The Winter Long
Page 76

She chose me, she chose me out of everyone she could have chosen in the world, and I will not disappoint her; I will be the man she needs, and the father that our child deserves. I will always be there for her. I will be there for both of them. Nothing in this world or any other could make me fail them.
Another flicker, and the Amandine who raced through our/my field of vision wasn’t pregnant anymore. The little girl she pursued had silvery braids that glimmered red, like the reddish gold I sometimes saw in wedding rings. Amandine pounced, and the little girl laughed, twisting in her mother’s arms to bury her hands in the pale waterfall of Amandine’s hair.
The scene froze.
“Even here, there are holes in what I can say.” The voice came from beside me, not inside my own head. I turned. There was Simon—but he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on his wife and daughter, and there was a look of heartbreaking yearning on his face. I think that if I had killed him in that moment, looking at that scene, he would have died thanking me. “The bindings I am under are very strong. She made sure of that.”
“You can say ‘she’ without flinching now,” I said. “Can you tell me if I get something wrong?”
“I believe I can, yes.” Simon sighed deeply. “We were so happy. What happened to us?”
“Near as I can tell, Evening Winterrose happened to you.” I didn’t mean to snark: it was almost automatic at this point. I still hated him for what he’d done to me—I wasn’t sure there was anything that could make me hate him any less—but I was also starting to feel strangely sorry for him. Maybe that was a sign of growing maturity. Maybe it was a sign that I was just too tired to care. “She’s the one who geased you, right? Just so we’re absolutely clear.”
“Yes.” The scene changed. In an instant, the little girl was a long-limbed teen, sitting at the table with her mother, a smile on her face as they shared a plate of fruit and cheese. Looking at them, I felt sorrow, and an overwhelming jealousy. Amandine had never been easy with me. Not like that. Not like she was with the daughter that she’d lost.
“Did you know Evening was the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn?”
“Not at first.” Simon’s voice took on a new level of bitterness. “I had my suspicions—things she’d said, things she’d done. Even the way she looked at my wife. I asked Amy once if—” He stopped speaking.
The silence stretched on for long enough that I started to worry. I turned back to him, and he was gone, replaced by the tower wall. “Simon?” A red veil began to cloud my vision. Something was wrong.
Spoke too soon can’t say can’t say can’t say her name . . .
The scene in the tower accelerated, the teenager becoming a young woman, arguing with Amandine, storming out; Amandine following her, and then the tower itself disappearing, leaving me floating in the endless red . . .
“Simon! It’s okay, you don’t have to say her name! Just focus, okay?” I tried to search through the red for the oranges and smoke combination of his magic, and as I did I realized that here, in his heart, there was no citrus sharpness or rot; just the sweet smells of mulled cider and extinguished candle flames. That was what his magic had been, once, before Evening corrupted him. “Come back to me.” I pulled harder on the blood, calling on the thin line of his magic.
Beside me, Simon gasped. I turned to face him. We weren’t in the tower anymore: we were standing in the trees, vast evergreens reaching for the sky on all sides. He was breathing heavily, his hand pressed to his chest like he was trying to keep his heart from stopping.
When he recovered his composure, he said, “My apologies, October. That was somewhat more . . . bracing . . . than I had expected.”
“I’ll be more careful,” I said. “Just breathe, okay?”
“I will do my very best,” he assured me.
“Okay. So . . . you knew that Evening was Firstborn, or at least you suspected it. And this was after you and Mom were married. What changed? How did Evening get her claws into you?”
There was a long pause. Then, in a voice that sounded like it was breaking into a million pieces right in front of me, Simon whispered, “There she is.”
I looked to the trees. The girl with the gold-red hair was stepping into view, wearing a dress the color of corn husks, a candle in her hand. I recognized its mottled calico pattern. She’d gotten it from the Luidaeg. She lingered for a moment, looking around herself like she was waiting for a sign. Then she continued forward, disappearing into the tree line.
“When August was . . . lost . . . we both dealt with our grief in our own ways,” said Simon haltingly. His words sounded strange at first, until I realized there were traces of an almost British accent seeping into them, like some long-buried wound was being torn open. He was focusing so hard on what he was saying that he didn’t have the energy to focus on how it was being said. “Your mother was . . . it’s hard to be of the First, and she had it harder than her siblings, because she was born so soon before Oberon and his wives left us. Her father was not here to teach her how to manage her strengths, or how to compensate for her weaknesses. She was unprepared for the reality of a situation she couldn’t change.”
“Parental abandonment seems to run in the family.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. To be fair, I didn’t try that hard.
Simon took a sharp breath. I waited for him to say I was being unfair, but he didn’t; he just let it out again, and said, “Be that as it may, she couldn’t handle the shock of losing our daughter. She began rattling at doors, making bargains, trying anything and everything she could think of in her mad quest to bring our little girl home. And I . . .” His voice trailed off, turning weak and broken.
The forest in front of us blurred, replaced by a room I knew all too well: the receiving room at Goldengreen, back when it had belonged to Evening. Back when it had been cold.
“I thought it was wrong to leave my wife—my love, my Amy—to sell her soul while I kept mine. So I went to the devil I knew, and I asked if she could help me.” His voice dropped even lower. “I was a fool.”
I hated to prod at what was clearly still an open wound, but I had to know. “Your daughter disappeared, and you went to Evening for help.”
“Yes,” said Simon. The word was soft, and somehow broken. His voice gained strength as he repeated, “Yes, I did, and I would do it again, even knowing her as I do now. What she offered me was worth the cost. I will not deny that.”