The Winter Long

“Toby?” The voice was Marcia’s, but it seemed very far away. The numbness that had been protecting me since Dianda dragged me out of the water was finally cracking into pieces and falling away, leaving me feeling naked and exposed to the elements. “Are you okay?”


“We fell, Marcia.” I looked down at the sandy beach in front of me, and considered the virtues of lying down on it, never to get up again. “She closed the wards, and we fell out of the sky. I couldn’t . . . their hands. I couldn’t keep hold of their hands.” A sob was threatening to rise and overwhelm me. I fought it for as long as I could, struggling to keep it contained, but it was too late. Too much had happened, and while maybe I could have stayed in denial for a little longer, the sight of Evening had broken some inherent part of my heart so quickly and so unexpectedly that everything else was tumbling uncontrollably downward. “They were gone so fast.”

“I’m going to get my mom,” said Dean, sounding alarmed. The sound of splashing followed his words as he scrambled to his feet and ran off into the water. I didn’t raise my head.

Then hands were on my shoulders, and Marcia was asking softly, “Who fell, Toby? Whose hands couldn’t you hold onto?”

I closed my eyes. “Quentin. Tybalt. They . . .” The rest of the sentence wouldn’t come. I started to sob instead, great, unsteady braying sounds. Silent tears were for smaller losses. This was too much, it was too big; it was going to consume the entire world. I leaned against Marcia, letting her put her arms around me, and just cried.

Evening was alive. Tybalt and Quentin were dead. The world made no sense anymore, and none of the places I should have been able to run were safe for me—not Shadowed Hills, not my mother’s tower, and not home. All the work I’d done since I’d returned from the pond was for nothing. I was alone. I was always going to wind up like this: sitting in icy water and utterly alone, no matter how many people were standing around me.

Marcia held me until the tears ran out. She didn’t try to make me talk after that first broken, half-comprehensible confession; she was too smart for that. Instead, she just knelt in the sand beside me and let me weep myself dry. I kept on sobbing after that. The sea could stand in for the tears that I could no longer produce. They were essentially the same thing, after all.

“Aw, shell and stone,” said a new voice. I heard Dianda pull herself up onto the sand beside me, and Marcia unwound her arms from my shoulders. Her relatively gentle embrace was replaced by a rougher, wetter one as the Merrow’s strong arms pulled me to her. “Toby, I’m sorry. We didn’t find them. I’m so sorry.”

I’d thought there were no more tears anywhere in my body. I was wrong. Dianda spoke, and suddenly I could cry again, doubling over until she was the only thing holding me upright. I had grieved before. I knew what loss felt like. But nothing, nothing, had ever felt like this.

“The sea will rock their bones in the cradle of the currents,” said Dianda, with the sort of sweet, ritual lilt to her words that parents use when talking to children. It would probably have been comforting if I’d been a daughter of the Undersea, raised to that kind of loss and that kind of sea foam immortality. But I wasn’t, and so I cried harder, causing Dianda to make a wordless sound of frustrated confusion and hold me even tighter.

Running footsteps on the deck caught my ear—some things can’t be ignored after you’ve lived the kind of life I have, no matter how much I might want to shut them out—but I didn’t raise my head or open my eyes. Dean had a security force, and he wouldn’t be caught off guard a second time in a single morning. Let him deal with whatever this was. He was the Count of Goldengreen, after all.