The Winter Long

by Seanan McGuire

  “Then why don’t you do it and report back?”

  I frowned a little, leaning on my hands as I looked at her. It occurred to me that Arden didn’t have that many friends. There was Madden, the Cu Sidhe from Borderlands, but . . . that was it, so far as I knew. She’d gone from being a bookstore clerk to being Queen essentially overnight, and she’d been outside Faerie since she was a child. When would she have had the time to make friends? “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I hate parties. You hate this party. I’ll pretend to like parties if you’ll pretend to like this party, and maybe together we can fool the rest of the Kingdom.”

  Arden gave me a sidelong look. “Really.”

  “If nothing else, people will be incredibly impressed that you got me to stay for an entire Yule Ball, rather than escaping at the earliest possible opportunity.”

  There was a long pause before, slowly, Arden smiled. “Will you sit at the high table with me during the banquet?”

  “On one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “Tybalt comes, too.”

  Arden’s smile grew. “Deal.”

  TWO

  SITTING AT THE HIGH table with Arden wasn’t so bad. Tybalt found the idea hysterically funny and was on his best behavior, while my squire—Quentin Sollys—not only joined us, but ate with a mannerly precision that put the rest of us to shame. It helped that he was the Crown Prince of the Westlands, the High Kingdom to which Arden and the Mists swore fealty, and had been trained on things like “which fork do you use with the second salad course” when he was in diapers. I caught Arden watching Quentin out of the corner of her eye, trying to mimic his motions. I smiled but didn’t say anything. Her own training had been disrupted by the years she’d spent in hiding, and if copying off my squire’s metaphorical homework helped her, that was fine.

  May and Jazz sat near the front of the banquet hall, where they could make faces at us throughout dinner. I smirked and made faces right back, earning me a few amused looks from Sylvester, who was seated with them. For the first time in a long time, I was totally relaxed, sure that nothing was going to ruin my good mood.

  I should really learn to stop being optimistic.

  The Yule Ball went until nearly dawn. Dinner was followed by more dancing, several musical performances by vocalists from around the Kingdom, and even an animal act with a phoenix and a flammable falconer. It was all good fun, and I was a little sorry to see it end. But no party can last forever, and eventually Arden moved to stand in front of her carved redwood throne, holding her hands up, palms facing outward. Bit by bit, the crowd quieted, everyone turning to face their Queen.

  “The Kingdom of the Mists has known great turmoil and tragedy since the death of my father, Gilad Windermere. I am truly sorry to have failed you for so long by allowing a pretender to hold my throne while I hid from your eyes. I will not fail you again. This is the longest night of the year, and the night when we make our pledges unto Faerie, swearing we will never freeze, never falter, but will continue to turn the wheel around. We will keep dancing. By the root and the branch, by the rose and the thorn, we will do our best in service to our unseen Lord and Ladies.”

  The room cheered. Arden smiled but didn’t lower her hands.

  “Now, before the night is done, I must make certain appointments . . .”

  I’m not ashamed to say I tuned out as she began reciting proclamation after proclamation, all of them impeccably memorized and dead boring. Li Qin was named as official protector of Dreamer’s Glass until such time as Duchess Treasa Riordan could be found. Etienne’s impending marriage to his mortal lover, Bridget Ames, was recognized and sanctioned by the crown. This person got permission to use that land. This other person was given leave to take a squire. The head of Arden’s guard, Lowri, was recognized for bravery. I started silently reviewing the contents of the pantry at home, trying to work out whether I had enough cereal to get me through the week.

  Tybalt’s elbow introduced itself to my side, none too gently. I managed not to yelp, turning to glare at him instead.

  “What?” I hissed, voice dangerously low.

  He didn’t answer. He just jerked his chin toward the front of the room.

  I turned to find Arden looking at me, a mixture of amusement and annoyance warring for possession of her face. I winced. A path had opened through the crowd between us. That had happened every time she’d called someone to the front of the room.

  Tybalt elbowed me again, clearly trying to urge me forward. Swell. I’d been summoned, and I didn’t even know what for.

  Please not another County, I thought as I walked to where Arden was waiting. Or a Barony. Or a puppy. Or anything else I’d have to be responsible for. At least I didn’t have to worry about getting saddled with a Duchy. The only one that was even halfway available was Dreamer’s Glass, and Arden had already given that to Li Qin.

  “October Daye, sworn to Shadowed Hills, you have done a great service to the throne of the Mists. I, and my household, stand in your debt.” Arden’s tone was calm and measured, as if there had been no delay at all between her calling my name and me getting a clue. “Your fealty is sworn to another, or I would offer you a place in this Court, to be yours forevermore.”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “I’m pretty attached to Shadowed Hills. Um. Sorry.”

  “And Shadowed Hills is pretty attached to you,” she said. “I attempted to convince your liege to release you. He refused.”

  I shot a startled glance to Sylvester, who was standing to the left of the crowd. Then I smiled. I should have known he’d never let me down.

  Arden was speaking again. I wrenched my attention back to her. “But I cannot allow a debt to go unacknowledged,” she said. “October Daye, let it be known that on this day, you are recognized as a hero of the realm, with all the responsibilities and privileges that includes. You will be offered safety and succor in any noble household. All doors will be open to you. But all dangers will be laid before you, and we’ll call you as soon as we need something large and monstrous slain.” She smiled. “You’re already doing that part. It won’t be a big change.”

  “Uh.” I stared at her.

  Arden raised her eyebrows. “Uh?” she echoed.

  “Uh,” I said again, before I grimaced and managed to say, “I’ll try really hard not to disappoint you?”

  “I don’t think that’s the standard response, but you know what? Good enough for me.” Arden tapped me on the left shoulder. “Congratulations, Sir October Daye, Hero in the Mists.”

  The applause of the crowd escorted me all the way back to where Tybalt was waiting for me. He didn’t look surprised. In fact, he was smirking, which told me he’d already known this little curveball was coming. “I hate you,” I informed him, and kept walking. With Arden’s proclamations done, the party was breaking up. The sun had finished rising in the mortal world. If we left now, we could be out of the parking lot before the human rangers started showing up for work. That would mean fewer questions all around since, technically, Muir Woods State Park was closed after sunset.

  The fact that human law said the park was closed wasn’t a big deal: most fae don’t have a lot of respect for human law. Still, the hour was a good reason for me to hustle my little changeling butt out of there. If enough people got out before being seen by humans became a risk, we were more likely to escape without somebody getting arrested and Arden needing to have some poor innocent park ranger’s memory wiped.

  Sometimes I think it must have been nice to be alive in the days where everyone knew that Faerie existed. Sure, bands of angry humans sometimes tried to kill us with iron and fire, but nobody questioned where we wanted to celebrate the seasons.

  Tybalt followed me to the entry hall, where May, Jazz, and Quentin were waiting. May was holding a large canvas bag that smelled suspiciously like sugar cookies. When she saw me, she beamed, held the b
ag up as if for inspection, and announced, “I raided the kitchen!”

  “Of course you did,” I said, with a weak smile. “I just got named a hero of the realm. Like, the actual title accessory pack kind of hero, not just ‘you do heroic things, gold star and try not to die.’”

  “You were already a hero of the realm to us,” said my squire. He sounded so sincere that I couldn’t even poke fun at the statement. Not that I wanted to. Quentin and I have been through a lot since Sylvester first tried to use him as an errand boy. I refused the message he was supposed to give me, but I kept the messenger. It’s all part of my larger pattern of picking up strays.

  Jazz yawned as she asked, “So are we getting out of here? Please? Because if we’re not leaving, I’m going to go sleep in one of the trees.” She was a Raven-maid, a form of skinshifter, and one of the few diurnal races in the primarily nocturnal landscape of Faerie. Things like Yule were hell on her internal clock.

  “We’re leaving,” I said, turning for the exit. We were just in time: I could hear footsteps behind us, signaling the start of the exodus. “Sun’s up, and this is a pretty popular commuting route. If we want to make it home by a decent hour, we need to head out now.”

  “Oh, thank Oberon,” said Jazz. “I can sleep in the car.”

  My skirt made descending the hiking trail connecting Arden’s knowe to the main park difficult. I gathered it as high as I dared, exposing my calves, knees, and sensible black flats as I picked my way down the side of the mountain. Tybalt took the lead, offering his hand to help me keep my balance. I didn’t object. We’d both been working on accepting help more easily, and it was starting to pay off, at least as far as I was concerned. Jazz nearly fell twice before saying something unpleasant in a language I didn’t know, pulling the feathered band out of her hair, and transforming into a raven. She perched on May’s shoulder after that, and we made the rest of the descent in silence.

  “Did everyone have a nice time?” I asked.

  “I ate so much sugar that I think I qualify as an annex to Willy Wonka’s factory,” said May.

  “I liked eating at the high table,” said Quentin. There was a hint of wistfulness in his tone, matched by a temporary strengthening of his Canadian accent.

  It made sense that eating at the high table was something he’d have missed, coming from the family that ruled the entire continent. I flashed him an understanding smile. Quentin smiled back, and we kept walking.

  Muir Woods was peaceful this early in the morning, empty of both the human tourists who would fill it in a few short hours and the swirling shadows that Arden and her illusionists had used to dissuade any illicit nocturnal hikers from setting foot inside. The redwoods stretched on toward forever, and everything smelled of sap, fresh running water, and the green.

  This time, it was Tybalt who stopped at the edge of the parking lot. “I must return to the Court of Cats,” he said. “My absence from last night’s Yule festivities was forgivable, for it is a great joke for me to be invited to the gatherings of the Divided Courts, but my people need my attention for a time. Will you be well without me?”

  “You mean will I pine and die wishing you were there? I think I’ll pass. Although you really owe me that ‘showing me how much you appreciate my choosing you’ thing.” I dropped my skirt and leaned up to give him a quick kiss. He slid his arms around my waist, pulling me closer and deepening the kiss into something more. The taste of pennyroyal and musk lingered on his lips, a sweet reminder of his magic.

  “Get a room,” said May, and kept on walking.

  I laughed, pulling away from him. “Okay, when my Fetch starts lecturing us on public displays of affection, that means it’s time to stop. I’ll see you tonight?”

  “Count on it,” said Tybalt. He turned and walked back toward the trees. The shadows at the edge of the wood spread for him like a curtain, and he was gone.

  I smiled a little goofily as I followed the others to the car. Quentin was draped over the hood, making exaggerated snoring noises. May was just standing there, watching me tolerantly. Jazz had apparently fallen asleep; she was stretched across May’s folded arms, still in raven form, not moving.

  “Did you have a good Yule?” May asked.

  “Not that it’s any of your business—”

  “It’s totally my business.”

  “But yes.” I unlocked the car, peering quickly into the backseat before I opened my door. “Quentin, stop faking being asleep and get in. You’re not fooling anyone.”

  My squire grinned as he straightened up. Then he yawned and climbed into the front passenger seat. His eyes were closed by the time I slid behind the wheel.

  May got into the back, setting Jazz on the seat next to her long enough to fasten her seat belt. Then she scooped her avian girlfriend back into her arms. “We’re good,” she said. Having significant others who spent a substantial amount of time as animals—mine a cat, hers a raven—meant we had adjusted the “everyone must wear a seat belt” rule to apply only to people who were currently in a seat belt-friendly form.

  As expected, Quentin turned the radio to the local country station as soon as I started the car. Then he closed his eyes again, rolling as far to the side as the seat belt and a seated position would allow, and went to sleep. I smiled as I glanced at the rearview mirror. May was slumped over in the back, cradling Jazz like a stuffed toy.

  “Peace at last,” I murmured, and started down the mountain separating Muir Woods from the nearest outcropping of human civilization. Don’t get me wrong: I was as tired as the rest of them, maybe more, since I was the one who found parties the most draining. The flip side was that escaping a party felt like a stay of execution, and that, combined with the comfort of being back behind the wheel of my faithful VW bug, meant I was more than awake enough to get us home.

  We were almost to the base of the mountain when I realized none of us was wearing a human disguise. I swore under my breath and grabbed a handful of shadows from the roof of the car, gripping them between my nails as they tried to squirm away like eels. The smell of copper and freshly cut grass rose as I chanted, rapid-fire, “The trees they do grow high and the leaves they do grow green, many’s the hour my own true love I’ve seen, many’s the day I’ve watched him all alone, he is young but he’s surely growing.”

  The spell, which had been building with each word, burst around me like a soap bubble, accompanied by a brief spike of pain at my temples. I breathed out, my shoulders relaxing. It was a simple blur, but it would do the job; as long as I didn’t get pulled over, we should be able to pass any cursory inspection by the other drivers on the road.

  A “simple” blur. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to manage a blur spell at all, much less cast one on a carful of people, and I would have paid for the attempt with a lot more than a momentary pang of magic-burn. Then again, two years ago, I was more human than fae, and still trying to force my magic into a mold it was never designed to fit. It turns out that when someone isn’t Daoine Sidhe, yet keeps trying to scale their workings to Daoine Sidhe specifications, things sometimes go wrong. Who knew? Now, I was more fae than human—it was hard to say how much more, it being a matter of reading the balance of my blood, and not something that could be resolved with a scale—and I was more confident in the magic I did possess than I’d ever been in my life.

  I blamed my years of uncertainty and confusion on my mother. She raised me to think I was Daoine Sidhe like Quentin and Sylvester, a blood-working descendant of Titania. The joke was on me. I was Dóchas Sidhe the whole time, only two generations removed from Oberon himself, and my skill set, while similar, didn’t follow the same rules.

  Quentin started to snore for real. I grinned to myself and changed the radio station to 80s rock, letting the dulcet tones of Simple Minds fill the car as I hit the gas. Next stop, San Francisco.

  Traffic was normally heavy at this hour of the mo
rning, but we were saved by the season: everyone who could be off the road was off the road, using vacation time and sick days to stay home with their families or catch an early flight to Maui. I concentrated on the drive, and in what felt like no time at all, I was turning into the driveway of our two-story Victorian home.

  Coming home to an actual house and not a rattrap of an apartment still felt like a gift every time it happened. Sylvester and Luna Torquill had been in the Bay Area for a long time, and they’d been investing in mortal-world real estate practically from day one. The house had originally been his. Technically it still was, since we’d never bothered to transfer the title, but in reality it was mine, and it would be mine for as long as I wanted it to be. It was home. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted one until I had it.

  “Wake up, sleepyheads,” I said, turning off the engine and releasing the blur spell at the same time. “I do door-to-door service, but I’m not carrying you to bed.”

  Quentin mumbled something in sleepy French. I poked him in the arm.

  “Wake up, go inside, and go to bed,” I commanded. “Come on, move it.”

  “’M up.”

  “You’re lying.” I twisted to look into the back, where May was yawning and unfastening her belt. “Are you going to be able to coax Jazz back to human form?”

  “She’s pretty easy to coax. She doesn’t like to sleep as a raven in the bed,” said May, cradling her still-sleeping girlfriend. “I’m always afraid of rolling over and squishing her, so I won’t cuddle when she does that.”

  “Firm but fair.” I jabbed Quentin again. “Up. Now.”

  “I’m up.” He sat up, opening his eyes, and glowered at me petulantly before pushing open his door and shambling toward the house like something that had just crawled out of its grave. May followed at about the same pace, Jazz’s head resting on her shoulder. I swallowed a laugh, yawned, and got out of the car.