A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  “Should’ve listened the third time I told you to sit your butt down or I’d make you,” said the Luidaeg, sounding almost jovial. “Most kids your age listen when the sea witch tells them to do something.”

  Quentin made a rude scoffing sound. I really did break that boy.

  My muscles were still in near-rebellion, refusing to obey when I told them I wanted to move. At least there was no pain, and blinking was getting steadily easier. I made a frustrated noise. Tybalt straightened, giving me an almost unobstructed view of the ceiling. I could still see his shoulder and the side of his head, which kept the “motionless and can’t see anyone” tension from kicking back in.

  “How much longer?” he asked.

  “Poppy is upstairs with Officer Thornton, and she’s promised to bring a strengthening potion with her when she returns,” said the Luidaeg. “I’m sure your alchemist could brew something almost as good, if you don’t want to wait.”

  Walther sighed gustily but didn’t argue. It wasn’t just that the Luidaeg can’t lie, meaning she wouldn’t have been able to say that if she didn’t really think her strengthening potions were better. Which, again, sea witch. If anyone had had the time to really refine what they were doing, it was her.

  “I’m here! Here’s me!” As always, Poppy made announcing her own arrival sound like something of vast and unspeakable import. “Brought what you asked for, yes I did, but the man’s restless as anything. He doesn’t want to stay asleep or abed. You’ll need to be seeing to him, because I’ve reached the limits of what I can do.”

  Poppy suddenly appeared in my field of vision, looming over me in all her orange glory. She had an uncorked bottle in one hand and beamed like this was an ordinary situation. “Want you up and about, we do, so it’s time to help with that,” she said, and slid her free hand behind my head, lifting it away from whatever I was lying on until she could press the bottle to my lips. “Drink careful.”

  The liquid tasted like bubblegum, blueberries, and tequila—not the best combination ever, but not the worst I’d ever come across. She trickled it past my lips slowly enough that I could swallow without choking, which was good, because she seemed determined not to stop until I’d swallowed it all. I did my best. After the first few mouthfuls, she took her hand away, and I was delighted to discover I could hold my head up without assistance. For that, I would drink all the weird bullshit she wanted.

  She kept pouring, stepping backward as she did, forcing me to follow her if I didn’t want the liquid to dribble down my front. Tybalt gasped. I ignored him and kept swallowing until Poppy pulled the bottle away and smiled radiantly, and I realized I was sitting upright, unsupported.

  “Better, isn’t that?” she asked.

  I looked around, still a little dazed and dizzy, and the rest of the Luidaeg’s living room became clear. There was Quentin on one end of the couch, with Simon on the other. Neither of them was standing, although Quentin looked like he wanted to. Simon looked like he’d been hit in the head with a plank and was lolling limply. If not for the fact that I knew it wasn’t her way of doing things, I would have suspected the Luidaeg of hitting him with elf-shot.

  Danny was looming off to one side, looking profoundly uncomfortable, with the Luidaeg standing nearby, back in her “ordinary, harmless human teenager” guise, down to the electrical tape in her hair. She smiled at me, and that was the last thing I saw before Tybalt swept down and grabbed me in a fierce embrace, burying his face in my shoulder.

  This time, when I tried to move my arms, they obeyed, and I wrapped my arms around him, stroking his back with one hand.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, I’m okay.”

  “Elf-shot, May still sleeping, Quentin kidnapped, half of Goldengreen enchanted, and you’d call that ‘okay’? My love, we need to buy you a dictionary.” His voice was slightly muffled by the fact that he was speaking into my shoulder, but he at least sounded amused enough that I probably wasn’t in any real trouble.

  At least not with him. If Walther didn’t wake May up soon, Jazz might be a different story. I twisted around to plant a kiss on the side of his head, and said, “We found Simon.”

  “Which is most of the problem, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Don’t worry; I have a bigger problem for you to deal with.” I pulled away. He let me go reluctantly, and I turned to the Luidaeg. “I need two favors, and I am willing to pay for them if you feel it necessary.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Are you, now? I’ve never met anyone so eager to fall into my debt. What can I do for you, October, daughter of Amandine, returned once again from beyond the borders of death? The night-haunts must curse your name every time you deny them, and dream of the day their bellies will be full.”

  “I need you to wake Simon up, and I need you to unlock Officer Thornton’s room,” I said.

  Her second eyebrow climbed to join the first. “Such small requests to risk your soul upon. I assume you have what you consider a good reason?”

  “I do,” I said. “To be clear, August traded her way home for your father’s return, and Simon took her debt upon himself. If he found your father and brought him back, would his way home be fully restored, no conditions, no strings?”

  “That’s the deal as struck, yes,” said the Luidaeg, still looking at me quizzically. “It’s a simple enough thing, on the face of it. Find one man in a vast universe largely made up of spaces he can reach, and no one else even knows for certain still exist, and convince him to come back to his eldest daughter who misses him very much. If Simon can find and recover my father, his debt is paid.”

  “What if someone else did it?”

  “Then Simon’s debt becomes unpayable, and he is lost.” The confusion faded from her face. “October, what is it you think you’ve done?”

  “We’ll find out in a moment, won’t we?” I slid off the Formica table where I’d been stretched out like a corpse, walking toward Simon. My knees were still weak and a little wobbly, but that was fine; that made it easier to hide my nerves. If I was wrong . . .

  I wasn’t wrong. It all made sense. Things in Faerie never start making sense until the moment they’re ready to unravel, and then they all fall into place at once, like the mystery has gotten tired of holding its breath and just wants to be finished. I walked toward Simon as if I were in a dream, only realizing when I was halfway there that I was unarmed; the knife that was normally at my belt was absent.

  I turned to face Quentin. “I need my knife back.”

  He looked at me mulishly, jaw jutting out at an angle entirely unbefitting someone who was going to be asked to rule a continent someday. “You could have died,” he said. “You left me alone with Simon. If I hadn’t taken the knife, he was going to shoot me, too.”

  “And if you think a knife was going to stop him from letting go of a bowstring, we need to call Etienne and arrange for more lessons,” I said. “Knife, please. Luidaeg? Can Quentin get up now?”

  “Give the lady back her pokey toy, kid,” said the Luidaeg. “I want to see what she’s about to do.”

  “I don’t,” said Tybalt.

  He was right. He didn’t. If there had been a way to make him leave, I would have taken it, for distressing as this was going to be for the rest of us, I had no doubt it was going to be twice as bad for him. I didn’t turn. If I saw his face, I would probably lose my nerve. Instead, I stayed exactly where I was, hand outstretched, waiting as Quentin sullenly stood, stomped across the room, and slapped the hilt of my knife back into my palm.

  “I appreciate it,” I said. Something Tybalt had said finally clicked home, and I blinked. “Half of Goldengreen enchanted?”

  “I had time to restore most of the larger occupants of the knowe to their customary forms before I got called away by the rolling emergency that is your ongoing existence,” said the Luidaeg dryly. “When this adventure is over, I’ll get back to work,
and restore the rest of them. I’m sure someone will get around to paying me eventually, since the alternative is a pissy, ill-treated sea witch hanging around making nasty comments about people who don’t pay their bills.”

  “Right.” That explained why Quentin looked sullen, not hysterical. If Dean was bipedal again, half of his problems were solved. Good thing for both of us that I was about to produce some new ones. I turned back to Simon. The Luidaeg snapped her fingers. He opened his eyes, stiffening when he saw his surroundings, and started to slide a hand over the cushion next to him in the time-honored “searching for a weapon” gesture.

  I held up my knife, wiggling it at him. “Maybe chill,” I said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  “I might,” said Tybalt.

  “We can start a club,” said Quentin.

  The Luidaeg didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The woman could radiate quiet malice like it was her job. Simon paled.

  “Stop being terrifying, everyone, I know what I’m doing.” I approached the couch, kneeling in front of Simon as I pulled the candle stub out of my pocket. “You may not remember this, but you made a bargain with the sea witch,” I said. “You gave her your way home in exchange for your daughter’s freedom, a daughter you immediately forgot, because if you knew she was there to find, you could never be truly lost. You promised Antigone of Albany, daughter of Oberon and Maeve, born when the tide was a toy and the sea was a wonderland, that you would find her father and bring him back to her. Do you remember?”

  Wordless and wide-eyed, Simon shook his head. He couldn’t seem to decide whether he should be looking at me or at my knife, which was an understandable dilemma. I have trouble figuring out whether to focus on the warrior or the weapon when someone’s that close to me with something that can do me harm. At the end of the day, though, a knife’s just a knife; what matters is the hand that holds it.

  “N-no,” he said, finally seeming to realize I was going to wait until he gave me an answer. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember any of this.”

  “You will,” I said, and placed the candle on the floor in front of me as I raised the knife, placing the point of it against my chest, right in front of my heart. A quick, hard thrust would be enough to drive it home. “Simon Torquill, by fae law, you are, and have always been, my father, whether we’ve accepted it or not. I spent most of my life not knowing what you were to me, and now you’ve forgotten what I am to you. But as your child, born of blood or no, I have the right to claim your debts as my own. Do you agree?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “You seem to have gotten the wrong idea. I assure you, if I had a child, I would know—”

  “Do you agree that a daughter has the right to take her father’s debts?” I hissed, between my teeth. I could hear Tybalt making an angry growling noise behind me, and I had little doubt that only the presence and obvious approval of the Luidaeg was keeping him from lunging forward and disrupting what I was preparing to do.

  I had a man who loved me more than he loved his own safety. Who loved me enough to stand idly by while I did the wrong thing for the right reasons. Oh, sweet Maeve, I hoped I wasn’t about to take myself away from him.

  “I agree,” said Simon, in a puzzled tone.

  “Good,” I said, and slammed the knife home as the candle lit itself.

  NINETEEN

  THE PAIN WAS LESS extreme than I expected it to be. It washed over me like a wave breaking on the shore, disappearing as soon as it passed across my skin. There was still a knife sticking out of my chest. It just didn’t hurt.

  The candle burned a clear and lambent blue, the shade of swampfire, the color of magic.

  Simon stared at me, horror and confusion in his eyes. Then he blinked, and while the horror didn’t disappear, the confusion did, replaced by something far worse: comprehension. “October?” he said, in a puzzled voice devoid of either hostility or dislike. “What have you—what have you done?”

  I could feel feathers in my throat, tickling and scratching me as something moved there. I coughed, trying to force them back down, and said, “I’ve paid for your freedom. Don’t worry, I have a plan. And Patrick is waiting for you.”

  Now the confusion was back, leavened with a sliver of hope. “Patrick? My Patrick? I remember you saying—but that can’t be true, can it? He’s alive?”

  “He’s alive, and the reason this is happening, so yeah, I’m telling the truth.” The feathers in my throat were getting harder to swallow. I bent forward, catching myself before I could fall, and vomited a live bird onto the floor next to the candle.

  Unlike the bird I’d seen the Luidaeg extract from Simon, which had been lovely and swallow-tailed, designed to be admired as much as anything, my bird was a pigeon, wings of slate and breast gleaming with greens and purples. But it was beautiful all the same, even if it wasn’t a valued or refined beauty. It was beautiful. And it was mine.

  The Luidaeg leaned forward and picked up my bird. I felt a pang of loss, like this was something that absolutely couldn’t be allowed to happen—something impossible and forbidden. I pulled the knife from my chest, intending to fight her for the bird, and she fixed me with a look that froze me where I knelt, making any further motion as good as impossible.

  “You agreed to this,” she said. “You chose this. As much as if not more than anyone else who has ever made this particular bargain with me. I just hope, for all our sakes, that you’re right. We can’t afford to lose another hero right now.”

  I might be frozen, but Simon wasn’t. He lunged to his feet, moving to put himself between me and the Luidaeg. “She may have agreed to this, but I didn’t! I don’t! Take it back, right now! Don’t do this to her! Please, Luidaeg, if there’s any good left in you, please, don’t do this to her. Don’t hurt her for my sake.”

  The Luidaeg fixed him with a look like a spear, and asked, “Do you think I would if I had any choice in the matter? She’s worth a hundred of you, failure, and I didn’t want to do this. Thank your Firstborn, if you’re ever unlucky enough to see her again. She can finish devouring you and tell you that you’re welcome as she picks her teeth with your bones. I believe this is yours.” She reached into her overalls with her free hand, pulling out a bottle. A bird was trapped inside, wings beating weakly against the glass. She popped the cork with her thumb and the bird flew free, slamming into Simon’s chest and disappearing.

  His gaze cleared further, and he dropped to his knees in front of me, nearly setting his trousers on fire as he gathered me clumsily into his arms. “October, October, I’m so sorry,” he moaned. “I never wanted to hurt you again, I never wanted to hurt anyone, but I got so lost, and it was like I was someone else, someone who didn’t care enough to stop himself from doing all those terrible things . . .”

  “Apologize to Quentin, not me,” I said, and forced a smile. “I signed up for this. He didn’t. Patrick’s probably going to be a little pissed at you for turning his eldest son into a tree, though.”

  Simon paled again. Apparently, the thought of Patrick being angry with him was even more distressing than I’d expected it to be. Interesting.

  But not for long.

  “Again, I’m sorry about this, and I hope you’re right,” said the Luidaeg, and shoved my pigeon into the bottle. It should have been too big to fit, but somehow it just got smaller and smaller until it was inside, and she pushed the stopper home. Something snapped under my breastbone, leaving me untethered. The world got fuzzy around the edges, and I couldn’t breathe.

  I blinked several times, trying to clear the dizzying specks from my eyes. Someone was touching me. No one was supposed to be touching me. I pushed them away, and managed not to shriek when I saw that it was Simon Torquill, my liege’s brother, a man who’d never been willing to give me anything more than a smirk or a sneer when he saw me in the halls of Shadowed Hills. Sweet Titania, was he one of those perverts who liked ch
angelings more than he should, because we were usually younger than any pureblood girl it was acceptable to fuck?

  I scrambled to my feet, spinning to see the rest of my surroundings. I was in someone’s living room, shabby and lived-in, with a large, comfortable couch up against one wall and a variety of other chairs and small tables scattered invitingly around the place. There was a candle burning by my feet, and no television. Whoever lived here must not have liked fun.

  It was impossible to guess which of the people around me lived here. There was another Daoine Sidhe in addition to Simon, a boy barely out of his teens, with hair in an improbably deep shade of metallic bronze. He was staring at me like I’d just sprouted another head. He must have been one of those sheltered kids who’d never seen a real changeling before, the ones whose parents wanted to keep them “pure” and uncorrupted by the human world and its byproducts. There was a Tylwyth Teg man standing in front of what looked like a really sweet chemistry set, boiling a bunch of rose petals in a beaker. Great. I’d fallen into a pureblood drug den. It wasn’t the first one. But alchemists in living rooms didn’t usually intend anything good for the local changelings.

  A Bridge Troll stood near one wall, looking at me miserably. Maybe he knew what that alchemist intended, and why I’d been brought here. Bridge Trolls don’t tend to have changeling kids of their own, on account of them being too big; they’d break any human they tried to get intimate with. Maybe that’s why they’re generally pretty mellow about us.

  The other three people in the room didn’t make things any easier to understand. There was a woman with orange hair and stained glass wings, who didn’t look right to be an Ellyllon, but was too tall and not scrawny enough to be a Puca; a human teenager in overalls, who had probably been brought here for the same terrible purpose I had; and—

  “You fucker!” I pointed at the Cait Sidhe man who was watching from the other side of the room, his face an impassive mask. Like the others, he wasn’t wearing any illusions to make himself look human; unlike the last time I’d seen him, he wasn’t manipulating his form to seem closer to Daoine Sidhe, either. His hair was striped like a tabby cat’s and looked halfway to becoming fur. His eyes widened when I spoke to him. Probably startled that I dared open my mouth in his presence, the jerk.