The Winter Long

One was shorter than the Raysel I knew. Her skin was a delicate shade of rose petal pink, and her hair, while still the color of fox fur at the roots, shaded paler and paler until it was white at the tips. She was her mother’s daughter. The other was tall and pointy-eared, and there was a scowl on her overly perfect face. She had always looked predominantly Daoine Sidhe, but the edges of her had been . . . blunted, for lack of a better word. That softness was gone now, replaced by hard angles and a subtly altered bone structure that spoke with absolute clarity to her heritage.

Tybalt and Luna were gone. We were standing in the middle of an endless riot of roses, real and unreal at the same time, until the two concepts ceased to have any meaning at all. There were three Raysels. This was going to be like Gillian, then: she was going to have a choice.

“Well?” demanded the Daoine Sidhe version. “What are you doing?”

“I’m here to offer you a choice,” I said, trying not to feel self-conscious about my bloody lips and borrowed sweater. “Your mother asked me to.”

The Blodynbryd’s eyes widened. “Why would my mother ask you to do anything for me? I tried to kill her. I’ll probably try again when I wake up.” The statement was devoid of malice: it was just something she was going to do, whether she wanted to or not. It was inevitable. “She shouldn’t be doing me any favors.”

“Uh, she sent me here, into your . . . I don’t know, dreams, whatever this is, so that I could pull you into a shared hallucination where I would ask you what you wanted to be. The end result is going to be a lot of pain.”

“Way to candy coat things for me, Toby,” said the Daoine Sidhe, actually looking slightly amused. I must have looked nonplussed, because she continued, saying, “I think a little more clearly here. I think it’s because I’m not awake, so I can take my time figuring stuff out. You know how that is.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, and held out my hand. “I don’t think we can stop being here if you don’t make a choice.”

“What kind of choice?” asked the Blodynbryd, as both of them waded toward me through the roses. “Are you here to wake me up or something? Because I have to say, you’re not really my idea of Prince Charming.”

I laughed despite myself. “No. I don’t think you’re going to be waking up for quite a while.” Admitting that out loud sobered me right back up again. “But your mother thinks you’ll have an easier road back to health if your blood isn’t warring with itself. She wants you to be either Daoine Sidhe or Blodynbryd.”

“She didn’t just tell you what to turn me into?”

“She sort of did,” I said, thinking back to Luna’s words to me in the garden. “But that was before I wound up here. Now that I can talk to you, I guess that means the choice is yours. What do you want to be?”

“Eight years old and not broken yet,” said the Daoine Sidhe, without hesitation. She had finally reached me. She looked down at the version of herself who slumbered on the bier, and then turned, looking at the Raysel who was still struggling through the roses. “So that’s what I look like if I take after Mom, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m really . . . pink.” Raysel wrinkled her nose. “Like really, really pink. I thought that color was reserved for plastic toys. What’s it doing on my skin?”

“Fae genetics are weird.”

“I guess so.” The Blodynbryd was speaking now. She stared at her Daoine Sidhe self and said, “I look like my father.”

“Not entirely,” I said. “You still look like yourself.”

“So I’m just one more Torquill.” She shook her head. It was starting to get hard to keep track of which one was speaking, impossible as that should have been. They were both her, and this was her dream, after all. “I don’t think he wants me to look like him. I don’t think he ever wanted me. You were the only daughter he needed.”

“That’s not true, Raysel. Your father loves you. He always has. He just doesn’t know how to help you, and he’s a hero. He doesn’t deal well with not being able to fix things.”

“I guess.” The two waking Raysels looked at each other before turning to me. The Blodynbryd asked, hesitantly, “Which would you choose?”

I paused. “In your position?”