A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  She pulled my hair into place, roughly enough to sting but not enough to hurt, and clipped it into place with two quick, vicious twists of the clips. Then she retrieved the chains from the sink and began affixing them, humming to herself as she did. I started to relax. She shoved the earrings into my ears.

  “Good thing you got these pierced before you healed like it was a competition, huh?” she asked.

  “I don’t like clip-ons,” I confessed. “I always lost them when I was a kid and Mom would make me wear them to formal events.” She hadn’t allowed me to pierce my ears until I was twelve, a rare degree of parental concern from Amandine, who had frequently seemed surprised to have a child at all when she’d stumble across me playing in the garden or reading in the drawing room. I paused, suddenly wondering if that was because she’d expected me to heal the way August always had and had only relented when she finally accepted that my mortality meant I’d have time to develop the necessary scar tissue.

  “I remember,” said May, and picked up the necklace that went with the rest of my jewelry, fastening it around my throat. “Can I do your makeup, please, or do I need to let you screw it up first and then ask for help? Because we only have like twenty minutes before we need to leave and it’s going to take me almost that long to get your eyeliner right.”

  I glared at her. “I’m a grownup, you know.”

  “I know.” She picked up the eyeshadow palette I had selected, scowled at the colors it contained, and put it down again. “I’m just going to run to my bathroom and grab a few things.”

  “Grownups generally know how to dress themselves.”

  “You’re the exception to so many, many rules. Be right back, don’t move.” She blew me a kiss and ducked out of the bathroom, leaving me sitting there in my robe, abandoned and annoyed.

  There was a rattle as Spike trotted into the bathroom, chirped, and rubbed against my ankles, careful to move with the grain of its thorny “fur.” I still didn’t know where it had gone after our time on the Rose Road, but it had been home when we’d returned there, curled up on the couch with the cats, seemingly none the worse for wear. I wasn’t going to look a gift rose goblin in the mouth. I leaned forward, scratching it gingerly on the head.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said. It chirped again, utterly content. “You’re a good little ambulatory rosebush, yes, you are. I appreciate you.”

  Spike sat back on its haunches and lifted a front paw, licking it daintily before running it across its muzzle.

  “I appreciate you, but this isn’t the biggest bathroom in the house, so go hang out somewhere else. May needs to fix my face before I head to Muir Woods.”

  Spike made a disappointed chirping sound, but rose and trotted back out of the bathroom, leaving me alone. I started to slump forward and put my head in my hands but stopped as I considered how annoyed May would be if I messed up my hair again.

  It had been a week since Walther found the right combination of herbs, simples, and magical brute force to wake her up. His counter had required a blood donation from the Luidaeg, to chase down and burn away her sister’s contribution to the mix. I was starting to think that minimizing contact with the Firstborn, or at least the shitty ones, might be the right answer after all. That was the last any of us had heard from her. She’d dropped the blood off in his office at Berkeley, leaving it on the desk without visibly appearing or opening the office doors, and left a note with it that read only, “Not now. Leave us alone. -A.” Out of self-preservation, we had listened, and even I hadn’t tried to call her.

  Quentin had attempted to go by the apartment once, to tell her the divorce was moving forward, and hadn’t even been able to find the alley, much less the door. He’d walked the block where it was supposed to be for almost an hour before coming home and informing me wearily that she didn’t want to be found.

  It made sense. She was in the middle of the most intense family reunion imaginable. Most people still didn’t know it was going on. We had all agreed without discussion that we weren’t going to tell anyone who hadn’t actually been there to witness what happened about Oberon’s return. It was a big secret to keep. It was a bigger secret to spill. Silence seemed like the best and only option we really had.

  Tybalt was still being clingier than usual, keeping a close eye on me when we were in the same place and checking in constantly when I went out to work. It would have seemed pushy and overbearing, if not for recent events—and if he didn’t calm down soon, he was going to wind up crossing that line, and he would not like what he found on the other side. Even I have my limits. Still, I can understand that it’s unsettling for the people who love me when I nearly get myself killed, or go and completely forget who they are due to taking Firstborn curses onto myself to save an old enemy, and I can be forgiving.

  It’s easier to forgive when you’re hoping to be forgiven. We care about each other. So we apologize, and we try, even when it’s not the most convenient thing that we could do.

  May bustled back into the room, a wicker basket full of cosmetics slung over one arm. “Stay,” she commanded me, even though I hadn’t so much as shifted positions while she was gone. She dumped the basket on the corner of the sink, grabbed my chin, and began smearing fixative around my eyes, blending it with her thumbs.

  “This will keep your eyeshadow from sliding down your face as the night goes on,” she said. “And it’ll help to keep your eyeliner from smearing. Tybalt loves you no matter what, but if you’re facing Mom tonight, you should do it looking majestic and heroic, not like someone’s slapped tits onto a raccoon.”

  “You jerk,” I said, trying to keep my head from bobbing as I swallowed my laughter. “Nothing too heavy, okay? I like to be able to recognize my own face when I see it in the mirror.”

  “Don’t worry. Stacy’s planning much heavier for the wedding. Now close your eyes and relax your face.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” It was easy enough to do as she said. I trusted her not to hurt me, and that alone was a wonderful thing. There aren’t many people in this world who I can trust like that.

  May worked quickly and silently, not asking for my opinion or my choices of color. She knew I didn’t care enough to make good choices, or at least not choices that she would approve of enough to honor. In what felt like hours but was probably less than fifteen minutes, she dropped the mascara back into her basket and said, “You can look now.”

  “Permission appreciated.” I stood, turning toward the bathroom mirror.

  May’s makeup choices for herself are often “1980s mall décor as aesthetic.” She favors heavy neons, contrasting colors that worm their way right up to the edge of clashing before they back off, and glitter. So much glitter. Glitter by the gallon. For me, she had gone in virtually the opposite direction, building up a smoky eye with black eyeliner and half a dozen shades of shadow, made dramatic only by the inclusion of a deep red that mirrored my jewelry and a few highlights of arctic white that made it easier to see what little color my eyes still possessed. She had highlighted my cheekbones so as to accentuate the actual color of my skin and painted my lips in a shade of deep pomegranate. I looked lovely and mature and not remotely like my mother, which, today, was a good thing. I turned back to May, earrings brushing my cheeks. She beamed.

  “See, this is why we skip the stage of you pretending you’re going to do it yourself and go straight to letting me make sure you’re ready for your public,” she said. “Your dress is on the bed. Get it on, and we’ll get out of here.”

  “I can dress myself.”

  “I know!” she said. She was still laughing as she left the bathroom.

  I threw a hairbrush at her.

  Someday I’ll move beyond the dresses we had made for me when I was a child, but as those were expensive, specially tailored to grow up with me as I matured, and most importantly of all, largely in my closet already due to repeated raids on Mom’s tower, “so
meday” isn’t going to be particularly soon. The dress spread out across my bed was from that era, long and flowing, with a high neckline that still managed to seem revealing, thanks to the “back” of the dress consisting simply of a band of fabric about four inches across that went over the back of my neck and provided structural stability to the entire bodice. It had been made when I was about nine. I didn’t remember what it had looked like before I hit puberty, but I had to hope Amandine hadn’t actually commissioned a backless gown for her pre-teen daughter.

  It’s hard to say, one way or the other. Sometimes fae ideas about appropriateness can be pretty dramatically distinct from human norms.

  It was made of gunmetal gray fabric, sleek as satin and softer than velvet, and it sealed to a point just above my hips before running out of fabric. I dropped my robe and worked the dress over my hips, pressing the fabric together with my thumb and forefinger to close it. Nothing so gauche as a zipper here; the dress knew what it was expected to do, and so it simply did it, courtesy of some pureblood seamstress who was probably centuries older than I was and would be appalled to know that a gown made decades ago was being worn in the company of a queen. The fae never get rid of anything. They still have opinions about how often a wardrobe should be refreshed.

  Faerie is a construct of constant contradictions. Take them away, and what remains is a jumble that can’t even hold its own shape most of the time.

  I smoothed the front of the gown with the heels of my hands and returned to the bathroom to retrieve the bangle bracelets that went with the rest of my jewelry, slipping them over my hands and looking at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t going to win any Summerlands beauty competitions, but no changeling ever will; we’d be competing against people who’ve worked for millennia to refine beauty into a weapon. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself or my household, and that was what mattered. Tybalt always liked it when I took the time to dress up, saying it was a pleasure to watch the purebloods who’d ignored me when my circumstances were different stand confronted by what they were no longer allowed to have.

  Personally, I thought he just enjoyed being a jerk. As with most of the dresses from Mom’s place, this one lacked a slit through which to draw my knife, and so I fastened my scabbard around my waist, wearing my weapons openly. A little gauche, maybe, but it was either go gauche or skip the event, since there was no way in hell I was going to this party unarmed.

  My shoes were by the door. I stepped into them and left the room, heading down the hall to the stairs. Quentin and Tybalt were already in the hall. They straightened at my approach, Quentin looking me over with the assessing eyes of someone for whom the pureblood court system, where appearances were more important than actualities, was second nature, Tybalt just looking. The pure appreciation in his eyes was almost enough to make me uncomfortable.

  Only almost.

  “No Shadow Roads unless someone is trying really hard to murder us,” I said. “This dress doesn’t have a back, and I’ll freeze.”

  “You do realize that by saying this, you’ve all but guaranteed someone will attempt to murder us in a way that suits your definition of ‘trying really hard,’” said Tybalt. “Turn around, please.”

  I turned around. He made a low growling sound. I smirked at him over my shoulder.

  “I take it I have your approval to leave the house like this?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” he said, and offered me his arm. “As your escort, I will absorb the envious looks of those who cannot touch you and keep them as my due.”

  “Gotcha.” He and Quentin had both lived up to the night’s call for formal dress in their own ways. Tybalt was wearing his customary leather pants, this time in a deep gray that matched my dress, and a dark gray poet’s blouse, complete with lace at the cuffs and throat. His boots were black leather, knee-high, and much sturdier looking than my dancing slippers. It was a rakish overall look, and would probably offend my mother’s sensibilities, which made it perfect. Quentin was more subdued in gray linen and wine-colored velvet, and he could have appeared in any BBC period piece without raising an eyebrow. His cuff links and belt buckle were bronze, matching his hair well enough to make its odd metallic sheen seem more intentional. Pureblood Daoine Sidhe are experts in dressing to match their hair. They sort of have to be.

  “Where’s Raj?” I asked.

  “Already in Muir Woods,” said Tybalt. “May and Jasmine have just left, courtesy of Daniel. It seemed unreasonable to cram five people into your car when we had another vehicle available to us and you wouldn’t allow me to carry you there.”

  “If you carried me, we wouldn’t have a car when we were done, and we wouldn’t be able to stop for takeout on the way home, and our collection of teenage boys would be at active risk of withering away and blowing off in the first stiff wind,” I said.

  “I starve, I fail, I fall,” said Quentin, deadpan. “If the rest of us can tolerate Toby’s driving, you can put up with it for a short trip.”

  Tybalt hissed at him. I laughed.

  “Come on, you dorks. We need to get to Arden’s before someone starts a diplomatic incident.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “We have a minimum of two Firstborn, reps from both the Mists and the Undersea, my sister, and all of Arden’s court. Also potentially Sylvester and Luna. It’s likely.”

  I started for the door. They followed.

  It was a beautiful night, the air crisp and cool without trending into actual coldness. Which was a good thing, considering how much of my dress the seamstress had forgotten about. I slid behind the wheel of my car, fastened my seatbelt, and turned to watch with a certain smugness as Tybalt got into the passenger seat. He waved a hand. The scent of musk and pennyroyal swirled through the air as he wrapped a don’t-look-here around the car, protecting us from prying human eyes. I smiled at him, and he smiled back, the nervousness that always accompanied rides in my car still lingering around the edges of his expression.

  Which wasn’t fair, honestly. I’m a very safe driver. I hardly ever get into car chases or crash on purpose anymore. I started the engine and pulled out of the driveway, clicking on the radio. Quentin hadn’t been messing with my settings recently, and the soothing sounds of Toy Matinee blasted into the cab as I turned down the street and began the long, increasingly familiar drive to Muir Woods.

  I know people who think anything outside of San Francisco is “the boonies” and not worth thinking about. There have been times in my life when I verged on becoming one of them and may only have been saved by the fact that my liege’s knowe is anchored in a small human suburb, and my mother’s tower is anchored nearby. I never had the option to shut myself away in San Francisco to the exclusion of all else, and that’s proven to be a good thing, since now that Arden’s back and holding her family’s throne, we’re back to attending formal Courts in Muir Woods at her knowe without a name.

  Not all knowes have names, obviously, but most of the more modern ones do. They take their names from geographical features, like Shadowed Hills, or from rare treasures, like Goldengreen, or from the person who holds them, like Lily’s knowe, or the old Queen’s knowe. The knowe in Muir Woods was opened by Arden’s grandparents, and while I’ve heard people try to refer to it as something more specific than just “Muir Woods,” nothing ever seems to stick.

  Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe we’ve been narrowly guarding our own places and protectorates for too long, and we need to spend some time dealing with the fact that Arden’s responsibilities neither began nor ended at her doorway. If it happened within the Mists, it was her problem, and she was allowed to involve herself. I spent a lot of time as Arden’s problem.

  It would still have been nice if it had been a slightly shorter drive.

  The roads were clear. Tybalt relaxed enough that he no longer looked like he was getting ready to leap for the Shadow Roads if I had to hit the brakes harder than
he approved of, and Quentin kept leaning forward, making rude comments about my taste in music and trying to get me to put a CD on. I finally snorted.

  “You complain because you think the 80s are too ‘retro,’ but you want me to play a bunch of whaling songs that people have been singing exactly the same way for hundreds of years,” I said. “What do you call that?”

  “Traditional,” he said. “Sea shanties are the heartbeat of the sailing man.”

  “Do you even know how to sail?”

  “Of course,” he said, sounding stung. “I don’t get to here, because none of the coastal demesnes were looking for a foster when my parents decided it was time to send me away—or maybe Evening convinced them they weren’t looking, since she wanted me in Shadowed Hills—but I sailed all the time back when I was home.”

  “The Duchy of Ships was even better for you than I thought, huh?”

  He beamed at me in the rearview mirror, all of us silently agreeing not to discuss what Evening had or had not wanted when she’d convinced his parents to send him here for his blind fosterage. Oh, we knew—she’d been trying to arrange a noble husband for her future use, someone she could mold to her liking while he was young, and then marry to legitimize a claim to the modern power structure of the Westlands—but it was disgusting from every possible angle, and so we did our best to pretend we didn’t.

  Massive age gaps are common in Faerie. Not as much among changelings, since most of us only have a few centuries to play around with, which is a lot by human standards, and nothing when compared to the literal eternities the purebloods have access to, but fae reach adulthood at roughly the same rate humans do, which means there’s a lot of time for a few decades not to feel like they matter as much. Quentin wouldn’t be considered an adult in fae society until he was in his thirties, which gave him plenty of time to grow up and figure himself out before he had to worry about getting married and ensuring the lines of succession.

  I had to admit, though, that I’m human enough to be glad he wasn’t going to be marrying a woman old enough to have personally witnessed continental drift. It would be like me getting into a romantic relationship with the Luidaeg. Not technically illegal, but imbalanced as all hell, and probably bad for both of us.