A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  “No,” I said, and took a step toward the coffin. “They didn’t wake her up.”

  There was a rustle and a faint creaking noise, and then Sylvester was saying, “We couldn’t risk it with Simon at large.”

  I whirled around, eyes wide, and beheld my liege for the first time in a year.

  He was a handsome man, Daoine Sidhe like his daughter, with the same fox fur-colored hair and golden eyes. He didn’t have the build of a laborer, slim and easy in his linen shirt and simple trousers, a look of profound weariness on his face. He looked at me, weariness growing tinged with sorrow as he met my eyes, and in that moment, all I could think was how sorry I was that I’d ever been the one to hurt him. It didn’t matter that in many ways he’d hurt me first—that’s not math that puts anything good into the world. I’m allowed to protect my heart. I’m also allowed to grieve when I don’t protect the hearts of the people around me.

  Sylvester looked, for a moment, like he was going to move toward me, like maybe we were on the verge of reuniting. Then he tucked his hands into his pockets and turned his face away, suddenly fascinated by one of the roses growing nearby, and the flicker of hope I hadn’t even been aware was growing guttered out and died in my chest.

  “If he were safely asleep, as he should be, we’d have woken her by now,” he said, tone dull, almost lifeless. “You promised to speak at her trial, or did you forget?”

  “I promised to speak at her trial, and the Luidaeg has agreed not to demand she be held accountable for the Selkie woman she murdered,” I said. “On account of how she was under Oleander’s influence at the time.”

  “Oleander . . . yes. She’s still the problem, even now that she’s gone to the night-haunts. With Simon out there doing as he pleases, he could appear and demand satisfaction for his lover’s death by my daughter’s hands. Raysel’s life could be forfeit to pay for killing that monster.” He turned back toward me, and his eyes were suddenly candle-bright with rage, less golden than lambent. I swallowed the urge to step away.

  My humanity is thin and faded these days, but part of me remembers what it is to be terrified of the gentry, to know that my place is so far below the least of the purebloods that looking at them can make it difficult to breathe. For Sylvester to be so angry that his magic was leaking into his physical form was viscerally terrifying in a way I had trouble articulating. I fought back the fear and stood my ground.

  “I don’t think he could, actually,” I said, in as level a tone as I could manage. “He traded his way home for August’s, so she could go back to her mother. For a moment, for his daughter, he was a hero, and I’m sorry you didn’t get to see him like that. But losing his way home means he can’t recognize anyone who matters to him. He wouldn’t know you if you were standing in front of him.” At least, that was how it had worked for August, and I had to hope it was how it would work for Simon. He’d still recognized me, after all. He’d just forgotten how much work he’d done to make amends and thought that it was his job to destroy me. There was a decent possibility he didn’t even remember Oleander was dead. This spell—if I could even call it that, it was a magical working so far above a simple spell that it might as well have been a sun compared to a candle—was a brutal one.

  “Would you take the risk if it were your child?” he demanded. “Would you do anything you thought might even have a chance of endangering Gillian’s life?”

  It was suddenly a lot easier to stand up to his anger without flinching. “If we’re bringing Gillian into this, now’s when I remind you that your daughter kidnapped and nearly killed mine,” I said coolly. “I had to rip Faerie from my own child’s veins to save her life—and that didn’t save it, did it? Because it made her mortal, and what’s mortal dies. Rayseline condemned my child to death when she stole her to get back at you, and I never held that against you. I never said ‘oh, your family isn’t worth taking risks for anymore because they got my family hurt.’ I know you were a hero, Sylvester. I’m a hero now, too. When did you forget what that means?”

  I glared at him until he turned his face away again, looking down at his feet rather than facing the implacable force of my anger.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, voice soft. “But my family . . . I’ve lost so much these last few years. My wife is changed beyond recognition. I fear she no longer knows what it means to love me. My daughter sleeps in a glass casket, and I can’t wake her because my brother chose a monster over his own flesh and blood.”

  “I think the first monster he chose was my mother,” I said, matching his tone. “I don’t have any illusions about my own family. I’m sorry you keep losing your illusions about yours. But, Sylvester, I need help, and it’s not my fault Rayseline was broken. All I’ve ever done is try to help her put herself back together.”

  He turned his attention toward the glass coffin. “I don’t even recognize her anymore,” he said. “She looks so much like . . .” His voice tapered off.

  I didn’t need to hear the name. The calendar I’m a part of began, as far as I know, with Sylvester’s sister, September. Her half-Tylwyth Teg daughter, January, is a friend of mine, but September was dead long before I was born. There weren’t any other redheaded Daoine Sidhe women lying around to be reflected in the reshaped bones of Raysel’s face.

  “She looks like her father,” I said. “But she’s still Rayseline Torquill, daughter of Sylvester and Luna, even if her blood isn’t mixed anymore, and she’s still going to have all her problems and all her sorrows when she wakes up. You’re her father. It’s on you to help her adjust to what her life looks like now. I’ll do my best to make sure she gets to have that life, that she isn’t sentenced back to sleep or worse, but honestly, that’s going to be an afternoon, and I have the ear of the High King. He’ll probably listen to me.”

  Behind me, Quentin snorted softly. I ignored him. I wasn’t making any promises his father would be compelled to keep, and if I wanted Sylvester’s help, this was what had to happen.

  “October . . .” Sylvester rubbed his face with one broad hand. I remembered when those hands used to braid my hair, or boost me up onto his shoulders, back in the days when I’d been young enough for that not to seem strange, when I’d been his surrogate daughter, and not the near-stranger I’d become.

  Oak and ash, I missed him. I missed him like I missed the rest of the family I’d once believed would be mine forever, back when I’d thought my mother loved and wanted me, that Cliff and I would stay together, that Gillian would grow up safe and cradled in the circle of my arms. I missed him like I missed the innocence I hadn’t appreciated until it was gone. I kept my hands by my sides and stayed where I was, not allowing myself to move toward him. He hadn’t earned that from me yet.

  Sometimes family means being willing to be the one who buries the hatchet and takes the first step. Sometimes family means they’ve already buried the hatchet, in your back.

  “Oberon’s departure was fresh in the memory of those who’d known him when I was born,” said Sylvester, voice soft and dull. “My parents truly believed he would return any day, that they would see him come again. I was raised believing he’d merely stepped away, that he was still watching over us from some remove, out of sight but never out of mind.”

  I blinked. That didn’t seem relevant. I glanced over my shoulder to May, who shook her head, a baffled expression on her face. At least she didn’t get it either.

  I returned my attention to Sylvester. “Okay . . .”

  He looked at me, almost sternly. “Five hundred years, October. You can’t fathom how long a time that is to wait for something.”

  “I know I’m not as old as you are,” I said. “That doesn’t make my heart less breakable.”

  “Our Firstborn told the Daoine Sidhe it was our duty to spread across Faerie, to carry the sword and the crown and protect the worlds Titania had granted into our care,” he said slowly. “Almost five hundred year
s I waited for a child of my own. I had all but given up hope when Luna told me she was expecting. Rayseline was the culmination of centuries of dreaming.”

  “She still is,” I said sharply. “She’s still your daughter, she’ll still love you when she wakes up. She needs help, she needs support, but she’s not lost to you just because she’s different now.”

  “She was perfect,” said Sylvester.

  I’d never wanted to slap my own liege as badly as I did in that moment. “If she was perfect before, she’s perfect now,” I said. “She did bad things, and she made some bad choices, but that doesn’t change who she is, and she is your daughter. No matter what her blood says or what face she wears, she’ll always be your daughter. She’s waiting for you to give her permission to wake up and come back to the world. A lot of the things that were hurting her aren’t here anymore. No more Oleander. No more impossible biology making it hard for her to think.”

  Even in Faerie, where the laws of nature sometimes seem less suspended than expelled, some things were never meant to happen. Rayseline Torquill was one of those things. Her father, Sylvester, was a mammal. Her mother, Luna, was a plant wearing a mammal’s stolen face, looped and knotted and barely staying in place. If not for the Kitsune skin Luna had taken in order to escape her father’s lands, Raysel could never have been conceived. Plants and mammals aren’t meant to have children together, and the stresses of Raysel’s impossible dual nature had been tearing her apart.

  She might have been all right if her uncle hadn’t abducted her as a child, casting her into formless magical darkness for more than a decade. The isolation and sensory deprivation had broken something in her, letting the little fractures of her nature take over and become dominant. That was why her mother had asked me to offer her the Changeling’s Choice—not normally something that applies to purebloods, who don’t have to decide between the human and fae worlds. In Raysel’s case, the choice was between her father’s heritage and her mother’s.

  She chose Daoine Sidhe. Not sure that was the right way to go, considering the Firstborn it left her with, but it meant when she woke up, her body and mind would no longer be at war with themselves. She had a chance.

  Sylvester just needed to accept the future he and his daughter could have together now, instead of mourning the version of it that he felt he’d lost.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  Sylvester flinched before looking at me and saying, “It’s my knowe. I could ask you the same thing.”

  “I need Luna’s help.”

  “Why?”

  Telling the truth was a risk, but it was the best chance I had. “I have to find your brother before I can get married,” I said. “Legally, he’s my father.”

  To my surprise, Sylvester smiled. Then he started to laugh. He sounded genuinely, enormously entertained. I blinked, taking a step backward. My shoulder bumped against Quentin’s, who shot me a baffled look. I matched it with one of my own. Whatever this was, I didn’t understand it at all.

  Sylvester stopped laughing and wiped his eyes with one hand. “Oh, October. October. You asked once why I didn’t tell you more about your mother. This is why. I loved you too much to let you become yoked to that man the way you have.”

  I blinked again. “Yoked? Because pureblood law doesn’t want to admit my actual father existed? I don’t think my ignorance would have changed that.”

  “Perhaps not. But if you knew nothing of your mother’s marriage, your ignorance would have prevented anyone using my brother against you.”

  “Maybe not. Doesn’t matter. I know what I know, and I need Luna to open a Rose Road for us.”

  Sylvester frowned. “Why?”

  “Simon’s got to be looking to wake up Eira. He lost his way home, which means all he can do is go deeper into the metaphorical woods. She’s his wrong direction. Always has been. If we go to where she’s sleeping, I can sniff out any traces of his magic, and know whether he’s been there.”

  “Luna opened him no roads.”

  “Luna isn’t the only Blodynbryd, and Simon is better at blood magic than you,” I said. “He knows how to borrow from blood. I’ve seen his handiwork. If he could bleed a single Blodynbryd, voluntarily or no, he could get access to the Rose Roads for his own purposes.”

  Sylvester didn’t look surprised or horrified by that proclamation. He just looked tired. “I see,” he said. “Luna will be here shortly, but if you wish to be allowed to speak with her, there’s something you must do for me.”

  I frowned. “Has she been listening through the roses this whole time?” Blodynbryd are intimately connected to the roses that belong to them. It makes them vulnerable; Raysel nearly killed her mother by salting the gardens and choking out the roots of Luna’s roses. It also makes them excellent, terrifying spies. If there’s a rose nearby, they could be watching you.

  Sylvester nodded. “She told me to come,” he said. “I don’t know how you found this room, but as soon as you entered it, she knew.”

  “We didn’t find it,” I said. “The knowe brought us here.” Next to me, Quentin nodded his confirmation.

  “Then the knowe wants this as much as I do,” said Sylvester. “If you want to speak to Luna, you must first speak to Rayseline.”

  I stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Oh,” said the man I once trusted more than anyone else in Faerie. “But I assure you, I am.”

  SEVEN

  “WHILE SHE SLEEPS, her blood is closed to me,” he said, wading into the roses around the coffin. They retracted at his approach, thorns twisting away from his skin. The worst of it was that I couldn’t say whether that was proof Luna still loved him enough to want him unharmed, or proof that she no longer wanted anything to do with him, not even as nourishment for her roses.

  Roses thrive surprisingly well on blood. I guess that’s why they’re such a foundational part of Faerie.

  “I need to know she doesn’t blame us for what’s happened to her,” he continued, laying a hand flat against the top pane of Raysel’s coffin. It shimmered, seeming to shiver like the door that had allowed us to enter this room in the first place. Then the surface of the coffin swung open, exposing her to the rest of the room.

  Glass coffins may be cliché, but at least this one meant she wasn’t dusty, as so many elf-shot sleepers tend to be. She looked as fresh and peaceful as someone who was just taking a nap, the very picture of pureblood health. It hurt to look at her.

  “What if she does?” I asked. “Blame you, I mean. Will that mean you refuse to let us speak to Luna?”

  He gave me a look of infinite pity and equally infinite sorrow. In that moment, I remembered that we had one more thing in common: neither of us had been allowed to raise our own daughters. Simon had taken them away, returning them to us as women who didn’t understand us and didn’t seem to want to. In my case, I was the one he’d stolen from home, while in Sylvester’s case, Raysel had been the victim, but the parallel was there.

  “If you tell me the truth, I’ll let you talk to my wife,” he said. “I’ve never asked you to lie for me.”

  You’ve never done a lot of things you’ve been doing recently, I thought, and took a step forward. “All right,” I said. “But you know she’ll have to bleed for me if I’m going to talk to her while she’s sleeping, right? And you know I haven’t really done this before.”

  Normal blood magic involves sampling a person’s blood to get to the memories contained there. It can be difficult and traumatic for everyone involved—the blood-worker because they can’t always control the memories they get, and the one who does the bleeding because the more they try not to think about something, the more likely that thing is to show up in the blood. Don’t think about elephants, in other words.

  What Sylvester wanted was stranger and more difficult, and honestly, not something I was sure I was capable of, although
I was willing to try. When I changed the balance of someone’s blood, giving them the Choice, the process manifested as a sort of dreamscape, myself and the person standing in a landscape shaped from their own blood, able to converse.

  I’d never done it without blood to change before, and Rayseline had nothing left to shift. Everything she was belonged to the Daoine Sidhe now, and I couldn’t give back what I’d taken from her even if I’d wanted to. What was lost was lost forever.

  “You’ll do your best,” he said. “I believe in you.”

  That made one of us. I approached the coffin, gazing at Raysel’s familiar, unfamiliar face, and wished there were a way I could ask for her permission before invading her privacy one more time. She deserved to be left to recover in her own way. Which was never going to happen if her parents didn’t let her wake up.

  I started to draw the knife belted at my hip, and then hesitated. Luna was watching through the roses. Even if she wanted this—which she clearly did—stabbing her daughter in front of her probably wasn’t the best way to convince her to help me. I turned to the nearest cluster of roses. Sylvester already knew Raysel had to bleed for me. I needed Luna, through the proxy of her roses, to consent.

  “I need her to bleed if I’m going to do this,” I said, reaching into the coffin and lifting one pale, limp hand with my own. The sleeve of her velvet gown fell back as I pulled her arm almost straight, revealing the creamy skin of her inner elbow. “Can I borrow your thorns?”

  There: make her a part of the process, even if she wasn’t here to actively help me. A long rose vine, devoid of blossoms but bristling with thorns, uncurled and swung toward me, hanging, serpentine, in the air. I nodded. “I appreciate it,” I said, and reached for the vine.

  It twisted in my loose grasp, driving thorns into my palm and fingers. The pain made me gasp, but I didn’t let go, only looked reproachfully at the same cluster of roses.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” I said. “I’m just doing what I was asked. I’m trying to help.”