The Winter Long

The rooms she shared with Sylvester were simple, all plain wood and unbleached linens. This room was like walking into a dream about a greenhouse. The walls were glass, held together by veins of silver filigree. Beds of flowers I couldn’t identify by name were everywhere, filling the greenhouse with a riotous mix of scents and colors. I recognized each perfume, even when it belonged to a blossom I’d never seen in my life—the part of my mind responsible for identifying the scents of the magic I encountered was expanding its botanical database. That was a little bit disturbing.

Luna herself was standing next to one of the nearby flowerbeds, a pair of silver shears in her hands, clipping blooms off a long vine of fist-sized morning glories. Her long pink-and-red hair was braided—a concession to the number of branches and thorns around her—and her clothing was the simple, practical kind I’d always associated with her.

I paused, looking behind me. The wooden door I’d entered through was gone, replaced by seamless glass and silver. That was going to be a problem.

“I’ve always been reluctant to allow the servants to come and go too freely here,” said Luna. I turned again. She wasn’t looking at me. All her attention seemed to be on the morning glories. “They might get ideas that could get somebody hurt. So I let them have their little doors, and let them think they can enter my spaces without my consent, but those doors never lead here unless I wish it. It seems a reasonable compromise, don’t you think?”

“I guess,” I said haltingly.

Luna raised her head, finally turning toward me. Her pink-and-yellow eyes were shadowed, making her look older than the lines of her face. “Hello, October,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to come looking for me.”

“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.”