A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  She started walking, the speed of her steps betraying her urgency. I followed in her wake, hurrying a little to keep up. She was a few inches shorter than me, and her stride shouldn’t have been long enough to rush me the way she was, but somehow she ate distance more quickly than should have been possible.

  The hallway curved, and she shifted trajectories to accommodate, the Luidaeg walking faster all the time, until the hall abruptly ended in a door. It looked like it had been carved from a single large piece of oyster shell, polished and placed perfectly to bar our way. The Luidaeg nodded, looking satisfied. “This was one of the first pieces she placed.”

  “How do you know that?” It was hard not to picture Evening smugly walking her sister through the halls, showing her each fixture and structure, proving without needing to say a word that she had claimed this space, it was hers now, and she was never going to leave or return it.

  “There used to be these giant bivalves off the coast. They were here when I made the beach, and I figured either they’d happened on their own, or one of my siblings had lost track of them, and either way, I didn’t care, so I let them stay as long as they weren’t bothering me. Well, my sister wasn’t as live and let live about weird slimy things that lived in the water. She dredged them all up, killed them, and used their shells in construction. For this door to be made from their shells, it must have gone up early. There were never very many of them.” Her face fell as she reached out and traced her fingers along the surface of the door. “We’re as bad as the humans are, in some ways. Give us a world, and we’ll barely stop to take a breath before we start devouring it.”

  The door shivered at her touch, creaking slightly open. The Luidaeg nodded and pushed it the rest of the way. I hesitated before following her.

  “Is there any chance she had some sort of ward set that would banish you to the old parts of the knowe if you ever came here?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” she said. “She would never have considered me enough of a danger to warrant banishment, and the times I did have cause to walk in Goldengreen, nothing of the sort occurred. She was never afraid of me after I was bound not to do her any harm. Smart enough to make no bargains, yes, but never afraid. She wouldn’t have set any attempts to banish me.”

  “No,” said Marcia, stepping around the corner of the hall on the other side of the door. “That was me.”

  FIFTEEN

  “OH, REALLY,” SAID THE LUIDAEG. Anyone who didn’t know her as well as I did might have missed the sudden tension in her neck and shoulders, illustrating just how unhappy she was about having someone join us without warning. “And when did you gain the ability to command Goldengreen’s defenses?”

  “I’m Dean’s seneschal,” said Marcia. “If I’m the ranking member of the household staff present in the knowe, it tends to listen to my requests. It’s easier than fighting with me.” Her voice was dull, almost dead; she sounded exhausted. More than that, she sounded defeated.

  I stepped forward, hesitating when I got a better look at her. She was wearing a simple yellow sundress, with a rip at the neckline and suspicious brown stains that could have been chocolate milk or could have been something else along the base of her skirt. More alarmingly, her lip was split, and there was a smear of what I couldn’t possibly pretend was anything but blood on her left cheek. The smell of it permeated the air around her. She looked at me with eyes as dull and empty as her voice.

  “I’m the only one here,” she said.

  “Marcia, what happened?”

  She worried her lip briefly between her teeth, wincing when she hit the split, and said, “The staff was serving dinner in the main room when he showed up. Just walked right in, through a door no one realized was there, like he owned the place. Like he was allowed.” A note of confused offense crept into her voice. “He walked in like he thought none of us would stop him, and I suppose none of us did, because he did it.”

  “He who?”

  “The man with the red hair,” she said, looking at me solemnly. In case that wasn’t enough, she added, “And the yellow eyes. But he wasn’t Sylvester Torquill. He just stole his face and used it to go where he wasn’t meant to go. He had Quentin with him, and an arrow, pressed against the side of Quentin’s neck, and when Dean demanded he let go and step away, he did . . . things.” She shuddered, voice going high and sweet and childish on the last word, like she was trying to put some distance between herself and the memory. “He said he was looking for Duke Lorden. Dean told me to get away. So I ran, and I asked the knowe if anyone came from the beach, to please send them here, where he wouldn’t think to look for them. No one comes here. We’re too far away from everything useful.”

  I moved closer, putting an arm around her shoulders. She nestled against me, blinking wide blue eyes up through the tangled fringe of her hair. As always, they were ringed in a thick corona of fairy ointment, a simple cream blended for her by one of the local alchemists—sometimes that meant Walther, sometimes that meant one of San Francisco’s many changelings just trying to get by—so she could see Faerie. I’ve never unsnarled Marcia’s exact heritage, but she’s thin-blooded, no more than a quarter fae, and without the fairy ointment, she wouldn’t be able to see the doors to the knowe, much less pass through them.

  “Marcia, where’s the man with the red hair now?” I asked.

  “He left,” she said, eyes still wide. “When he couldn’t find me, he left. He took Quentin with him. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’re looking for Quentin?”

  “I am,” I said, stomach sinking. Simon had been here, done something terrible to leave Marcia with blood on her dress and glassy shock in her eyes, and left again, taking Quentin with him. “Can you take us to Dean?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think anyone can do that anymore.”

  My stomach sank further. “Can you take us to the last place where you saw him?”

  Marcia considered for a moment before nodding solemnly and pulling away from me. “I can do that,” she said, and started walking down the hall, not waiting to see if we were following.

  I glanced back at the Luidaeg, who looked at me with confusion and shook her head, clearly not sure exactly what was happening. Together, we followed Marcia down the hall and down a short flight of wooden stairs into a small room at the very back of the kitchen. It wasn’t a pantry, more an antechamber disguised as a pantry, and once we left it, we were in the kitchen proper, surrounded by the smell of baking bread and simmering broths. The stove was still on, burners heating the pots above them. Magic means not worrying about burning the house down if you step away for five minutes. Just one of the many wonderful services it offers.

  Marcia stopped in the middle of the kitchen, eyes going to the rafters, anxiety written clearly in the thin line of her mouth. I followed her gaze, and paled when I realized what she was looking at—or wasn’t looking at, more importantly. There were no candy-colored bodies fanning their wings in the gloom, and no dog-sized spiders sneaking up behind them.

  Goldengreen sat empty between Evening’s supposed death and my taking the knowe over. It hadn’t been as well-sealed as Arden’s knowe in Muir Woods, which had been locked by the Luidaeg herself, and things had been able to creep in around the edges. Nothing big—we hadn’t been forced to evict a dragon or anything of the sort—but big enough to be a nuisance. Normally, Goldengreen had a thriving population of pixies, as well as a large colony of bogeys, shapeshifting spiders that liked to make people uncomfortable. I had always acknowledged them as the true owners of the knowe, and while Dean hadn’t chosen to do the same, he’d never tried to evict them, choosing instead to establish a stable, if occasionally frustrating, peace.

  They were always here. Even when Marcia was away from the knowe, her kitchen was alive with small bodies, stealing bits of bread, adding unexpected seasonings to the stew, and generally making a polite n
uisance of themselves. I had never seen the rafters empty before.

  “They rose to defend the knowe,” she said dreamily. “This is their home and they love it, and they love being accepted as a part of the household when so many would have had them evicted for the crime of being small and simple, so they rose to defend what they love when they felt it was in danger. And now we’re the only ones left.”

  The hole in the bottom of my stomach felt like it was opening wider and wider. Soon it would be a gaping chasm, and May and I would match again. “Take us to where you last saw Dean,” I said, in a very small voice.

  Marcia nodded, and the three of us left the kitchen together.

  The smell of smoke and rotten oranges completely filled the hall, thick enough that I gagged as soon as I inhaled. Simon had not only been here, he had been flinging spells around with wild abandon. It was probably too much to hope for him to have exhausted himself in the process, although it was likely. There were traces of other magical signatures blending into his, but none were strong enough to imply that anyone had been able to successfully fight back. We kept walking.

  When Goldengreen had belonged to Evening, it had been centered around the receiving room where she had kept her throne—as if anyone expected a Countess to sit a proper throne, like she thought she belonged among the upper echelons of the nobility. Etiquette didn’t demand that level of formality from anyone below the ducal level, but Evening had always been one to strive for extra credit when it meant she’d have the opportunity to look down her nose at someone. As one of the Firstborn, she’d probably considered it her due. After I’d taken over Goldengreen and moved in the survivors of my friend Lily’s unaligned Court, we had abandoned that receiving room, moving the knowe’s social center and heart to the courtyard.

  If there had been a specific goal in mind when the Goldengreen courtyard was designed, no one has ever been able to tell me what it was. It’s set up almost like a smaller version of the rose gardens in Berkeley, large and circular, with walls arranged in six shallow concentric tiers, terminating at a floor-level central promenade, which is no more than sixty feet across. Tiny, for something with that design. Massive, by the standards of an indoor room. Goldengreen doesn’t have a ballroom, and I’ve often wondered if that was because the courtyard made it irrelevant.

  The tiers had each been fitted with their own garden beds, and planted with a wide variety of plants, ranging from herb gardens and flowerbeds to vegetables, grasses, and trees whose root networks could survive the limited space. The top, and largest, tier was dominated by a copse of willow trees that Lily’s former handmaids had transplanted from her knowe before it finished the process of sealing itself after her death. Even knowes can mourn.

  Goldengreen was going to be in mourning soon if we didn’t do something about it. We stepped out of the hallway, into the courtyard, and the Luidaeg made a sound barely shy of a gasp, a strangled inhalation that sounded entirely alien coming from her. The air was even thicker with the cloying smell of Simon’s magic, forcing me to breathe through my nose to stop it coating my tongue and the back of my throat. Debris littered the floor, weapons, cooking implements, and other, less martial artifacts—books and eyeglasses and tumblers, all the things people would have been carrying in their hands when they were unexpectedly interrupted by Simon Torquill and his captive.

  There was no blood. There were no bodies. But the lowest tier of the gardens, usually reserved for Marcia’s kitchen herbs and easier-to-grow vegetables, like zucchini and tomatoes, was suddenly clogged with trees. Oak and ash and hawthorn and yew, all the sacred woods of Faerie were growing there, where I knew for a fact they hadn’t been on my last visit.

  I could see screaming faces pressing against the bark, distorted by the grain of the wood, but recognizable all the same. Nothing else about them was recognizable. Looking at the trees, I couldn’t say which one was Dean, or who any of the others might have been.

  The soil around them was dense with red-capped toadstools and even larger mushrooms with purple-and-yellow caps. The toadstools glowed faintly, in a variety of colors that didn’t match the red of their caps. I turned back to the Luidaeg, pressing a hand to the base of my throat as both a signal of distress and an attempt to keep myself from vomiting.

  “Did Simon really do all this?” I whispered.

  Marcia, meanwhile, had drifted over to stand in front of the largest of the new oaks, her hands clasped in front of herself like a very small child and her eyes filling with tears. “He told me to run,” she whispered. “He saw what was happening, he saw he wouldn’t be able to stop it, and he told me to run. So I ran. Maybe if I’d stayed, this wouldn’t have . . . maybe I could have . . .”

  “Hey,” said the Luidaeg. “No. Don’t do that to yourself. My own mother couldn’t have stopped this. The magic that shaped this was Simon’s, but the power beneath it belonged to my sister. She should never have given it to him.”

  “Because he’s using it irresponsibly?” I asked.

  “Because it’s destroying him! You think I don’t just hand out bottles of my blood because I’m being greedy? Sweet daddy’s ass, Toby, you’ve had to use my blood. You know how strong it was, and that was under controlled circumstances, when I spilled it to save your life. He’s flinging her powers around like there won’t be any consequences. Taste the spell. You’ll see for yourself.”

  I frowned before taking a shallow breath, this time trying to taste Simon’s magic, rather than shutting it out. There was the smoke, and the flavor of rotting oranges, and the absolute absence of anything approaching mulled cider, which would have told me Simon was coming back into himself . . .

  And there, under all the rest of it, was a hint of snow, of cold, of the winter’s incipient descent. For all the Luidaeg’s protests that Evening was a summer creature, her magic had always held the scent of snow and roses, like she was the purest part of winter given physical form and malicious intent. Now that I was looking for it, it was everywhere. It was freezing the rest of his magic, encasing it from the inside out. What would happen when it took over completely? What happens when Simon Torquill’s magic grows red with roses?

  It’s a question I doubt anyone has needed to ask in a long, long time, not since the Firstborn were common and Faerie was learning to cope with the size of their powers. I’ve known more Firstborn than anyone needed to, really, but I’ve never used their blood the way Simon was using Evening’s. He was using powers that had never been his to channel, that his body wasn’t equipped to handle, and people were going to be hurt. Very, very badly.

  I stared at the Luidaeg. “We have to find him.”

  “I know.”

  “We have to stop him.”

  “I know.”

  “He’ll be trying to get to Saltmist next, since he can’t find Shadowed Hills and he’s forgotten the tower is even relevant to him and ugh, Luidaeg, next time you need to ruin someone’s entire life in exchange for a candle, can you do it by turning them to stone or something like that? So they don’t go around making things harder on the rest of us?”

  “I’ll do what the magic allows,” she said stiffly. The Luidaeg set her own prices, yes, but sometimes they were too strange and too specific to have been her own idea. Taking August’s way home when she really wanted my sister to find Oberon wasn’t just steep, it was cruel, in a way the Luidaeg usually wasn’t. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that I didn’t fully understand the geas she’d been forced to live under.

  “Speaking of what the magic allows, this is Simon’s spell, though spun from my sister’s strength,” she said, turning her attention to the nearest tree. She reached out and ran the tip of her finger along a seam in the bark, expression turning contemplative. “The world isn’t meant to bear this sort of strength, not the way it used to. We’ve left this pain behind.”

  “Can I help?” I tried to see the spell the way I’d seen the on
e Simon used to weave his shard realm, the way he’d woven the spell that had almost turned Jazz into a fish in my kitchen the first time he’d approached me after the pond. I got a brief, wavering glimpse of what looked like macramé, only to lose sight of it as soon as it appeared, wisping away into the air. A bolt of pain lanced through my head. I winced.

  The Luidaeg turned to me, and her expression was barely shy of outright sympathy. “Hurts, doesn’t it? You’re not supposed to behold our workings so directly. The ways of the Firstborn are subtle and dreadful, and sometimes even our own parents couldn’t contain us, although they were far more equipped for the attempt than you could ever be. No, this isn’t something you can unmake. I can try, although my sister’s involvement means it may or may not work.”

  “And if it doesn’t—”

  “Either you or Marcia is going to wind up becoming the new custodian of Goldengreen. Which means probably you, since I doubt even Arden could be convinced to put a thin-blooded changeling in charge of a county.”

  I stared at her, mouth going dry. Finally, I swallowed and asked, “Are you really saying Dean and the others could be lost?”

  “Look at this room.” The Luidaeg waved her hands. “No windows. No skylight. The plants are sustained by the knowe’s magic, but dawn will never find them here, and without dawn to weaken the transformation, if I can’t tear it down, you’d need to wake my sister and convince her to do it for you. I know you like to wake up sleepers and ask them to do you favors, but I think this one would be a little bit beyond even you.”

  “Believe me, she’s the last person in the world I want to see wake up.” I shook my head. “I need to get out of here. I need to find and stop Simon. You’re going to stay here and break the spell?”

  “If I can.”

  “Then there’s just one more thing I need for you to do.”