The Winter Long
Page 65

“What did you expect me to do?” I crossed my arms, feeling obscurely naked without my jacket. It wasn’t magical. There were no wards or protections built into the leather. It was still the armor I’d worn into almost every battle I’d fought in the last four years. “I need answers. They must have told you that when they came and said that I wanted to see you.”
“Before that, I assumed that if you had any inkling of what was happening here, you would stay far, far away. But I suppose that was never an option, was it?” Her mouth twisted, expression going bitter as she turned away from me and went back to pruning her morning glories. “You came back to warn Sylvester. You’ll always come back to warn him, no matter how much danger it could put you in, no matter what it costs you, because he cared for you when you thought you were nothing. You were never nothing. That didn’t matter. Perception is everything in this world.”
“I never wanted us to be enemies,” I said. The words felt weak and insufficient even as they left my lips. I couldn’t think of anything better to say. Luna had hidden her parentage from the world, wrapping it in the stolen skin of a Kitsune girl named Hoshibara. She had lost that borrowed skin and the safety that went with it, thanks to Oleander and Rayseline. I’d tried to stop them. I’d failed. That was on top of everything else I’d done to her, however accidentally.
It wasn’t really a wonder she didn’t much care for me these days. The miracle was that she didn’t try to kill me every time I stepped into the knowe. “What you wanted doesn’t matter that much, October,” she said, stressing my name so hard I was almost afraid she would somehow snap it off. “What matters is what you did. That’s what matters for all of us. Intention is meaningless—the people you cut still bleed, whether you cut them for good or ill.”
I stared at her, aghast. “Luna, I . . .”
“Just ask whatever questions you have, will you? I’m tired.” She dropped her shears in the dirt of the planting bed as she whirled toward me again, and I found myself more than a little bit relieved by the fact that she was no longer armed. “It’s winter here, in case you hadn’t noticed, and most roses do not fare very well in the snow.”
That was the opening I’d been waiting for. “That’s sort of why I’m here. Evening Winterrose is back from the dead.”
“I am fully aware.” Each word was sharply bitten off, more a staccato series of syllables than a proper sentence. “I felt her enter, with Simon like a poisoned thorn beside her. They have the run of the knowe, and I am here.”
I blinked. “Luna, she’s in Shadowed Hills right now. She has Sylvester wrapped around her little finger—oak and ash, she’s the one who ordered Simon to kidnap you in the first place! Why are you here in the greenhouse, and not out there getting between your husband and that . . . that bitch?”
“Because I cannot touch her.” Luna tilted her chin up, looking at me flatly. “Maybe I could have, before Oleander finished the process of stripping my stolen skin away, but all I have now are a Blodynbryd’s charms, and those are not enough. You said it yourself: my husband is already hers to command. What would you have me do? Take up a sword and challenge her? My own true love would be her champion, and he wouldn’t know what he’d done until he’d cut me down. Maybe were my father still alive . . . but no. He would never have raised a blade for my defense. Only to prune me back into a shape he could allow.”
It took me a moment to find my voice again. Finally, once I could get my mouth to move, I said, “I’ve been looking at some of the things that have happened over the last few years, and some of the things that haven’t happened—the ones that should have happened and didn’t. Was Evening ever really dead?”
She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side, studying me. In most people I would have called the motion “birdlike,” but there was nothing avian about Luna. She was more closely related to her roses than she was to anything with a heartbeat, and she somehow made that simple motion into something alien. “That’s not really your question, is it?”
“It is and it isn’t,” I said. “You say you don’t have the power to stand against her. Is it because she’s the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn?”
Luna blinked, looking faintly taken aback by the bluntness of my words. Then she straightened, drawing herself up as tall as she could go—and I remembered a time when she was shorter than I was, when we were friends, when her welfare mattered to me almost as much as Sylvester’s did—and said, “If you want me to answer you, you’ll have to do something for me, first.”
“What’s that?” I asked warily. I hate it when people start the game of “if you want me to do this, you’ll do that.” It always ends badly. Most fairy-tale clichés are snares in disguise.
“She may have seized my husband’s will for now, but she can’t keep him forever. The roses will bring him back to me, even as they shield me here, out of her view. And while she plays her little games, my daughter is suffering.” There was real pain in those words, and there was nothing alien about them. Whatever else Luna was or had become, she was a mother, and she loved her child. “Even in her sleep, she suffers. Your little oneiromancer says—”
“Wait,” I said, my own spine stiffening. “You sent Karen into Rayseline’s sleeping mind? She’s barely fourteen years old! You have no right to do something like that!”
“I convinced her it would be useful in her training,” said Luna, apparently unmoved by my protests. “Oneiromancers are rare. The last one before her died centuries ago. I don’t know where she got such a wild talent, but there was no way I would let my daughter sleep for decades without at least finding an avenue into her dreams.”
“And you didn’t like what you saw there,” I said, dropping my arms and glaring at her. “You sent Karen into a nightmare. You must have known.”
“That my Raysel was suffering? I suspected. I had to know.” She began walking forward. I resisted the urge to take a step back. Tone level, she continued, “I never expected to have children, October. Unlike your mother and her Firstborn’s fecundity, I am a rosebush who dreams of being a woman. My offspring are rose goblins and prize-winning cultivars. It was only Hoshibara’s stolen skin that allowed me to bear my little girl, and I nearly lost her several times before she arrived. She has suffered more than enough in this life without my being able to save her. Do you understand me? What I did, I did for a mother’s love, and I’m not sorry.”