The Winter Long

Simon’s thoughts slammed into me with the force of a hammer hitting a wall. I gasped, not opening my eyes, and tried to force my way through that top layer of active thought. I hadn’t been expecting that, although I suppose I should have been; blood holds thoughts and memories, and Simon’s blood was still a part of him, still connected to the rest of his body through the open wounds and the hot skin beneath it. Of course it was carrying more than I was used to.

Down, down, down, I thought, willing my magic to take me there. Like Alice and the rabbit hole, come on, down . . .

The thoughts faded into blurry unintelligibility, replaced by the veil of red that I was more accustomed to when I was working blood magic. I took a breath, only dimly aware of my body—of the fact that I had lungs I could breathe with—and pushed harder, until I broke through the blood, into—

She is so beautiful. She owns this room: all others might as well not be here, because no eyes are on them, not when Amandine walks in beauty. My brother loves her. He thinks I don’t know, because he thinks I am foolish, but I am not foolish; I have seen the way he looks at her, the brave hero assessing the next tower he intends to climb. He won’t have her. She deserves much more than Sylvester Torquill, and so much more than his younger brother, whose eyes follow her like all the rest. I have no chance with her. I have no choice but to look. She is so beautiful.

Seeing Amandine through his eyes was almost shocking enough to throw me out of the memory. She was wearing a long purple gown in a style that had been outdated for centuries but probably hadn’t been outdated yet, not in that moment, and she was . . . there are people who say I look like her. Most of the time I’ll just shrug and let them think that if they want to; it’s not worth fighting over. But seeing her reflected in Simon’s memory was enough to hammer home the fact that no, I don’t look like her. No one with a drop of human blood could ever look like her, and that’s a good thing, because her kind of beauty stopped hearts.

She was tall, with the kind of curves that would have made her a star if she’d ever cared to try her hand in Hollywood, and a face that looked like it had been refined by a hundred great artists before it was given to anyone to wear. Her white-gold hair was held away from her face with a simple circlet, and fell otherwise loose down her back, like a river of molten metal. I looked at her through his eyes, and wondered if the false Queen of the Mists had gotten her fondness for long, pale hair from my mother, who made it look like the only style worth wearing.

I hadn’t seen her since I’d learned that she was Firstborn. Looking at the memory image of her, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it from the very beginning. She looked nothing like the Daoine Sidhe. She looked only and entirely like herself.

Amandine looked around the room (ballroom in the great palace of Londinium, and not a jewel in the Queen’s crown could shine any brighter than her smile) until her eyes settled on me/Simon. She started toward me/Simon, her smile broadening.

“Simon. I had hoped you would do us the honor of attendance this day. My lady, the Queen, has remarked often on your absence.” She had an accent. Since when did my mother have an accent? She sounded Scottish, rolling her r’s and burring her t’s in a sweet, lilting rhythm.

She’s never had an accent, I thought fiercely. The scene took on a red tint as I resisted it. Accents don’t just disappear. Don’t lie to me, Simon. Don’t you dare.

I can’t. Not here, not in the blood. The thought was wistful, and almost intrusive in its immediacy. This was no memory: this was Simon answering me without saying a word. Her accent faded, and then she put it aside like a toy she no longer wanted to play with. Centuries and the desire not to stand out as foreign when walking among the humans will work wonders on even the deepest habits. But when I first loved her, when she was Amandine of no particular family line, she was born in Scotland, and raised there for the better part of her youth.

The ballroom had frozen, Amandine still smiling at Simon’s memory of himself. This must have happened centuries ago. She hadn’t aged a day.