A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  The vine didn’t twist again as I tugged it toward Raysel’s arm. The punctures in my hand were already healing, leaving my skin sticky with blood but otherwise unmarred. I don’t like a lot of the magic tricks I inherited from Mom. The rapid healing is an exception.

  Careful not to cut too deeply, I pressed the vine against the skin of Raysel’s wrist, pressing until the thorns broke the skin and blood welled to the surface. Behind me, Sylvester made a wordless sound of protest. I looked over my shoulder at him, one eyebrow lifted.

  “Yes?” I asked. Maybe that was a little curt of me, but nothing that had happened since we’d entered this room left me feeling charitable.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Continue.”

  “I will,” I said. “Normally, if I were trying to talk to someone who can’t talk back, I’d be changing their blood or at least trying, and that pulls on my power. There’s nothing left in Rayseline for me to change. She’s going to have to do some of the heavy lifting.” I didn’t know how I knew that; I just did. It’s not like my mother ever gave me any lessons on our particular brand of blood magic. Everything I know how to do, I’ve figured out through trial and error. Occasionally massive error. It’s fun and not at all terrifying to figure out an entire school of magic on my own. Really.

  Turning back to Raysel, I pulled the vine away from her arm and ducked my head, bringing my mouth to the breaks in her skin. Her blood was salty and sweet at once, and between one blink and the next, the room was gone, replaced by the red veil of blood memory descending over everything.

  No, I thought, keeping myself forcibly separate from the memories threatening to rise up and overwhelm me. That’s not why I’m here. She gets to keep her privacy.

  I could feel my body, but distantly, like it was on the other side of a thick wall of fog. I fumbled at my hip until I found my knife, then brought it to my other hand in a quick slashing motion, laying my palm open. As was so often the case, I cut too deep, stopping when I felt the blade strike bone. There was no pain. My body was too far away, even as I raised my hand to my mouth and drank deeply of my own blood.

  It mixed with Rayseline’s in a cloying flood, and the world finished the process of dropping away. It took the haze with it; I blinked, and there was nothing remotely red about the shadow-struck wood in which I found myself. Not even—or maybe especially not—roses. I was surrounded by dark trees, their trunks streaked in bands of charcoal and their leaves a green so deep that it seemed virtually black. The ground was carpeted in tiny white flowers, gleaming like stars against their surroundings, but there was no other color to be found.

  “Raysel?” This had to be her creation. When the hallucinations belonged to me, they usually involved apartments I no longer lived in, or homes I’d given away. I had never seen this wood before in my life. “Raysel, are you here?”

  “Where else would I be?” She sounded distantly amused, like this was the stupidest question anyone had ever asked her. The branches of the nearest tree quivered with the motion of an unseen figure, and Raysel continued, “It’s not like sleeping criminals have a lot of say in where they get to go.”

  “You’re not a criminal,” I said. “Could you come down here?”

  “A lie and an unreasonable request in the same breath? How could I refuse?” The branches quivered again, and Raysel dropped to the ground. She looked exactly as she had the last time I’d seen her, Daoine Sidhe to the core, sharp and poised and perfect by the standards of anyone inside or outside of Faerie. There were still no roses, but her appearance brought red into the wood in the form of her hair, bright as a flame against these trees. I was starting to understand why the Daoine Sidhe so often preferred to live alone. It let them tailor their environments to best suit their often ridiculously overdramatic coloration.

  “Why are you here, October?” she asked. “How are you here? I made my choice.” A flicker of alarm worked its way into her expression. “You can’t make me do it again, can you? Because that hurt like hell last time, and I’m pretty happy the way I am now.”

  “I can’t make you do it again, I’m afraid,” I said. “I don’t get to keep what I take away from people. It’s not like shuffling a deck of cards. Once I pulled the Blodynbryd out of you, it was gone forever.”

  “Ah,” she said. She didn’t sound disappointed. Folding her arms, she leaned against the tree. “So why are you here? I thought we were done annoying each other until it was time for me to wake up.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said. “Your father hasn’t pressed to let them wake you up because he’s worried about what’s going to happen when you stand trial.”

  A flicker of alarm passed over her face. “I killed two people. I deserve whatever happens to me.”

  “The Luidaeg doesn’t intend to demand satisfaction in the matter of the Selkie woman’s death, since her skin was returned to the Clans, and I don’t think anyone is going to stand up for Oleander.” The woman had been a monster. A true monster, not the sham people have tried so hard to make of the Luidaeg. Countless deaths could be laid directly at her feet, quite possibly including King Gilad Windermere and his wife.

  The Law is supposed to apply to everyone, but if no one is willing to stand up for the dead, it doesn’t. The perfect murder isn’t one where no one knows. It’s one where no one cares.

  “Why would the Luidaeg be willing to stand aside for me? I haven’t made any bargains with her.”

  “No, but I have.”

  Raysel stared at me, her thin veneer of cockiness dropping away. “I . . . but I’ve been awful to you. Why would you intercede on my behalf?”

  I shrugged. “Because we’re more than the substance of our scars, and I loved you before you hurt me. Because I know you’ve been lashing out, and people who are in pain aren’t always careful about where they throw their punches. Because you loved me, too, before the world made you feel like you had to hate me.”

  Raysel blinked, face crumpling like a piece of paper. “I’m sorry,” she said miserably. “I don’t know why I felt like I had to do the things I did. They all made sense while I was doing them, but the longer I spend asleep, the less sense they make.”

  “Your blood was at war with itself,” I said. “That has to have made it hard to think rationally about things.” More and more, I was coming to suspect that all the stories about changeling madness I’d been fed as a child were actually about mixed-blood fae like Raysel. People whose blood could be traced back to some combination of either Maeve or Titania and Oberon seemed to be fine. People who were descended from Maeve and Titania could wind up having problems.

  The bad blood between our Queens was apparently literal enough to be hereditary.

  “I still did them, though,” she continued doggedly. “I don’t think I should get to just walk away from that.”

  “If it’ll make you feel better, after I speak on your behalf at the trial, I’ll claim offense against you and make you spend a year serving my household,” I said.

  It was intended as a joke. To my immense surprise, Raysel’s eyes widened and she sagged, relief flooding her face. “Oh, would you?” she asked.

  I blinked. “Um.”

  “I don’t want to be here with my parents, not when they have all these expectations of me and who I’m supposed to be, and I don’t know how to fulfill them. But I don’t want to be alone, either. I don’t ever want to be alone again.” She wrapped her arms more tightly around herself, shivering. “Alone is where the cold comes from.”

  “If that’s really what you want,” I said.

  “It is.” She paused, frowning. “What’s happening to your hair?”

  I reeled back, reaching up to touch my head. It felt normal. Then I slid my hand down to the point of my ear, which was getting sharper by the second. I winced. “Damn.” I dropped my hand. “I normally get to this space when I’m changing someone else’s blood. I gues
s this time I’m changing my own. I need to get out of here before I’m not even partially human anymore. Are you all right with your parents waking you up so you can stand trial and move on with your life?”

  “I am.” Raysel nodded. “I appreciate you asking. No one ever asks what I want. And I’m sorry you had to hurt yourself for me.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, although I wasn’t so sure. Now that I was paying attention, I could feel the fizzing burn of my blood shifting in my veins. It was slow, like a moth chewing its way through a piece of silk, but it was happening faster than I liked. “Until next time.”

  Problem: I wasn’t actually sure how to break the connection. Well, Raysel had given us a wood, with accurate recreations of our actual bodies, which meant—yes. I felt my hip and found my knife there. Drawing it quickly, I jammed it into my forearm, not taking the time to be careful. This space wasn’t real, and I needed to get out of it as soon as I could.

  There was no pain, but there was blood, immediate and bright as rubies in the dimness of the forest. I pulled the knife loose and clamped my mouth down over the wound, drinking deeply of the idea of my own magic as I closed my eyes. I almost immediately began to feel dizzy and felt a pulse of dully aggravated pain shoot through my temples—the beginnings of magic-burn, a sensation that’s so unfamiliar these days as to be vaguely shocking.

  I was still bent double, mouth on my arm, although there was no blood and not even the healing remnants of a wound. I opened my eyes and straightened. Another wave of dizziness swept over me, strong enough this time that I fell backward, narrowly missing the nearest clump of roses as I landed on my butt in the dirt. A few thorns pierced my jeans, adding injury to insult.

  Quentin rushed to help me to my feet. “Toby! Are you all right?” A pause. “What did you do to your hair?”

  “I’m fine. How bad is it?” Reaching inward, I could feel what remained of my mortality cowering at the bottom of my blood, like a rabbit afraid of the hounds. Of course, it wasn’t really doing that—biology doesn’t work that way. Magic and science sometimes take very different snapshots of the same situations.

  I was still a little bit human. Not enough. Maybe a quarter; probably substantially less. Tybalt wouldn’t be upset by that, but I was. This hadn’t been my intention. And even the thought of trying to shift myself back right now made my head spin and ache worse. This wasn’t the time.

  May moved to put her hand on my other shoulder as Quentin let go of me. I leaned against her, scanning the room until I found Sylvester. He was in the same place; I was the one who’d moved. He stared at me like he was seeing a ghost. I guess watching my hair bleach itself in real time had been unsettling for him.

  Raysel was motionless in her coffin. She couldn’t heal like I did, and the scratches on her arm were still gently bleeding. The scent of it hung sticky in the air, stronger to my specially attuned nose than the scent of the roses. I could taste the new makeup of her magic in the scent; it was still built on a base of hot wax, but the mustard flower was gone, replaced by crushed blackthorn fruit. Interesting. I still don’t fully understand what determines magical scents, but I know they’re partially a factor of heritage. She must have gotten the mustard from her mother, and now it was gone.

  There would be time to think about that later. Right now, I had a quest to finish, and a stepfather to find. “She’s fine with you waking her up,” I said, voice low and a little rougher than I intended. “She knows she’ll have to stand trial, but she’s feeling better, and she’s ready.”

  Sylvester blinked. “October, your hair . . .”

  “Why does everyone keep saying that?” I knew why they kept saying it. My mother looks like she’s been bleached. Everything about her has been drained of as much of its color as possible, leaving her a watercolor sketch of a woman who looks about as substantial as the morning mist. Every time my blood shifts away from humanity and toward the fae, I lose a little more of the coloration I inherited from my father.

  “Anyway.” I shoved my knife into its sheath and folded my arms, glaring at the man who was my liege and had once been the person I trusted most in all the world. “Can I talk to Luna now? Because I’m not going in to talk to Rayseline again. I don’t have enough humanity left to pay for another visit.” That might or might not be true. In the moment, it felt entirely sincere.

  “I . . . yes.” Sylvester bowed his head as he turned to the nearest cluster of flowers. “Dear, would you come to the state room, please? October needs to speak with you.”

  The flowers rustled before turning away from him, exactly like a sullen teen refusing to look at a parent who’d displeased them. Silence hung in the room, almost as heavy as the scent of Raysel’s magic and the perfume wafting from the roses. I leaned against May, letting her steady, silent presence lend me the strength I didn’t presently have on my own. She’d be with me until the end. That was what it meant to have a Fetch.

  To have a sister, too.

  The roses shivered again before the vines began moving, curling and expanding to form a tunnel of sorts, like the sort fancy gardens like to make with carefully constructed trellises. There were no trellises here, just the roses holding themselves upright through sheer force of Luna’s magical will.

  There was a momentary stillness, and Luna came walking down the tunnel.

  She was beautiful in the way only the fae can be beautiful, like a natural disaster walking as a woman, and she was terrible in the same way, tall and willowy, with hair that hung past her knees in a riot of curls, pale pink at the crown of her head and darkening as it descended, until it was red-black at the tips. Her eyes were pollen-yellow, and her skin was white as bone or ivory, with no color to soften it. Luna Torquill might be one of the only people in Faerie who’s actually paler than my mother.

  She wasn’t always like that. She was all soft browns and grays when I was younger, a warm and loving Kitsune shadow haunting the halls of her husband’s knowe. Changing the blood really does change everything, in Faerie.

  She walked to her husband’s side and stopped, turning her dispassionate gaze on me. I fought the urge to flinch. No one can make you feel small and judged like the people who loved you as a child.

  “Why are you here?” she demanded. “We have only one sleeper left for you to wake, and she isn’t yours to run away with on another of your mad quests.”

  So don’t tell Luna about my plan to claim offense against Rayseline, check. “I’m here on another of my mad quests,” I said. “I need you to open a Rose Road for me.”

  Luna looked momentarily nonplussed before she forced her expression of dispassionate disapproval back into her face. Neutrality was apparently easier for her. Well, it wasn’t easier for me, and it made me want to scream that we were better than this, that I’d done enough, risked enough, lost enough for the sake of her family that she owed me anger if she didn’t owe me anything else. “Why in Oberon’s name would I be willing to do that for you?” she asked.

  “Because I have to find Simon if I want to get married, and he’s probably looking for his liege, and the last time I saw her, she was elf-shot and asleep at the end of a Rose Road.” I didn’t want to say Eira’s name in the presence of the roses. They might not be hers, but she controlled too many roses for me to feel safe bringing her up here. Even more, I didn’t want to tell her about Karen. I wanted Luna as far away from the members of my surrogate family as possible. “I don’t know how he could have reached her there, or if he has, but I’m trying to avoid going to the Luidaeg for this one, and that means starting in the places I know he wants to go. Since he can’t go to Mom’s tower.” Privately, I doubted he could come to Shadowed Hills, either. He and Sylvester might have drifted apart, but they had loved each other dearly once, and Simon had helped to construct the anchors binding the knowe to the delicate membrane between the Summerlands and the mortal world. This place had been his home.

 
; And right now, home was precisely what he didn’t get to have.

  Luna’s nostrils flared as she took a deep breath and turned to Sylvester. “It’s unfair of you to allow her to ask this of me,” she said, voice mild. “You should never have let her back into our home.”

  “Technically, it was Etienne who let us in, and he did that because nothing I’ve done has been bad enough for my liege to ban me from the demesne where I’m sworn to serve,” I said. “I was told it would be better if I kept my distance. I wasn’t banished from the Duchy. I’d have to cross a lot more lines for that to become appropriate.”

  From the burning anger in Luna’s eyes when she turned back to me, she didn’t think I needed to cross any more lines. I had already crossed them all as far as she was concerned, and I had no business being here.

  “Perhaps my husband didn’t let you in, but he let you stay,” she said, voice measured. “That seems like quite enough offense to me.”

  That word just kept coming up today. I took a deep breath, holding it for a moment before I let it slowly out. “Please, Luna,” I said. “Please. I always did my best to do whatever you needed or wanted me to do. When you got sick, I would have done anything to save you. I went into Blind Michael’s lands to keep you safe. I shifted Raysel’s blood because you asked me to. I just need a road. I just need a way to get to the sleeper, and then I’ll leave you alone.”

  She frowned, and for a moment, I was sure she was going to refuse me. Then she held out her hand.

  “I know you don’t want an ordinary Rose Road, because none of the places they can reach are the place you need,” she said. “That means you brought the key.”

  Trying not to show my gratitude too openly and risk changing her mind, I dug into my pocket and produced the braided metal key that had once belonged to Evening Winterrose, before she was supposedly murdered and my life changed forever. “I did.”

  “Give it to me.”