The Winter Long

That was it: I’d heard enough. I shoved my way through the thorns with my good arm, ignoring the way they pierced and tore my skin—now that I was revealing myself to Evening, a little blood could only help me—and into the clearing on the other side of the wall.

I found myself standing at the middle of a large clear space in the forest. Not naturally clear, if the broken trees and shattered stumps were anything to go by, but that wasn’t the worst problem currently facing me. No, that honor was reserved for the two angry Firstborn who were now flanking me. The Luidaeg was to my left, her clothing torn to reveal the dark green scales that were now covering her skin. Evening was to my right, her red dress dyed even darker by sweat and water and blood.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” Evening spat, eyes narrowing as she took in my bedraggled appearance and motionless right arm. “You can’t reach this place. It is forbidden to your kind.”

“You’re a little off the mark there, Eira,” said the Luidaeg. She actually sounded like she was enjoying herself. That made one of us. “The Thorn Road wasn’t forbidden when Annis died, it was sealed. There’s a difference. If someone can open the doors, they’re welcome to commit suicide by walking through them.”

Evening’s head whipped around, her narrow-eyed glare transferring to the Luidaeg. “Stay out of this, Antigone.”

“I would, if you hadn’t dragged me here and kept trying to kill me.” The Luidaeg folded her arms. “That’s what you always do, you know. Drag me places and try to kill me. You should really get a new routine. Something more interesting and modern than sororicide.”

I blinked. The Luidaeg could be hard to deal with sometimes, and I’d never known her to take a challenge lying down, but she didn’t sound like herself. The way she was mouthing off to a greater power made her sound more like, well, me.

She caught me looking at her and winked broadly before adding, “Maybe you could take up needlepoint. You know, a nice handicraft that wouldn’t leave bodies scattered everywhere when you were finished.”

Evening made an incoherent sound of rage as she whirled and hurled a blast of ice at the Luidaeg. The Luidaeg didn’t dodge: she just raised her crossed arms, and the blast rebounded off the air in front of her, freezing the nearest patches of thorn solid. I blinked again, this time with understanding. Whatever fight they’d been having before I arrived, it had changed when I entered the scene. The Luidaeg was trying to protect me, and if there was one thing my method of dealing with a greater threat was good at, it was drawing focus.

Too bad I couldn’t let her die again for my sake. “Evening, stop,” I said. “Just stop. I don’t understand why you’re doing this, but I know that you’re not a bad person. You’re just . . . I don’t even know. You’re my friend. Friends don’t do this sort of thing.”

“Your friend?” Evening turned back to me, an astonished look on her face. “Is that really what you think, October? That we’re friends? We were never friends. I wouldn’t lower myself to form that sort of bond with someone like you.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Someone like me?”

“You’re a half-breed. A mongrel. You should never have existed, in this world or any other. I knew Amandine was perverse, but I had no idea she would lower herself to lying with a human before the day that news of your birth was brought to me. As if it were something to celebrate! As if I should have rejoiced in a new niece who carried the stink of mortality in her veins.” The air around Evening’s hands began to crackle with cold. “You should have been killed in your cradle, rather than allowed to live and taint our bloodline with your filth.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s funny, because I mean, you had the hope chest. The whole time, you had the hope chest. You could have pulled the human out of me while I was still a baby, and I would never have known any better. But you didn’t. You left me the way I was, and you let Mom have me. It seems weird.”