The Winter Long

“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.”

“I do understand,” I said. “You forget I was a mother, too.”

Luna sniffed. “Only for two years.”

It was funny. She had betrayed me with her silence; she had tried to forbid me to love Connor because she’d felt it would be inconvenient; she had been the one who’d roped Connor into a loveless, dysfunctional marriage in the first place. But until that moment—until those four words—I had never actually believed that I could learn to hate her.

“So what do you want from me?” I asked, balling my hands into fists to keep myself from going for her throat.

“I want you to take me out of her. Or her father. It matters little, as long as one of us is removed.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I know what you did to the false Queen of the Mists. She was one thing, you put your hands on her, and she became another. I know what you did for Sir Etienne’s child. I’m asking you to do the same for Rayseline.”

Oh, oak and ash. I had considered offering the Torquills this very thing, but I had never been able to figure out the way to word it. “Luna, this will hurt her.”

“I know.”

“It’ll hurt her bad, and it’s not going to wake her up. You know that part too, right? All it will do is change her, and it can’t be undone.”

“Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Luna, waving my objections away as if they were of no consequence. “She’ll sleep until one of the alchemists finds a way to counter the specific blend they used on her, or until she’s slept enough to satisfy the elf-shot. Either way, she’ll wake up in a body where her blood is not at war with itself. She’ll wake up with a chance. That’s more than she has now.”

When I first met Rayseline, she was a bright-eyed little girl who had yet to be kidnapped by her uncle. Her years of growing up in darkness were ahead of her, part of a dark and undreamed-of future. I loved her then. I would have done anything to protect her. Had that really changed, or had it just been buried under the bad blood and ill faith that stretched between us after she became an adult?

“I want Tybalt to be here,” I said, before I could think better of it. “He knows how much blood magic takes out of me. And you have to tell me everything you know about Evening.”

“But you’ll do it,” she said sharply. “Before you leave Shadowed Hills, you’ll do it.”

“Evening—if she is what I think she is, using that much blood magic could lead her straight to me. It could put Quentin and Raj in danger.” I was less worried about myself and Tybalt. I was damn hard to kill, and he was more than capable of taking care of himself.

Luna smiled slightly. “I don’t care about anything but my daughter. You’ll change the balance of her blood, and then I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

I bit back a curse. “Fine. Open the door to the servants’ hall. I want to tell Tybalt what’s going on.”