A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  And the sea witch was looking at me with barely disguised impatience, waiting for me to get over myself. I swallowed hard and asked, “Do I have to turn into anything?”

  “I know you think I can do whatever I want, but those potions I mix up aren’t just for show; the accessories matter when I’m doing big magic and want it to last more than a few minutes. All I could turn you into without proper preparation is something simple, and I don’t think either of us wants that.”

  A fish. She was saying she could turn me into a fish without access to her tools, and she was right: there wasn’t much in the world that I wanted less than I wanted that. Quentin being hurt badly enough that we couldn’t save him made the list. I closed my eyes, trying to focus on my breathing, and keep myself from losing control of my nerves. “All right, then,” I said. “Do it.”

  There was a pause. When she spoke again, there was a hitch in her voice. “October . . . Toby . . . you do understand what you’re asking me to do, don’t you? It’s a small enough thing that we don’t have to make a bargain for me to do it, but it’s still going to be—”

  “We have to get under that wall, and I can’t swim well enough to make it,” I said, cutting her off, not opening my eyes. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it now. Before I come back to my senses.” I paused before adding, in a very small voice, “Please.”

  “If you insist,” said the Luidaeg. She clapped her hands, and the smell of the sea, which had already been all around us, rose and grew until it was overwhelming. Until I was choking on it.

  Until I couldn’t breathe.

  FOURTEEN

  “YOU AREN’T THE TRAITOR’S GRANDCHILD; that baby died in your grandmother’s womb, an unexpected victim of a night that had been coming from the beginning but should still never have happened.” The Luidaeg’s voice was low and earnest; the voice of a woman who was taking advantage of some sort of loophole in the world to say things she otherwise couldn’t. I kept my eyes closed, tensed against the transformation I knew was coming. “No human child could survive being exposed to that much transformation magic, and while your grandmother wasn’t the one changed, her lover the traitor was, and the baby was too close to the spells my mother was using in her own defense. I don’t think she meant to kill the bairn. She was never cruel to children. But she was fighting for her own life, and it was a mortal babe, and they were so common and died so often in those days, and so I don’t think she ever paused to ask herself what she was doing.”

  She stepped closer, the fabric of her dress rustling against the sand, and cold fingertips caressed my cheek. “Your grandmother’s body never changed, save in the ways a mortal woman’s body is meant to change, and Mother took more than half of those away from her when she stopped the clock and bound her to immortality, but she was singed by the flames of her lover’s transformations. Her blood remembered. Your blood remembers. It is the weakness of your line, October Daye, daughter of Amandine the Liar. You will always be easy to change, because your blood still sings with my mother’s work, even at this distance, and it always will. Don’t be too angry. Every line has a weakness. At least yours is balanced by your strengths.”

  She touched my cheek again, I knew she did, but it felt like she was reaching down this time, which made no sense. I couldn’t be getting smaller. I could still breathe. After the initial shock of the rising scent of the sea, I had gotten my breath back. If I was getting smaller, I wouldn’t be able to breathe, would I?

  “Transformations last longer with the children of Amandine’s line, because your bodies yield to them so easily. It makes you a pleasure to change. I can show the full strength of my art. Or could—if you weren’t so easily upset.” She sounded almost amused.

  I opened my eyes, and she was far, far above me, towering like a titan. But I could still breathe. The air hadn’t left me. I tried to protest, and all that came out of my throat was a guttural squeak that bore no real resemblance to speech. What the hell had she done to me?

  I looked down at myself. I didn’t have to look far. My body was a tubular stretch of brown fur, ending in short, clawed hind legs. I was naked, except for, again, the fur, and spending time around Cait Sidhe has taught me that no one with a decent pelt is ever really naked. I looked back up at the Luidaeg and squeaked again, furious and confused.

  She stooped down to scoop me into her arms, carrying me toward the water line. I didn’t fight. I was too busy glaring at her.

  “You thought I was going to turn you into a fish, and I’d be mad at you for that if you were in your right mind,” she said. “I would never do that to you if there were any other choice in the matter. That kind of cruelty is my sister’s domain. But sea otters have been native to the Pacific coast since long before the fae sailed here in our tall-masted ships, and the body you’re wearing knows these waters better than you can imagine. Go to the wall, and down, until you find the opening in the wards Dean carved out for the Merrow of Saltmist. They’ll let you in as well. They know you.”

  I wrinkled my nose, feeling my whiskers crinkle—not a sensation I was used to—and tried to roll over in her arms. My body still wasn’t sure what shape it was, and it didn’t want to do what I told it. Those didn’t seem like the ideal circumstances for a dip in the ocean.

  Not that I was going to have a choice. The Luidaeg bent forward and tipped me into the water. It wasn’t as cold as it had seemed from the shore, or maybe my fur was insulating me more than I expected, because it felt like being dropped into a pond, something shallow enough to be completely warmed by the sun. I rolled onto my back, the air pockets in my fur letting me float without effort.

  She smiled down at me. “You’re adorable, and much less mouthy this way,” she said. “Now go on, swim. Save your squire. I’ll be right behind you.”

  I cocked my head, waiting to see what she was going to turn herself into. Nothing as adorable as an otter, that was almost guaranteed, and indeed, as I watched, she folded inward on herself before blossoming outward like a flower, flesh turning corrugated and rough, arms going boneless. Her skin flushed vivid orange, then darkened to a deep, bruised gray, as the massive black octopus she had become swirled through the water next to me.

  It was impossible to say whether Disney had gotten something right, or whether she was making fun of them for being so far off the mark, and it didn’t matter either way, because she was diving, vanishing in an instant and leaving me alone. I squeaked in surprised alarm and dove after her—or tried to, anyway. The same air pockets that had been allowing me to float without effort kept me functionally stranded at the surface, refusing to let me duck more than a few inches below the water.

  I would have had better luck diving as a human. The thought was frustrating enough that I spun in the water, effectively centrifuging the air out of my pelt. This time, when I tried to dive, it worked, better than I could have imagined. I sliced through the water like a knife through flesh, scything smoothly and unerringly downward.

  The Luidaeg was there, about ten feet below the surface, floating motionless with all her limbs extended. Each of them ended in a hooked claw, like the talon of some great raptor, and her suckers flexed hungrily, eager for prey. I steered clear of her reach, not wanting to tempt whatever instincts her new body came with. The mind matters more, absolutely, but every shape I’ve ever worn has had its own opinions about what I should do.

  The wall loomed ahead of me, smooth and gray and faintly pearlescent. I swam close enough that my tail brushed the stone—another strange sensation—before diving deeper, looking for the opening that had to be there. Patrick and Dianda used it, and Di wasn’t small, especially not in her natural form, where the musculature of her tail would necessitate a reasonably sized hole.

  Deeper and deeper I dove, until I started to wonder if the hole even existed. I didn’t feel any discomfort; while I hadn’t intentionally held my breath when I went under, this body knew what to do, an
d it was happily doing it. The Luidaeg flashed by me, deeper dark against the increasingly shadowed water, and then she was gone. I angled my body in her direction and was rewarded with a vast circular opening in the wall. It was probably no bigger than a manhole, but in my current reduced state, it felt broader than a highway. I tucked my body down and shot through it, moving faster than anyone bipedal could have even attempted. Otters are much more aerodynamic than people.

  Why wasn’t everyone an otter, all the time? Patrick would probably have had an easier time dealing with the transition to the Undersea if he’d been an otter. Just float around looking cute, eat the occasional raw fish, and swim like it’s your job. The water here felt shallower than the water on the other side of the wall, and I shot toward the surface, breaking through into the light of the cove-side receiving room. I scrubbed the sides of my face with both paws, wiping the clinging water off my whiskers. It was getting harder to focus on what we were here to do. Otters are mammals. They have more room in their brains for complicated thoughts than fish do. They’re still not people. I’m not a natural shapeshifter; my magic wasn’t protecting my thoughts from fading into the thoughts of the animal I had become.

  That was enough to make me roll in the water, making an alarmed chittering sound. I wasn’t going to be able to save Quentin if I didn’t have thumbs. Thumbs seemed like a fairly key component to getting things done.

  The water next to me churned, before the head of a large gray-purple octopus broke the surface, alien eyes fixed on me. The Luidaeg reached out and wrapped two tentacles around my body, stopping my panicked roll. They were tense and muscular, like being restrained by two boneless snakes, and something about them set off a deep-set instinct that wasn’t normally mine. In the face of increasing panic, I did the only thing that came naturally.

  I bit her.

  What flooded my mouth didn’t taste like blood, exactly, or not blood as I normally understood it; it tasted too strongly of salt and copper, like it had been boiled down to the essentials of what blood could become. The octopus heaved in what I would probably have seen as a sigh had she been in her usual shape, and began swimming toward the beach with her six free arms, still holding me tight, even as I bit into her rubbery flesh again and again. Neither memories nor magic sparked in the thick substance filling my mouth; if this was her blood, one or both of us was too changed for me to read it.

  The thought that a simple transformation could be enough to lock me away from my magic made me panic more and bite harder, until the Luidaeg’s grasp loosened and I slipped out of her arms, swimming as fast as I could toward the only thing that looked remotely like safety: the long, creamy crescent of the cove shore, which gleamed in the pearly light emanating from everywhere and nowhere around us. If I could get to land, the octopus that was trying to attack me would be unlikely or unable to follow, and I could go back into the water farther down the shore, well away from the mighty predator.

  So I swam until my paws brushed the shore, then ran up onto dry land with an odd, rollicking gait that felt almost like I was jumping every time I tried to take a step. When I was well clear of the water, I turned and chittered triumphantly at it, giving that octopus a piece of my mind.

  It wasn’t there. I stopped, blinking, and sat back to scrub at my whiskers again. I had defeated it, clearly, driving it back down to the depths where it belonged.

  I barely noticed the water starting to churn. It extended upward into a tall column, and popped like a bubble atop a frothing wave, leaving a woman standing on the surface of the water. She was dark-haired and oddly dry, wearing something long and flowing that merged into the water beneath her feet. She walked toward me, held up by the tide, and I backed away, chittering in as warning a manner as I could manage. No, human. No, this is my beach. No, you are not welcome here.

  Then she was stepping onto the sand, looming over me, an odd expression on her face. I hissed before chittering louder, showing her the sharpness of my teeth. She had already encountered the sharpness of something else’s teeth; her forearm was punctured and torn, as if something had tried to gnaw it off of her body. The injury didn’t seem to be bothering her, or making her any more cautious or clever, because she reached for me with that hand as she bent forward, ignoring my increasingly frantic threat display. She was between me and the water, and I wasn’t fast enough on land to evade a human that wished to do me harm.

  She grabbed the scuff of my neck, seizing the loose skin that hung there in a tight grip, and I twisted around, sinking my teeth into her wrist.

  Blood filled my mouth, and a red haze dropped over my vision, taking the world away.

  It always comes down to the sea. Creatures of the land like to think dryness is the natural state of living things, but that’s arrogance and nothing more; the sea came first and the sea will come last and everything in the middle is only a story sung by children who have achieved temporary mastery of the air.

  I have spun this stretch of shore with my own two hands, and it will not take the place of Cailleach Skerry, but it is close enough, for I am alone in the world now, and need offer no comfort to my children. The wind blows hard here and the sea clashes wild, and I will never love again, for my heart has gone to ice and ashes. Nothing more can matter in the face of all that has been lost. It is a terrible thing, to be a mother with no children. It is a terrible thing, to be alone.

  But what is this? My wind dies down, and my waves turn placid, and something stretches toward the sky, spun like a spider’s web of pearl and bone. It is beautiful. I hate it.

  My sister. She pollutes even this, which should have been mine and mine alone, and she will not stop until she sees me utterly destroyed—

  The red mist broke just enough for me to unclamp my teeth from around her wrist. I dangled, limp and dazed, chittering softly, as she raised me to the level of my face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forget sometimes, how quickly instinct overwhelms you. It’s part of being so easy to change. But we got through the door, and that’s what matters.” She blew on my face. Her breath was strangely sweet, like the wind blowing across a field of fresh seagrass.

  Everything shifted, getting smaller and bigger at the same time as my field of vision expanded. My feet brushed the sand. The Luidaeg left her hand on the back of my neck, more cupping it than grasping it, and looked me solemnly in the eye.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fi—oh, fuck, I bit you!” Everything I’d done after my thoughts started getting fuzzy was still with me, even the parts that no longer seemed to make any sense now that my mind was my own again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said, sounding amused. “You absolutely meant to. I was big and frightening and a potential predator, and you reacted accordingly. Never get mad at a dog for biting, or for a changeling you’ve transformed into a sea-dwelling weasel for reacting with aggression when cornered. You meant to do it, but it wasn’t your fault. New instincts are powerful things. What did you see?” She took her hand away.

  “I think . . .” I reached up and rubbed the back of my neck where her fingers had been. “I think I saw Goldengreen being built. She really did just crash in here without permission and try to take away what you were making for yourself.”

  “That’s my sister for you. Do you have your land legs back yet?”

  I nodded. “I do.”

  “Then let’s go. The beach is empty. That doesn’t mean the rest of the knowe will be.”

  With the Luidaeg leading the way, we crossed the sand to the long staircase that spiraled upward into the knowe, compensating for the distance between beach and cliff. We climbed the stairs as quickly and quietly as we could, the Luidaeg in her gown of night moving with absolute silence, me grimacing every time my shoes scuffed against the treads.

  The door at the top of the stairs was locked. I paused, blinking at it bl
ankly, before leaning close and murmuring, “You know me. I held you once, although I gave you up. I have no right to command you now—I know that. Still, I think your master is in danger. Please, let us pass.”

  There was a click as the door unlocked itself. I smiled and caressed the doorknob. “You are a very good knowe,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether the prohibitions against saying “thank you” applied to buildings, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way. Offending the knowe when we were trying to move through it uninvited didn’t seem like the best of plans.

  The Luidaeg was looking at me oddly when I straightened. “You know, if you can sweet-talk locks into opening for you, I don’t understand why you decided to become a detective instead of a thief,” she said.

  “Devin would have preferred the latter, and I did my share of stealing. I prefer working for a living.” I eased the door open. It had never creaked before, but it’s hard to say with knowes whether something that’s true today will be true tomorrow.

  And, indeed, the door opened on a hallway I’d never seen before, long and featureless, with no furnishings, and gently curving walls that gleamed in the same pink mother-of-pearl shade as the ones outside. The door swung closed behind us and disappeared. I glared at the spot where it had been.

  “Oh, come on,” I snapped. “That’s just dirty pool. How are we supposed to get out of here if you take all the doors away?”

  The knowe didn’t respond. I shifted my attention back to the Luidaeg.

  “Do you recognize this hall?” I asked.

  “I think this is one of the ones my sister built herself, rather than waiting for the knowe to develop them in its own time,” said the Luidaeg. “If I’m right about that, there are only a few places it can lead. Come on.”