The Winter Long

by Seanan McGuire

  “. . . whoa,” I said.

  Luna had clearly been preparing the grounds for winter, even if she was spending the bulk of her time at Rayseline’s bedside. Most of the roses were covered by canvas sheeting, and the hedges had somehow been teased to even greater heights than in the summer, twisting into strange, elegant shapes. The roses that weren’t covered didn’t need to be; they were flowers of pure snow white and brittle, translucent ice blue, impossible in the mortal world, and impossibly beautiful even in the Summerlands.

  Quentin was less reserved than I was. “Snow!” he shouted, our troubles forgotten as he dove straight into the nearest snowdrift. The spray he kicked up hit me in the face. I yelped.

  “Hey! Be careful! That stuff is cold.” I looked mournfully at the white expanse of the lawn. “It didn’t even occur to me that it might be snowing in the Summerlands.”

  “It may not have been five minutes ago,” said Tybalt. He gave me a concerned look. “Should I go inside, and see if I can locate a Hob to give me directions to the winter wear?”

  “No,” I said, turning to face him as I finished my scan of the gardens. “I need to talk to you.”

  Tybalt frowned, watching me silently. I fought the urge to bite my lip. He looked so serious, and so worried, like he knew that whatever I was going to say, it wasn’t going to be something he wanted to hear.

  Tough. “Did you know?” The words were strangely fragile when exposed to the light like that.

  Tybalt blinked. “Did I know?” he echoed.

  “Did you know Simon and my mother were married? Have you been keeping this from me? Have you been doing the same thing everyone else has been doing, and protecting me?” I spat the words at him like a mouthful of snakes, all twisting and venomous. “I need to know the truth, and I need to know it now.”

  “No,” he said, and I didn’t hear any lies in that word, only rock-solid conviction. “I swear to you, October, I did not know. My association with the Torquill line goes back centuries, but it was broken after the Great Fire of London, when they ran and left me behind in a city full of ghosts. I never even knew that Simon had married, and to be quite honest, I did not care. He is beneath my notice, save for where he endangers you.”

  I searched his face, looking for any hint of dishonesty. I didn’t find it. I relaxed, the tension going out of my body. Tybalt put an arm around me, and I leaned close, grateful for his warmth.

  “I won’t claim never to have lied to you, but I have not lied to you since we decided to try taking this relationship seriously,” he said quietly. “I love you. Lying to you would be a mistreatment of what that love means.”

  I laughed, a cold, jagged sound. “None of the other people who say they love me seem to feel that way.”

  “Then they are not very good at loving,” he said. “We will go to your mother. We will see that she is fine. If Simon troubles her, perhaps that will pull her out of the fog. We know she can rise, when she feels the need.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m just worried.”

  “That is because you are a good daughter.” Unspoken was the fact that he didn’t think Amandine was a very good mother. I loved him even more for that—both for thinking it, and for not saying it out loud.

  She did the best she could with me. It’s just that what she wanted for my life and what I wanted were always different things. I would have broken myself trying to be the daughter she wanted me to be. In the end, I did the only thing I could have done—the only thing that stood any chance of saving us both. I ran away.

  I leaned closer to Tybalt, resting my head against his shoulder as I watched Quentin, who was apparently half Snow Fairy, kicking his way through the glittering yard. “We really need to take him skiing,” I said.

  Tybalt snorted. He pulled me closer and pressed his cheek against mine, only to draw back and look at me disapprovingly. “You are cold,” he said. “Can I convince you to reconsider your position on properly outfitting yourself for this expedition?”

  “Mom’s tower isn’t far, and it’ll be closer if I have genuine need to get there,” I said. “I’ll be cold, but I’ll live.” The Summerlands are the last layer of Faerie to remain accessible. They’re both larger than the mortal world and smaller, following some strange set of physical laws that no one has ever been able to adequately explain. My friend Stacy’s oldest daughter, Cassandra, is majoring in Physics at UC Berkeley, in part because she’d like to be able to figure out how the Summerlands can bend space the way they do.

  Living in the mortal world makes it easy to forget that Faerie doesn’t follow the same laws. Maybe that sounds a little pat—I mean, my boyfriend is a cat in his spare time, and my sister was originally the physical embodiment of my impending death—but those things are normal to me. Unlike snow in California, and land that can expand and contract like a rubber band according to the needs of the people who use it.

  The one thing that never changes is the size of a claimed demesne. Shadowed Hills had set boundaries and borders. No matter what happened, it remained the same size. Technically, the same could be said about my mother’s tower, but it was a pretty small chunk of real estate: the tower and grounds occupied a patch of land scarcely larger than the footprint of my own Victorian house. I guess that’s one of the side effects of building upward, rather than outward.

  The door opened behind us. I pulled away from Tybalt, turning to see Sylvester standing there with an assortment of coats slung over his arm. He had added a military-style greatcoat to his own attire, tan camel hair or something close, with patches on the elbows. “It occurred to me that you had not made allowance for the weather in your plans,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind if I reduce our chances of dying of exposure during the walk.”

  There was no point in arguing now. “No, coats are great,” I said, shivering exaggeratedly before I held out my arms. “Gimme. Please. Before I lose feeling in my fingers.”

  “You chill too easily,” said Tybalt, with an “I told you so” look.

  “You love me anyway.” The coat Sylvester had brought for me was patchwork wool in a dozen shades of red, trimmed with rabbit fur and large enough to fit over my leather jacket. Slipping it on was like enfolding myself in a giant fabric hug. I stuffed my hands into the pockets, enjoying the feeling of being completely surrounded.

  “True enough.” Tybalt’s coat was of a similar style, if in a more masculine cut, and made of shades of brown and gray. He sniffed once, and then said, “These will do.”

  “You’re darn right.” I took the last coat from Sylvester—this one done in shades of purple—and held it up, shouting, “Quentin! Come put this on before you catch your death of cold! I need you to live long enough to be cannon fodder when Simon decides to attack.”

  “You’re really inspiring, you know that?” asked Quentin, as he trudged through the snow to take the coat from my hands.

  “I learned from the best,” I said. “Come on. Let’s move.”

  The boundary of Sylvester’s land was always marked by a forest. We walked toward the trees, our feet crunching in the snow, and into a veritable winter wonderland. Everything was limned in glittering white. Most of the trees were leafless and dormant. Meanwhile, the scattered trees that always appeared brown and dead during the summer had come alive, putting forth frost-laced leaves and even delicate winter flowers. I glanced to Sylvester, who knew more about fae flora than I did.

  He took the hint. “Luna planted some of these, of course; she took cuttings from others, for the winter gardens. They’re all naturally occurring. They can lie dormant for years while they wait for a good snowfall.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  Quentin was ranging ahead again, too delighted by the snow to be sensible about staying with the pack. Tybalt walked to my left; Sylvester to my right. They didn’t look at each other, and I was too tired from lack of sleep and too worried about my
mother to play mediator. They were both big boys. They’d figure it out for themselves, or they wouldn’t.

  The wood ended at a meadow. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was the dividing line that ran through the middle of the open ground, cutting it into two distinct landscapes. On our side, the Shadowed Hills side, everything was white and frozen. On the other side, as the land grew closer to Mother’s tower, everything was growing resplendently green, completely ignoring the season. In Faerie, the king is the land, and that goes for anyone who holds dominion over even the smallest scrap of territory. The space between Shadowed Hills and Amandine’s tower was unclaimed, responding in a general fashion to the kings and queens around it.

  “Is there a reason Shadowed Hills is having a white Christmas?” I asked, glancing to Sylvester.

  He sighed, and looked away. “Luna is . . . not well,” he said, before beginning his march down the gently sloping hillside, toward that slash of improbable green.

  I winced. “Right.” I looked to Tybalt. “Mom probably doesn’t even know what season it is.” Actually, thinking about it, it was never anything but summer at her tower. That was part of why the snow had been such a surprise. I’d only lived in the Summerlands for a decade or so—no time at all, as Faerie measured such things—and most of that time had been spent as Amandine’s shadow, living with her in her eternal summertime. It was easy to forget that some people were fond of cycles, if not of actual change.

  “Amandine will be fine,” said Tybalt, taking my arm in his. “If Simon wishes to challenge a Firstborn daughter of Oberon on her own ground that will be his funeral, not yours.”

  “Come on.” I started after Sylvester, trying not to dwell on the word “funeral.” Mom was Firstborn. That didn’t make her immune to Oberon’s Law. If she killed Simon, she could be in serious trouble, and while I didn’t think she was a killer, it was always hard to tell what Mom would do. I’d never learned to read her the way I had most of the other people who made up my admittedly small circle of family and close friends. But in the years since I’d returned from the pond . . .

  Fae madness isn’t the same as human mental illness. Sometimes I wish the fae had maintained a language of their own, rather than stealing and sharing with mortals. Maybe then we’d have a better word for what the purebloods go through when the centuries of mistakes and magical backlash get to be too much. They go away for a time, receding into themselves and pulling a veil of fog over the world. It’s the only way to give their brains the space to carve out a new worldview, something that can account for the changes that inevitably happen around them. Amandine had been skirting the edges of that fog when I had run away from her, tired of watching her flirt with an oblivion that would probably leave me dead of extreme old age before it let her go. Then Simon had transformed me, and by the time I made it back to my own body, Amandine was gone, burying herself in the fog with all the enthusiasm of a girl preparing for her first formal ball.

  She might know Simon wasn’t living with her anymore. But depending on how long they’d been together, she might not.

  I walked a little faster.

  Everything changed when we stepped across the invisible line dividing the lands influenced by Shadowed Hills from the lands influenced by my mother. The temperature shot up at least ten degrees, everything suddenly smelling of fresh green leaves and sweet potential. I pulled my arm away from Tybalt long enough to shrug out of my coat. He and Quentin did the same. Sylvester kept his coat on, but his was tailored, not borrowed from the general stock; it was probably enchanted to keep him at just the right temperature, regardless of the weather. We walked on until the bowl of the meadow began slanting upward again, and we stepped out of springtime into summer.

  By any rules of normal geography, we should have been able to see Amandine’s tower long before we reached that transition point. The Summerlands aren’t big on rules. We stepped into the summer, and the land leveled out before us, and we were suddenly standing less than fifteen yards from the low stone wall that surrounded the elegant white needle of the tower. The stone glowed faintly against the twilit sky. Flowering trees and bushes crowded her garden, all blooming in a dozen shades of white and ivory.

  “Think she’s home?” asked Quentin.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said, and started walking faster. The others fell back, allowing me to take the lead. The enchantments on the tower knew who I was; they’d always let me in, no matter what else might be going on. That could be important, depending on the situation ahead of us.

  The gate swung open when I touched it. I left my fingertips against the wood, murmuring, “These three are with me. Let them in.” Then I walked on, into my mother’s garden.

  Tybalt, Quentin, and Sylvester followed without difficulty. The enchantments were listening.

  I hadn’t lived in the tower for a long time, but the layout of the garden had always been simple, and I knew the way. I followed the path as it curved gently past the marble birdbath to the door, which was standing open. That was enough to make me stop, one hand going to my knife as I sniffed the air, trying to find traces of magic beneath the riotous perfumes of a dozen different types of flower, some of which never existed in the mortal world. I thought I smelled smoke. I couldn’t be sure.

  “Tybalt?”

  “Yes.” The smell of pennyroyal and musk cut through the layers of perfume as he transformed, and as a cat, he raced past me, up the shallow steps at the threshold, into the building beyond.

  I tensed, waiting where I was. Simon was a powerful magician, but Tybalt was harder to transform than I was—most people are harder to transform than I am—and there’s very little that can catch a Cait Sidhe when he’s not trying to be caught. The tower was five floors, no more than four rooms to a floor. Some of the floors were a single large room, like mine, like Amandine’s. He could search them and return in an instant. He could—

  He reappeared on the steps, stretching back into human form, a blank expression on his face. For just an instant, I was certain that he had found her body in one of the tower’s upper rooms, throat slit by the silver and iron required to kill one of the Firstborn, colorless eyes open and staring into the rafters.

  Then he shook his head. “She is not here; from the scent markings in her room and parlor, she has not been here in days, maybe even weeks. There are no signs of a struggle. I’m sorry, October. Your mother is still missing.”

  It was almost a relief. I realized that even as I sighed, shook my head, and said, “We had to check. Did you smell anyone else?”

  “Yes.” His face hardened again. “Traces of candle smoke and rotten oranges. Simon has been here, and recently.”

  I turned to Sylvester to see how he was taking this news. He was staring at the tower, lips gone pale and bloodless as he pressed them into a thin, hard line. One hand was grasping the pommel of his sword. His knuckles were white, and I had to fight not to take a step away from him.

  “I can’t follow this trail. Our magic is not so attuned as it once was, and he is too far for me to follow. He could see our walls from your mother’s land, and the wards would never tell me how close he had come,” said Sylvester, voice pitched low. “He could have been here for days, watching us, waiting for the chance to strike. Oh, he is going to pay for what he’s done to me and mine, October. On the root and the branch, I promise you that.”

  I glanced to Tybalt, who looked as alarmed as I felt. He stepped away from the tower, and the door swung shut behind him, leaving the four of us standing in my mother’s garden, where the white petals from the blossoming trees were falling like so much unfrozen snow.

  SIX

  WE TRUDGED SILENTLY through the meadow between Mom’s land and Sylvester’s. Even when we stepped back into the snow, Quentin remained by my side, not running off to make snowballs or enjoy the weather. The quiet lasted until we were standing on the lawn of Shadowed Hills, with
the doors waiting to welcome us into warmth and presumptive safety. Tybalt, Quentin, and I stopped. Sylvester took a few more steps before turning to face the rest of us.

  “October—” he began.

  I raised a hand, cutting him off. “Who would he run to? If he isn’t here with my mother, where would he think he could go for aid?” He wouldn’t be hiding with the changeling underground, of that I was certain: places like the one that had raised me were too far beneath him, even in his hour of need.

  Sylvester frowned slowly, looking confused. “Are you that angry with me?”

  “Right now? Yes. You’ve been keeping secrets from me. Things I needed to know.” Like maybe before he’d sent me running after Simon, before I’d been turned into a fish and left stranded in a watery jail for fourteen years. “I love you. I always will. But right now, I’m pretty pissed at you. So can you just answer the question, please?”

  “Simon was . . . not well when he was last here,” said Sylvester, picking his words with care. “He was separated from your mother. Luna disliked having him in our halls. He wandered the Kingdom, taking hospitality where he could find it.”

  “Did he go to January?” I asked.

  Sylvester shook his head. “No. Tamed Lightning had not been founded yet, and as a titled, unlanded Count, Duchess Riordan saw him as a threat. Perhaps if he’d been willing to formally divorce your mother—but that would have required taking steps neither wanted taken.”

  I blinked, frowning. Fae marriages are complicated things, filled with rules about inheritance and succession that I never bothered learning. But fae divorces are simple. Unless there are children involved, all the couple needs to do is announce that they’re no longer married. “Why didn’t they want to get a divorce?”

  “I don’t see how this relates to where he would be if not here or at your mother’s tower.”