A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  In one place, at least, his ambitions had borne the intended fruit: in his marriage to the lady Amandine, whose title was a courtesy, not nobly granted, as the Countess Winterrose was swift to remind the nobility of the Mists when the topic of her graces arose. She was a beautiful woman, for to be anything else would be to have been less than Daoine Sidhe, and Amandine’s priority had always been bent toward proving herself the best of us. If Treasa showed herself to be well-mannered, Amandine must find an opportunity to show her own manners to be twice as fine. If Dawn shunned the King’s halls for their disarray and unruliness, Amandine must shun the King himself. And so it went, and had always gone, and Simon, with his eyes all full of her reflected light, never saw how her brightness forced him to remain dimmer, unable to find the traction he yearned for in the halls of the nobility.

  Their daughter, August, was a joy when kept apart from her mother, full of the same bright wit and cunning choices that made her father such a delight to be around. Put near Amandine, however, she would rapidly acquire and emulate her mother’s supposed graces, her small cruelties and her dismissal of anyone she saw as standing below her station. And Simon seemed oblivious to it all, unable to see any flaws in his lady, or to comprehend those same flaws when they came mirrored in his child.

  It was almost enough to put a man off the idea of marriage, for all that it had its temptations, and its compensations. Unmarried, I was landless, with nothing to offer any who might wish to lie with me: I had a workshop, and my hands, and the flock of pixies who danced willing attendance upon both. Pixies are not considered an asset by the greater majority of Faerie. Married, I would at least have whatever halls and home my wife possessed. Had my heart been wiser, I might have made a decent match among the maidens of the Mists. Treasa Riordan was lovely to look upon, if rancid to the core of her, and Dawn Winterrose was a sweet soul to hang one’s time upon.

  Of her sister, the less said, the better. Evening Winterrose would never love a man, but she would freeze him solid and leave him for the sun to steal.

  Other bloodlines of Faerie are freer to follow their desires than the Daoine Sidhe are bid to be. Sylvester Torquill’s greatest shame, in the eyes of many, is not the reprehensible way he has treated his twin brother, who loves him yet, despite his coldness, but his taking of a Kitsune maid to wife. And as the purpose of marriage is the begetting of a new lineage, unquestionable and uncontested, I could not have married Simon even had he been unwed and interested in someone as unsuited to assist his elevation as myself. I was beneath notice and without value, and always had been. I had long since resigned myself to a life devoid of love, for my traitorous heart had never once found a woman of acceptable breeding worthy of attention.

  For again, it always comes back to the sea.

  The Duchess Dianda Lorden tumbled into my life at the most inopportune of times: I had become comfortable with the thought of perpetual bachelorhood, centuries of working alone in my lab or dogging Simon’s steps as he ambled through the blessed sunshine of his daily life. I had found my peace with it, even a flavor of contentment. I was no longer looking for any deeper affection from the world than the sweet, untroubled attention of my friends.

  As for Dianda, well. She had only just been elevated to her position, heir to her father, who had chosen to swim away from his sunken demesne, seeking his fortune in warmer waters. The manner of succession in the Undersea was still a mystery to me, for all that it had been more a mystery when first I met her, me a man who had never thought himself likely to meet a mermaid, her a mermaid who had never considered herself inclined to favor the company of a man of the land.

  But I did meet her, and she did favor my company, and now, some sixty years later, we were as closely cleaved to one another as any pair I knew. She accompanied me when King Gilad sent summons to one of his infrequent social gatherings, slipping her feet into satin slippers and her hand into the crook of my arm and smiling politely at even the most minor of dignitaries, for all the world as if her station were not so far above my own as to be a mountain’s summit. My only regret was that circumstance and biology forbade me to do the same for her; she had known a ball when first she attended one, had found no mystery in a dinner party, so surely they held such events in the Undersea. Surely, they had ballrooms of pearl and coral through which mermaids danced whatever strange dances were meant for fins in place of feet, surely, they played such music as could be carried on the waves. Surely.

  I dreamt of it most days. The palaces beneath the sea, the palaces where my ladylove belonged, where she went when she was not in my arms. The palaces she was born to inherit, while I stood to inherit only Twycross, and that only if both my parents were gone to the night-haunts, leaving me an orphan evermore. Her riches outstripped my own by any measure, and that would have bothered me not at all, had I not feared that my company kept her from her birthright.

  Even as I was forbidden to consider a more permanent arrangement between us by the order of my absent Firstborn, she was kept from my full company by biology, that cruel mistress which deemed her born to the water, while I was born to the land. She could no more share my bed from dawn until dusk without suffocating than I could go with her below the waves, and would one day have to leave me for a more suitable mate, one who could help her to secure her lineage and legacy.

  Sixty years was longer than I had spent in another’s company, save for Simon’s, in all my life, and if I were going to be kind to her, that needed to be the whole of it. It was time for me to tell her that she deserved better than a landless baron from Tremont, and to make her heed the words as my own, and not some cruel trick of sorcery played by the Countess Winterrose, who had perhaps taken our Firstborn’s command to cleave only to our own kind more deeply to heart than most of us, and who had tried on one wicked occasion to separate us with a blade made entirely of magic.

  Simon had interceded on my behalf after that event, sparing me the need to face her presence a second time, and that kindness had cost him dear. Since that day my friend had grown paler and thinner, as if he dwindled before my eyes, until his melancholy seemed at times to be as deep as his Amy’s, and as her black moods were all but legendary, that was a terrible comparison to draw. But when the light broke through, he was still my Simon, still scintillating and irreverent as the night is long, still one of the sweetest and dearest stars in my sky. He had spared me from the Countess, and if it meant he now danced attendance upon her, he did so willingly, without a murmur of complaint upon his lips. He insisted there were as yet no debts between us, and because I loved him and my doubt caused him pain, I chose to believe him. But oh, how it sometimes burned.

  And now it was all to be for naught. I looked one last time at myself in the mirror, knowing that when I returned to my workshop, it would be as a changed man, before I turned away. My coat hung as always on the peg beside the door, and when I lifted it, two motes of colored light detached themselves from the rafters and came to flit around my shoulders, wings chiming like distant bells.

  I smiled. It didn’t matter what else was happening, or how far down the road of my own self-pity I had traveled, my pixies could always coax a smile from me. And after sixty years of cohabitation, I felt I could safely call them my own. I was their friend and their protector and their provider; I filled their larders and provided them with the weapons in their hands and the bangles around their wrists. In exchange, they assisted me with the finer details of my work, adjusting mechanisms too minutely built for the manipulations of my hands, which were sized to a man near six feet in stature, and not to a delicate creature barely scraping six inches, and they provided me with the companionship I would otherwise have dearly lacked.

  Many of the local nobles and courtiers who frequented the various courts thought me mad for dallying with vermin. It was a fair judgment, no doubt fairer than my own, as I thought them cruel for treating the least of us as barely more than mortal, designed to be exploited a
nd swatted carelessly away. Perhaps we were both right. Perhaps I was mad, a son of the Daoine Sidhe who had come to keep company with mermaids and with pixies. Perhaps I had strayed so far from my Firstborn’s wishes that I deserved to be lost in whatever wood might have me, wandering forever with no light nor compass to guide me home.

  As to them, they were definitely cruel.

  The larger of the two pixies hung in front of my face, her arms folded across her chest, her pretty, if diminutive face set into a scowl. She rang her wings imperiously at me. I afforded her a smile.

  “I am aware, Daffodil, that I’m meant to be making a stew for the colony tonight, and I fully intend to discharge my duties as soon as I return.” Even a sad and broken man can chop carrots and dice chicken into a pot. The pixies would see to the spicing. They were too small to make effective use of even my kitchen, which had been adapted as far as was possible to their use, but they were dab hands with an herb garden, and under their care mine had grown almost lush enough to rival Luna Torquill’s.

  The pixie rang again. I sighed and raised my hand, allowing her to land upon it. The smaller pixie did the same, the glow of her wings dimming as she settled. Lilac had been brought to me as a very small child, with one wing crumpled to the point of unusability by one of the larger fae. It had taken me years of corrective devices such as no one in Faerie had ever built before to restore that wing to functionality, and while she could now fly as well as any of her kind, she tired easily, and needed to rest at frequent intervals.

  She would never have survived on her own. My workshop, as much as my actions, had saved her life. Not only hers; many members of my flock would surely have been captured and pressed into service as decorative lights, left to suffocate or starve inside glass cages, had they not been able to escape to the safety of my company. I might have no kingdom of my own or land to speak to, but I had served as their benefactor, all the same. My parents would be proud.

  “I must go out,” I informed the two of them. “I will be back tonight. I promise.”

  Lilac chimed inquisitively. I smiled at her.

  “Yes, I’m seeing Dianda. She’s expecting me at the pier in very short order, and you know how I do hate to disappoint my lady.” Not that she would be my lady any longer when this night’s work was done. She would be well within her rights to shun me, to become once more a stranger in the sea, and it would be—in all honesty—no less than I deserved.

  Lilac chimed again. My smile gave way to laughter.

  “I am sure she’ll have remembered to bring you some bits of pretty glass for your collection, and if not, it will be a small thing to find some.”

  Humans were forever throwing broken bits of glass to the waves, like they believed the sea to be some great beast that could be placated with tasty scraps and trinkets. The sea, not being anything so tamable as a beast, would roll them in its depths for what seemed like eons and then spit them back onto the shore, softened and refined into colorful jewels that resembled nothing else in the world. “Driftglass,” they were called. I made jewelry of the larger stones, and brought chips and pebbles for Lilac to stuff her pockets with and glory in.

  Truly, my pixies were rich by the standards of their own kind, and if that richness came at the expense of my own place in polite fae society, who was to say that the ledgers between us did not balance? One life selfishly lived in exchange for over a hundred lives of peace and plenty in my rafters.

  The thought somewhat eased the sting of what I was about to do. I began to lower my hand. Lilac and Daffodil, taking the cue from my motion, launched themselves into the air and began to fly a lazy loop around me.

  Fortunately for us all, I have long since mastered the art of conversing with a pixie in motion. If I had not, my life would be even more confusing than it already is, and far less pleasant. “I will be back, and I’ll stop for some of that bread you like so much,” I said. Daffodil’s answering ring was imperious. She grabbed Lilac by the hand, sweeping her away into the rafters and leaving me to finally shrug my coat over my shoulders and open the door.

  The night was cool, the sidewalk washed in fog rolled off the bay, like a soft gray cloak wiping away all the world’s petty imperfections. I pushed my hands down into my pockets, pulling the denser cloak of a human illusion around myself with a thought, the scent of my magic briefly sparking in the air. There are times I’m tempted to waste magic needlessly just for that moment where it wraps around me and I smell the mayflowers that were so common in my youth. California has a different set of scents to carry, and I sometimes wonder what perfumes the children born here will spin when they do their own casting.

  August was born in the Mists, her magic tied to this land from her first breath, but when she spins spells, they smell of smoke and roses. Nothing to connect her to the land of her birth, only roses in mirror of her mother, and smoke, like a shadow of Simon’s own, wound through her mother’s floral sweetness until they could never be picked apart.

  It occurred to me, as thoughts sometimes do when one walks along in the fog, with nothing to provide distraction, that I couldn’t remember the last time Simon had spun or released an enchantment in my presence. He seemed always to arrive at the workshop door with his masks already in place and tailored just so, and kept them on until our evening ended, or, when that evening included waiting upon King Gilad’s court, would remove them outside my presence. It was a jarring thought. We had always donned and doffed the illusions that allowed us to move undetected through the human world as casually as we might remove a pair of shoes, and for him to be hiding his magic from me seemed . . .

  Strange. It seemed strange because it was strange, and it was strange because it wasn’t happening. It was a ridiculous thought, brought on by my unavoidable melancholy over what I was about to do. Entertaining it for even a moment more would be a grave unkindness toward my friend, and even if he never knew of it, I would know, and I would not forgive myself. With what felt like a physical act of force, I shoved the idea aside and, driving my hands deeper into my pockets, walked onward into the fog, which spread its arms to gather me into a lover’s embrace.

  Fae eyesight is far keener than its mortal counterpart. While we prefer the soothing moonlight’s glow to the harsh beaming of the sun, we can see equally well by either night or day, and twilight is no barrier to us. That does not mean our eyes can pierce through fog. The sound of the sea was my only beacon, a cold reminder of how many times it had been the only thing to lead me home. I no longer deserved its assistance, but I was grateful for it all the same. If I wandered lost through the streets of San Francisco until my pixies had to come and find me, Simon would never let me hear the end of it.

  The fog cleared somewhat as I grew closer to the water, whipped away by the wind that chased it from the sea. Soon enough, I could see great dark patches of wave, their surfaces as smooth and shining as glass, their peaks tipped with froths of white. I walked to the pier’s end and sat, pulling a small white shell from my pocket and turning it over in my hand. I could delay this. One more night, I could delay this, if I so desired.

  I skipped the shell across the surface of the waves as hard as I could, refusing to allow myself any further hesitation. If this were to be done, it were better that it be done quickly. As it should have been years ago, before I became a weight around her neck.

  The shell left a glittering trail behind it as it skipped across the water, striking seven times before it sank. Seven leagues away, then, a distance she could travel in a twinkling. She would never be a runner, but in the water, Dianda was faster than any fish, capable of crossing great distances faster than should have been possible. Maybe faster than was possible; it wouldn’t make her the only person in Faerie to speed her travel through magical means, even if unconscious ones. Did the Silene put magic to their hooves when they wanted to outrun the wind, or did they simply do it? Perhaps it was the same for Merrow wishing to outswim the t
ides. Whatever the cause, she was close. She would be with me soon.

  I closed my eyes, indulging in a brief moment of imagining that when she arrived, it would be only to wrap her arms around my shoulders and gather me close, her fins brushing my ankles as she sat beside me on the pier. Even in her natural form, her body was built along a biped’s lines, with hips designed for bending and a posterior that was beautifully shaped, whether scaled or not. I was a comedy in the water, and her endurance on the land was brief, but we could sit together for hours without end, or so I had allowed myself to think once, when the world had been younger and sweeter.

  Nothing truly vast had changed. The mortals bred, and expanded on their city, a hive of ever-industrious ants building their towers toward the sky. Evening and Treasa plotted and schemed, perfect ladies of the Daoine Sidhe, doubtless bent on eventual domination of the Kingdom. Simon wore himself to nothing attending on both Evening and his lady wife while Sylvester shirked his duties as often as he could manage, as if by taking another child of Faerie to his bed where tradition dictated a Daoine Sidhe woman should have lain, he had shrugged off all responsibilities laid upon him by our Firstborn when she abandoned us.

  “Keep your bloodlines pure, and gather power like roses in the spring, for when I return, I will expect a hearty crop of crowns and children.” Those had been Eira Rosynhwyr’s last recorded words, as reported by her eldest living daughter, Rhew of the Glass Shadow. The mother of the Daoine Sidhe had raised her children to bend toward obedience, and so we had done our best to create the mandated crop.

  If she were to return tomorrow, I would provide her with neither. Nor would Sylvester, and there was some succor in that, that the man who had treated my beloved friend as a failure would be the failure in our Firstborn’s eyes, while only Simon had a Daoine Sidhe child to present as proof of his obedience.