A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  “To do the same for him,” I said grimly, and led him out the kitchen door, into the cool air of the coastal night.

  SEVENTEEN

  MOST UNDERSEA DEMESNES ARE huge by land standards, consisting of miles upon miles of sea floor and coast. Half Moon Bay was as adjacent to Saltmist as San Francisco, and thanks to the presence of the Roane—formerly the presence of the Selkies—the paths between the two were better worn here.

  We made our way along the beach, heading for the rocky tower rising in the distance, a natural result of time and erosion. There are wonders in this world that have nothing to do with Faerie. Natural archways created by ceaselessly rushing water created doorways into the center of the rock formation, and we walked through the largest of them, into a moon-washed chamber with salt-stained walls. The surf ran out halfway across the “room,” creating a line of darker, heavily moistened sand.

  And there, at the edge of where the ocean met the shore, was Simon Torquill, bow still in his hands. He was facing the water, eyes locked on the reflection of the moon on the waves, looking like he was on the verge of tears. It was odd to see him that way. It was odd to see him in any way that wasn’t cool and conniving and somehow three steps ahead of the rest of us.

  “What did you think was going to happen?” I asked, once we were close enough that I didn’t have to yell to be heard above the waves. Simon whipped around, starting to raise his bow, then sagged and let it fall back to his side. He looked at me like a man defeated. I shrugged. “Did you think the seas were going to open at your approach?”

  “I thought I’d steal a skin from one of the Selkies, and let it carry me down to Saltmist,” he said, voice dull. “Once there, I could breach the doors and find Patrick. If they’re holding him captive down there, I can get him out. That boy, in Goldengreen . . . he looked so much like my Patrick, and nothing like him at all . . .”

  I’d never thought Dean looked that much like his father, but it was possible Simon had seen something I couldn’t. “Patrick’s no one’s captive. Dianda isn’t in the habit of kidnapping her own husband.”

  “Then why did he leave me for so long?” Simon glared at me, anguish in his voice and eyes. He barely seemed to realize Quentin was there. That was probably a good thing; Quentin clearly wanted to hurt him for what he’d done to Dean, and if he made another move toward my squire, I would help. I wouldn’t need to invite Simon to my wedding if he was dead. Sometimes the easiest solution to a problem is also the best one.

  “He didn’t leave you,” I said. “He fell in love, and when the earthquake happened, both of you got distracted. He had to help Dianda rebuild Saltmist. You were looking for your daughter. I know you can’t remember her right now, because she’s part of your way home, but please try to believe me when I tell you she’s real. Her name is August. She loves you very much.” That was as close as I could come to praising my sister, who was every inch our mother’s child.

  Simon frowned, shaking his head hard. “No. I could never—I would never—you’re telling me I have a child and I’ve somehow forgotten her? Is that how little you think of me?”

  “I think you’ve been the monster under my bed for more than a decade,” I said. “I think you terrify me. I think you made a lot of really bad choices, and it doesn’t matter if you made them for what you thought were good reasons, because why you do a thing doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you do. And I think that no matter how powerful you are, magically, you’re not too powerful for the Luidaeg to enchant. You put a compulsion spell on my squire. She put a slightly more elaborate spell on you. It’s the same thing.”

  “I don’t know how to fix this,” he said, sounding utterly miserable. “I’ve never encountered anything I didn’t know how to fix before. This is . . . terrible.”

  He raised the bow again, in a single smooth motion, pulling back the string and aiming his already-notched arrow directly at the center of Quentin’s chest. My squire made a small, strangled sound of dismay. I fought the urge to jump between them. I was the one with the potential to fix this. If I got myself elf-shot, I couldn’t do that.

  It was the right decision. But leaving Quentin to take the risk of what would happen if Simon’s hand slipped was more painful than anything else I’d done since this whole mess began.

  “Simon, if you hurt him, I will kill you, and Oberon’s Law be damned,” I snapped. The Law was full of loopholes anyway. If Simon shot Quentin with elf-shot so powerful that it overwhelmed his system and he died in his sleep, he wouldn’t be considered guilty of Quentin’s murder. There were always ways to argue around the consequences of your actions in Faerie, if you could make yourself stop caring about who got hurt in the process. And if Simon hurt Quentin again, I was going to be way, way past the point of caring.

  Simon blinked, a look of brief consternation on his face. “You really mean that,” he said.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so surprised. You were with Oleander de Merelands for years, and I don’t think anyone will ever be able to accurately verify her kill count.”

  Simon shook his head. “She never killed as many people as she was given credit for. I think Faerie just wanted another monster, and she was the best candidate we could find.”

  “She killed King Gilad, and she killed the mother of his children, and she killed Lily,” I said. “That’s at least three corpses I can place at her feet, and she already had a reputation as a killer when she killed Gilad and his lover.”

  Simon shook his head again, harder this time. “I never said she was a good person. Just that she wasn’t as much of a monster as they accused her of—uh-uh, boy.” He shifted the angle of his bow, keeping the arrow trained on Quentin. “You don’t move. I’d rather not die today, so I’m holding my fire. You’ll excuse me if I don’t trust you to do the same.”

  “I won’t excuse you for anything,” spat Quentin. “You hurt Dean. You say you’re looking for Patrick because you care about him, but you hurt his son, and he won’t ever forgive you for that. I won’t forgive you for that either. I love him, and you hurt him, and you made me stand there and watch. I hate you.”

  Simon frowned and switched his gaze back to me, clearly trying to dismiss Quentin as unimportant—and just as clearly failing. “Patrick will come home. He always comes home.”

  “Patrick is happy in Saltmist. He’s not going to come here just because you decided to stand on the beach and chuck rocks at his roof. And you’re lucky you didn’t find and steal a Selkie skin. Not only would the Luidaeg have hunted you to the ends of the earth for interfering with her plans for them, you wouldn’t have been Daoine Sidhe anymore. A Selkie transformation is permanent.” Rayseline had dodged that change only because she had never actually used the skin she’d stolen, choosing instead to wear it as a simple disguise. She might never know how close she’d come to becoming the Luidaeg’s charge instead of Titania’s.

  “I don’t remember any of this,” snapped Simon. “You’ve been lying to me since we met.”

  “I’ve never lied to you at all,” I said. “It’s your patroness who lied to you, and who’s still lying to you, because you’re in her service and you shouldn’t be. She never meant you well. All she ever did was help you get lost.”

  To my surprise, Simon sighed. “I know that,” he said, in a soft voice. “You think I don’t know that?”

  I blinked. “Um, yes. I thought you didn’t know that. If you know she’s lying to you, why are you breaking things to try and wake her up?”

  “Because I have nothing else. I can’t find Oleander, my parents are dead, Sylvester rejected me when he found his Luna, Patrick—Patrick let me think he was dead. I’m alone in the world except for my lady, and if she wants to lie to me, then let her lie. At least I know I’m useful to her. At least I know she’s not going to leave me.”

  The thought of Evening Winterrose as the last dependable person in Simon’s life a
ched. I took a step forward. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Let me take you back to the Luidaeg. She can help you find your way home.”

  “Does that require someone to find Oberon?” asked Quentin.

  “If that’s what has to happen, that’s what has to happen,” I said, keeping my eyes on Simon. “Come on, Simon. Let me bring you back to your family. They miss you.” August did, anyway. I couldn’t be so confident about Mom. Mom rarely seemed to miss anyone, and she’d left Simon when he’d demonstrated that he cared more about August than he did about her.

  My family sort of sucks sometimes.

  Simon looked, for a moment, like he was considering my request. Then he raised his bow again, aiming squarely for the center of my chest. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  Things began to happen very quickly after that. Quentin lunged forward, shouting. Danny’s own shout echoed a second later, the massive man running down the beach with a wide, ground-eating stride. For a second, it looked like he was going to reach us on time, like this was all going to have a very different ending.

  Then Simon let the arrow go.

  It flew swift and true and faster than any of us could move. I looked numbly down at the arrow protruding from the left side of my chest. It had missed the heart, although it was probably embedded in my lung. Well, that wouldn’t be the first time. Not by a long shot. I started to reach up and pull it out, but midway through the gesture, my arms stopped obeying me.

  I was unconscious before I hit the beach. I never even felt myself fall.

  EIGHTEEN

  I OPENED MY EYES on a world wreathed in fog, the sort of thick, gray, all-consuming fog that hasn’t been common in the Bay Area since I was a little girl. I sat up, pleased to find I still had arms I could use to lever myself, and a body that could do the sitting, then pushed myself to my feet. So far, so good. Everything seemed to be working normally.

  There was a faint ache in the left side of my chest, like there was something lodged there that didn’t belong, but I tried not to dwell on it. If Quentin and Danny wanted to leave the arrow where it was until they could get me to someone who could help, that was their choice. I didn’t have many choices left to me right now.

  I felt surprisingly good, for someone who’d just been flung into a chemically induced dream state by an asshole with a bow and arrow. That could probably be partially attributed to how little humanity I had left. Elf-shot puts purebloods to sleep. It kills humans and changelings. I was still human enough that it would kill me eventually, if it didn’t start shutting down my body’s autonomic functions before it had the chance to poison me. Really, life in Faerie is an endless string of delights.

  But I was almost a pureblood now. I had so little humanity for the elf-shot to attack that I might as well have had none at all. I held tightly to that thought as I stepped forward into the fog, trying to make out literally anything that could tell me where I was.

  When I wind up in these weird dreamscapes, there’s usually a reason for it. And yeah, the reason is frequently either “you’re dying” or “you’re attempting some act of blood magic that isn’t just beyond you, it’s literally impossible, and yet you’ve decided you can do it anyway,” but those are still reasons. Since I’d just been elf-shot, I was willing to bet “dying” was the answer here.

  I took another step into the mist that swirled and eddied around me like a flag. The smell of roses drifted through the chill, and I recoiled, trying to move away from it. Not fast enough; not well enough. My shoulder bumped into something solid that couldn’t possibly have been behind me, and I turned, glacially slow, to gaze upon the face of the woman I was increasingly convinced had been my enemy since long before I existed.

  Eira was back in her Evening Winterrose guise, beautiful, yes, but no more so than any other member of the Daoine Sidhe. Her long black hair was unbound and filled with glittering oil slick rainbows that shifted and danced despite the absence of any clear light. Her skin was so pale that it would have looked completely white if not for the mist surrounding her, and her eyes were a deep, frozen blue, like jewels dredged up from the bottom of the sea. She was beautiful and she was terrible and just looking at her made it harder for me to breathe, like she was stealing all the air from the rest of the world.

  She was draped in a dress that appeared to have been crafted from layers of mist, tied over her shoulders in careless ribbons that shifted and faded away at the ends. I will never fully understand what it is about the Firstborn and wearing the weather. Although I guess if I had that kind of power, I’d show off, too.

  “Well, well,” she purred. “Amy’s little castoff. I’m not allowed to kill you myself, but it seems I’ll have the opportunity after all. I’m inside you now.”

  “Since you weren’t invited, that’s a massive violation,” I said. “I’d go be in someone else if I were you.”

  She laughed, sounding as giddy and delighted as she ever had, back when she’d been pretending to be my friend. “Still the same little October, I see. The most impatient month of the year.”

  My knife was still at my belt. It would take nothing to slide it into her belly and spill her arrogant Firstborn guts on the mist-draped ground. It also wouldn’t do me any good. As a Firstborn, she couldn’t die unless her killer used silver and iron. I lost the ability to carry iron without hurting myself a long time ago. My fingers still itched to make the attempt.

  “You’re supposed to be asleep, remember? You invented elf-shot. The least you could do is let it do its job.”

  “Oh, now you respect my work? You, who did everything in your power to do away with it? I don’t believe you get a say in how it’s used now.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to be having a say in anything, since you’re currently asleep in a couloir at the end of the Rose Road, where no one’s ever going to find you or set you free again.”

  “Of course they will. In a hundred years I’ll wake up, if nothing else changes, and I have the Torquill boy.” She waved a hand dismissively. “He’ll keep fighting for me forever, thanks to you and my briny sister. You know, she treats you as poorly as I ever did, the way she keeps sending you off on her errands with no concern for whether you can survive whatever you find. I don’t understand why you like her so much better than you do me.”

  If not for how dark her hair was, she could have been swallowed entirely by the mist around her. She was almost the spitting image of my mother, which made me wonder why it had taken me so long to realize they were sisters. Well, half-sisters. They shared a father, but their mothers couldn’t have been more different if they’d been trying.

  “The Luidaeg has never lied to me,” I spat. “Unlike you.”

  “Ah, but she would, if she was able. She would tell you all the same pretty, self-serving lies you hated so much from me, because we’re Firstborn. We’re better than you. You’ve never done anything to earn the truth from either one of us—she gives it to you because she doesn’t have a choice, not after my mother cursed her.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  Evening shrugged, the edges of her dress blending into the mist. “She thought she had reason. Someone must have told her Maeve’s daughter was spreading lies about her, and about me, and about all her other children. Someone must have said there was a danger. And that someone must have gotten exactly what they wanted, because when we’re honest with you, our fragile little descendants, you realize too quickly that we’re not the same. We’re so far above you that you’ll never be our equals, even if you try forever, and so there’s no sense in trying.”

  I had always known the Luidaeg’s honesty was a punishment. I’d never considered that it might have been a punishment intended to make us more afraid of our own Firstborn. Something had to have changed to take them from being beloved parents and family members and turn them into gods and monsters. Something had to have caused us to pull away. Was
one curse on one woman that something? I stared at her.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said. “How long have you been working to betray Faerie?”

  “Oh, a long, long time,” she said. “Longer than your tiny mind is capable of comprehending. I work on a scale you can’t understand even in your fantasies.”

  “Uh-huh.” I studied my fingernails. “Sure you do. But you know, here’s the thing: I know you can still lie.”

  Evening blinked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “If you had so much time, why would your dogsbody be working so hard to wake you up? Why would you even care about being put to sleep for a century? That’s no time at all to someone who works on a scale I can’t comprehend.” I lowered my hand and smiled at her. “I think you’re full of shit. I think you’re working on a much tighter timeline than you want me to believe. And I think you’re desperate to wake up before we manage to dismantle any more of your plans. When you faked your death to try and take me out you had, what, two kingdoms in your thrall? That’s not counting the nobles who owed you their positions, or Goldengreen, or Simon, oak and ash, Simon. That man only ever wanted to bring his daughter home, and you used that wanting like a knife you could slide between his ribs over and over again until he bled out on your floor. You had everything, and now you have what? A rose bier in a place none of your faithful can reach? One last servant, who’s killing himself trying to control your magic long enough to wake you? Simon’s about used up.”

  “He was always weak,” she said dismissively. “Son of a human woman playing at being good enough to be a member of my bloodline, panting after my tainted baby sister like she meant something. My blood was always going to be the death of him, regardless of what drove him to start abusing it, because only purity can handle purity.”

  It was my turn to blink at her. “Wow. I really hope this is some sort of messed-up hallucination, and you’re not really talking to me right now.”