The Winter Long (24 page)

Oh, oak and ash. I had considered offering the Torquills this very thing, but I had never been able to figure out the way to word it. “Luna, this will hurt her.”

“I know.”

“It'll hurt her
bad
, and it's not going to wake her up. You know that part too, right? All it will do is change her, and it can't be undone.”

“Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Luna, waving my objections away as if they were of no consequence. “She'll sleep until one of the alchemists finds a way to counter the specific blend they used on her, or until she's slept enough to satisfy the elf-shot. Either way, she'll wake up in a body where her blood is not at war with itself. She'll wake up with a
chance
. That's more than she has now.”

When I first met Rayseline, she was a bright-eyed little girl who had yet to be kidnapped by her uncle. Her years of growing up in darkness were ahead of her, part of a dark and undreamed-of future. I loved her then. I would have done anything to protect her. Had that really changed, or had it just been buried under the bad blood and ill faith that stretched between us after she became an adult?

“I want Tybalt to be here,” I said, before I could think better of it. “He knows how much blood magic takes out of me. And you have to tell me everything you know about Evening.”

“But you'll do it,” she said sharply. “Before you leave Shadowed Hills, you'll do it.”

“Evening—if she is what I think she is, using that much blood magic could lead her straight to me. It could put Quentin and Raj in danger.” I was less worried about myself and Tybalt. I was damn hard to kill, and he was more than capable of taking care of himself.

Luna smiled slightly. “I don't care about anything but my daughter. You'll change the balance of her blood, and then I'll tell you what you need to know.”

I bit back a curse. “Fine. Open the door to the servants' hall. I want to tell Tybalt what's going on.”

“It's behind you,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

I turned, unsurprised to see the plain wood panel now set into the glass-and-silver wall. It slid open easily under my hand, revealing a distressed-looking Tybalt caught in mid-pace. He stopped when the light flooded into the hall, his head snapping up and his pupils narrowing to slits. Then he was through the opening and wrapping his arms around me, pulling me into an embrace as comforting as it was incomplete: his head stayed up the whole time, and I knew by the tension in his body that his eyes were fixed on Luna.

“Hey.” I pulled away. He let me go, albeit reluctantly. The wooden panel was gone again, I saw, taking our only easy means of escape with it. “I have to do something before we can get the information we need. I'm sorry, but we're going to be here a little longer.”

“What does she want you to do, pick lentils out of a fire?” he asked.

“Nothing so simple,” said Luna. “Although I suppose the concept is the same.”

Tybalt's eyes narrowed. “You must be joking.”

“She's not, and I already said I'd do it,” I said wearily. Maybe the confirmation of Evening's identity wasn't as important as I was making it out to be—but then again, if I was
right
, we needed to be prepared. There were only two ways to know for sure. This was one of them. The other involved trying to kill her and seeing if we could make it stick without using both silver and iron at the same time. For some reason, I wasn't all that excited about potentially breaking Oberon's Law again just to test a theory.

“I'm coming with you,” said Tybalt. He didn't look happy, but to his credit, he didn't tell me not to do it. He knew better.

“I hoped that was what you'd say,” I said.

Luna rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, you're very sweet together, it's lovely to see a relationship so stable. Perhaps if you'd pursued each other rather than ruining my daughter's marriage, we wouldn't be standing here now.”

I didn't have anything to say to that. Tybalt was not so restrained. “Much as I disliked the good Master O'Dell, his marriage to your daughter was dissolved, not through October's actions, but through Rayseline's. I believe she attempted to assassinate you, did she not?”

“She wasn't in her right mind when she did that,” said Luna, drawing the tatters of her serenity around herself until it seemed almost believable. “She hasn't been in her right mind in a long time. Some of that is trauma, and will take a very long time to heal, but being what she is hasn't helped her.”

“Being part plant probably does a number on your sense of reality,” I agreed, trying to keep my tone neutral. “Where is she, Luna? If you're going to make me do this, we need to do it now, before Evening comes looking.”

“Didn't my husband tell you I was in mourning?” She waved her hand, almost carelessly, and the vines she'd been pruning this whole time writhed, twisting and pulling back to reveal the glass coffin at the center of the growth.

It was almost like a miniature greenhouse in its own right, designed to complement the architecture of the room. That said something about Faerie, right there: Luna had not only commissioned a coffin for her daughter, she'd made certain it wouldn't clash with her décor. Rayseline was lying inside, her hands folded on her chest in the classical fairy-tale position, her fox-red hair spread out across the pillow that supported her head. She was wearing a gown that appeared to have been made entirely from goose feathers, adding to the fairy-tale quality of the scene. She looked like something out of a painting, serene and pure and untouchable.

It was really a pity that I'd met her. “I need to touch her skin if I'm going to do this,” I said. “Can you open the coffin?”

“Of course,” said Luna. The vines writhed again, this time twisting and grasping until they had somehow lifted the lid entirely off of Rayseline's glass prison.

I breathed in, tasting the strange mixture of her heritage under the floral scents that dominated the room. Then, after one last uneasy glance back at Tybalt, I climbed into the still-writhing morning glory vines and started to wade toward Rayseline.

Luna might have wanted me to help her daughter, but the plants she controlled were nowhere near as sure about the idea. Vines tangled around my waist and legs, slowing my progress and threatening to send me face-first into the undergrowth. I gritted my teeth and forged on, trying not to break or uproot any of the individual tendrils as I made my way to the coffin.

“That's quite enough,” said Luna. The vines let go of me so abruptly that I wasn't braced for it. I stumbled, falling forward, and caught myself against the coffin's edge. I glanced back. Luna was looking at me coldly. “Fix her.”

“I'm not a switch, okay? You can't flip me on and off.” I straightened, pulling the knife from my belt. “This is going to hurt her. I don't know whether people who've been elf-shot usually scream, but Gillian did, so there's a chance Raysel might. Scream, I mean. If that happens, you need to stay where you are. Don't try to touch her, and don't use your plants to try to throttle me. I have to finish once I start.”

“If I think you're hurting her on purpose, you'll never be seen again,” said Luna, and there was a coldness in her voice that I'd heard before from her mother, Acacia. It was impossible not to believe her.

And I couldn't let that matter. “You're the one demanding I perform blood magic on your daughter while she's unconscious and can't consent,” I snapped. “Is it going to make her life better? Maybe. It'll stop her blood from warring with itself, and that's something anyway. But any pain she suffers is on you. Now are you
sure
you want me to do this?”

For a moment—just a moment—Luna looked fragile and uncertain, and in that moment she was more like the Luna I had known for most of my life than she had been since Raysel poisoned her. Then the moment passed, the shutters on her face falling closed again, and she said, “Yes. She is my daughter. She is lost. Now
save
her.”

I sighed. “Right.” I turned my back on her as I raised my knife and slashed the palm of my left hand in a quick, unhesitating gesture. Pain followed the blade, and blood followed the pain, welling up hot and red in my palm. I clamped my mouth over the wound, filling it before I could start to heal. The smell of my magic rose around me, cut grass and bloody copper overwhelming everything else.

When I had changed the Queen of the Mists, she had been awake and fighting me. It had been the same with Chelsea. With Gillian, though, she had already been elf-shot before I started to work my magic. I kept that in mind as I swallowed the blood, leaned forward, and pressed my lips against Raysel's forehead, starting to search for the tangled threads of her heritage.

Choose,
I thought.
Tell me what you want, because I don't want to make this decision for you. Tell me what comes next.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Raysel's voice came from directly behind me. I opened my eyes. Her body was still in front of me, but the glass coffin was gone, replaced by a bier of roses. I straightened, turned, and saw two women standing there.

Both of them were Rayseline.

One was shorter than the Raysel I knew. Her skin was a delicate shade of rose petal pink, and her hair, while still the color of fox fur at the roots, shaded paler and paler until it was white at the tips. She was her mother's daughter. The other was tall and pointy-eared, and there was a scowl on her overly perfect face. She had always looked predominantly Daoine Sidhe, but the edges of her had been . . . blunted, for lack of a better word. That softness was gone now, replaced by hard angles and a subtly altered bone structure that spoke with absolute clarity to her heritage.

Tybalt and Luna were gone. We were standing in the middle of an endless riot of roses, real and unreal at the same time, until the two concepts ceased to have any meaning at all. There were three Raysels. This was going to be like Gillian, then: she was going to have a choice.

“Well?” demanded the Daoine Sidhe version. “What are you doing?”

“I'm here to offer you a choice,” I said, trying not to feel self-conscious about my bloody lips and borrowed sweater. “Your mother asked me to.”

The Blodynbryd's eyes widened. “Why would my mother ask you to do anything for me? I tried to kill her. I'll probably try again when I wake up.” The statement was devoid of malice: it was just something she was going to do, whether she wanted to or not. It was inevitable. “She shouldn't be doing me any favors.”

“Uh, she sent me here, into your . . . I don't know, dreams, whatever this is, so that I could pull you into a shared hallucination where I would ask you what you wanted to be. The end result is going to be a lot of pain.”

“Way to candy coat things for me, Toby,” said the Daoine Sidhe, actually looking slightly amused. I must have looked nonplussed, because she continued, saying, “I think a little more clearly here. I think it's because I'm not awake, so I can take my time figuring stuff out. You know how that is.”

“I'll take your word for it,” I said, and held out my hand. “I don't think we can stop being here if you don't make a choice.”

“What kind of choice?” asked the Blodynbryd, as both of them waded toward me through the roses. “Are you here to wake me up or something? Because I have to say, you're not really my idea of Prince Charming.”

I laughed despite myself. “No. I don't think you're going to be waking up for quite a while.” Admitting that out loud sobered me right back up again. “But your mother thinks you'll have an easier road back to health if your blood isn't warring with itself. She wants you to be either Daoine Sidhe or Blodynbryd.”

“She didn't just tell you what to turn me into?”

“She sort of did,” I said, thinking back to Luna's words to me in the garden. “But that was before I wound up here. Now that I can talk to you, I guess that means the choice is yours. What do you want to be?”

“Eight years old and not broken yet,” said the Daoine Sidhe, without hesitation. She had finally reached me. She looked down at the version of herself who slumbered on the bier, and then turned, looking at the Raysel who was still struggling through the roses. “So that's what I look like if I take after Mom, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm really . . . pink.” Raysel wrinkled her nose. “Like really,
really
pink. I thought that color was reserved for plastic toys. What's it doing on my skin?”

“Fae genetics are weird.”

“I guess so.” The Blodynbryd was speaking now. She stared at her Daoine Sidhe self and said, “I look like my father.”

“Not entirely,” I said. “You still look like yourself.”

“So I'm just one more Torquill.” She shook her head. It was starting to get hard to keep track of which one was speaking, impossible as that should have been. They were both her, and this was her dream, after all. “I don't think he wants me to look like him. I don't think he ever wanted me. You were the only daughter he needed.”

“That's not true, Raysel. Your father loves you. He always has. He just doesn't know how to help you, and he's a hero. He doesn't deal well with not being able to fix things.”

“I guess.” The two waking Raysels looked at each other before turning to me. The Blodynbryd asked, hesitantly, “Which would you choose?”

I paused. “In your position?”

She nodded.

“Probably Daoine Sidhe. I've always been best at blood magic, even when I didn't want to be, so that would be the easier way for me to go. But that wasn't my choice. It never has been.” I lost a little more of mortality every time I had to make one of these decisions for myself, and every inch I lost carried me closer to my Dóchas Sidhe heritage. There had never been a choice about that, not where I was concerned.