The Winter Long (16 page)

“I was already planning to stay at Queen Windermere's Hotel and Day Spa for the foreseeable future, especially after Quentin's cute little status update,” said May without pause. Then she took a whistling breath and said, “He was
there
? At our house? Again?”

“He was,” I said grimly. “Quentin brought you up to speed on the situation?” I was willing to let Simon go out into the world thinking that the Luidaeg was truly dead—it was better if we kept the knowledge of her survival close to our chests—but I wouldn't do that to May.

“He did, and sweet Titania, that's terrifying,” said May. “Are you safe?”

“I honestly don't know,” I said. “I'm just really, really glad you're in Muir Woods.”

May actually laughed. “What a difference a monarch makes, huh? Six months ago you'd have gone for elective facial piercings before you went to see the Queen, and now you're happy to pawn me and Jazz off on her protection.”

“It's amazing how quickly I can adapt to having someone on the throne who isn't actively trying to get me killed,” I said. “Just stay safe, all right?”

“You know, I don't like that the pattern has become ‘danger arises, get May the hell away from it,'” she said. “I want to help.”

I hesitated before saying, “Maybe you can. This geas—it's on Simon
and
the Luidaeg, and the Luidaeg confirmed that the person who cast it is someone I know. We already know that whoever did it is still alive, or the geas wouldn't be active. So who knows me, Simon, and the Luidaeg, and has the power to bind one of the Firstborn? I've been trying to figure it out all day, and I'm coming up empty.”

“Not quite empty,” said Tybalt, from behind me. “You still have to consider the possibility your mother is involved with this somehow.”

“He's right,” said May wearily. “Tell kitty-boy I can hear him, and that he has a damn good point. Amandine is Firstborn, and she knows all three of the people who have to be checked off before someone makes the list. She's been sort of cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs for a while now, so there's an absolute chance that she could have done this.”

“Why?” I asked. “What would she have to gain? And how could she have hurt the Luidaeg the way she did? Mom's not a fighter. She can mess with the balance of someone's blood, and yeah, that hurts like hell, but there's nothing in the Luidaeg for her to catch hold of.”

“Maybe she didn't attack the Luidaeg,” said May. “Maybe she hired or compelled someone else to do it, or maybe this isn't her at all. I'm just saying we can't cross her off the list because she's your mother. If anything, that puts her closer to this than almost anybody else.”

I ran one hand back through my hair, wincing as my fingers snagged on several poorly placed knots. “Right. So you and Jazz will stay where you are, and stay safe. I'll take Tybalt and Quentin and go back to Mom's tower. It looks like I need to verify, once and for all, whether she's behind all of this.”

“And if she is?” asked May. “Because let's face it, Toby, this is a pretty weak plan.”

“It's what I've got.” I dropped my hand. “If Mom is there, I arrest her for compelling the kidnapping of Luna and Rayseline Torquill, and I take her before the Queen to be held accountable for her crimes.” Yes, I'd allowed Simon to walk away, even though he was the one who'd actually kidnapped them. I was going to be sorry about that later, I was sure. And yet the geas—which genuinely existed, since it also bound the Luidaeg, although I wasn't sure why Mom would have
needed
to bind him—had left him with little choice about his actions. Under those circumstances, it made sense to bring the mastermind to justice first, find out how much free will the underlings really had, and take care of things in the proper order.

May laughed unsteadily. “Sounds like you're going to have a fun night.”

“I always do,” I said. “Open roads.”

“Kind fires, and Toby . . . be careful.” She hung up, presumably to keep me from saying anything she didn't want to hear. I could understand the sentiment.

I put my phone back in my pocket. “Wait here,” I said to Tybalt, before ducking into my room and yanking off my blood-crusted shirt, replacing it with a clean one. He was right: I did feel better with less blood on me. He smiled when I rejoined him in the hall, giving me an approving look. Together we walked downstairs and to the kitchen, where a clearly anxious Quentin was slapping together egg salad sandwiches with more force than strictly necessary. The roses from Simon were on the kitchen table. Patches of frost had begun to form around the bouquet, and some of the glacier-colored flowers looked like they were actually melting.

He whirled when he heard our footsteps. “Well?” he asked, gesturing toward us with his spoon, which was still full of egg salad. “Is everything okay?”

“It's all good,” I said. “If Simon came into the house, he doesn't seem to have touched or done anything.”

Quentin relaxed slightly. “Oh, thank Oberon. I don't want to deal with magical booby traps in my own home.” He turned back to his sandwiches. “I didn't like standing idle, so I figured I'd start putting together something for us to eat. We've been running hard with no food all day. That can't continue forever.”

“See, October, the Crown Prince's association with you has done him good after all,” said Tybalt. “It has taught him to force-feed his elders, as they cannot take care of themselves.”

“That's going to serve him well.” My stomach growled, reminding me that Quentin was right: I hadn't eaten since getting out of bed, and I hadn't been in bed nearly long enough. I walked over and snagged a plate with one of the fully assembled sandwiches, carrying it with me as I crossed to the table and peered more closely at the roses. The chill coming off of them was enough to make me want to turn the heat up, but something told me that would just make them melt faster, and any message they might imply would be lost.

“Some of them are Duchess Torquill's own creations,” said Quentin, as he went back to mechanically slapping sandwiches together. “Some were cultivars from the Snow Kingdoms, or from the deeper lands. People brought them along when all the doors were sealed.”

“Makes sense,” I said. That was how goblin fruit had been transported from the lands where it grew naturally into the mortal world. It was actually sort of nice to realize that we'd carried more than just deadly narcotics with us when we had to flee our ancestral homelands. “How long has Luna been growing this kind of rose?”

“As long as I've known her,” said Tybalt.

“It's hard to grow roses from the Snow Kingdoms when it's not always winter,” said Quentin. “They're really delicate. There are a few in the palace gardens back home, and
Maman
refuses to let me or my sister near them, since she's afraid we'll offend the Snow Kingdoms by picking flowers and turning prize blossoms into snowmelt.”

“You mean like Simon has?” I asked. I stuck my finger into the water pooling around the bouquet. It was freezing cold. “Okay, so Simon mentioned the language of the flowers. Rosebay is a warning. White roses mean ‘I am worthy of you,' which, fuck no, he isn't. Even if he weren't my stepfather. Blue roses mean . . .” I stopped, drawing a blank.

“Blue roses mean nothing, because they do not naturally occur in the mortal world, and the language of the flowers was borrowed, like so many other things, from humanity,” said Tybalt. “They are a flower without a definition.”

“Well, I'm just going to take a wild guess that roses made of ice are also outside the flower language, so . . . he gave me a bouquet that means both ‘warning' and ‘nothing.' What the hell, Simon?” I frowned at the flowers, taking another bite of my egg salad sandwich. There had to be something I was missing. Something—my eyes widened, and I swallowed my mouthful only half-chewed, to ask, “What if the point isn't the message, but the contents of the bouquet?”

Tybalt frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

“He's not saying ‘beware, I am worthy of you,' or ‘beware, no definition found,' he's saying ‘beware' and giving me roses made of ice. Winter roses.” I dropped the rest of my sandwich onto the table, whirling. “He's telling us that whatever's coming next, it's going to happen at Evening's old knowe. We need to get to Goldengreen.”

“Are you sure?” asked Quentin.

I snorted. “Kiddo, I'm not sure of anything right now, but I'm sure we don't have time to waste standing around and arguing about it. Tybalt?”

“Yes?”

“Much as I hate to leave my car behind, it'll be faster if we take the shadows. Can you . . . ?”

He smiled a little. “You know, every time you request this of me, I laugh on the inside.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, once upon a time I freaked out at the idea of the Shadow Roads, and now I treat them like a faster version of the Monorail at Disneyland. The question stands. Can you get us both there without hurting yourself?” Tybalt was a King of Cats, but that didn't make him indestructible. He'd died twice in the past three years, and while he'd recovered both times—it turns out the old “cats have nine lives” myth got its start with the Cait Sidhe—that didn't mean I wanted to overtax him and go for a third.

Tybalt thought for a moment before he nodded. “Goldengreen is a friendly territory. I have passed through its wards before. I am more than willing to undertake this journey.”

“Good.” I offered him my hand. “Quentin, come on. We're heading for Goldengreen.”

“I like field trips,” he said, and grabbed my hand, and Tybalt pulled us both with him, into the shadows.

The Shadow Roads seemed a little less cold than usual, as if the lingering chill from my contact with Simon's roses was keeping the normal freeze at bay. That didn't make me any more likely to linger, especially not with my head still pounding and my legs still a little weak from blood loss. Tybalt ran and I ran with him, keeping a tight hold on Quentin's hand. The last thing I wanted to do was explain to his parents that I'd allowed him to become lost on the Shadow Roads for all eternity. Not to mention the fact that I would genuinely miss the kid if something ever happened to him.

We ran, as always, until I felt like there was no way I could run any farther; my lungs were going to give out, my feet were going to freeze solid, and I was going to fall. Then Tybalt's body gave a lurch, his hand very nearly ripping out of mine as he abruptly stopped moving. There was a moment of disorientation, during which I couldn't have said which way was up, and then Tybalt was pulling, and we were tumbling out into the empty air—

—some twenty yards above the cold black waters of the Pacific Ocean. I scrabbled to keep hold of his hand, and Quentin's, but it was no use; the wind ripped them away from me as we fell, and then I hit the water, and everything went black.

I
OPENED MY EYES ON
watery gloom, surrounded by waving fronds of the kelp that chokes the California coastline like the hand of a cruel regent. For a moment I hung suspended in the green, too stunned to understand what was going on. One minute we were running along the Shadow Roads, and the next, we were standing on thin air somewhere above the waves. And then we fell—

I jerked in the water, comprehension sweeping over me as I finally realized what had happened, and more importantly, where I was. I began to thrash, trying to follow the trailing kelp up to the surface. There was no way of knowing whether I was going the right way, but it was a fifty-fifty chance, and that was fifty percent more than I'd have if I stayed where I was. There was no sign of Tybalt, or Quentin. I may as well have been alone in the ocean.

Oddly, their absence helped: it gave me something to focus on beyond my own predicament. If they were hurt, or worse, they would need me to stay calm. They would need me to help them. Even with my hydrophobia threatening to rise up and slap me down, I clung to the thought that my boys needed me, and I kept on swimming.

Dammit, Luidaeg, why aren't you here to turn me into a mermaid again?
The thought was almost dizzy, and I realized my vision was going black around the edges. All my runs through the airless cold of the Shadow Roads had been a sort of conditioning: I might not be a swimmer, but I could hold my breath for a surprisingly long time all the same. That was only going to get me so far, though. As I strained toward the surface, I was dimly, terribly aware that the end of the road was very close indeed.

Then something with all the grace and subtlety of a torpedo slammed into my middle, hard enough that the last of the air was knocked out of me and escaped toward the surface. I wanted to go after it, but I couldn't break away from the arm that was locked around my waist, dragging me toward some unknown destination.

I tried to focus through the black spots that were increasingly devouring my vision, and caught a glimpse of black hair, pale skin, and scales like blue-and-purple jewels. Something about them was familiar enough that I stopped fighting and closed my eyes, letting their owner carry me wherever she would.

The darkness had just been waiting for me to relax. It closed in, pouncing on the shreds of my consciousness like a cat pounces on a mouse, and the world went away for a little while.

“—by? Hey, are you dead? Wake up if you're not dead.” Someone grabbed my shoulders, shaking briskly enough that my head flopped from side to side. I coughed, and water filled my mouth, summoned up from my throat and lungs. “Shit, she's choking.” The voice didn't sound surprised, or particularly worried; this was more of a statement of fact than anything resembling concern.

Strong hands rolled me onto my side, and then someone gave me another shake, hard enough that I started coughing again. This time, I didn't stop until I was vomiting water all over the sand next to me. Someone helped me sit up enough that I wasn't throwing up on myself, which was a serious improvement. I struggled to catch my breath, breathed in, and resumed coughing. This time, no water accompanied the action. Thank Oberon.

“Oh, good, you're
not
dead,” said a female voice. I started trying to sort through the options for who might have hauled me out of the ocean. I'd seen enough to know that I should know her, but the whole “nearly drowning” thing had put a bit of a crimp in my memory.

Everything was wet, and my body was one big ache, bruised by its impact with the water. My headache had become virtually an afterthought when held up against the rest of the pain. My leather jacket was like a lead blanket encasing my upper body, so waterlogged that it had probably pulled me almost to the seafloor before I woke up. I tried to roll toward the person next to me, and as I did, I realized I was covered in sand. That was a natural result of lying wet on a beach, but it was going to mean getting wet
again
, and somehow that was the final indignity. I braced my hands against the beach, shoving myself into a standing position, and turned.

Dianda was sitting on the beach a few feet away, her tail folded under her like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen story. She raised an eyebrow as she met my eyes, looking dubious. “Are you done with the barfing water and attempted suicide by ocean? I don't
mind
dead bodies in the Pacific, but you were right next to Goldengreen. That means you were trying to get in. And don't stress about my fins and your ears—I have the Cetacea maintaining a screen around this area, no one's going to see you.”

I took a quick, borderline frantic look around. There was a heavy fog covering the beach, leaving the two of us sitting in what appeared to be the only clear area. That must have been Dianda's “screen” . . . and we were inside it alone. “Oh, oak and ash, Dianda, where are the others?”

She frowned. “Others? You mean the Cetacea? They're farther out from shore.”

“I don't mean your damn Cetacea, I mean Quentin and Tybalt!”

Dianda's frown slowly faded into an expression of blank neutrality. “October, you are the only one we found in the water. We wouldn't have been able to find you at all if we hadn't already been circling Goldengreen. I'm sorry. They're not there.”

“Look again!” I hadn't been intending to scream at her, and yet somehow it happened anyway. My voice bounced off the nearby cliff wall and was swallowed by the sea.

“My people are still out there, October,” said Dianda. “They're moving through the waves, they're looking for anything out of the ordinary, and if either of your friends are in the water, we'll find them. But you were half-drowned, and—”

“They're not my friends. They're my family.”

“The sea doesn't care.”

I looked at her bleakly, trying to make those words make sense within the context of the world. The sea didn't care. Tybalt, Quentin, and I fell out of the sky, and now only I was here, and the sea didn't care. I turned my eyes toward the gunmetal-gray waves of the roiling Pacific. Once again, the water had taken everything away from me. Because the sea didn't care.

“Why did we fall?” There was no life in my voice; it was a dead thing that fell between us like an accusation. That seemed somehow exactly correct.

“Because the wards of Goldengreen have closed,” Dianda said. She rose, scales falling away, and moved to stand beside me, putting her hand on my shoulder. I didn't shrug it off. It would have been too much work. “Dean and most of his court are still inside, but all the doors are shut, and all the entrances are locked.”

“How do you know?”

“Mary. She started screaming, and said that if we wanted to save Dean, we needed to get to Goldengreen before the doors froze shut.” Grief rolled across Dianda's face like a wave, there and gone in moments. “We weren't fast enough. That's good for you, though, since I wouldn't have found you if we hadn't been beating at the underwater doors.”

Mary was a Roane woman attached to Dianda's court. She had the gift of prophecy, even if she didn't always make sense—like most soothsayers, she spoke in riddles and metaphors more often than she did in simple, declarative sentences. The last time our paths had crossed, she'd foretold Connor's death. My eyes stung with salt that had nothing to do with the sea. I blinked the tears away, grasping instead for the burning ember of rage that was starting to burn in my chest.

“Who locked the doors?” I asked.

“Not Dean,” said Dianda. “No matter who he swears his loyalties to these days, he would never,
never
seal the wards against his mother.”

Her logic made sense. Dean had always been a dutiful son, and even if he kicked absolutely everyone else out of his knowe, he would have left a door open for Dianda. The rage was growing brighter in my chest, becoming a fire that warmed me even as it left ashes in its wake. “We came here because someone gave me a warning about danger at Goldengreen. I guess we needed to be faster, too.”

“You think so?” Dianda's voice was frozen. I glanced at her. She glared at me. “You knew my son was in danger, and you didn't come sooner?”

“I didn't
know
anything, Dianda. We left the minute we figured out what the warning meant, and while we stand down here arguing about it, no one's getting in there to find out what's going on.” I turned to face the cliff that stood between us and the mortal museum that housed the entrance to the knowe, so very high above us. “Do you have anyone who can get me up that cliff?”

“We're the Undersea. We don't fly.”

“Right. Make yourself useful, then, and get back in the water.
Find my boys.
” Anger has always made my illusions come easier. I grabbed a handful of fog out of the air and twisted it into a human disguise, draping it over myself as I said, “I'm going to go find out what the hell is going on in Goldengreen.”

“October, if they've been in the water this whole time, they're not—”

“Find them.”

The Undersea prizes strength above all else. Dianda had been fighting to hold her Duchy since the day she received it. She looked at me and didn't argue. “All right,” she said. “But what are you going to do?”

“I'm going to remind the knowe that I had a valid claim to it once, and I didn't abuse it,” I said. “And then I'm going to go inside. Whether the knowe likes it or not.”

“Take me with you.”

“If the wards are sealed, I don't think I can talk it into letting two people inside. Find my boys. I'll find your son.” I didn't wait for her to reply. I just turned and stalked across the sand, walking through the bands of concealing fog until I reached the base of the cliff. It wasn't quite sheer, and generations of San Francisco beachgoers had been able to find their way down. I walked along the rocky wall until I found a series of shallow steps someone had taken the time to hew out of the stone. That was as close as I was going to get to an engraved invitation. I brushed a little more of the sand off myself, and started to climb.

It was a cold enough, foggy enough day that even the exertion of climbing wasn't drying me off. My wet clothes got heavier and harder to carry with every step I took. I didn't take any of them off. The most logical thing to lose would have been my leather jacket, and that was never going to happen. So I climbed, wet and cold and furious, pulling myself hand over hand where the steps became too shallow to be anything more than suggestions, until finally—after what felt like an eternity—the slope turned gentler, and the last ten yards became almost reasonable. I straightened as I walked up the last few steps, and then I was standing on level ground, with scrub brush and sticker-plants tugging at my calves and ankles. I turned. The San Francisco Art Museum was about two hundred yards away, sitting serene on the edge of the cliff I'd just climbed.

I paused, turning again, this time to look at the water. There were no signs of Dianda and her people—or of my boys. If Tybalt and Quentin were out there, I couldn't see them.

Maybe I was never going to see them again.

The thought was chilling, even in comparison to the cold seawater soaking through my clothes. I forced it away as hard as I could, trying to bury it beneath the layers of my exhaustion and my determination to get into the sealed knowe. We fell because someone had locked the wards. That meant that everything which came after our fall—everything I wasn't going to let myself think about—was that person's fault. The more I focused on that, the easier it became to shut away the things I didn't want to be true. Someone had
done
this to us. Someone was to blame. And whoever it was, they were going to regret messing with my family.

I stalked across the stubby field behind the museum until I came to the ramshackle frame of an old storage shed. It had probably been intended as a place where tools and garden supplies could be kept away from the refined eyes of museum patrons, but the landscapers hadn't used it in decades. Some of them even said it was haunted. Yet somehow it remained, even as they kept their rakes and weed killer in safe, well-lit closets. It should have been torn down as an eyesore. The same spells that birthed the rumor of its haunting kept that from ever happening.

The door was locked, sealed with clever charms as well as a more mundane padlock. I produced a set of lock picks from inside my jacket, flicking through them until I found the pick and wrench I wanted. Holding the pick between the first two fingers of my right hand, I pressed that palm against the cool tin door.

“You remember me,” I said quietly. “I never forced you to go against your nature, or tried to wrest you away from the owners you'd chosen, and when I couldn't be the Countess you needed, I found you someone who could play the part. I've tried to be a friend, when I could, and I've tried to do no harm when friendship wasn't possible. Now I'm here because I need a favor. I am begging you. If you have any power over the spells that hold your wards in place, let me in. I need to know what's going on. I need to know why the doors are locked. Please.”