The Winter Long

The feeling of her hands on my skin made me want to submit, to bow down and do anything she asked of me. I was no descendant of Titania; I shouldn’t have felt her presence that strongly, even through the bond of fealty I shared with Sylvester. Her blood, wailed that still, small place in my mind, the one that people like her never seemed to quite touch. You drank her blood, and that makes her hold on you stronger.

The things that voice was saying made me wish, more than anything, that I had a time machine and the ability to go back and punch my past self in the nose. I swallowed hard to clear the dryness from my throat and said, “I’m me.”

“You? What a charming statement of identity. What, precisely, are you?”

The smell of smoke was getting stronger, setting off alarm bells that weren’t connected to any specific danger. I swallowed again before I said, “I’m Toby. October Christine Daye, Knight of Lost Words. Hero in the Mists.”

“New titles won’t impress me, child. You’re telling me who you are—or who you think you are—but you’re not telling me what you are.”

I took a hard breath. “Changeling.” I had to get away from her. I was drowning in her eyes. Obedience is a hard habit to break, and her hands had held my strings for much too long, even before I had tasted her blood and given her another way of controlling me. There had been a time when I enjoyed being her plaything. At least she’d treated me like a person, most of the time. I was coming to see that all of that had been a lie, and it was the real Evening who stood in front of me now, in this room that smelled like smoke and roses.

Wait—smoke? Evening’s magic didn’t smell like smoke.

But Simon’s did.

“Changeling?” asked Evening mockingly, yanking my attention back to her. “Born of Faerie and human both? Is that what you are?”

“Yes,” I managed.

“Can you even remember what humanity felt like anymore?” she asked. The danger in her tone was impossible to ignore, and it triggered the part of me that was more interested in staying alive than anything else. I jerked away from her like I’d been stung, nearly falling off the dais.

At least that got her hands off of my skin. “I’m still part human! I remember my humanity.”

“How can you remember something you’ve never had? Humanity has never been your cross to bear, and as for the contamination in your blood, you’ve been giving it up freely, more and more with every day that passes.”

I took another step backward, my eyes narrowing. “I didn’t give it up freely.”

“Didn’t you?”

Her clear amusement made me pause. Had my humanity really been stolen from me, the way I told myself it was? The first time, when I was elf-shot and dying, maybe I hadn’t had much of a choice. When the options are “die” or “become a little harder to kill,” well. I’m not completely stupid. The second time, it had been to save myself from the goblin fruit that was eating me alive. I’d only changed to survive.

Standing a little bit straighter, I said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m myself. That’s who I’ve always been and who I’ll always be, no matter what my blood says about me.” The universe could do whatever it wanted to me—it would anyway, whether or not I gave it permission. But I always knew who I was.

Evening frowned sharply, and I fought back the impulse to cringe. She had always been commanding. Now, stripped of whatever illusions she’d used to make herself fade into the fabric of Faerie, she was terrifying. “Will you really be your own creature?” she asked.

I forced myself to meet her eyes, and not flinch as I watched frost spreading across her pupils. “I am Amandine’s daughter, and I belong to no one.”