The Winter Long

I took a careful step forward, still listening. The courtyard was the center of Goldengreen’s social whirl, and normally, if someone was talking but out of sight, I would find them there. The voices didn’t seem to be coming from the courtyard this time. I allowed that to embolden my steps, and sped up as I walked down the short span of hall between me and the courtyard doorway. When I got there I stopped, trying to let my eyes adjust, hoping that what I saw wasn’t really true.

Shortly after I had become Countess of Goldengreen, my friend Lily, the Lady of the Tea Gardens, had been murdered by Oleander de Merelands. I had inherited Lily’s subjects, a motley assortment of changelings and purebloods with nowhere else to go. They’d promptly set about making the knowe a home, transplanting trees and flowers from Lily’s holdings to the indoor garden that had been established in the courtyard. They’d stayed with Goldengreen when I’d passed it on to Dean, partially because I’d vouched for him, but mostly, I knew, because they hadn’t wanted to move the trees.

They weren’t going to have to worry about that anymore. The courtyard looked like it had been hit by a localized but powerful tornado. Trees were on their sides, roots sticking up in the air like accusing fingers. Flowers had been crushed, rosebushes uprooted and flung against the walls. I was still trying to take in the damage when I realized that the pale branches extending from beneath one of the fallen trees weren’t branches at all. They were fingers.

“Oh, oak and ash,” I breathed, and bolted up the courtyard stairs until I reached the level where the fallen tree was splayed. It was one of Lily’s willows, old and grizzled with years of survival. As I drew closer, I could see the scales on the pale fingers, and on the soft skin of the hand that they were attached to. One of Lily’s former handmaids, a woman whose name I had learned and then forgotten, because we’d had nothing in common except for our love of an Undine who would never walk with either of us again. I tried to brace against the dirt and shift the tree off of her body, but it was no use; I didn’t have super strength, and all I could do was force her deeper into the soil.

I dropped to my knees, following some half-formed instinct as I grabbed her wrist—not to check for a pulse, but to check the temperature of her skin. She was cool enough that I guessed she had been dead for at least an hour, maybe longer. So why was there still a body here for me to find? The night-haunts came for all the dead of Faerie. That was their purpose, and their one form of sustenance. They would never leave a body unclaimed for this long, and here—inside a knowe, where no human eyes would ever look—they wouldn’t have bothered leaving a replacement. The night-haunts should have come by now.

Unless someone was keeping them out, along with the rest of us. I stood, looking uneasily around the darkened courtyard, which could easily hold another dozen bodies buried beneath the broken greenery. Was Dean in here? Or Marcia? Had I lost friends today?

You mean apart from the obvious?

Again, I pushed the thought down, burying it deep within my mind. If I started mourning, I was going to break. I could already feel the fissures forming, and when they gave way, I would be glad to fall into the abyss of my own grief. Right here, right now, I needed answers. I needed someone to blame.

I wasn’t going to get any of that in the courtyard. Murmuring a quick farewell to the fallen handmaid, I turned and ran back down the steps to the door, heading into the hall and pausing only long enough to reorient myself to the distant sound of ghostly voices. They were coming from farther down the hall. I started toward them, slowly at first, and then breaking into a run that stopped only when I reached the door to what Dean called “the cove-side receiving room.” It hadn’t existed when Goldengreen was mine, but knowes can rearrange themselves. The current Count was a mermaid’s son. Of course there would be a seaside entrance.