The Winter Long

“Toby!”


My head snapped up, eyes opening. The bright light of the cove room nearly blinded me for a few seconds. By the time it cleared, I had found the source of the voice, and the blurriness faded to reveal Raj, Tybalt’s adopted nephew and future King of Cats, standing just outside the reach of the water. His glass-green eyes were wide, and his narrow chest was heaving from the exertion of his run. My heart sank. I was going to have to tell him. I hadn’t even reached the point of fully telling myself, and I was going to have to tell him, because I was his friend and he was Quentin’s friend, and I owed him the news from my own lips.

“Raj.” I pulled away from Dianda, noticing distractedly that she was in her natural form, the jeweled sweep of her tail curled underneath her like a cushion, and staggered to my feet. The ritual words that should have been used to announce a death to a member of the family weren’t there, they wouldn’t come; they had fled into some dark and hallowed place where I was not allowed to follow. So, instead, I took a step toward him, and trusted the bleak, broken look on my face to say all the things that my lips couldn’t.

Raj blinked at me, eyes widening briefly. Then, to my enormous surprise, relief washed across his features and he dove forward, risking the water in order to throw his arms around my waist and shout, “You’re okay! You’re—all right, you’re soaking wet and that’s horrible, but you’re not hurt! I’m not going to get skinned when I come home without you!” There was a note of forced joviality in his voice, barely concealing real, concrete relief. “Are you done doing whatever it is you’ve been doing here? Because I’m supposed to take you back to the Court of Cats.”

My stomach sank as I realized I had no idea what the funeral rites of the Cait Sidhe entailed. Maybe Raj was here to take me back to the Court of Cats for his coronation, since I was technically Tybalt’s consort. “I . . . Raj, I don’t think I can . . .”

“What?” Raj pulled away, frowning at me. He left his arms clasped around my waist, like he was afraid I was going to run away if he let go for even a second. “Are you doing something here that’s too important to leave? Because it looks like you’re going wading with mermaids, and you can do that later. You know, for somebody who hates fish, you spend a remarkable amount of time with them socially.”

I stared at him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What?” Raj frowned, gathering his princely imperiousness around himself like a cloak—although he still didn’t let me go. “What do you mean, what’s wrong with me? You’re the one sitting in the water and refusing to come to the Court of Cats like a sensible person.”

“I’m not Cait Sidhe, Raj,” I said, frustrated. “I had no way of getting there, even if I’d wanted to.”

“I know, which is why they sent me to find you.” His princely stoicism wobbled, revealing first relief, and then something deeper, something he probably hadn’t intended to ever let me see: grief, raw and bleeding like an open wound. “You couldn’t get to the Court of Cats on your own, and we were so scared, Toby. They said you all fell into the water together, and then you were just gone.” He lunged into another hug, burying his face against my sternum. I would have slapped most teenage boys for trying that, but the gesture was so feline that I couldn’t view it as anything but what it so clearly was: a request for comfort.