A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  There was no echo from my shout, which told me more about our surroundings. Wherever we were, it wasn’t the bottom of a gulch or gully. See? We were learning things even as we sat on our asses and hoped the dark wasn’t full of hungry monsters!

  The pause was longer than I liked before May rasped weakly, “Up in the tree. I, um. I landed badly.”

  That didn’t sound good. I pushed myself to my feet, academically relieved when I didn’t bash my head on anything. “Keep talking. I’ll follow the sound of your voice.”

  “Are you sure that’s,” a pause to cough, “a good idea?” I really didn’t like the bubbling undertone to her words. I had the sinking suspicion that we were about to test just how far her indestructability went, and neither of us was going to be thrilled with the results.

  “Nope,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, and held my hands in front of me as I began inching forward into the darkness.

  I didn’t have to go far before something even more helpful than her voice reached me: the smell of blood. It was hot and thick, but not enough to become overwhelming—there was still blood inside her body, it wasn’t all out here with me. The phantom scents of cotton candy and ashes were wrapped around it, ghosts of the magic May carried in her blood.

  If she was bleeding magic, she was hurt even worse than I’d been afraid she was.

  “Toby?” Quentin sounded worried.

  “Shh,” I replied, and kept walking forward, letting the smell of the blood guide me. The ground was fairly level; I didn’t trip or shove my foot into an unexpected hole. That was good, except for the part where it meant we still had no landmarks apart from the tree that had broken our fall.

  The fingers of my left hand hit wood. I immediately grabbed hold, feeling around until I was certain it was a tree, smooth, with a fragile, papery bark that dissolved under my fingertips, turning into motes of dust too small for me to catch as they fell away. May was very close now. I could smell it.

  Even so: “May? Where are you?”

  “Right here,” she replied. Her voice was on roughly the level of mine. She might be in the tree, but she wasn’t that high off the ground. That was a relief. It would be easier to get her down if I didn’t have to climb in the dark.

  I kept inching forward, feeling in front of me with both hands, and stopped when I hit the soft, yielding flesh of May’s hip. The fabric of her jeans was drenched with blood. It squelched between my fingers like unpleasantly warm jelly, but I couldn’t feel a wound. That wasn’t great.

  From the angle of her body, it felt like she was hanging draped over something, but I couldn’t feel anything for her to be draped on. It was a terrible mystery that I didn’t like at all. I ran my hands higher and froze when they hit wood. As in, the side of the huge, jagged branch that was sticking out of my sister’s stomach.

  “May,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level and not alarming, “are you impaled right now?”

  “I think so,” she said, with a weak laugh. “I can’t move much, but it feels like that branch went right through me. I can feel my toes, so I guess it missed my spine. That’s good, right? That it missed my spine?”

  “Yes, since we don’t know whether your nerves would regenerate from that sort of trauma, that’s a very good thing. Hold still.”

  “I wasn’t planning on doing anything else right now,” said May dryly.

  I kept feeling around the branch, trying to establish the diameter of the wound. It was at least a foot around, occupying most of the space that should have been her abdomen. Not great. Even worse, I didn’t know how we were going to get it out of her. I had a single silver knife, and even though the blade had been magically hardened to allow me to slice through most things short of metal or stone, it didn’t have a serrated edge; if I tried to saw through this branch, we’d be here long after Quentin had died of hunger. May didn’t have any weapons.

  That left . . . “Quentin! Do you have your short sword with you?”

  “You came to get me while I was on a date. Do you normally bring weapons on your dates?”

  “I bring weapons everywhere. Tybalt wouldn’t know what to do with me if I didn’t.”

  Quentin made a soft scoffing noise that I could only interpret as “adults are weird.” “No, I don’t have my short sword with me. Or any other kind of sword. I am sword-free. Why? What’s going on?” His tone turned suspicious on the last question, thus proving that he was a smart kid.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” I shot back. “May, I need you to keep breathing while I take care of things, all right? There’s nothing for you to worry about, either.”

  “I have a branch sticking out of where I’m pretty sure my liver is supposed to be,” she said. “This is really more your kind of thing, and you didn’t do this before I was created, so I don’t have any memory of how to handle this kind of bullshit.”

  “A branch sticking out of her where?” demanded Quentin.

  I swallowed a sigh. “I’m handling it! Just stay where you are and let me work, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Quentin, sounding uncertain.

  I reached further up, finding May’s shoulder, and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring pat. “It’s going to be fine. I promise you, it’s going to be fine.”

  “I don’t think you get to make promises right now,” she said.

  “Like that’s ever stopped me.”

  All my magic centers on blood. Well, there was plenty of blood around, and I had my knife if I needed some of it to be mine for whatever I was going to achieve. There was no way this little pocket of nothingness happened naturally—or even what passes for naturally in Faerie, where the rules are sometimes more flexible than they would be in the human world. I could tell even without exerting myself that we were standing in something created.

  What I couldn’t tell just yet was whether it was the bubble Simon had created to contain Luna and Raysel or something else. I wasn’t sure that part mattered. If this was his handiwork, it would mean Spike had opened the door for a reason, I supposed. But it was so hard to say.

  One of the other gifts of the Dóchas Sidhe is breaking things. I don’t do it nearly as often as my reputation implies and it’s not like I’ve had any real training, since that would require my mother to acknowledge that I understand my own magic well enough to use it, but I can do it. Give me a spell I don’t like, and I can probably pick it apart, given sufficient time.

  The tree was a part of the black void around us, which, if it had been magically created as I suspected, meant it was part of a large, complicated spell. When Simon had described making something like this, he’d called it forcing magic into the membrane between worlds. If I unraveled too much and popped the bubble, we could wind up exposed and unprotected in that membrane.

  Given how hostile the roads that travel through the membrane can be, I was pretty sure we didn’t want to be standing in it by ourselves. I was going to have to be more careful than I’d ever been before. More careful than came naturally if I was being honest. I drew my knife.

  The whisper-soft sound of it leaving the sheath was enough to make May tense under my other hand and demand, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to help,” I said, taking my hand off her shoulder and bringing it around to the edge of my blade. Carefully, carefully, I drew the knife along the tip of my index finger, splitting the skin in a single sharp line of pain. It was already dark. I closed my eyes anyway, sticking my finger into my mouth. This was something that didn’t require vision and would go easier if I wasn’t being confused by the signals I was—or wasn’t—getting from my eyes.

  Everyone has a distinct scent to their magic, something they’re born with, and that matures and changes with them as they get older. Sometimes it can transform entirely, as with Raysel after I changed her blood, or with Simon as he’d shrugged off Evening’s influence. His m
agic had shifted back to its corrupted state as soon as the Luidaeg had taken his way home. But what I didn’t realize until fairly recently is that magic also has an appearance.

  It makes sense—I have to see something if I want to take it apart in the most efficient way I can—but it was still a shock the first time I saw a spell. I held onto that memory as blood filled my mouth and the coppery taste of it settled on my molars. I needed to see this one.

  Like a ripple spreading from a stone dropped into a still pond, the unseen space around me began lighting up with gray-and-orange lines, twisted and knotted together like the most ambitious macramé project anyone had ever undertaken. Orange and gray. I breathed in through my nose, looking for the scent of the spell. Smoke and rotten oranges. I was right. This was Simon’s handiwork, and if it wasn’t where he’d been keeping Luna and Rayseline, it was a trial run for the same spell.

  Good. I was at least familiar with his magic. I turned my head, eyes still closed, until the spell-strands spreading out in front of me included the jagged, broken-off shape of a massive tree limb. May must have hit the willow precisely wrong when she fell, snapping it off in the impact and then tumbling to land on top of it before she could hit the ground.

  Its strands were connected to the landscape around us in places but were closer to standing on their own than many of the others. This was a decorative feature, not a part of the foundation. That was good. It was a start. As gingerly as I could, I reached out and hooked my fingers into the surface tangle of the spell.

  It was malleable enough that I could work my way inside. I kept breathing, kept reaching, even as the scent of smoke and rotten oranges began wafting through the air. Bit by bit, I yanked the threads out of the branch holding my Fetch in place, unmaking the magic that comprised it.

  I couldn’t see her with my eyes closed, since she wasn’t a spell, and so it was a bit of a surprise when there was a thump and a yelp. I opened my eyes. The lines winked out, leaving me back in absolute darkness. “May? May, are you all right?”

  “I’m right here,” she said, from ground-level. “You sort of took my chair away.” There was a pained laugh in her voice. She was still trying to see the bright side.

  And I was still trying to see her. I blinked and realized I could make out a faint outline through the darkness, which was impossible; I hadn’t been able to see my own hand in front of my face only seconds before. It was like being in a cave so deep that your brain started playing tricks.

  Only this wasn’t a trick. I blinked again, and she became even clearer. I turned and looked over my shoulder; Quentin was about eight feet behind me. No details yet, but I could see the outline of his body clearly enough to know where he was.

  “Is it just me, or is it getting lighter in here?” I asked, doing my best to keep my voice from shaking.

  “It’s getting lighter,” said Quentin. “I can see you. What did you do?”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s maybe not such a good thing. I broke part of the spell making this place in order to get May free, but if I broke too much of it, it might all fall apart, and we could be left floating in the space between the mortal world and the Summerlands.”

  “Oh,” said Quentin, with dawning horror. “Oh, I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

  “Neither do I, so let’s hope that’s not what I just did.” I turned back to May, who hadn’t moved since she hit the ground.

  Now that I could see her, I was glad I hadn’t been able to see her before. Her abdomen was a ruin, a hole punched through skin and muscle alike and most of her organs either shredded or missing. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell in shallow jerks, even though she should by all rights have been dead at this point. I would have been dead by this point. Still healing, sure, but absolutely dead.

  “May, hey.” I knelt next to her, reaching down to smooth her blood-matted hair away from her face. “Honey, I need you to wake up for me now. Things are getting sort of complicated, and we need to leave.”

  Now that the lights were coming up, I could see more and more of our surroundings, and Raysel’s description of the place as formless void was beginning to make sense. The only landmark I could see was the willow tree, which we had landed on through pure dumb luck.

  Despite the damage it had done to May, I was grateful for the willow. Quentin could have died if we’d hit the ground without something to break our fall. Even as the thought formed, the willow shimmered, dancing in soap bubble rainbows, and popped just as abruptly, vanishing from the landscape like it had never been there. I blinked.

  Quentin stepped up behind me, Spike cradled in his arms. “Did you do that?” he asked, a note of strained terror in his voice.

  “I did not, no,” I said, as calmly as I could.

  “So the spell is continuing to unravel?”

  “I don’t think so, actually. I think that was a part of the spell.” Luna and Raysel had survived in here for years without seeing another soul—not even Simon. But they were both ordinary fae, and they could be killed. Something must have kept them alive. “Hold on. I want to check something.”

  I closed my eyes and bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood, only wincing a little from the jagged grind of molars against flesh. Then I swallowed, letting the blood light up the space behind my eyes where my magic lived. My head throbbed again, still angry from the earlier shift in my humanity. I did my best to set the pain aside. If May could stay conscious and talking with a branch sticking out of her gut, I could handle a headache.

  The spell blossomed back into view, a web of gray-and-orange lines that somehow tasted of rotten oranges. The place where I’d unraveled the branch was a scar in the otherwise relatively even weave, but none of the strands looked torn, and nothing seemed to be unraveling; I’d turned the lights on, but I hadn’t broken reality. I didn’t think. We’d find out soon enough if we didn’t get moving.

  This was all surface level. I sank deeper into the spell, treating it like a blood memory, something to be ridden, studied, and learned from. Below the surface, the lines grew tighter, more closely interwoven; if the branch had been down here, it would have been impossible to remove it without shattering the spell itself. That was useful to know—or to assume, anyway. I really had no idea what I was doing.

  That’s never stopped me before. I bit the inside of my cheek again and used the fresh burst of blood to sink even deeper into the spell. And there, cradled inside the nest of snarls and lines and twisted threads, I found the thing I’d been looking for. It was delicate even when compared to everything around it; I couldn’t have touched it without breaking it. So I didn’t.

  I kept my distance as I studied the sphere, which looked like blown glass or sugar when compared to the threads around it. It had an orange sheen to it, but it smelled faintly of mulled cider and sweet smoke. Simon’s uncorrupted magic, the way it had been before Evening granted him power and twisted him to her own ends.

  I took a breath and let myself rise up out of the spell. “The bubble is designed to keep the people inside it alive as long as it possibly can,” I said. “May, I’m assuming it left the branch you broke in place because pulling it out of a normal person would have killed them. But if we stayed here long enough, it would give us food, water, whatever we needed to survive. The idea is to drive us to despair and suffering, not to starvation. So we got a tree to keep us from splitting our skulls on impact with the ground.”

  “That’s . . .” Quentin paused. “I can’t decide whether that’s really evil or really sweet.”

  “Kid, I’m marrying a literal cat. He thinks playing with your food before you kill it is a totally normal thing to do. I think you stab it until it stops moving, you don’t prolong its suffering. Maybe don’t make me your moral compass.”

  “Too late,” he said simply. “You’re my knight.”

  I
rubbed my face with one hand. “Okay, look, my head already hurts. Please do me a favor and don’t make it worse.”

  Quentin beamed.

  Now that I was reasonably sure the bubble was stable, even if I’d managed to turn on the lights, I returned my attention to May. “Are you awake, or did you pass out from the shock of not having a liver anymore?”

  May cracked open an eye. “Am I not allowed to pass out from shock?”

  “You’re allowed, but then I’ll have to carry you, and you know something’s going to try to kill me and I’m going to drop you on your head. Did you want to add a broken neck to all those missing organs?”

  “I did not,” said May, and pushed herself laboriously into a sitting position, grunting with effort. When she was done, she looked down at the ruin of her stomach, grimaced, and asked, “Do you have any duct tape?”

  “Not with me. I wasn’t planning to let the Luidaeg do my hair today.” The bubble had continued to grow lighter around us, until it was lit almost as well as a downtown 7-11 at three o’clock in the morning. The light had a similar artificial quality, although at least it wasn’t flickering like some fluorescents. Look as I might, there were no doors or openings, not even above my eye level.

  There was also no ground to speak of. Now that the tree was gone, there was nothing. We had found Raysel’s featureless void. If the dark came back, we’d be able to experience exactly what she had for almost fourteen years of her life.

  It was enough to make me sick to my stomach. We needed to get out of here. “Right.” I turned to pet Spike. “Hey, buddy. I know you can’t open a Rose Road on your own, but Luna opened this one using the key I took from Goldengreen, and Maeve may have been paying attention. Can you take us back to the Rose Road we were on before?”

  Spike rattled its thorns uncertainly.

  “Look, I’m asking a lot of you. I get that. But I can’t open doors to anywhere, and if I collapse this place to escape it, we could wind up someplace much worse. So it’s in everyone’s best interests for you to at least try. Can you try for me, buddy? Is that something you can do?”