The Winter Long
Page 4

“Only momentarily,” said Tybalt.
“We’ll talk later,” said Li Qin, still smiling.
I turned back to Sylvester. “I’m all yours,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” he replied, as he tugged me gently with him onto the edge of the nearby dance floor. The dancers parted to let us in, recognizing the necessity of making way for a Duke. “But your loyalty remains mine to command, and that’s more than sufficient for me.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I settled for focusing on the dance, my hand resting lightly on his arm, his body guiding me through the steps. I’ve never been much of a dancer, but he made me look like I almost knew what I was doing. “So who else is here?” I asked finally. “We just got here.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “Your squire, your Fetch, and the rest of your household arrived a quarter of an hour ago, and the party started at sunset. You’re very late. That’s something of a relief, actually.”
“It is?”
“Yes. It means you try to avoid everyone’s parties as if they were filled with flesh-eating monsters. I’d begun to worry that you only avoided mine.”
“Be nice to me, I’ve had a hard night.” I wrinkled my nose at him. “I meant ‘who else from Shadowed Hills is here’?”
“Ah. You meant, ‘did Luna come?’” Sylvester’s expression darkened. He spun me out and back in again, timing the motion to a flourish in the music that I hadn’t seen coming. “She stayed home with Rayseline. She didn’t feel it was meet for her to come out and celebrate the longest night of the year when our daughter would not be able to join the celebrations.”
Rayseline Torquill was Sylvester’s only child. She was currently deep in enchanted slumber, caused by an elf-shot arrow that had been intended for me. I felt a little guilty about that, but only a little. She had been trying to kill me, and she had killed her ex-husband—who’d been my boyfriend at the time—as well as wounding my little girl so badly that the only way for me to save her had been for me to turn her completely human.
Part of me knew that Raysel deserved whatever horrible dreams she was getting from her fevered brain. The rest of me loved her father too much to ever say that to his face. “Well, tell Luna I said hello,” I said awkwardly, trying not to let my dismay interfere with my dancing.
“I will. As for the rest of my household, we’ve loaned the better part of the staff to Queen Windermere for tonight’s fete, and all but the most essential of my knights and guardsmen are in attendance.” He smiled. “You really do look lovely tonight. I remember when your mother had that gown made for you.”
“Me, too,” I said. “It’s a good thing she invested so heavily in spider-silk when I was a kid. I’ve never really had much fashion sense.” Spider-silk is a uniquely fae material, and once it’s been cut and tailored to fit someone, it fits them forever, no matter how much they grow or shrink.
“I don’t know about that. You wear that dress in your own way, not as your mother would, and I’m proud to have seen you grow into the woman you’ve become.”
I reddened, blinking at him. “What brought that on?”
“Nostalgia, perhaps? It’s good to see you. That’s all.” The dance was coming to an end. He guided me out of the crowd and back to where Li Qin and Tybalt were waiting for us. “You have honored me with the pleasure of this dance.”
“You have honored me by asking,” I replied, reclaiming my drink from Tybalt, who remained silent and stone-faced. This time I actually drank some. It tasted like blackberries, with a crisp, almost floral aftertaste. I turned to Li Qin. “Sorry about that.”
“Never apologize for dancing,” she said. “It’s something everyone should enjoy, as often as they can.”
I grimaced, trying to make it look like a smile, and changed the subject. “So who all’s here from Tamed Lighting?”
“Everyone but Alex, since he still can’t go out at night. Even April, although she’s having trouble with some of the local redwood Dryads.” Li Qin sighed. “They’re a little snobby where she’s concerned, and she doesn’t handle it as well as she might.”
“Are we talking tears or declarations of war?” April O’Leary was the Countess of Tamed Lightning, and the world’s only nonorganic Dryad. Her tree had been destroyed to make room for a housing development, at which point her adoptive mother, January, had transplanted her into a computer server to save her life. The result had been a quirky, slightly alien individual with a strange sense of humor. She was doing an excellent job with her County, so far as I knew. That didn’t mean she was equipped to do an excellent job with a bunch of leaf-brained tree huggers who thought she was an abomination.
“A little bit of both,” said Li Qin. She sounded aggravated on April’s behalf. It was a natural response. Li Qin was January’s widow, after all.
There was a soft displacement of air behind me, accompanied by the smell of redwoods and blackberry flowers. I knew who was there even before Sylvester offered a shallow bow and a mild, “Your Highness,” to the new arrival.
I turned, already smiling, to face our new Queen in the Mists, Arden Windermere.
She was wearing a flowing gown in a shade of frosted white that matched the blackberry flowers woven through her purple-black hair. Her mismatched eyes—one brilliant blue, one mercury-silver—were striking enough that she didn’t need makeup to set them off. She looked like the Queen she was. She also looked profoundly uncomfortable. I guessed that was natural. Arden had been living outside Faerie for her entire adult life, spending more than a century hidden in the mortal world. She’d been back for less than six months, and in that time she’d become Queen and taken on responsibility for a whole Kingdom. Being surrounded by so many of her subjects at once had to be hard on her nerves.
“There you are,” she said, and grabbed my hands, pulling me with her into a gateway that suddenly opened in the air. The world shifted around me as her portal deposited us outside. I yanked my hands away, as much to get my balance back as in protest of her treatment.
We were standing on a slanted rooftop, the shingles beneath our feet ripe with healthy green moss. Redwood saplings had rooted on some of them, straining toward the Summerlands sky above us. I looked around. Adult redwoods grew on every side, some of them ascending from the forest floor far below, others growing from the palace on which we stood.