The Winter Long

The darkness had just been waiting for me to relax. It closed in, pouncing on the shreds of my consciousness like a cat pounces on a mouse, and the world went away for a little while.

“—by? Hey, are you dead? Wake up if you’re not dead.” Someone grabbed my shoulders, shaking briskly enough that my head flopped from side to side. I coughed, and water filled my mouth, summoned up from my throat and lungs. “Shit, she’s choking.” The voice didn’t sound surprised, or particularly worried; this was more of a statement of fact than anything resembling concern.

Strong hands rolled me onto my side, and then someone gave me another shake, hard enough that I started coughing again. This time, I didn’t stop until I was vomiting water all over the sand next to me. Someone helped me sit up enough that I wasn’t throwing up on myself, which was a serious improvement. I struggled to catch my breath, breathed in, and resumed coughing. This time, no water accompanied the action. Thank Oberon.

“Oh, good, you’re not dead,” said a female voice. I started trying to sort through the options for who might have hauled me out of the ocean. I’d seen enough to know that I should know her, but the whole “nearly drowning” thing had put a bit of a crimp in my memory.

Everything was wet, and my body was one big ache, bruised by its impact with the water. My headache had become virtually an afterthought when held up against the rest of the pain. My leather jacket was like a lead blanket encasing my upper body, so waterlogged that it had probably pulled me almost to the seafloor before I woke up. I tried to roll toward the person next to me, and as I did, I realized I was covered in sand. That was a natural result of lying wet on a beach, but it was going to mean getting wet again, and somehow that was the final indignity. I braced my hands against the beach, shoving myself into a standing position, and turned.

Dianda was sitting on the beach a few feet away, her tail folded under her like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen story. She raised an eyebrow as she met my eyes, looking dubious. “Are you done with the barfing water and attempted suicide by ocean? I don’t mind dead bodies in the Pacific, but you were right next to Goldengreen. That means you were trying to get in. And don’t stress about my fins and your ears—I have the Cetacea maintaining a screen around this area, no one’s going to see you.”

I took a quick, borderline frantic look around. There was a heavy fog covering the beach, leaving the two of us sitting in what appeared to be the only clear area. That must have been Dianda’s “screen” . . . and we were inside it alone. “Oh, oak and ash, Dianda, where are the others?”

She frowned. “Others? You mean the Cetacea? They’re farther out from shore.”

“I don’t mean your damn Cetacea, I mean Quentin and Tybalt!”

Dianda’s frown slowly faded into an expression of blank neutrality. “October, you are the only one we found in the water. We wouldn’t have been able to find you at all if we hadn’t already been circling Goldengreen. I’m sorry. They’re not there.”

“Look again!” I hadn’t been intending to scream at her, and yet somehow it happened anyway. My voice bounced off the nearby cliff wall and was swallowed by the sea.

“My people are still out there, October,” said Dianda. “They’re moving through the waves, they’re looking for anything out of the ordinary, and if either of your friends are in the water, we’ll find them. But you were half-drowned, and—”

“They’re not my friends. They’re my family.”

“The sea doesn’t care.”

I looked at her bleakly, trying to make those words make sense within the context of the world. The sea didn’t care. Tybalt, Quentin, and I fell out of the sky, and now only I was here, and the sea didn’t care. I turned my eyes toward the gunmetal-gray waves of the roiling Pacific. Once again, the water had taken everything away from me. Because the sea didn’t care.