A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  Getting into most knowes requires completing some sort of trial. Maybe it’s an obstacle course, or climbing the tallest tree in the world, or resisting the whispering terror of a field full of enchanted grass. When Sylvester established the entrance to Shadowed Hills, he wanted to be sure no mortals would wander into his entry hall by mistake, and he set up one of the more complicated patterns I’d encountered.

  We climbed the highest hill in the park, winding up on a summit from which we could see most of the city, then crawled on our hands and knees under a cluster of spiky hawthorn bushes that hasn’t been cut back since the first time I visited the knowe. After so many years of unchecked growth, they should have dominated the landscape, but somehow, they still occupied roughly the same amount of space they always had. Magic is funny that way. Getting back to our feet, we all ran six times counterclockwise around a tall oak tree. It was like watching the world’s weirdest aerobics class in progress, and I hated every second of it.

  For someone who dislikes exercise as much as I do, you’d think I would have found myself a nice desk job instead of going into the hero business, but no.

  When we were done, I glanced at Quentin and May. Both gestured for me to go on. I turned to a large old stump and rapped my knuckles against the wood, producing a hollow booming sound that carried much too far and echoed much too long.

  There was a burnt-out oak tree nearby, victim of a lightning strike sometime in the deep past. It was still struggling to put out new leaves, having refused to die even when all the odds said it should have. I had a lot of affection for that tree. I stepped back, waiting for the echoes of my knock to fade away.

  Slowly and then all at once, the outline of a door appeared in the seamed bark and char of the oak. In what felt like the blink of an eye, something impossible had happened. And then the impossible swung open, revealing a dark-haired man in the blue-and-yellow livery of Shadowed Hills standing in a corona of buttery lamplight.

  He blinked at the sight of us, hand dropping away from the doorknob before he asked, in a faintly baffled tone, “October . . . ?”

  “Hey, Etienne,” I said, and took a step toward the door. “Can we come in?”

  “I . . .” He paused. “I honestly don’t know the answer. You haven’t been banned from the knowe, so far as I’m aware.” He was being polite there; as Sylvester’s seneschal, Etienne would absolutely know if I’d been formally banished, “but I know you were encouraged to stay away.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I said dryly.

  His face softened, and he stepped over the threshold into the mortal world, grimacing a little at the moment of transition. It doesn’t hit purebloods as hard as it hits changelings, but it does hit them. “October,” he said. “Do you think it doesn’t ache, knowing you can’t come home? Chelsea speaks of the warmth and comfort of your house as if she were talking about the halls of Caer Sidi. I’m jealous of my own daughter, that she gets to keep your company while I must keep my distance. Our hearths are colder for your absence.”

  It’s not just Tybalt: all the older purebloods have a tendency to become uncomfortably flowery when they get emotional. Hearing it from Etienne, normally the most rule-abiding and straitlaced of Sylvester’s knights, was still surprisingly moving. “You’re an ass,” I said, and stepped forward to meet him.

  He closed his arms around me, the cedar smoke and lime scent of his magic enveloping me, and I breathed in deeply, enjoying the familiarity of the scent, if not the moment itself. Etienne was never a hugger before he was able to bring his human lover, Bridget Ames, home with him to Shadowed Hills and take her for his wife. Having Bridget, and more, Chelsea, around had done wonders to relax him when it came to things like showing affection to the people he cared about. I had only been a little surprised when I realized that list included me.

  He let me go, stepping back again, and said, “Of course, you realize I can’t let you in.”

  He might be more relaxed about hugging, but he certainly wasn’t more relaxed about rules. I blinked at him.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “His Grace asked—”

  “That I stay away for a little while, I know. I was there. It’s been a year, Etienne. In case you forgot, I’m a changeling, I’m mortal, I pay attention to the passage of time. A year is long enough to qualify as ‘a little while.’ Anything longer than a year would be a ‘a long while,’ and that’s not what he said.” I crossed my arms and glowered. “He also asked me to stay away. He didn’t order. He didn’t command. He certainly didn’t bind. I am a knight of Shadowed Hills, and I am exactly as free to walk through that door as you are.”

  “More, maybe,” said May, in a pleasant tone. “Because Quentin and I won’t try to stop her, and she’s armed, which is two things she currently has over you.”

  Quentin didn’t say anything. He just stepped forward and glared at Etienne.

  Etienne held his position and his posture for a long beat before he sagged and sighed. Quentin seemed to have been the last straw for him. While I’m Quentin’s knight, there are things I’m not equipped to teach him, and he’d been traveling to Shadowed Hills twice a week for lessons in swordsmanship, etiquette, and the intricacies of Daoine Sidhe magic for almost as long as he’d been living with me. Having one of his students clearly prepared to move against him while he was telling another that she was no longer welcome in her home had to hurt.

  He stepped to the side. “You have my apologies. When I said I could not let Sir Daye in, I was unaware of the minutiae of the situation.”

  I took pity. Etienne’s greatest flaw has always been his rigid obedience to the rules. It doesn’t make him a bad person. It doesn’t even make him a bad friend. It just makes him someone who needs an excuse to misbehave. It’s hard for him to go against orders, even under the best of circumstances, and this was not that.

  “It’s cool,” I said, and stepped inside, Spike at my heels. It rattled happily as we crossed the threshold into the knowe, and three more rose goblins popped out from behind the bookshelves, rattling their own thorns in answer. I felt a pang of something close to shame. By staying away, I had kept Spike away as well, and this was where its family lived.

  It hadn’t been my intention, or my choice. I looked over my shoulder at Etienne and the others.

  “Well?” I asked. “Are you coming?”

  They came. All three of them, Quentin in the lead and Etienne bringing up the rear. He closed the door behind himself, and it melted away, leaving a smooth expanse of wall behind.

  “His Grace and the Duchess Luna are in the Moon Garden,” he said, voice back to perfect formal precision.

  I nodded. “That’s the one past the main library, right?”

  Luna has always been a gardener by both choice and calling. It’s one of many things that started making more sense when I found out she was a Blodynbryd, and not a Kitsune as she’d led us all to believe. Her mother is Acacia, Mother of Trees, and she’s a sort of Dryad in her own right, tied to the rosebushes growing on the land she’s rooted herself to, rather than an oak or an elm. For her, gardening is a song, something that lets her call the living world into focus. Plants thrive under her hands, and she finds peace in the action. Even when she was swaddled in a stolen skin, she’d found peace in it.

  Hopefully, the fact that she was in one of her gardens would improve her mood and keep her from getting too pissed when she saw me. I waited for Etienne to nod in the affirmative, and then took off down the hall, following the half-familiar curvature of the knowe, which rearranged itself on a regular basis. Quentin and May paced me, keeping up with ease. This had been home for both of them, in their own ways. I wasn’t the only one who’d been in a form of exile.

  We passed the large, ornately carved doorframe to the banquet hall, a room that had only been used for Beltane Balls in my lifetime, and started down a narrower hallway with wooden walls an
d a scuffed maple floor. Halfway down it, I paused, frowning.

  “I don’t think this is the way to the library,” I said.

  “At last she gets it,” said May.

  I blinked at her. “Why didn’t you—?”

  “The knowe is taking us somewhere,” she said. “Every turn you’ve made has been the right one, and normally I would expect the library to be somewhere around here. It doesn’t move much. But instead we’re someplace I don’t know, and that tells me the knowe is deciding how this is going to go.”

  I glanced at Quentin. He shook his head.

  “The servants’ markings say we’re moving toward the library,” he said. They were small flowers carved into the wainscoting and the decorative flourishes on the walls, all but invisible to the untrained eye, intended to make sure the small army of maids, courtiers, and servers who kept the knowe operational would always wind up where they needed to be instead of wandering in endless, bewildered circles. “I have no idea where we are.”

  Well. Wasn’t that fun. I looked up at the ceiling. “We’re sort of in a hurry here,” I said.

  There was no response. There never is, when I’m addressing the knowes.

  I sighed heavily. “May as well see where it wants us to go,” I said, and resumed walking down the hall. May and Quentin followed, and for a while, the only sound was the scuff of our feet against the floor.

  There was a soft chiming, like a crystal bell being rung, and a door literally appeared in the wall ahead of us. As befit the sound of its arrival, it was made of cut crystals set into a silver weave, seemingly too loose and open to hold them in place, so they appeared to hang suspended on nothing but air. When I looked closer, I could see the finest of silver wires connecting each of them to the lattice, keeping them in place.

  “Do you know this door?” I asked.

  Quentin shook his head. After a pause, so did May.

  “I think someone I was once knew it,” she said, in an uncertain tone. “I mean, part of me feels like it’s familiar. But there’s no memory associated with the feeling. Just this sort of itch of recognition.”

  “So anything could be behind it,” I concluded. “Awesome. Well, this is where the knowe wants us, so we might as well go inside.” I reached out, running my fingers along the surface of the crystals as I searched for anything resembling a doorknob. There wasn’t one, but one of the crystals nicked my index finger, bringing a bright, quick bead of blood to the surface. “Ow!” I yelped, yanking my hand away.

  Quentin stared at me in obvious disbelief. “You get stabbed like it’s the hot new thing, and that’s what makes you show some self-preservation?”

  “I wasn’t expecting it!”

  “Are you usually expecting to get stabbed?”

  “When we’re out in public, yes.” My finger was already healed. I lowered my hand and stared as the drop of blood that had been left on the crystal was absorbed into its glistening surface, leaving a faint pink sheen behind.

  Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, that sheen spread to the crystals around it, and then to the crystals around them, until every crystal in the improbable door was tinted a faint, unmistakable shade of pink. I blinked. “Well, that’s new.”

  “You’re redecorating with blood now?” May shrugged. “I guess that’s a natural next step for you.”

  “Ha, ha.” The crystals shivered, emitting another of those soft chiming sounds, before the door swung slowly inward, revealing a room overrun with roses. I blinked again. “Whoa.”

  “Whoa is right.” Quentin stepped forward, sticking his head through the open door. “Toby, you need to come see this.”

  “Quentin!” I grabbed him by the collar, hauling him away from the opening. He made a bewildered squawking sound. I released him and glared. “Dude, you’re with two functionally unkillable women. Why would you stick your head through a mysterious, blood-drinking door when we’re right here to do it for you?”

  “I guess I didn’t think,” he said sheepishly.

  “That’s one more thing he learned from watching you,” said May airily, before she stepped through the open door and into the green room on the other side. “All right, I’m going to be the third one to throw a ‘whoa’ in here. Toby, come on.”

  “Coming.” I shot Quentin one last quelling look and followed my Fetch through the open door.

  My first impression, that the room on the other side was full of roses, was more correct than I could have imagined. We were in what was essentially an overgrown greenhouse, the original flowerbeds and walkways completely overtaken by tangled vines and loops of thorns. Roses the size of dinner plates hung heavy on their stems, seeming to almost nod as we passed them, done in by the weight of their own splendor. There were no lights, only the dim gleam of moonlight passing through the mostly blocked panes of glass.

  And everywhere, the scent of roses.

  It wasn’t a cultivar I’d encountered before, but it was a cultivar. They lacked the deep, primal scent of wild roses. This wasn’t one of Maeve’s places. I took another step forward, Quentin close behind me, and there was a chiming sound as the door swung closed. I whirled, intending to catch it before it could shut fully. I was too slow. The door clicked back into its frame and trembled before disappearing, leaving us with no visible way out of the room.

  “Oops,” said Quentin.

  “Very succinct.” I turned back to the roses. They appeared to have grown with no intervention, wrapping their vines around whatever they desired and flowering with no regard for where people would need to walk. Despite this, there was a clear, if narrow, path through the greenery. I frowned as I considered it. Whatever this was, it seemed too easy.

  “Okay,” I said finally. “This probably isn’t a trap. Wherever we are, it’s still in Shadowed Hills. If we have to break a window to get out of here, that’s what we’ll do.” The fields around the knowe were still familiar, even if it had been a long time since I’d been a feral child running wild through them in the company of my friends. The grounds have never changed as often as the interior did, and I’d be able to find my way.

  Carefully, I began working my way along the narrow path, doing my best to dodge the thorns. There were so many of them, though, that it was inevitable that a branch would scrape across the back of my hand, leaving a series of shallow scratches behind. I winced and sucked air through my teeth, continuing to pick my way through. I could hear May and Quentin moving behind me; hopefully, I would be the one to block all the thorns, since I would recover quickly.

  The branch that had grazed me withdrew of its own accord, twisting up on itself into a fernlike spiral. The branches around it began to do the same, a ripple of sudden withdrawal that more than doubled the width of the path. I rubbed the back of my hand, smearing the blood remaining there, and watched the roses move.

  “Roses don’t normally do this, right?” asked May. “I’m not misremembering the way plants behave?”

  “Roses don’t normally move unless there’s a good wind blowing,” I said.

  “Cool. Good to know. We’re all going to be eaten by weird magic flowers.”

  “Let’s face it,” said Quentin. “This isn’t much of a surprise.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. I just snorted, and watched the roses pull further and further away, until we could see the shapes of the overgrown planter beds, and the light had brightened considerably as they unblocked the windows, and . . .

  Oh.

  And the glass coffin at the center of the growth was fully revealed. It was an ornate, geometric thing, almost a miniature greenhouse, and every inch of it shone, somehow clear of either dirt or sap. In the coffin was a woman with hair the color of fox fur, dull only in comparison to the roses, which were a richer, bloodier red; she would have blazed against any other setting, but here, she was dimmed down, reduced, made less than she should
have been. Her hands were folded across her chest, like a princess out of a fairy tale, and her gown was green, seeming to have been made entirely out of rose leaves, each one connected to the one beside it with a delicate silver loop.

  May’s eyes widened. “Is that . . . ?”

  “It is.” I was the only one of the three of us who’d seen her like this, features sharp and beautiful and flawless, ears as sharply pointed as Quentin’s. If her eyes had been open, they would have been the color of summer honey, perfectly golden and utterly inhuman.

  Of course she was beautiful. The Daoine Sidhe always are. Titania would have tolerated nothing less.

  “Rayseline,” said May, with all the fondness of a woman who remembered the girl in the glass being born, remembered holding her when she was a baby, remembered thinking she was going to grow up to do incredible things. Well, she’d done that. They hadn’t been good things, but kidnapping my daughter, killing Oleander de Merelands, and nearly assassinating her own mother made for a pretty incredible list, all things considered.

  “She’s still asleep?” said Quentin, in a bewildered tone. “But Queen Windermere made the elf-shot cure available after the tribunal said it was okay to use it. I thought . . .”

  “You mean you never asked?” I turned to him. “You’ve been coming here every week for lessons, and you never saw her, and you never asked?”

  “I didn’t want to upset anyone,” he said. “I thought she might be having trouble adjusting. I knew you’d pulled the Blodynbryd out of her. I guess I just couldn’t imagine Luna allowing her to stay asleep any longer than she had to.”

  I could understand his confusion. It still reminded me that Quentin was a pureblood—a famously incurious lot. They don’t like to dig below the surface of things, preferring the comfort of the obvious and the known. If Raysel wasn’t there, of course he’d assumed there was a reason and left it alone. It took changelings like me and oddities like May to ask the questions that keep Faerie changing. The purebloods would be happy, by and large, to let it stay the same forever. It’s safer for them that way.