The Winter Long

FOURTEEN

RUNNING THROUGH THE shadows with Raj was nothing like running through the shadows with Tybalt, despite the similarity of the empty space around us. We ran for what felt like an eternity, connected only by our hands. I’d gotten used to running side by side with Tybalt, guided through the darkness more than hauled. With Raj, it was back to square one: he pulled, and I came, because stopping would have meant a frozen death. We ran through a cold, lightless world, caught in the jaws of a winter that would never end. I just hoped we’d come out the other side.

The seawater soaking my clothes was freezing into sheets of ice that cracked and fell away as we ran. My strength was fading, and Raj couldn’t be much better off. It was hard for Tybalt to take me on the Shadow Roads, and he was an adult Cait Sidhe, secure in his powers. Raj was just a kid. Carrying me through the shadows had killed Tybalt once; what was it doing to Raj?

I was dwelling on that thought when Raj yanked me out of the darkness and into the dimly-lit hall of the Court of Cats. I threw my free arm over my eyes, squinting through the ice on my eyelashes as I tried to speak. It came out in a squeak. Raj pulled his hand away and dropped to his knees, retching. I stayed upright for a moment longer before I collapsed beside him, gasping for air.

“Let’s not do that again for a long, long time,” I wheezed.

“Okay,” Raj shakily agreed.

The feeling was rapidly returning to my fingers and cheeks, accompanied by the pins and needles sensation of healing frostbite. It was intense enough to keep me where I was for a few more seconds, and to make me very grateful that Raj and I hadn’t tried that particular run before I could recover quite so quickly from injuries. It definitely made me miss running with Tybalt.

Tybalt. The thought stiffened my spine. I pushed myself to my feet, demanding, “Where do I need to go, Raj?”

“Wow.” He managed a wan smile and raised his hand, pointing off down the hallway. “You stayed still longer than I expected. Just go that way. He wants you to find him, you won’t get lost.”

“Okay.” I hesitated. Every nerve I had was screaming for me to run until I found Tybalt and Quentin, but Raj looked so small lying there on the hallway floor . . . “Can you shift? I can carry you if you’re in cat form.”

Raj’s smile was bright enough to make me feel bad about even those few seconds of hesitation. “Yeah,” he said. The air around him blurred, the smell of pepper and burning paper lancing through the air, and he was gone, replaced by a young Abyssinian cat—but not, I realized as I stooped to gather him into my arms, by a kitten. He had grown into the length of his limbs and the size of his ears, making him a handsome creature even in this form. My boys were growing up.

“So you know, I’m putting you down as soon as I see Tybalt,” I said, and started walking, slowly at first, and then breaking into a jog.

Raj purred.

The Court of Cats is a patchwork kingdom, made from the lost pieces of the world around it. Mortal buildings and pieces of disused knowes, they’re all the same to whatever strange magic assembles and maintains the Court. The hallway where we’d landed was all aged, oiled wood, like something out of a medieval castle. As I ran, I passed through a white-tiled hospital and an empty, disused library, where the shelves were empty and the ceiling was so high above me that I couldn’t even hear the echoes end. There were windows, but after the first two we passed, I stopped looking their way—the things they showed were too skewed, and they didn’t help me get where I was going.

Raj curled loosely in my arms, showing admirable restraint for a cat; even when I tripped over a raised doorjamb or a bit of uneven brickwork, he didn’t dig his claws into my flesh. Much. The few times he did, the smell of blood put strength back into my wobbling legs, allowing me to keep up my pace.

“Did you intentionally drop us on the other side of the Court or what?” I asked. Raj, who didn’t currently have a mouth capable of forming human words, didn’t answer me. That was probably for the best.

Then I ran out of a plain hallway that could have been ripped from my first apartment building and into a large, stone-walled room with fireplaces on three of its four walls. It felt old, like it predated the world I lived in. Two long wooden tables were set up in the center of the room, big enough to seat thirty people between them. Only two people were actually there. I stumbled to a stop, barely noticing when Raj leaped down from my arms and went padding toward the nearest fireplace. My knees wobbled. I reached out and caught myself against the doorway.

That was what finally caught their attention: the small, mundane sound of my hand slapping against the stone. Even a Cait Sidhe could make noise running, but no Cait Sidhe would be so gauche as to slam their hand against the door. Cats only make noise when they want to.

Tybalt heard me first. His head snapped up, exhaustion written clearly in the lines of his face as he turned. There was a moment when that was all that happened: apart from that one small thing, he might as well have been a statue. Then, slowly, his eyes widened, exhaustion replaced by relief. It didn’t happen all at once; in fact, it was still happening when he stood—the movement attracting Quentin’s attention, causing him to finally turn as well—and walked toward me, moving with a frozen stiffness that spoke of both caution and minor injury.

He stopped a foot or so in front of me, gathering himself, before reaching out to stroke my hair away from my cheek, tucking it behind my ear. His hand was trembling. I reached up to catch it with my own, and realized I was shaking, too.

“I thought . . .” he whispered.

“I know,” I replied, and flung myself into his arms.

Up until that moment—up until he drew me close and his mouth closed over mine, and I could feel the hot reality of his skin through my still-damp, ice-cold clothes—part of me had been unwilling to believe that this was happening. I’d seen my share of dream realities, from Blind Michael’s dangerous homeland to my adopted niece, Karen, and her ability to pull me out of sleep and into whatever fantasy she wanted me to witness. I knew how real unreality could be. But this . . .

No dream I had ever experienced had been realistic enough to recreate the feeling of Tybalt’s hands around my waist, or detailed enough to show me the small scratches on his left cheek, abrasions that would have healed in seconds on my own skin. His lips tasted like salt. I pulled away, startled. He was crying. I raised my hand to touch my cheek.

So was I.

When we broke the kiss, I leaned my forehead against his shoulder and directed my next words toward the floor, which wouldn’t blame me for anything that I might have to say. “I tried so hard to hold onto your hands, I really did, but the wind pulled you away, and I couldn’t find you, I couldn’t find either one of you . . .”

“Toby?”

Quentin’s voice came from my left. I raised my head and found him standing there in his torn, salt-stained shirt, a pleading expression on his face and his hands twisted together in front of him. I put my hand on Tybalt’s chest, pushing him gently away as I tried to step free of his embrace, and to his credit, he let me go.

“I’m sorry,” said Quentin miserably. “I tried to hold onto you, and I tried to fall where you were falling, but it happened so fast, and then I hit the water and everything went away and I woke up here and I’m sorry, Toby, I’m so sorry, can you forgive me? Please?”

“Oh, honey,” I said, moving to put my arms around him. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You did the best you could, but there was no reason to think the wards were going to slap us off the Shadow Roads. Do you hear me? We were all surprised by something that shouldn’t have been able to happen. It’s not your fault you couldn’t predict the unpredictable. You did amazing. You lived.”

Now it was Quentin’s turn to bury his face in my shoulder and sob, with no trace of teenage self-consciousness or dignity. He clung to the front of my shirt with both hands, and I just held him. What else was I supposed to do? I knew how it had felt for me to think that he’d been lost. I couldn’t imagine it had been any easier for him.

Tybalt put his hand on my shoulder, not trying to pull me away from Quentin. I tilted my head back to look at him.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We fell,” he said. He couldn’t keep the bleakness from his tone, or prevent his fingers from tightening slightly, like he needed to reassure himself that I was really there in front of him. “I lost hold of you almost immediately. I thought . . .” He paused, chuckling bitterly. “I thought you would both be better swimmers, given your coastal upbringings. I stopped trying to catch your hands and positioned myself to strike the water at an angle that might allow me to retain consciousness.”

The desperate misery that had been in his eyes since I arrived suddenly made a little bit more sense. If he’d allowed me to fall without trying to get me back, and then thought I was dead . . . I couldn’t imagine living with that knowledge. I bit my lip and just looked at him, willing him to see the understanding I was trying to project. I would have done the same thing in his place. That didn’t make it any easier.

“I lost sight of both of you for a few seconds when I hit the water. Long enough, I assume, for the undertow to have changed everyone’s positions. I swam, trying to find you—I admit, much to my chagrin, that I was only looking for you, at least at first—but you were nowhere to be seen. I found Quentin tangled in the kelp. The tide was trying to take him, and I was losing strength, and so . . .”

And so, faced with the choice of drowning or finding me, Tybalt had made the only choice I would ever have been able to forgive: he’d saved himself, and in the process, he’d saved Quentin. “You opened a doorway to the Shadow Roads,” I guessed.

“There are a surprising number of shadows at the bottom of the sea,” he confirmed. “I thought I would carry your squire to safety and then return. I admit, there were . . . complications . . . that I did not anticipate.”

“Uncle Tybalt flooded two hallways,” said Raj.

I turned my head, my arms still wrapped around Quentin, and asked, “When did you turn human again?”

He shrugged.

“Fair enough.” I looked back to Tybalt. “The water came with you, huh?”

Tybalt grimaced. “Yes. Quite a lot of it, as well as some rather surprised fish. I was unprepared.”

I looked to Raj for translation. He shook his head and said, “It knocked him out. The noise was enough that a bunch of us came running and found them flat on their backs in the hall, with water everywhere. When they woke up, they both started asking where you were.”

“You were dead.” Quentin finally pushed away from me. I turned back to him. He looked at me bleakly. “I just . . . I just knew that you were dead. That I’d have to be the one who told everyone in Arden’s Court, and in Shadowed Hills, and everywhere, because Tybalt is Cait Sidhe, and they wouldn’t listen to him. I was going to have to give your eulogy a hundred times, and I was never going to see you again.”

“Hey.” I put my arms around him again. It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do. “That didn’t happen. You with me? I’m not dead, you’re not going to tell anyone that I’m dead, and if I were dead, you’d still be my squire. Sylvester would take care of all the announcements after you told him what had happened.”

Quentin hugged me for a few seconds more before pulling away and saying, “You’d better mean that.”

“You’re going to be a king someday,” said Raj. “Shouldn’t you get used to saying the names of the dead now, while you still have time to harden?”

All three of us turned to look at him. He squared his shoulders and looked defiantly back at me, and I realized how terrifying this must have been. His uncle, who was supposed to keep all the Cait Sidhe in San Francisco safe, broken by the loss of one woman. His best friend, equally broken.

They were my boys and they loved me, and I needed to be careful with them if I ever wanted to be worthy of them.

That was an unsettling thought, no matter how true I knew it to be. I stayed where I was, not going in for another hug, as I raked my salt-matted hair back from my face with one hand. “We’re all okay now, and that’s what matters,” I said. My words rang hollow. Considering how much else we had to deal with, from Simon to Evening and whatever her plan was, us being okay was a small thing. It wasn’t going to save the world. But in that moment, it was definitely enough for me.

Tybalt was the first to break the silence. “Where were you? What happened?”

“It’s sort of a funny story, actually,” I said, even though there was nothing remotely funny about any of it. I began to explain, beginning with Dianda pulling me out of the water and stopping when I successfully negotiated my way inside the wards at Goldengreen. I knew what I wanted to say, but the words refused to come. I realized I was shaking again, uncontrollably this time, as my entire body got into the act.

“October?” Tybalt sounded alarmed. I didn’t exactly blame him. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulling me toward one of the room’s three fireplaces. “Raj, get her a blanket and some dry clothing.”

“Yes, Uncle,” said Raj. The smell of pepper and burning paper rose again, and he was in cat form before he finished going around the corner. I guess that was a faster way to move around the court.

Tybalt was continuing to pull me along with him. I gave up any pretense of resistance and let him tug me along, my teeth chattering. The analytical part of my mind identified the issue as shock, both physical and emotional, coupled with hypothermia and blood loss. My body recovers quickly from physical damage, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy on me, especially when I’m not sleeping or eating properly.

He got me settled on the end of the bench nearest to the fire, sitting down beside me and wrapping his arm around my shoulder as he tried to loan me the body heat that I so desperately needed. Raj came back in human form with a thick wool blanket, which Tybalt took and draped around me. I unclenched my hands enough to grasp the blanket and pull it tighter, trying to ride out the shock, which felt more psychological than physical. It had been a long day, filled with surprises that I hadn’t been looking for and wasn’t really equipped to handle.

“October?” Tybalt’s hand touched my shoulder, pressing down to be felt through the heavy wool. “Is there anything else we can do?”

“The person who raised the wards on Goldengreen—the reason we fell into the sea—it was Evening.” I kept my eyes on the fire as I spoke. That made it easier, somehow. The fire didn’t have any opinions on the matter; it wouldn’t judge me or think that I was seeing ghosts.

Tybalt went still. After a long pause, he asked cautiously, “Evening?”

“Evening Winterrose, the former Countess of Goldengreen. That’s how she was able to control the wards—she’s the one who designed most of them.” I shivered again, turning to face Tybalt. Quentin and Raj were behind him, both looking faintly bemused. “She was the first person I saw when I got out of the pond—the first fae person, I mean. She was the one who helped me get my PI license back. I stopped running away from Faerie because I had to solve her murder.”

To my profound relief, Tybalt didn’t immediately tell me I had to be mistaken. Instead, he blinked, a slow frown spreading across his face as he considered what I had said. Finally, he asked, “Could it have been a doppelganger, or someone else pretending the right to her face?”

“I tasted her magic; that’s how I knew who she was. Even without the confirmation, I don’t think a doppelganger could have convinced Goldengreen to close the wards like that,” I said. “Dean was inside at the time, and the knowe has accepted him as Count. I couldn’t have snatched the wards away from his control, but she was able to. So either she’s incredibly powerful, or she’s attuned to the knowe on a level that none of us can match.”

“But you said you talked the knowe into letting you in,” said Quentin.

I glanced his way. “That’s also part of why I don’t have any trouble believing it was really Evening. I don’t think Goldengreen ever liked her very much. Remember how upset the pixies and bogeys were when we came to reopen the knowe? They were afraid, because they’d been treated badly.” Evening had used pixies to power her lights. I would never forget their small, shriveled bodies, preserved behind the glass that had imprisoned them until they died. It was inhumane. And Evening, the real Evening, had done that.

I took a deep breath. “So, yeah. It was her. Evening Winterrose is alive.” Saying the words out loud made them feel more real. My shock began to splinter, replaced by a slow, growing anger. “She nearly killed me with the binding she used to make me solve her murder, and she was never dead. That b—”

“What did you say?” Tybalt’s voice was like a whip crack, tight with sudden tension.

I turned to look at him, frowning. “I said she nearly . . . oh.” The blood drained from my cheeks as I finally put together the implications of my own words. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to see it. The binding, the message in the flowers Simon brought to the house, all of it. “She bound me. She used the old forms, and she bound me so tight that I nearly died getting rid of the ropes she used.”

“Simon is bound, as is the Luidaeg, by someone who knew all three of you, and who is still among the living,” said Tybalt. “Does the once-Countess Winterrose fit this description?”

“She’s still a Countess, she’s just landless now,” I said automatically, before nodding. “But yes. She and Simon were both frequent attendees at the false Queen’s Court. That crazy bitch was one of the only people who could tolerate them. And the Luidaeg . . .” I hesitated, trying to remember exactly what the Luidaeg had said when I told her about Evening’s murder. The sea witch couldn’t lie. That didn’t mean she couldn’t talk her way around the truth, when she had to. “She talked about Evening like she knew her. I think they’ve met.”

“So she fits the bill,” said Tybalt.

“Yes,” I said again. “The roses Simon brought—the winter roses, from Luna’s winter garden. He wasn’t telling us there was danger at Goldengreen. He was trying to tell us that Evening was the danger at Goldengreen. It was her all along.”

The statement was simple. Its implications were anything but. I went still, trying to steady my breathing as I considered everything that it could mean. Finally, I said, “You know, the Luidaeg tried to tell me. All the way back when we first met, she tried to tell me. She kept referring to Evening in the present tense. And I never saw her among the night-haunts. How could I have been so stupid?”

“You’re very good at being blind to what you do not want to see,” said Tybalt, a trifle wryly.

I shook my head. “This is too big. I should have seen it.” I pushed myself away from the bench, letting the blanket fall as I stood, and began to pace. My waterlogged leather jacket was heavy, but I didn’t take it off. “I feel like I’m still missing something.”

“The dead are walking,” said Raj. “I didn’t realize we’d be living in a fairy tale this week. I would have packed tights.”

I stopped mid-step, turning to face him. “Say that again.”

“What?” Raj blinked at me. “Do you have an objection to men in tights?”

“The first part.”

“I didn’t realize we’d be living in a fairy tale this week?”

“That’s it. Shit. Oak and ash and shit and damn and we are so screwed. So screwed.” The Luidaeg always referring to her in the present tense; the way that she, and a bunch of other people, had called her “the Winterrose,” rather than using her given name. It all pointed to a conclusion that I had never actually drawn, in part because it was impossible.

“Toby?” said Quentin, sounding uncertain.

“Just give me a minute here, okay? I can figure this out.” I fumbled in my pocket until I found the damp rectangle of my phone, only realizing when my fingers touched the plastic that it might have been killed by its encounter with the Pacific Ocean. Still . . . “Quentin, when April modified these for us, did she make them waterproof?”

“I think so,” he said. “I know she said she was making yours extra-durable, since she’s, you know, met you.”

“Works for me.” I pulled up Li Qin’s number, hit “connect,” and raised the phone to my ear, waiting anxiously as it rang.

Finally, just as I was about to give up, Li Qin answered with a genial, “Hello?”

“Li, it’s Toby. Also, wow, you should tell April her work is top-notch, because I’m calling you from the Court of Cats, which means she managed to design a phone that can connect through like, three completely different layers of reality, and that’s after being dunked in the Pacific Ocean. Can you call Mags over at the Library and ask her to call me, please? And maybe convince her to give me her phone number? This thing where I have to call you to get to her is getting old.”

“Yes, but you’d never call me if you didn’t need me to reach the Library, so cutting myself out of the loop isn’t in my best interests,” said Li Qin, sounding bemused. “Are you all right? You sound worried.”

I couldn’t quite prevent a burst of jagged laughter from escaping my lips. “Oh, man, Li, you have no idea how loaded a question that is. I will explain everything later, assuming we live, but right now, I have to ask Mags something. It’s super-important. Please, can you get her to call me?”

“I’ll do my best,” said Li Qin. The line beeped as she hung up. I lowered my phone, turning to face my bewildered companions.

“I think I know what’s going on,” I said carefully. “I mean, the pieces have been there for a while now—maybe even since the beginning, with the Luidaeg refusing to actually say that Evening was dead. But I don’t want to tell you what it is until I’m sure.”

“Because you don’t trust us?” asked Raj, looking affronted.

“No,” I said. “Because I’m terrified.”

My phone rang.

I stared at it like I had never seen it before. Once I answered the phone and asked my question, everything was going to change. Or maybe that was the wrong way of looking at things. Once I answered the phone and asked my question, everything was going to be revealed for what it had been all along. And Oberon forgive me, but I genuinely did not want to see.

I answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Er, October? Li Qin called and said that you wanted to speak with me. Is everything all right?” Mags sounded faintly puzzled, but I was coming to accept that as the Librarian’s primary method of dealing with the world around her. Even when she knew exactly what was going on, she sometimes seemed like she didn’t have a clue.

“Not really,” I said. “I have to ask you a question, and I need you to be really, really certain of your answer. It’s sort of ‘everything depends on this’-level important.”

“Oh. Well.” Now Mags sounded flustered rather than puzzled. “I can certainly try.”

“Okay. Remember when I was having my little goblin fruit problem, and we asked to look at the book about the creation of the hope chests?”

She chuckled darkly. “How could I forget? That was the most excitement I’d seen around here in positively years.”

“Well, I think this may turn out to be more exciting. The hope chest that the County of Goldengreen was named after was given to some lady with a totally unpronounceable name, and you said that her big parlor trick was ‘playing Snow White.’ Can you explain? Please?”

“Er. Do you mean Eira Rosynhwyr?”

“Yeah, that’s the totally unpronounceable name I meant.” I looked toward Tybalt. He was watching me talk, his face utterly devoid of expression. He knew what I was asking and why I was asking it, I could tell, just like I knew he would let me finish the conversation before he started demanding details. “What did you mean about playing Snow White?”

“Just that she was rumored to be nigh-impossible to kill, even for one of the Firstborn,” she said. “She could suffer an incredible amount of damage and recover completely without outside aid, providing she was given time to sleep. She favored cold places for her recovery . . .”

No shortage of those in the modern world, where anyone could rent a walk-in freezer for less than a thousand dollars a year. “Okay. One last question. What does ‘Eira Rosynhwyr’ mean?”

“Uh. It’s Welsh, it means . . .” There was a pause, and the rustle of pages. I didn’t bother wondering too hard how it was that she had a book of names close at hand. She was the Librarian, and she was in the Library. She could have anything she wanted close at hand. “‘Eira’ is a Welsh female name meaning ‘snow.’ ‘Rosynhwyr’ is a compound word. It doesn’t have a direct translation—the closest I can get is something ‘rose that has been frozen.’ Why do you ask?”

“Because we’re all too stupid to live, and that’s why we’re all going to die soon,” I said slowly. “Mags, I need you to do me a favor now, if you possibly can. I need you to close the Library.”

“What? October, I don’t think you understand what you’re asking me to—”

“I need you to close the Library,” I repeated, cutting her off before she could fully launch into her explanation. “I have every reason to believe that Eira Rosynhwyr is not only alive, but in San Francisco right now, and she’s not playing nicely with the other children. You need to defend yourself. Close the Library.”

“I . . . what?” Mags sounded frightened now. Good. Fear might be the only thing capable of keeping her alive if Evening came to the Library on whatever strange errands were driving her. “I’ll try. I’ve never closed the doors without changing locations before, and I can’t change locations intentionally unless someone is actually trying to burn the place to the ground.”

“If the doors won’t close, call me,” I said. “I’ll show up with matches.”

Maybe that was what finally convinced her that I meant business. “All right,” she said. “Is there anything else?”

“Yeah. If you see a woman with skin as white as snow and hair as black as coal . . . run.” I hung up the phone without saying good-bye, stuffing it back into my pocket as I turned to face the others. They looked at me with varying degrees of understanding—Tybalt, who knew best out of all of us how Faerie worked, looked resigned; Quentin looked faintly horrified; Raj, who had never known Evening, just looked bemused.

“Evening Winterrose is alive, and her real name is ‘Eira Rosynhwyr,’ and she’s the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn,” I said without preamble. “I don’t know why she faked her own death, and I don’t know why she bound Simon and the Luidaeg to silence, but I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Raj.

“We are so screwed.”