The Winter Long

“It’s behind you,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

I turned, unsurprised to see the plain wood panel now set into the glass-and-silver wall. It slid open easily under my hand, revealing a distressed-looking Tybalt caught in mid-pace. He stopped when the light flooded into the hall, his head snapping up and his pupils narrowing to slits. Then he was through the opening and wrapping his arms around me, pulling me into an embrace as comforting as it was incomplete: his head stayed up the whole time, and I knew by the tension in his body that his eyes were fixed on Luna.

“Hey.” I pulled away. He let me go, albeit reluctantly. The wooden panel was gone again, I saw, taking our only easy means of escape with it. “I have to do something before we can get the information we need. I’m sorry, but we’re going to be here a little longer.”

“What does she want you to do, pick lentils out of a fire?” he asked.

“Nothing so simple,” said Luna. “Although I suppose the concept is the same.”

Tybalt’s eyes narrowed. “You must be joking.”

“She’s not, and I already said I’d do it,” I said wearily. Maybe the confirmation of Evening’s identity wasn’t as important as I was making it out to be—but then again, if I was right, we needed to be prepared. There were only two ways to know for sure. This was one of them. The other involved trying to kill her and seeing if we could make it stick without using both silver and iron at the same time. For some reason, I wasn’t all that excited about potentially breaking Oberon’s Law again just to test a theory.

“I’m coming with you,” said Tybalt. He didn’t look happy, but to his credit, he didn’t tell me not to do it. He knew better.

“I hoped that was what you’d say,” I said.

Luna rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, you’re very sweet together, it’s lovely to see a relationship so stable. Perhaps if you’d pursued each other rather than ruining my daughter’s marriage, we wouldn’t be standing here now.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. Tybalt was not so restrained. “Much as I disliked the good Master O’Dell, his marriage to your daughter was dissolved, not through October’s actions, but through Rayseline’s. I believe she attempted to assassinate you, did she not?”

“She wasn’t in her right mind when she did that,” said Luna, drawing the tatters of her serenity around herself until it seemed almost believable. “She hasn’t been in her right mind in a long time. Some of that is trauma, and will take a very long time to heal, but being what she is hasn’t helped her.”

“Being part plant probably does a number on your sense of reality,” I agreed, trying to keep my tone neutral. “Where is she, Luna? If you’re going to make me do this, we need to do it now, before Evening comes looking.”

“Didn’t my husband tell you I was in mourning?” She waved her hand, almost carelessly, and the vines she’d been pruning this whole time writhed, twisting and pulling back to reveal the glass coffin at the center of the growth.

It was almost like a miniature greenhouse in its own right, designed to complement the architecture of the room. That said something about Faerie, right there: Luna had not only commissioned a coffin for her daughter, she’d made certain it wouldn’t clash with her décor. Rayseline was lying inside, her hands folded on her chest in the classical fairy-tale position, her fox-red hair spread out across the pillow that supported her head. She was wearing a gown that appeared to have been made entirely from goose feathers, adding to the fairy-tale quality of the scene. She looked like something out of a painting, serene and pure and untouchable.

It was really a pity that I’d met her. “I need to touch her skin if I’m going to do this,” I said. “Can you open the coffin?”