The Winter Long

“October—”

“I have to try!” I wasn’t intending to shout. I did it anyway. My voice seemed to echo in the small, dark space of the hall. Tybalt looked at me, his eyes opening wide in surprise. I looked back at him, trying to make him see how desperate I was. “If there’s anything I can do . . . she’s been threatening to kill me since the day we met, and she’s been saving me the whole time. I can be with you because of her. I’m here because of her. I have to try.”

“I would never have asked you not to try,” he said quietly. “I only need you to tell me what I can do to help you.”

I smiled a little. “Just hold me up when my legs give out.”

“My dear, that is something I will always be here to do.”

We carried her through the junk-clogged hall to her bedroom door. It took some shuffling, but we managed to transfer her entirely into Tybalt’s arms. The Luidaeg had never been larger than a human teenager. He held her easily, and I was grateful for her long, blood-matted hair, which hid her face from me.

The door to her room swung open as soon as I touched it, and the light of a thousand candles flooded out into the hall, seeming to chase away the clutter and the grime with its touch. Inside, the walls were lined with saltwater tanks rich with exotic fish and stranger creatures, things that were never meant to thrive in the oceans of this world. The pearl-eyed sea dragon she kept in the largest tank reared back when it saw us framed in the doorway, me with my bloodstained clothes, Tybalt with the Luidaeg in his arms.

I held up my hand. “Don’t freak out,” I said. “We’re not the ones who hurt her. I just want to help.”

The dragon glared at me, but it didn’t break the glass of its tank and come rampaging out into the room, so I was willing to call that a victory, however small. I gestured for Tybalt to put the Luidaeg down on the wide expanse of her four-poster bed. Its frame was ornately carved with mermaids and seaweed, and it reminded me of the furniture Arden had kept with her during her exile from her own Kingdom. It’s funny the things the mind throws up to protect itself from panic. Trivia suddenly matters more than anything else in the world.

The Luidaeg’s head lolled like a dead thing’s as Tybalt maneuvered her onto the mattress, setting a pillow under her neck to support it. He stepped back, glancing at me, and for a moment I could see the naked terror in his eyes, the fear he’d been hiding under bravado and efficiency. I managed another small smile, forcing it until the corners of his mouth relaxed, just a little.

“I won’t do anything I haven’t done before,” I said.

“That’s what I am afraid of,” he replied.

Talk was just putting off the inevitable. I drew my knife for the second time before gingerly lifting her right arm and turning it until the underside of her wrist faced the ceiling. I winced. A deep cut had split her flesh, opening it to reveal the pale ice-blue of her bones. It ran parallel to the vein. That explained the blood. Someone had been trying to bleed her out, and they might well have succeeded.