The Winter Long

“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.”