A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  I took three steps forward and dropped it into her palm. As always, I felt a slight pang of loss at the act of giving it to someone else. It wasn’t like my knife, something that mattered to me and was always close to hand, but it was something I’d had longer than almost anything else at this point, and it represented a time in my life that was over. Things had been simpler then.

  In a way, it represented the transition between things being simple and things becoming very, very complicated. And when I looked at it that way, my attachment made no sense at all. I should want the thing as far away from me as possible because the last thing I needed was more complication.

  Luna turned the key over in her hand before holding it up to the light as if she’d never seen it before. “I do wonder who made this,” she said. “I know where you obtained it, but my aunt was never fond of working metal or making her own jewelry. Mother could have done it once, but she didn’t; this isn’t her handiwork.”

  As the daughter of two Firstborn, Luna shares the same sort of queasy, overly familiar relationship with them that I do. Her mother is a child of Titania, however, whereas most of my acknowledged family comes from Maeve and Oberon. It’s a very different sort of relationship.

  Her father was a son of Maeve, and an actual monster, unlike the stories Titania’s children spread about the Luidaeg and her other siblings. Blind Michael alone was enough to justify many of their lies about the children of Maeve. He preyed on children.

  I killed him. I sleep better at night knowing he’s dead, and never coming back, and even knowing that, I can’t stand the flicker of candlelight. He took that away from me, possibly forever.

  “Someone may come to take this back from you someday,” said Luna, almost dismissively. “When that happens, I want you far from here.” She turned the key over one more time before she shoved it into the air, grimacing slightly.

  It slid smoothly into a keyhole I couldn’t see, that probably hadn’t existed at all until Luna needed it, vanishing to a point halfway up its shaft. Luna raised her eyes to mine, and I recoiled involuntarily from the loathing I saw there.

  “Whenever you touch this family, we lose something,” she said. “Sometimes things that can’t be recovered. I can’t be the one to banish you, and my husband refuses to take that step on his own behalf, even as I tell him it would benefit us all.”

  Sylvester winced and looked away. So he was still defending me, at least a little. That was good. I hadn’t been counting on it.

  “I don’t want you coming back here until it’s time for you to speak in Rayseline’s defense,” she continued. “I don’t want you—any of you—anywhere near my family.”

  I blinked. “Quentin has to come here for his training,” I said. “The High King insists he be properly trained to serve his people one day, and there are lessons I can’t teach him.”

  Luna shrugged. “He should have thought of that before he agreed to damage his future prospects by being squired to you.”

  The urge to defend both my squire and myself, to point out all the errors and lies in what she said, was strong. I tamped it down, grinding my teeth and holding my tongue. Not easy.

  “I’m quite sure Queen Windermere will be happy to take over the remainder of my training,” said Quentin, in what I thought of as his “crown prince voice”—calm, measured, and polite. He was reminding Luna without reminding her that he represented the trust of his parents, and once he removed himself from their custodianship, they would lose that trust. Possibly forever.

  I wasn’t sure alienating the future High King of the Westlands to score points against me was a good move, politically speaking, but in that moment, Luna didn’t seem to care. She grasped the key again, this time twisting it sharply to the left. There was an audible click, which seemed odd only because there were no visible locks. Luna took her hand away.

  “Do you agree?” she asked.

  “I can only speak for myself, but yes, I agree,” I said. “Unless my liege summons me, I won’t come back until you wake Raysel and it’s time for me to speak at her trial.”

  “I agree,” said May, and the judgmental regret in her voice was deep enough to drown in.

  “I agree,” said Quentin.

  “Good. Then I’m finally rid of you.” Luna twisted the key further. There was a second click, softer than the first, and she opened a door none of us could see, revealing a long tunnel lined with roses. She pulled the key out of the air and held it out to me. “Now go.”

  “Promise me we can come back.”

  She frowned, key still held out. “I just banished you, and you agreed.”

  “Not to Shadowed Hills, necessarily, but from the Rose Road. Swear on the root and the branch that this road will lead us home again.”

  She sighed, frown fading. “Fine. I swear, this is a road from here to someplace else, and home again, although it will not return you here.”

  “Good enough,” I said, and took the key.

  Sylvester, who hadn’t said a word in my defense while his wife was effectively exiling me, turned his face away and didn’t watch us walk into the opening in the air.

  I guess as far as he was concerned, I was already gone.

  EIGHT

  THE DOOR NONE OF US could see slammed shut as soon as we were through, leaving us standing stranded in the tunnel of roses. I jumped but didn’t turn toward the sound. Quentin started to. May grabbed the sides of his face, locking his head in place. He blinked at her, obviously confused.

  “You can’t look back when you’re on the Rose Road,” she said. “If you do, you’ll be dropped off it, and you’ll wind up wherever the road is running right now. We don’t know where that is, and these roads are old enough to bypass some of Oberon’s closed doors. Plus, I don’t know how we’d get you back on the Rose Road. Luna’s unlikely to open it for us again.”

  “You know, for someone who tried to put all his descendants under house arrest on his way out the door, he sure did leave a lot of loopholes,” said Quentin peevishly. “Am I allowed to look around?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You just can’t look back, even if you drop something. You can’t—Spike!” The rose goblin had never come to join us in the greenhouse. I grimaced. “We left Spike behind. I hope Luna doesn’t prune it or anything.”

  “She made the rose goblins, she’s not going to hurt one of them,” said May, who sounded about as confident of that as I felt.

  “No, but she might clip back any new growth she doesn’t like,” I said. I sighed. “Maybe it can catch up with us. The first time I used a Rose Road, Spike led me to the Luidaeg’s place. We don’t know how much freedom of movement they have in here.”

  “That’s true,” said May. “Let’s go.”

  We started walking.

  The roses forming the walls were from a hundred or more different cultivars, and their blended perfume was a dizzying mixture that made my already aching head hurt even more. I rubbed my temple with one hand as we walked, causing May to look at me with concern.

  “It still hurts?” she asked.

  “It always hurts when I change my own blood, and I’m barely human anymore,” I said. “I guess this is my human side giving me one last headache as a good-bye present.”

  May frowned. “I know you don’t want to stop being a changeling . . .” she said, trailing awkwardly off.

  “Even though it would make everything easier for everyone,” I finished. “I know. Tybalt brought it up while we were at dinner. He’s not going to try to force me to do anything, but he worries about me dying on him, even though I’m so fae at this point that it would take literal centuries for me to get old, and nothing else is going to kill me.”

  “I’m pretty sure you can be killed,” said May. “Call it a feeling from someone who used to be your death omen. I think you can die and stay dead. It’s just not going to be easy.”

&n
bsp; I shot her an amused look, despite the pain. “Gosh, you’re so optimistic, I should bring you on all my ridiculous quests. It’s easier to do the impossible when I have someone around to remind me that it could kill me.”

  “Do you actually know where we’re going, or did we just let a woman who currently hates us all put us on a road to nowhere without a map?” asked Quentin. “Not that I’m questioning your judgment—it’s a little late for that—but I’d like to know if we’re going to wander the rest of eternity through a flower shop from hell.”

  “I’m pretty sure starvation is one of the ways Toby can die, so I’ll be the only one of us wandering forever,” said May blithely.

  Quentin gave her a horrified look. I snorted and was preparing to answer when something rattled ahead of us, loud as a maraca being shaken by an over-enthusiastic preschooler. I angled sharply toward the sound, and relaxed as I saw a small, roughly cat-shaped creature push through the wall of roses.

  “Spike! There you are, my good goblin! I was afraid we’d left you in Shadowed Hills, but no, you followed us here, because you’re such a genius, aren’t you?” Spike shook itself the rest of the way free, chirped, and trotted toward me, spines rattling with every step. The rules about never turning back were clearly more flexible for the rose goblins. I knelt, letting it climb into my arms. It chirped again. “Hey, buddy,” I said, and scratched it under its thorny chin. Spike half-closed its eyes, as content as a cat.

  May shot me an amused look as I straightened. “You’re such a pushover,” she said.

  “Only for family, and that includes Spike.” I looked at the goblin in my arms. “Do you know where we are, buddy? We’re trying to find Simon. That means we need to go to the place Maeve unlocked for her daughter. The place where the bad woman is asleep. Can you help?”

  Spike chirped, louder this time, an obvious affirmative, and leapt out of my arms. It trotted a few feet ahead of us, waving its tail in invitation. It didn’t look back. It knew the rules of this place well enough not to look back for us, even if those rules were a little malleable where it was concerned.

  “Come on,” I said, and hurried after it, gesturing for May and Quentin to follow. Not a second too soon: it transitioned from trotting to a flat-out run, racing along the thorny ground. I didn’t hesitate, but ran after it, the roses around us blurring into an undifferentiated wall of red, white, and pink, broken occasionally by streaks of yellow or orange. Spike didn’t vary its pace, just kept on racing.

  The smell of roses somehow grew even stronger. I would have considered that an impossibility, since we were already surrounded by the things, but the harder we ran, the more cloying the scent became, until I couldn’t breathe through my nose without gagging.

  Suddenly, and without warning, there was a gap in the wall ahead of us, a black slash among the colorful flowers, opening onto apparent nothingness. Spike chirped, still running hard, and leapt through the gap, into the darkness.

  Hesitation wasn’t going to help us, and I had the genuine feeling that whatever this was, it was a limited-time offer. I fumbled behind me until I found May’s hand and gripped it fast. Then I leapt after Spike into the darkness, and fell, both of us plummeting into nothingness.

  Someone screamed. It might have been me. May was laughing, sounding astonished and delighted at the same time. I guess knowing you’re genuinely impossible to kill makes falling an unknowable distance toward an equally unknowable landing a lot less terrifying. I wasn’t too terribly worried about hitting the ground—I’ve survived deadly falls before—but Quentin isn’t as resilient. I could hear him screaming, and he wasn’t far away.

  “Quentin!” I shouted, letting go of May and feeling around helplessly in the black. “Quentin, try to find my hand!”

  “It’s dark!” he yelled back, sounding more than a little freaked out. It made sense; we’d been falling for a long time, and purebloods aren’t used to being unable to see. Their night vision is so good that anything short of a closed cave is usually navigable for them.

  “Follow my voice!” I kept feeling around, until my fingers brushed against something soft. I grabbed it, hooking the fingers of both hands into the fabric of Quentin’s shirt and yanking him toward me. He responded by wrapping his arms around me. I did the same with him, trying to shield his body with my own as much as I could. He clung tightly, clearly aware of what I was doing.

  It would be traumatic for him if we hit the ground and I splashed all over him, but not as traumatic as dying would be.

  There was a soft crashing sound below us. I didn’t have time to react to it before we hit what felt like the crown of a mature willow tree, broad and soft and cushioning. It was so much less violent than I’d expected that I relaxed, allowing my grip on Quentin to slacken.

  Which is when we fell out of the tree.

  I tightened my hold immediately. We fell the rest of the way to the ground—less than fifteen feet, all told—Quentin landing solidly in the middle of my chest and knocking the breath out of me. Also breaking at least one of my ribs, based on the snapping sound and the stabbing pain that lanced through my left lung. I wheezed, tasting blood, and pushed him away.

  “I’m sorry!” squawked Quentin, rolling away and stopping himself before he could get too far. Everything around us was still pitch-black, and it would be far too easy for us to lose each other. “Are you hurt?”

  Of course I was hurt. I just took a teenage Daoine Sidhe to the sternum. I breathed as deeply as I could, swallowing blood and spit, and tried to focus on something other than the pain. It wasn’t easy, since there was nothing to look at except for endless darkness, but the pain was already fading, whisked away by my body’s ludicrous gift for putting itself back together. I could feel my broken rib bending back into its original position, giving my lung room to heal. Not the most comfortable sensation ever. I swallowed again, catching my breath, and managed to croak, “I’m fine. Are you hurt?”

  Because that was the real question. May didn’t heal as quickly as I did, but she could walk off almost anything, thanks to her nigh-indestructible status. I’d be back to fighting strength in a few more seconds. If Quentin had a broken leg, we’d be carrying him.

  “No. I landed on you.”

  Thank Oberon for small favors. I wiped my eyes, more out of habit than anything else, and pushed myself into a seated position, squinting into the blackness. Nothing. Oh, this was going to be fun. “I can’t believe you followed us into that hole.”

  “I can’t believe you jumped.” There was a weariness in his tone that told me clear as the missing daylight that he was lying. Of course, he believed I would jump. There was nothing else I could have done, and everything we’d been through together supported that.

  “Yeah, you can.”

  He sighed. “Yes, I can.”

  There was a rattling sound somewhere nearby, more subdued than normal, followed by a tiny chirp.

  “Hey, Spike,” I said. “I know it’s dark, buddy. It’s okay. Sounds like this isn’t where you meant to be, huh? Just follow the sound of my voice, and we’ll take care of you.”

  The rattle came again, closer this time, and something spiny rubbed against my leg, moving with the grain of the thorns, so as not to stab me. I only know one rose goblin who’s that careful with people.

  “Hey, bud,” I said, and ran a hand along its back. It was trembling. “Okay, we need to find some light, and we need to get out of wherever this is. Hopefully, we haven’t lost the Rose Road completely with this detour.”

  “My phone doesn’t work.” Quentin sounded miserable, and a little scared. “I have a flashlight app, but the screen won’t even turn on. I had a full battery when we got to Shadowed Hills. There’s no reason for my phone not to work.”

  No reason, apart from “we were in a dark pit somewhere unknowably deep inside Faerie, having fallen from an ancient road that cut through boundaries
set by Oberon himself.” April’s good, and her upgrades to our personal technology have been amazing, but she’s still only a Dryad. She’s not playing on the same field as the Firstborn, or worse yet, the Three, and I had asked Spike to follow a trail originally opened by Maeve in order for us to make it this far. We were in a hell of a lot deeper than our consumer electronics were intended to go.

  “Breathe,” I said. “Just breathe. Okay. We’re looking for the place where that woman is sleeping.” Purebloods put a lot of stock in names, and sometimes even saying the name of a powerful enough pureblood can attract their attention. Eira was elf-shot and helpless, but she’d been able to reach out through her dreams to harass Karen. I didn’t know how close we were to her now, and I didn’t want to find out by breaking some magical rule and having her decide to possess one of us.

  I also didn’t want to find out that Karen was having dreams about me solely because of the threat Eira posed to her family. If I was the only thing standing between the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn and the Browns, this was not going to go well.

  “Yeah,” said Quentin.

  “Well, we’re also looking for the places Simon has been, and hopefully for Simon himself. We know that when he kidnapped Luna and Rayseline, he placed them in a formless void of utter darkness. A bubble of space he’d created and suspended between the worlds. And we know he must have been able to access it somehow, and he’s a magic-borrower. He could have used their blood to open a Rose Road.” His void had to have been anchored somewhere. This seemed like as good a place as any.

  “But this isn’t formless,” said Quentin, sounding horrified. He was doubtless remembering that Luna and Raysel had been trapped there for fourteen years, despite all the tricks they’d had at their disposal to try making an escape.

  “No. But it’s dark. And maybe Raysel was speaking hyperbolically when she said it was formless—there doesn’t seem to be much around here, and it’s not really safe to go feeling around for more. Which reminds me.” I sat up straighter, taking a deep breath, and was pleased to feel both lungs expand to their usual limits. Take that, blunt force trauma. “Yo, May! We want to get the hell out of here! Where’s my Fetch at?”