The Winter Long

“She’s a changeling. She has no decisions on her shoulders. Only duty.” Evening focused on me again. “She’ll work herself to death to be what I order her to be.”


“No, I won’t,” I said, licking my lips to get the last of the half-dried blood and the strength that it promised me. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it still helped me keep my grip on the Luidaeg’s hand, even as the part of me that remembered the taste of Evening’s blood murmured about loyalty and legacies and why I needed to go to her now, before she grew angry with me.

“You see, this is why I didn’t want her anywhere near you,” said Evening, throwing up her hands in a gesture of frustration that was as familiar as it was out of place in this setting, in this scene. She should have been wearing a business suit when she threw her hands up like that, not a dress better suited to the wicked queen from a fairy tale. “You always spoil everything, Annie. That’s your entire role in my life. The spoilsport.”

“I’ve been called worse,” said the Luidaeg. She gripped my hand even harder. “Don’t trust her, Toby. Don’t let her take you back. She’s not worth it, and you’re worth so much more than she is.”

“Oh, leave her alone, Annie. She doesn’t know me. She never did. You told her, and she thought she heard you, but she didn’t understand. They’re so frail, these changelings, and so slow to catch on to what’s happening around them. Leave her alone. She belongs to me.”

“No, she doesn’t.” The Luidaeg gripped me even harder, until a small gasp escaped my throat, summoned by the pain of her nails against my skin. “If she doesn’t know you—and you’re insisting that she doesn’t—then she can’t give herself to you. You know the rules.”

“Oh, yes, the rules,” said Evening mockingly. “Mustn’t forget the rules. Who branded those rules across your heart, dearest sister? Who made you what you are today?”

“And don’t think I’m not intending to kill you for that when I get the chance,” said the Luidaeg.

“You’ll have to catch me first,” said Evening. She returned her focus to me, smiling so sweetly and so warmly that my heart leaped in my chest like a salmon trying to swim upstream. She looked like safety. She looked like home. “October—Toby. I know you missed me while I was gone, and I’m so sorry that I had to leave. Can you forgive me? Can you just come over here, come to me, and forgive me?”

“I—” The sentence dissolved into a wordless yelp as a sudden, piercing pain lanced through my hand. I looked down and saw that the Luidaeg’s nails—which were more like talons, really, making a matched set with her teeth—had gouged into my flesh, opening cuts that ran all the way down to the brutal whiteness of bone. “What the hell, Luidaeg?” I jerked my hand away, sticking the side of it in my mouth as I sought some small measure of relief in that most mammalian of gestures.

The taste of blood hit my tongue and I froze, the scene around me suddenly becoming clear. Still sucking on the open wound I turned to Evening, eyes wide. She didn’t look like home anymore. She looked like the deep, dark wood where little girls and boys went to find wolves of their very own, the place that no one returned from. Her coloring was as fairy-tale extreme as ever, but it didn’t seem comforting or familiar: it was alien and garish, her lips too red for her skin, her skin too pale for anything that wasn’t dead.

I took a breath, scenting out the magic in the room. It had all faded away under the taste of blood and the compulsion that was rolling off of Evening like a wave. Now that I was looking, though . . .