A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  “They were still brothers when Patrick came with me to the Undersea. Your mother . . . she wasn’t as bad then as she is now, but she was getting more and more unreasonable, and Evening had begun to make demands of Simon that made us very uncomfortable. We were trying to convince him to leave his wife when your sister disappeared.” She paused expectantly.

  I picked up where she clearly hoped I would. “Meaning divorce was impossible until August was found,” I said.

  “I’ll admit, when he first went looking for her so vehemently, we half hoped it was because he’d seen sense and wanted her to consent to his leaving her mother. We were willing to delude ourselves if it meant we weren’t losing him, and I was still adjusting to life in Saltmist with an air-breathing husband, and we allowed our attention to waver more than we should have. That’s our regret to carry. I won’t say we could have stopped or saved him, but maybe we could have done more than we did, and you’ve suffered because of the actions of a man I still have cause to love dearly. And then the earthquake came, and everything got too complicated to walk away from.” Dianda looked at me, dark eyes dry and solemn. “Bring him home. Whatever you need to make that happen, you’ll have it from us; you know you will.”

  “There are things you can’t give me,” I said. “But I’ll remember that you offered. Good night, Dianda.”

  She nodded, accepting my dismissal for what it was, and wheeled her way back to the table where Patrick was waiting. I turned and looked across the table at Tybalt.

  “I don’t feel much like dessert, do you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I find that for once my sweet tooth has deserted me. Shall we return to the safety and comfort of home?” He held his hand out to me.

  I took it as we both rose. “Don’t we need to wait for the check?”

  “We’re not getting paid for dining here.”

  “I meant—you have enough interaction with the human world to know what I meant, you dork. Don’t we need to pay for dinner?”

  Tybalt looked at me like I’d never said anything more foolish in my entire life, something we both knew wasn’t the case. “We granted my subject the honor of feeding us,” he said. “Why would we need to compensate him further?”

  “Silly me,” I said, and picked up my bouquet, tucking it under my arm. “I guess that means we’re ready to go.”

  “Indeed.” In a single motion he had swept me off my feet and up into his arms, holding me against his chest as easily as if I were made of straw. He dipped his head toward Patrick and Dianda, more out of politeness than any sincere farewell, I was sure, and strode across the room to the nearest patch of deep shadow.

  The shadows pulled apart as he approached, parting like curtains to reveal even deeper darkness beyond. I took a deep breath, screwing my eyes shut against the cold to come, and he carried me onto the Shadow Roads.

  FOUR

  THE COLD WAS A SHOCK. The cold of the Shadow Roads is always a shock, no matter how often we travel this way. Every kind of fae has their own innate talents and skills; Cait Sidhe, like Tybalt, can access the Shadow Roads, one of the old conduits through the Summerlands. They allow for faster, more efficient travel than should really be possible. Only problem is that while the Shadow Roads are cold and airless for the fae who can natively access them, they’re freezing and suffocating for the rest of us. If I tried to inhale, my lungs would collapse, because there was nothing there for me to breathe in.

  I huddled against Tybalt’s chest instead, focusing on the steady, reassuring beat of his heart as I shivered. He would see me safely out of the darkness he’d carried me into. He always had before. And then I would throw myself right into another kind of darkness, as I went searching for the man who’d been my personal bogeyman, only to show a certain sort of stunted heroism in the way he lost himself again.

  Why can’t anything ever be easy?

  My lungs were starting to burn from the strain of holding my breath when the dark outside my eyelids bloomed into bloody red. I opened my eyes, blinking away the ice coating my lashes, and beheld the brightly lit walls of my own kitchen. May wasn’t there, but the scent of sugar cookies lingered in the air, telling me she hadn’t been gone for long. She hadn’t baked this much when we first moved in together. We hadn’t played host to an endless parade of rotating teenagers back then, either.

  May and I both remembered what it was like to be young, hungry, and unsure that there were any safe places left in the world. We’d never discussed it openly, but I knew she was as focused as I was on making sure the teens who trusted us would never need to feel the way we’d felt at their age. Not as long as we had the power to keep them safe.

  Tybalt swung my feet to the floor, keeping his hands on my waist for a beat longer than necessary. I blinked through the melting ice, offering him a shivering smile. He laughed and plucked the flowers from under my arm, holding them up for me to see.

  “A little refrigeration is good for a bouquet,” he said, and turned to take a vase down from the top of the cabinets. “These will keep nicely, I think.”

  “They’re really beautiful.” My dress, which had been so appropriate for a dinner out, felt overly fancy for my kitchen. I pushed my hair back with both hands, glancing at the door. “I need to go find May and tell her we’re going hunting for Simon. Do you want to come with me?”

  “No.” He suddenly scowled. “If your heart is set on going without me, I’d best practice letting you race off on your own.”

  “It’s not my heart, it’s Karen’s vision, combined with the political reality you’ve worked so hard to drum through my thick skull,” I said. “You know I’d take you with me if she hadn’t already told me it would mean failure, and if it wouldn’t make everything harder for you. And for Raj. Poor kid already puts up with enough.”

  “He is compensated for his suffering,” said Tybalt. “He’s a Prince of Cats. He’ll never want for anything in his life.”

  “Except for freedom, right?”

  Tybalt grimaced. “Except that,” he admitted. “I only hope his heart is better behaved than my own, and that it fixes itself upon something easier to keep and protect than you.”

  “You’ve basically raised the kid, and the only reason he’s not officially my squire is because the politics of dragging him into the peerage of the Divided Courts might cause someone’s head to actually explode,” I said. “I think the ship of Raj being well-behaved and obedient to Cait Sidhe law has well and truly sailed.”

  Tybalt made a pained expression, clearly trying to hide the fact that he was fighting not to smile. “A perfect representative of his kind, he may never be, but he’ll do as he’s told enough to take and hold the throne.”

  “I’m really going to enjoy seeing how much he listens to you or does as he’s told once he’s King of Cats,” I said, and blew him a kiss as I made my way to the door.

  The downside of having a big house is that sometimes you have to go looking for people. When we shared my old apartment, I knew where May was at all times; she literally couldn’t go to the bathroom without me knowing about it.

  Okay, maybe most of having a big house isn’t such a downside after all.

  May wasn’t in the living room or the dining room, which eliminated the downstairs from contention. I turned to the stairs, starting upward into the gloom. Her bedroom door stood open, which meant she wasn’t doing anything she’d get mad at me for interrupting. I still paused to knock before sticking my head inside.

  My style of housekeeping is best referred to as “benign neglect.” I don’t have a lot of stuff, which is the only reason there are any visible flat surfaces in my house. If not for Quentin’s desire for tidiness leading to him constantly straightening things up in his wake, we would have lost the dining room to the slow march of spiderwebs and junk mail a long time ago. I’m not filthy or anything—I wash dishes, do my laundry, and don’t let the b
athroom garbage overflow—but I’m messy.

  May takes messiness to the Olympic level. Looking into her room is like looking into the Cave of Wonders from a retelling of Aladdin, with costume jewelry, makeup in brightly colored containers, and heaped-up piles of jewel-toned clothing everywhere the eye can see. I swear she emptied out all the drawers of old, weird, unsalable silk scarves at the local thrift stores and used them to build decorative heaps in the corners. Her bed is a sea of pillows, blankets, and the kind of handmade quilts that wind up in those same stores when someone’s grandparents die and their worldly goods get donated because it’s too much to deal with. In short, it’s beautiful, but it’s a lot.

  May was sitting on the edge of the bed, brushing her blue-streaked hair and humming an old English folksong under her breath. She looked up and smiled at the sound of my knock, putting the brush aside. “Hey. How was your date?”

  I stepped fully into the room and leaned against the doorframe. “More eventful than either Tybalt or I would have preferred, but no one got stabbed, so we’re okay. Where’s Jazz?”

  “Out with her flock for the evening,” said May. “Something about family time. I didn’t ask too many questions. She doesn’t like explaining herself, and to be honest, it’s none of my business.”

  “Ah,” I said. Jazz is a Raven-maid, a skinshifter, who possesses a feathered band that allows her to transform into a raven and keeps her tied—sort of literally—to Faerie. Now that the Selkies are largely gone, there aren’t many skinshifters left, just the Ravens and Swanmays. Maybe that was why Jazz’s flock had been asking for more of her time lately, sometimes going so far as to land in the front yard and caw until someone came out to ask what they wanted.

  Somehow, they never thought to knock on the door or ring the doorbell. It was like we were good enough to yell at, but not good enough to talk to. Jazz was the only member of her flock I’d ever seen in human form. That was interesting, and dwelling on it right now wouldn’t do me any good, not with May watching me with wary, slightly narrowed eyes.

  As my Fetch, May has my memories up to the moment of her “birth”—inaccurate, but more correct than “creation,” since she was a night-haunt for centuries before borrowing my face and yoking herself to my survival. If I’d died when I was supposedly meant to, she would have winked out of existence and been lost forever, leaving the rest of the night-haunts to miss or mourn her. As it stands, she found a family and got to keep it, which is more than any Fetch before her could say. It may never happen again. She’s unique in all of Faerie, and she knows me too well to be fooled when I get flippant.

  “All right, since you’re clearly not planning to volunteer the goods, what do you mean when you say ‘eventful’?” she asked.

  “I mean Patrick and Dianda Lorden also dined at the Cat in the Rafters tonight, and they came over to our table to make sure I was aware that if I got married without inviting Simon, his family, or his liege—that being Eira—could claim insult against my household.”

  May’s eyes widened. “They did what? Why would they do that?” She fell backward on the bed, groaning. “Pureblood marriage law is so stupid,” she said. “I knew that, I knew that, but I never thought anyone would care enough to make sure you knew that.”

  “You and Tybalt have been banking on my ignorance throughout this whole process, and now your reward is that you have to go with me to look for Simon Torquill, and Tybalt can’t come,” I said dryly. It was impossible to think of Karen’s vision and the visit from Patrick and Dianda and not see the two as connected. “So I guess you got a pretty quick ‘don’t keep secrets from Toby’ reminder here. Are there any other fun points of fae law that you’d like to remind me of, so we don’t get fucked unexpectedly?”

  “Um.” May pushed herself up onto her elbows. “There’s a decent chance I’m legally your kid, so you and Tybalt may not be able to divorce unless I let you? I don’t think anyone’s ever tried to nail down exactly where a Fetch falls in the chain of inheritance.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Okay, that’s . . . special. And probably good to know. But I’ll fight anyone who tries to say you’re not my sister.”

  “If I’m your sister, then I also have to sound off if Simon ever wants to separate from Mom,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Not that he will. I remember enough from lives before this one to know he thinks the sun sets in her shadow and the moon rises in her eyes. Their love story may be terrible and bad for everyone around them, but it’s going to last a long, long time.”

  “That’s not what Dianda’s hoping,” I said. “She seems to think if I bring Simon home, she can talk him into leaving his wife.”

  “Is ‘talk’ mermaid for ‘threaten’?” asked May.

  “I don’t know. It seems more likely than the alternative.” Whatever that was. I couldn’t think of anything. “So okay, you’re my sister every way but legally because we don’t need to make this shit any more complicated than it already is, fine. I still need you to come with me.”

  “Why me?”

  “Karen called and told me she’d seen you going with me in a dream, which means it definitely happens. Tybalt has to stay here and keep kinging, Raj can’t come, Walther will literally laugh in my face if I ask him to go on another wacky, potentially fatal quest right now, and I’d leave Quentin if I thought he’d let me get away with it. You’re literally unkillable—even more so than I am, since I can die, I just get better. You can’t die.”

  “Why does that being a selling point make me so uncomfortable?”

  “You’re smarter than we look.”

  “Damn right I am.” May stood. “Okay, so what’s the game plan here? We go to the Luidaeg and—”

  “No,” I said. “We go to Luna.”

  May blinked. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “But she hates you and, by extension, hates me.”

  “I know.”

  Slowly, her look of shock became a scowl. “The Luidaeg would be, and I can’t believe I’m saying this in a serious, non-ironic manner, easier.”

  “I know that, too.” The Luidaeg is the eldest daughter of Maeve, one of Oberon’s two missing wives. She’s one of the oldest people left in Faerie, and they call her “the sea witch” because there was a time when she was the only witch of the water in the entire world. She’s my mother’s sister, making her my aunt, and her magic is essentially boundless—which is ironic, because it’s been pretty tightly bound by Oberon’s other wife, Titania.

  The Luidaeg can’t lie. She can’t harm anyone descended from Titania, even if they’re trying to harm her. And she can’t say “no” when someone asks her to use her considerable magical powers to grant their heart’s desire. All she can do is set a price so high that no one with any sense would be willing to consider paying it.

  It’s still surprising to me, even after everything I’ve been through, how many people think that when her prices are so high it hurts, it’s because she’s being cruel, and not because they’re asking for something they’d be better off leaving alone. The Luidaeg will give you anything. She doesn’t have a choice. She gets to decide how much you’ll have to pay, though, and she uses what little choice she has left like a surgeon uses a scalpel. When she cuts the flesh of your desires, it bleeds.

  August had gone to the Luidaeg, looking for a way to find Oberon and bring him back. The Luidaeg’s price for giving her a chance had been her way home: her memory and ability to recognize anything and everything that anchored her to the life she’d had before her quest began. To save August from the consequences of her own actions, Simon had traded his way home for hers, and I’d stood powerlessly by and watched it happen. The Luidaeg had been able to see that he was clawing his way back to being a good man. She hadn’t wanted to do it. She hadn’t been able to refuse. Not once he met her price. Unless he found Oberon somehow, he was a danger now and would remain o
ne.

  I was direly afraid that if I went to her for help, even if I did my best to play my cards close to my chest, she’d turn her previous order to find Simon into an order to kill him—an order I wouldn’t be able to refuse. I didn’t know why she’d want him dead, but I didn’t know why she’d wanted him found in the first place, and the risk wasn’t something I wanted to take. He had been redeeming himself. He had been doing his best to come home, before August’s choices, combined with his own, had taken that option away from him.

  I’d already lost my father. I wasn’t going to be the reason she had to lose hers as well. And I know that being a hero means I’m supposed to put Faerie first, always, but there are some costs that are personal, and too much to pay. I wanted to find Simon. I wanted to come home and get married.

  And yes, I actually wanted him to be there when I did that, if it was even remotely possible. I had little enough family who could realistically be in attendance. If Faerie was going to make him my father, he could damn well act like it.

  Technically, bringing Simon home might still mean killing him, depending on how he responded to the attempt. I wasn’t ready to think too much about that yet, just like I wasn’t ready to commit to giving up my humanity yet. Somewhere in the muddle my life had become, I’d wound up dealing with things that were much bigger and more terrifying than anything one changeling from San Francisco should be expected to contend with. I wasn’t going to do it until I had to.

  “You’re worried she’ll make the cost something impossible,” said May.

  I nodded. “I am.”

  “I’d never let you make a bargain like that. I’d take the price first.”