The Winter Long

She nodded.

“Probably Daoine Sidhe. I’ve always been best at blood magic, even when I didn’t want to be, so that would be the easier way for me to go. But that wasn’t my choice. It never has been.” I lost a little more of mortality every time I had to make one of these decisions for myself, and every inch I lost carried me closer to my Dóchas Sidhe heritage. There had never been a choice about that, not where I was concerned.

“My mother loves me,” said Raysel thoughtfully. “She always will, I guess, if she was willing to send you here after I almost killed her. But I think if I were a Blodynbryd, we’d always be a little bit connected. I don’t know if I could take that. And I don’t know if the parts of me that are broken and the parts of her that are broken would be able to coexist.”

“That’s definitely a risk,” I agreed.

“My father doesn’t know what to do with me, but he always tried to let me find my own way. There are more Daoine Sidhe in our world. It might be easier to learn how to be whole.”

“That’s true.” I felt like all I was doing was agreeing with her, offering meaningless sounds that couldn’t possibly simplify such an impossible decision. It was all I had.

Raysel bit her lip, worrying it between her teeth for a moment before she asked, “If you were in my position . . . what do you think my parents would want me to be? The royal, or the rose?”

“I’d say your parents both have their flaws, and you should be choosing for you, not for them. You’ll have an easier time of it if you’re Daoine Sidhe. There will be more people who can help you heal, and who’ll understand the way your magic works.”

“I’ll have magic?” She sounded almost amazed, and I realized this, too, would be a big change for her: she’d never been trained, partially because her heritage was so strange that no one knew how to teach her, and partially because of her stolen childhood. She could disguise herself from human eyes, and that was about it. “Like my father?”

“If you choose to be Daoine Sidhe.”

“But I’ll be betraying my mother again,” she said reluctantly. “I’ll be leaving her alone.”

I thought of Gillian, and the way she’d looked at me when we’d been standing together in her equivalent of this rose-strewn field. “You’ll never leave her alone, and she knows it,” I said. “Our mothers can betray us, and we can betray them, but they’ll always be our mothers. Nothing takes that away.”

The two Raysels nodded, very slowly. The Blodynbryd turned her face away as the Daoine Sidhe offered me her hands. I took them, smelling blood on the air, coiling like smoke through the mingled perfumes of a thousand roses.

“I choose Daoine Sidhe,” she said.

I’d been expecting that. I still mustered a smile. “This will hurt,” I cautioned.

“I know,” she said. “And Toby . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

There was no way I could answer that, and so I didn’t try. I just reached into the cool, thorny field of her heritage, grasping the roots of what made her Blodynbryd, and yanked as hard as I could.

I was getting better with practice: I was able to keep going even when Raysel began to scream. Her blood didn’t fight me, which made things easier. She had come to terms with what I was here to do, and even if she had never been much of a blood-worker before, every inch of her that turned fully Daoine Sidhe added a sliver more strength to her power. She fed that power into me, and I took it greedily, turning it back on her in a continual, cleansing wave.