The Winter Long

I put my arms around him, lowering my face until my cheek touched the top of his head. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I just . . . I can’t, Raj. I can’t go there yet. I don’t know if I ever can.”


“October.” A hand touched my back. I raised my head to find Marcia standing next to me, a concerned look in her eyes. “I don’t think you’re listening to each other. You’re both scared and shaken, and you aren’t really paying attention to what’s happening. You’re too busy paying attention to what you’re afraid of.”

“What do you—”

“Tell Raj why you don’t want to go to the Court of Cats.” There was a note of command in her voice. I’d grown accustomed to taking orders from her during the time we spent together at Goldengreen: she might be thin-blooded and only a quarter fae, but she pretty much always knew what she was talking about.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go to the Court of Cats because I’m not ready to see someone else sitting on Tybalt’s throne,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady, maybe because I was speaking the absolute truth for once. The Luidaeg must feel like this all the time, I thought, and continued, “I love you very much, and you’re going to be a great King, but you’re not him, and I’m not ready.” And then there was Quentin. Losing him was going to hurt even more, and for a lot longer. Tybalt was the man of my dreams. Quentin was the son I’d never been given the chance to have.

This time when Raj pulled away, it was to stare at me with disbelief that shaded slowly into understanding. “You think . . . when you lost hold of them, when you fell, you thought they drowned, didn’t you? You thought you were the only survivor.”

“Dianda found me,” I said. Hope was trying to awaken in the pit of my stomach, and I forced it to be still, refusing to let it come fully alive until Raj actually said the words that I could feel him dancing around. “Raj, what are you saying?”

“Uncle Tybalt thought the same thing,” said Raj. “He managed to save Quentin. He thought he’d lost you.”

I stared at him for a moment. Then I whirled, breaking the seal of his arms around my waist as I said to the people behind me, “I have to go.”

“Yeah, you do,” said Dean. “Don’t worry about Goldengreen. I’ll ask my mom to loan me some guards so that we can keep that woman from coming back.”

“And I’ll ask my son to tell me what in the name of Titania’s talons he’s talking about,” said Dianda, in what for her passed for a reasonable tone.

Marcia didn’t say anything. She just smiled, eyes bright and teary in their sheltering rings of fae ointment.

I turned back to Raj. “Take me to him.”

“Do you have a towel or something?” he asked. “You’ll freeze.”

I managed to resist the urge to grab him by the shirtfront and shake him until a doorway to the Shadow Roads fell out. “I’ll heal,” I said. “Take me.”

“Okay,” said Raj. He took my hands and pulled me into the shadow formed by the bodies around us, and then we were falling down into the freezing, airless dark, and I didn’t care.

They were alive. Nothing else mattered.





FOURTEEN


RUNNING THROUGH THE shadows with Raj was nothing like running through the shadows with Tybalt, despite the similarity of the empty space around us. We ran for what felt like an eternity, connected only by our hands. I’d gotten used to running side by side with Tybalt, guided through the darkness more than hauled. With Raj, it was back to square one: he pulled, and I came, because stopping would have meant a frozen death. We ran through a cold, lightless world, caught in the jaws of a winter that would never end. I just hoped we’d come out the other side.