The Winter Long

TWENTY-TWO

MY 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.

“She’s sowing dissent, that’s what, the same as she always has,” said Evening. She turned to face me, a cool wind blowing between us and carrying the scent of snow and roses. Roses. That was another clue I should have caught. When I believed that my mother was Daoine Sidhe, the fact that they both smelled of roses made perfect sense. Once I learned that Mother was something else entirely . . . but ah, Evening was speaking, and I needed to pay attention to that. I always needed to pay attention to her.

“My sister is the sea witch,” said Evening, taking a step toward me. The skirt of her torn and dirtied dress swayed around her legs, and I felt a pang at seeing such beauty disturbed. “She is the darkness under the waves and the bargain you fear to make. Of course she’s a troublemaker. Of course she wants to turn you against me, October, can’t you see? I’ve been your friend for years. I’ve always been your friend.”

The Luidaeg can’t lie and this woman just said in so many words that she could never be your friend, whispered the part of my mind that was distant enough from Evening’s spell to hold itself separate. Sadly, that part of me was outweighed by the sweet, cloying scent of her magic as it rose around me.

“I was the one who came for you when you returned from the pond,” said Evening, taking another step toward me. “I was the one who told you how your human family would react to your return. I tried to save you so much pain. Don’t you remember?”

I frowned, trying to find the line between what she was saying and what I knew her words actually meant. It had been so clear only a few seconds before, but now it was blurred and difficult to see. She had been my friend for so long. She had allowed me to enter her presence and treated me like I was almost worth something, despite my human heritage. She had hired me to do the things she didn’t want to do herself. She had . . .

She had ordered Simon Torquill to kill me. She had orchestrated the kidnapping of Luna and Rayseline Torquill, tearing wounds in the fabric of their family that would never really heal, just scab over and fester. She had treated me like dirt and, because I was a changeling, desperate for any sign of acceptance, I had allowed her to do it.

“You’re not my friend,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?” asked Evening.

“I said, you’re not my friend.” I forced my right hand into a fist, sending bolts of clarifying pain through my broken arm. It cleared the fog out of my thoughts as I raised my head, forcing myself to look at her. The air around her head crackled with the power she had gathered around herself, splintering and refracting the faint light until it seemed like she almost glowed. “You were never my friend. You were just using me until you didn’t need me anymore. I don’t know if you still need me. But I don’t need you.”

Evening smiled languidly. “You will,” she said, and let all that gathered power go, directing it straight at me, and at the thin cord of my fealty. What had been a faint glittering in the air exploded into true light, virtually blinding me. She was perfect, she was untouchable, she was above reproach, she was undying, she was everything I had ever wanted to be and everything I could never approach, she was—

—she was casting a spell, she was casting a spell on me, and spells could be broken—

Shaking from the effort, I forced my hands up, one balled into a fist and coated in my own dried blood, one holding Dare’s silver knife. My broken arm howled in protest. The pain was still helping me focus, no matter how much damage I might be doing to myself. I squinted into the brilliance, finding the individual threads of Evening’s compulsion. Then, before I could think about it too hard, I opened my right hand, grabbed a fistful of threads, and yanked them tight, slashing my knife down across them in the same gesture.

Evening shrieked with pain and surprise. The spell snapped, casting the clearing back into its previous darkness. And the faint smell of smoke drifted out of the trees across from me. That was my only warning before Simon Torquill stepped out of the tree line, a longbow in his hands, and fired the arrow that he had been aiming during our confrontation.

It flew straight and true, and would have embedded itself solidly in Evening’s back, had she not turned as fast as a striking snake, raising her hand in an imperious gesture. The arrow froze in midair, becoming completely motionless.

Simon’s eyes widened and he dropped the bow, turning to run. Not fast enough. With a small gesture, Evening sent the arrow flying back to him. He yelped with pain as he fell. I didn’t see the arrow strike, but I didn’t need to.

I could smell his blood.

“Simon!” He’d tried to kill Tybalt. He’d nearly killed me. But he was also Daoine Sidhe, and I had seen firsthand just how hard it was for Evening’s descendants to tell her “no.” When the chips were down, he’d tried to change sides. In that moment, in that place, that was good enough for me.

I ran across the clearing, heedless of the fact that I was putting an angry Firstborn behind me. Let the Luidaeg distract her; Simon needed me.

He was facedown in the brush when I reached him. The arrow protruded from the top of his left arm. I dropped to my knees, pushing him onto his side with my left hand. “Simon? Simon, look at me.”

“October.” His eyes were closed when I first rolled him over, but he opened them, offering me the most honest smile I had ever seen on his face. “Even now you’re trying to be a hero. Let it go, and run. Save yourself.” His eyes drifted closed again.

A horrible certainty stole over me. “You were trying to hit her with elf-shot, weren’t you?”

“Mmm,” he said. “I’d been meaning . . . to rest . . .”

“Simon!” I shook him. “Don’t go to sleep. You have to fight this.”

He chuckled. “As if elf-shot can . . . be ignored. You are your mother’s daughter. Too stubborn . . . by half.” He yawned again. “You should have been mine,” he murmured, and went limp. The elf-shot had him. He’d wake in a century, if he woke at all.

I stayed frozen where I was for a few precious seconds, trying to make sense of things. Then, moving slowly and methodically, I reached forward and shoved the arrow through his arm, causing the already-crowning arrowhead to break out into the open air. A literal gush of blood accompanied the motion. I let go of the arrow and washed my hands with it, covering my fingers in as much of the wet redness as I could. Then I wiped them on my knife, until both my hands and my blade were completely covered. My arm throbbed. I ignored it.

“Sleep well, Simon,” I murmured, and stood, turning back to Evening. “He’s gone.”

She had gathered the shreds of her glamour while I was distracted: she was once again beautiful, perfect, untouchable, so much better than me that it was a wonder I was allowed to look at her at all. I locked my eyes on her face as I started across the clearing, noting the small, smug smile that she wore.

“Good,” she said. “That means it’s just us, at last. You’ve been very bad, October, but I can forgive you, if you’ll let me.”

“I’ve been very bad,” I agreed. I cheated my eyes to the side. There was the Luidaeg, standing apart, bound by the injunction that she not harm Evening. At least she could defend herself now. I returned my attention to Evening before she could start to question, and said, “He was yours.”

“He was flawed,” said Evening. “You can be better.”

“I can be better,” I agreed. There were only a few feet between us. Could it really be this easy? Was she really that sure of herself?

“But first, put down the knife,” she said.

Apparently not. Damn. “Right,” I said, and lunged for her.

I expected a bolt of ice to catch me in the chest. Instead, she danced backward, trying to evade me. There was what looked like genuine fear in her eyes.

Several things suddenly started making sense. “Luidaeg!” I shouted. “What you said before, about her not being able to touch me. Is she allowed to hurt me?”

“No,” called the Luidaeg. She sounded almost smug. “She can’t.”

“Good,” I snarled, and lunged again. This time, I didn’t let fear of reprisal hold me back. I slammed my shoulder into Evening’s stomach, bowling her to the ground. She screamed. I shoved her down, straddling her, and raised the knife covered in Simon’s elf-shot-riddled blood in my left hand.

“Don’t,” she begged.

“Sorry,” I said, and stabbed her in the shoulder.

It wasn’t a mortal wound, but Evening stiffened all the same, eyes going wide with shock and pain before they clouded over in what looked very much like exhaustion. “You can’t kill me,” she said, punctuating her words with a yawn. “I’m . . . the First . . .”

“I don’t need to kill you. I just need you out of the way.”

“. . . be back . . .”

“Promises, promises.”

Evening closed her eyes.

I stayed where I was until her breathing leveled out, becoming deep and slow. Then I crawled off of her, watching warily for some sign that she was going to wake up. The Luidaeg walked over to stand beside me, and we watched her together.

Finally, after several minutes, the Luidaeg said, “You can pull your knife out now.”

“Soon,” I said.

She put an arm around me, pulling me close. I let myself be pulled, sagging against her as my own pain and nonmagical exhaustion threatened to overwhelm me. We stood there, watching Evening sleep, and I had never been so tired in my life, and I had never felt so far away from home.