The Winter Long

There are four major holidays in the fae calendar, the fixed points in the year around which everything else revolves. Beltane and Samhain represent the transfer of power between the Unseelie and Seelie Courts. Back in the days when every fiefdom had two regents, they would have traded places on those nights. Yule and Midsummer are more general holidays, meant for everyone to celebrate. Hosting one of those two parties is a pretty big deal. Since the false Queen of the Mists had never been much into throwing the kind of shindig that would attract common ruffians like me and everyone I knew, we hadn’t had a Kingdom-wide Yule celebration since King Gilad was murdered.

It looked like Arden was working overtime to make sure everyone knew that things were different now. A band played on one side of the room, and space had been cleared for the dancers, while tables had been provided for those who would rather sit and talk. Hobs and Brownies circulated through the crowd with trays of drinks and finger foods. I suppressed a shudder. The last time I’d been dragged to one of these large seasonal parties, my old enemy, Oleander de Merelands, had been disguised as one of the servants. She’d poisoned several people that way, and she’d drugged me. Not one of the high points of my career.

That had been a different time, in a different knowe, and Oleander was dead. I allowed Tybalt to hand me a tall flute of something that bubbled like champagne, but was the pale purple of lilacs. I sniffed it. It smelled, perhaps predictably, of blackberries. “Let’s find Sylvester,” I said. “I need to present myself to him before things get too hectic.”

Unsurprisingly, Tybalt made a face. “Must we?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “We must.” Sylvester Torquill was my liege, and had been for most of my adult life. Civility said that if we were both at the same party, I should find him and make sure he knew I was there. Tybalt wasn’t bound by the same rules of fealty and propriety, which was a good thing, since he would have committed murder if he’d been forced to deal with Sylvester as often as I did.

Tybalt counted Sylvester as . . . not an enemy, quite, but definitely someone he wouldn’t think twice about leaving behind if the situation required it. That was because of me. They’d been almost friends before I came along and complicated things. Yet somehow I couldn’t feel too bad about it, since the “complication” had involved Sylvester refusing to let Tybalt stay with me when I was sick and on the verge of dying. Tybalt took that sort of thing personally.

He wasn’t the only one.

“Must I be pleasant?” he asked.

“Yes, unless he starts something.” I scanned the throng. “He’ll probably be near the refreshments. Come on, I think I see an ice sculpture this way.” Keeping my arm linked through his, I plunged into the crowd. If he didn’t like it, tough. Turnabout was fair play.

He didn’t fight me. He understood where my duty lay, just like I understood about his. Faerie is a feudal society: Kings and Queens, knights and lords and ladies. I’d earned my title. It was the only way for someone like me to get the honor, since changelings—human-fae crossbreeds—can’t inherit titles from our parents. It would have been a moot point in my case anyway, since my mother, Amandine, is untitled. I guess people figured that since she was Firstborn, she didn’t need a title to get respect. I did. Part of having that title was maintaining it, doing all the things that a good little changeling knight was supposed to do. And as much as I didn’t want to be at the party, it was nice to have an event that justified me and Tybalt attending together. Being a King of Cats meant that Tybalt’s responsibility to his people had to come first. Sometimes I didn’t see him for days. Other times . . .

I’d been in relationships before. One of them had been serious enough to result in my now-teenage, now-mortal daughter, Gillian. But what I had with Tybalt was something special.

The crowd fell away as we emerged into the bubble of empty space between the dance floor and a refreshment table laden with sparkling sugar desserts. Towers of cookies and less recognizable confections surrounded a huge gingerbread reproduction of Arden’s knowe as seen from the Summerlands: a palace that was half redwood forest, half fairy-tale dream. There were even tiny lights inside, shining through the stained sugar glass windows.