The Winter Long

“Huh,” I said.

Quentin was ranging ahead again, too delighted by the snow to be sensible about staying with the pack. Tybalt walked to my left; Sylvester to my right. They didn’t look at each other, and I was too tired from lack of sleep and too worried about my mother to play mediator. They were both big boys. They’d figure it out for themselves, or they wouldn’t.

The wood ended at a meadow. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was the dividing line that ran through the middle of the open ground, cutting it into two distinct landscapes. On our side, the Shadowed Hills side, everything was white and frozen. On the other side, as the land grew closer to Mother’s tower, everything was growing resplendently green, completely ignoring the season. In Faerie, the king is the land, and that goes for anyone who holds dominion over even the smallest scrap of territory. The space between Shadowed Hills and Amandine’s tower was unclaimed, responding in a general fashion to the kings and queens around it.

“Is there a reason Shadowed Hills is having a white Christmas?” I asked, glancing to Sylvester.

He sighed, and looked away. “Luna is . . . not well,” he said, before beginning his march down the gently sloping hillside, toward that slash of improbable green.

I winced. “Right.” I looked to Tybalt. “Mom probably doesn’t even know what season it is.” Actually, thinking about it, it was never anything but summer at her tower. That was part of why the snow had been such a surprise. I’d only lived in the Summerlands for a decade or so—no time at all, as Faerie measured such things—and most of that time had been spent as Amandine’s shadow, living with her in her eternal summertime. It was easy to forget that some people were fond of cycles, if not of actual change.

“Amandine will be fine,” said Tybalt, taking my arm in his. “If Simon wishes to challenge a Firstborn daughter of Oberon on her own ground that will be his funeral, not yours.”

“Come on.” I started after Sylvester, trying not to dwell on the word “funeral.” Mom was Firstborn. That didn’t make her immune to Oberon’s Law. If she killed Simon, she could be in serious trouble, and while I didn’t think she was a killer, it was always hard to tell what Mom would do. I’d never learned to read her the way I had most of the other people who made up my admittedly small circle of family and close friends. But in the years since I’d returned from the pond . . .

Fae madness isn’t the same as human mental illness. Sometimes I wish the fae had maintained a language of their own, rather than stealing and sharing with mortals. Maybe then we’d have a better word for what the purebloods go through when the centuries of mistakes and magical backlash get to be too much. They go away for a time, receding into themselves and pulling a veil of fog over the world. It’s the only way to give their brains the space to carve out a new worldview, something that can account for the changes that inevitably happen around them. Amandine had been skirting the edges of that fog when I had run away from her, tired of watching her flirt with an oblivion that would probably leave me dead of extreme old age before it let her go. Then Simon had transformed me, and by the time I made it back to my own body, Amandine was gone, burying herself in the fog with all the enthusiasm of a girl preparing for her first formal ball.

She might know Simon wasn’t living with her anymore. But depending on how long they’d been together, she might not.