The Winter Long

by Seanan McGuire

  “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.

  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 t
he 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. T
he 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.”