A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  “Because the Evening Winterrose I knew was arrogant and smug and thought too much of herself, but she was never this kind of bigot. Although I guess, with everything I’ve learned about the Daoine Sidhe since I stopped calling myself one, none of this should be a surprise. You are your mother’s daughter.”

  “My mother’s favorite daughter,” she corrected. “You’ve met two of us now. Can you honestly believe Acacia would ever be as well-beloved as I was?”

  The count was actually three: I had also met Amphitrite, the Merrow Firstborn, during our trip to the Duchy of Ships. Three daughters of Titania, one aligned to each of the three major schools of magic. It was interesting, and somewhat telling, that the only one of them I’d spend any time with socially was the most water-aligned of the three. Water is traditionally Maeve’s domain, but the lines aren’t hard and fast.

  “I’m not sure I’d brag about being Titania’s favorite,” I said. “It seems like an honor with very few selling points.”

  Evening scowled, red, red lips pursing in a moue of displeasure. “I’ll thank you to keep my mother’s name out of your mouth.”

  “I’ll thank you to stop messing with my friends and family members because you think being Firstborn makes you better than us.” The pain in my chest was getting worse, radiating from the place where the arrow had pierced me in the waking world. I grimaced and touched the spot, trying to massage the pain away. It didn’t help. Evening’s scowl melted into a smile, as smug as the cat with a mouthful of canary.

  “Oh, does it burn?” she asked. “That’ll be the poison doing its work. My little dogsbody, as you call him, has a nimble mind but no imagination. It’s been easy enough to influence him since all he knows how to do is bleed the world around him for his own benefit.”

  “He’s been using more and more of your blood because you wanted him to, hasn’t he?” Evening didn’t answer. She also didn’t deny it or look away. That was something of a relief since the wave of rage that washed over me made it easier to ignore the pain. “It’s the blood. The more he uses, the more you can tell him what to do. Even elf-shot, you’re still pulling the strings.”

  “The humans have a fairy tale about me, did you know that?” She smiled again, more magnanimously. It was probably easy to be magnanimous, now that she thought she was winning. “They say I ate a poisoned apple and spent a century asleep in a coffin made of glass, until I was brought back to the land of the living by the mercy of true love’s kiss. I didn’t love the man. He just happened to lay his shameful little fetish at my perfect feet as the effects of the poison left my system, and so I woke up and allowed him to be useful.”

  “I’d heard rumors,” I said warily. The connection between Eira Rosynhwyr and Snow White was more than just skin-deep. The people of the mortal world had seen a beautiful woman with skin as white as snow walking through the forest, untroubled by the frost, and they had explained her to themselves, spinning a story to suit the facts they had and replace the ones that they were missing. That’s mortal magic. They patch the holes in the world with words, and sometimes those words can hold long after the truth has worn away.

  “I’m strongest when I’m sleeping,” she said, still with that smug little smile on her lips. The desire to slap it off was stronger than I wanted to admit. “Out of all my siblings, even Amy, I’m the one who understands the blood we were gifted by our parents the best. I can see what it intends, not just what it is. And I can order it to conceal the things I don’t want to share. Simon has been in communion with me since he was foolish enough to take my sister’s bargain and remember what it means to be mine. Every time he’s let me past his lips, he’s been listening to me as he will never listen to anyone else. I told him how to brew the elf-shot from what he could find growing in my lands. I told him which roses to gather, which streams to attend upon, and how to patch the empty places with my blood. Sleep is my gift.”

  I stared at her. “Your blood is in the elf-shot he’s using.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you that.” She took a step toward me, the fabric of her dress fading and almost drifting away with the motion. “I’m inside you now, little blood-worker girl, and no matter how strong you think you’ve become, you’re never going to be as powerful as I am. I was the first of our kind. Without me, you’d have had no one to learn from.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, and refused to step backward. She didn’t get to intimidate me. Not here, not now. Not ever again. “Oberon would have been there even if you’d never been born.”

  “And where is he now? My precious father, who loved his children so dearly that he left us the second he had the opportunity to do so? I suppose you’d know something about absent fathers, though, wouldn’t you? Born of Amandine’s line. Tam Lin couldn’t wait to run. Not once Maeve’s Ride was broken by your grandmother.” She paused, smirking.

  Clearly, she thought she’d just dropped a bombshell, something that would stun and disorient me. That seems to be the real reason purebloods are so obsessed with keeping secrets: they treat them like weapons, assembling their armories one blade and bludgeon at a time, only to deploy them when they can do the most damage. Too bad for Evening that I already knew who my grandparents were, and who they weren’t. Janet had been pregnant when she’d gone to break the Ride, and the strain of the magic she’d been barraged with had been enough to make her lose the baby. It would have been mortal if it had lived, and like all mortal things, it would have been long since gone. The Ride was centuries ago, after all.

  “Your father and my mother’s father are the same man,” I said patiently. “If he was absent for her, he was absent for you as well, and I don’t see how it has anything to do with me. Oberon vanished after the Ride was broken.”

  “You mean Oberon left. Maeve was taken, my mother was banished, and Oberon left us to fend for ourselves, after chasing us out of our rooms and locking the doors to trap us here like naughty children. He laid down what bindings he thought were essential to keep us from killing each other in his absence, and then he was gone, and we had no one left to protect us. We were children, and our parents abandoned us.”

  “Children” seemed like a funny way to describe a group of immortal, ageless fae, many of whom had children and grandchildren of their own by the time Oberon left—and some of whom had already, like the Luidaeg, buried those descendants. But for Evening, who had always possessed Titania’s protection and what passed for her approval, it must have been a shocking, almost unendurable change. It didn’t make me feel bad for her, even though that was clearly what she’d been trying for. It did make me feel like I might be able to understand her just a little bit better.

  “I don’t know why Oberon left, or why Titania was banished; I’m not entirely sure why Maeve disappeared, because you all hint at it and talk around it, instead of saying anything simply. I know it had something to do with the breaking of her Ride.” I shrugged. “If you want to explain, it’s not like I have anywhere else to be right now.”

  The pain in my chest was getting worse and worse, making it increasingly difficult to concentrate. I didn’t like that. I tried to turn my awareness inward, to make sure I wasn’t involuntarily changing the balance of my blood again, but my magic refused to respond. It wasn’t there to listen to me. I lifted my hands and stared at them, wide-eyed.

  Evening laughed, the sound of ice breaking at the edges of a frozen lake, sharp and beautiful and terrible, all at once. “You’re in my domain now, traitor’s child. You have no power that I do not choose to grant you.”

  “That’s real nice of you, Ms. Winterrose,” I said, lowering my hands and glaring at her. “It’s because your blood is currently inside me, right? Well, it isn’t in my veins, and unless you have a way to stop me healing, it won’t be there for long.”

  “Oh, October, October, don’t you understand how dreams work?” Her smile was swee
ter, and smugger, than it had ever been before. She took another step toward me. “You can dream for years in a single night—not even a night. Most dreams last only minutes when they’re measured outside the sleeper. Out there in the waking world, you haven’t even hit the ground yet. I have all the time with you I could possibly need. By the time I allow this dream to end, you’ll be mine as sure as Simon is, and your only wish will be to fulfill my deepest and cruelest desires. As soon as he shot you, you belonged to me. There was no other outcome left.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “That’s it? That’s your grand and glorious plan? To get me elf-shot so you can use the presence of your blood inside my body to manipulate me? Don’t you ever come up with anything new? At least last time, you managed to get me to swallow it myself. This is sort of cheating, don’t you think?”

  “Mock me all you like, child, you’ll have time enough to regret it. No roses here for you to pull, no herbs to gather; I could tell you ‘lady, let alone,’ but it would make no difference, not when your transgressions are so dire.”

  I blinked, taking a step backward. “Wait—say that again.”

  Evening looked confused. “Mock me all you like; you’ll have time enough to regret it?”

  “No, not that part—the part about leaving things alone. Where have I heard that before?”

  “It’s what the man who would have been your ancestor, had your grandmother not bewitched my father with her mortal charms, said when he found her stealing roses from his good green wood.”

  The ballad—of course. It was a line from the ballad of Tam Lin, the song Amandine used to sing me when I really was a child, the song that commemorated the devastation my family had accidentally unleashed on Faerie. “She had not picked a rose, a rose, a rose but barely one,” I said slowly. “When up there came the young Tam Lin, said ‘lady, let alone.’” But where had I heard that recently?

  Evening stepped toward me again, expression growing impatient. “No more foolishness. It’s time for your education to begin.”

  The pain in my chest was growing intense enough to make everything else seem irrelevant. It was like someone had scooped out my lung and replaced it with a burning ember, scorching my ribs and charring the flesh around it. I gasped and clutched my chest, dropping to my knees in the soft, unseen sand of the beach. Above me, I heard Evening’s disdainful laughter.

  “Really, October? Feigning a heart attack to avoid the inevitable? You may as well surrender now, for nothing is going to change what’s coming.”

  My heartbeat was perfectly normal. I raised my head. “This isn’t a heart attack,” I spat.

  “Well, what is it, then?”

  I smiled. “Salvation,” I said, and opened my eyes.

  My eyelashes were frozen together. I felt some of them shatter when I pulled them apart. The cold struck me a moment later, ice caking my face and hair. I couldn’t move, but I could freeze. That was normal enough. Danny must have called for Tybalt before he’d come running, and then my glorious, reckless fiancé had carried me along the shadow roads, as he always did when he needed to save me from the consequences of my own actions.

  I allowed my eyes to drift closed again, not quite comprehending the blurry shapes and lights of whatever I’d been looking at. It seemed less important than lying quietly and starting to thaw. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been so cold.

  Cold or no, the feeling was coming back to my fingers, and I could tell that someone was clutching my hand so tightly that it would probably ache, once I was capable of comprehending pain.

  “—her up,” said Tybalt, voice quick and urgent. “You need to wake her up. She can’t sleep for a century. I can’t endure a century without her. I’ve endured too many already.”

  “She’s awake,” said Walther. He sounded utterly exhausted, which made sense; he’d already been fighting to wake May and must not have been expecting to have me dumped on his plate as well. I made a mental note that we owed the man some good strong coffee, and maybe a trip to the massage parlor of his choice. He was going to need to relax after this night.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” demanded Tybalt.

  “She just woke up,” said Walther. That was all he had time to say before Tybalt was gripping the sides of my face, lifting my head off whatever I’d been lain out on. I tried to open my eyes again. They refused to accommodate me.

  “She’s awake, but she’s not likely to be responsive for a while,” said a third voice—the Luidaeg. I officially had no idea where we were. Evening must have been lying about how long I’d been asleep. That was no real surprise. Tybalt was fast. He wasn’t that fast. “My darling sister put her blood into that elf-shot mixture, or more accurately, convinced the failure to do it for her. Toby’s not a descendant of Titania. The stuff will be eating at her until she manages to expel it.”

  “Can we help at all?” Walther again. Good old Walther. How does anyone function without an alchemist on call? I guess they have to make much more of an effort not to get poisoned, which seems like a lot of work.

  “You’re already helping,” said the Luidaeg. “But your countercharm doesn’t purge the body; it just breaks the connection between the ingredients. There’s no way to purge blood from her system without some really nasty side effects. Like exsanguination.”

  “I should never have allowed her to go off without me, whatever the little dream-walker said she saw,” said Tybalt, slowly taking his hands away from my face. He didn’t move away; I could still feel his presence, warm and close and comforting. “She always gets herself into trouble when I’m not around.”

  “Be fair to yourself, kitty-cat,” said the Luidaeg. “She gets into trouble when you are around. She gets into trouble like my father is paying her for it.”

  Her father. Something about Oberon . . . my conversation with Evening wasn’t fading like an ordinary dream, maybe because it hadn’t been a dream at all. It had been all too real, and I had come all too close to being trapped there. But something Evening had said about Oberon was nagging at me.

  I opened my eyes again. This time, the room around me came more immediately into focus; I was looking at the ceiling of the Luidaeg’s apartment, not at Walther’s office. How many people had Tybalt transported?

  “Welcome back,” said the Luidaeg. “I’d say I’d been worried, but I can’t lie. Your kitty is another story. Maybe reassure him.”

  Tybalt’s face appeared in my limited field of vision, as his hands returned to the sides of my face. “October?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  Well, I couldn’t speak or shake my head, so clearly, I was not all right. I blinked, and promptly regretted it, as my eyes didn’t want to open again once they were closed. This was getting tedious.

  Opening my eyes took the kind of effort I normally associated with hard labor, but I was determined, and Tybalt was holding me, and in the end, I achieved it. He looked me in the eye and laughed, an oddly choked sound that teetered on the edge of becoming a sob. I wanted to comfort him, and the fact that I couldn’t was one more thing I was never going to forgive Evening for. That woman had a laundry list of offenses to answer to, and while many of them weren’t crimes by either human or fae standards, I was going to hold her to them as if they were.

  The thought was comforting enough to make me feel a little warmer, although that could just have been the ice in my hair continuing to melt. This time when I blinked, my eyes opened again easily. That wasn’t enough for Tybalt; he gave me a concerned look before turning to look at someone I couldn’t see, hands still cupping my face.

  “She’s not moving. Luidaeg, why isn’t she moving?”

  “The little alchemist—”

  “Walther,” Walther interjected, mildly as if he weren’t interrupting the sea witch.

  “—was able to counteract my sister’s new elf-shot blend, barely, but it had time to do plenty of damage, and October is st
ill piecing herself back together. Yes, this is unusually slow for her, but I don’t think it’s a problem: she’s had my sister’s blood inside her body a lot longer than would be good for anybody, much less one of my father’s children with nothing of Titania in her to fight back. We can be sure she’s all right once she starts talking.”

  Talking. The idea was appealing and incredibly daunting at the same time, like a mountain too insurmountable to consider climbing. I took a deep breath and tried to force a sound out from between my lips, succeeding only in making a squeak so soft it was barely audible even to my own ears. No; there wasn’t going to be any talking for a while yet.

  I wanted to know who else was here. Danny had called Tybalt, and there was no way they’d left Quentin on the beach while they carried me back to the Luidaeg. But where was Simon? Was Cassandra here? Were we almost finished with this day’s work, or was it just beginning?

  I tried again. This time, I made a louder sound, one that was audible outside my own head. Tybalt’s head snapped around, pupils narrowing to slits as he stared at me. “October?”

  I took the deepest breath my lungs allowed and finally managed to whisper, “Quentin . . . ?”

  “He’s here,” said Tybalt, stroking my cheek with one hand. “He was with you on the beach when I reached you. That boy should have been Cait Sidhe, he has the heart of a lion. He had the knife from your belt in his hand and was squaring off against a sorcerer with bow and arrow. He is, perhaps, a little too accustomed to your invincibility, and forgets he isn’t actually your son. He can bleed almost as well as you can.”

  I blinked again, managing to force the slightest sliver of a smile. Tybalt laughed in earnest this time, beaming down on me.

  “Once you can sit up, you can see him. I’m afraid he’s been banished to the couch for the crime of hovering.”

  “Getting real tired of having people cast compulsion spells on me,” snapped Quentin, irritation and exhaustion painting his Canadian accent in broader strokes than usual. “I need to pee, and I can’t get up!”