

“Uncle Tybalt thought the same thing,” said Raj. “He managed to save Quentin. He thought he’d lost you.”

I stared at him for a moment. Then I whirled, breaking the seal of his arms around my waist as I said to the people behind me, “I have to go.”

“Yeah, you do,” said Dean. “Don’t worry about Goldengreen. I’ll ask my mom to loan me some guards so that we can keep that woman from coming back.”

“And I’ll ask my son to tell me what in the name of Titania’s talons he’s talking about,” said Dianda, in what for her passed for a reasonable tone.

Marcia didn’t say anything. She just smiled, eyes bright and teary in their sheltering rings of fae ointment.

I turned back to Raj. “Take me to him.”

“Do you have a towel or something?” he asked. “You’ll freeze.”

I managed to resist the urge to grab him by the shirtfront and shake him until a doorway to the Shadow Roads fell out. “I’ll heal,” I said. “Take me.”

“Okay,” said Raj. He took my hands and pulled me into the shadow formed by the bodies around us, and then we were falling down into the freezing, airless dark, and I didn’t care.

They were alive. Nothing else mattered.