The Winter Long

“What happened?” I asked.

“We fell,” he said. He couldn’t keep the bleakness from his tone, or prevent his fingers from tightening slightly, like he needed to reassure himself that I was really there in front of him. “I lost hold of you almost immediately. I thought . . .” He paused, chuckling bitterly. “I thought you would both be better swimmers, given your coastal upbringings. I stopped trying to catch your hands and positioned myself to strike the water at an angle that might allow me to retain consciousness.”

The desperate misery that had been in his eyes since I arrived suddenly made a little bit more sense. If he’d allowed me to fall without trying to get me back, and then thought I was dead . . . I couldn’t imagine living with that knowledge. I bit my lip and just looked at him, willing him to see the understanding I was trying to project. I would have done the same thing in his place. That didn’t make it any easier.

“I lost sight of both of you for a few seconds when I hit the water. Long enough, I assume, for the undertow to have changed everyone’s positions. I swam, trying to find you—I admit, much to my chagrin, that I was only looking for you, at least at first—but you were nowhere to be seen. I found Quentin tangled in the kelp. The tide was trying to take him, and I was losing strength, and so . . .”

And so, faced with the choice of drowning or finding me, Tybalt had made the only choice I would ever have been able to forgive: he’d saved himself, and in the process, he’d saved Quentin. “You opened a doorway to the Shadow Roads,” I guessed.

“There are a surprising number of shadows at the bottom of the sea,” he confirmed. “I thought I would carry your squire to safety and then return. I admit, there were . . . complications . . . that I did not anticipate.”

“Uncle Tybalt flooded two hallways,” said Raj.

I turned my head, my arms still wrapped around Quentin, and asked, “When did you turn human again?”

He shrugged.

“Fair enough.” I looked back to Tybalt. “The water came with you, huh?”

Tybalt grimaced. “Yes. Quite a lot of it, as well as some rather surprised fish. I was unprepared.”

I looked to Raj for translation. He shook his head and said, “It knocked him out. The noise was enough that a bunch of us came running and found them flat on their backs in the hall, with water everywhere. When they woke up, they both started asking where you were.”

“You were dead.” Quentin finally pushed away from me. I turned back to him. He looked at me bleakly. “I just . . . I just knew that you were dead. That I’d have to be the one who told everyone in Arden’s Court, and in Shadowed Hills, and everywhere, because Tybalt is Cait Sidhe, and they wouldn’t listen to him. I was going to have to give your eulogy a hundred times, and I was never going to see you again.”

“Hey.” I put my arms around him again. It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do. “That didn’t happen. You with me? I’m not dead, you’re not going to tell anyone that I’m dead, and if I were dead, you’d still be my squire. Sylvester would take care of all the announcements after you told him what had happened.”

Quentin hugged me for a few seconds more before pulling away and saying, “You’d better mean that.”

“You’re going to be a king someday,” said Raj. “Shouldn’t you get used to saying the names of the dead now, while you still have time to harden?”

All three of us turned to look at him. He squared his shoulders and looked defiantly back at me, and I realized how terrifying this must have been. His uncle, who was supposed to keep all the Cait Sidhe in San Francisco safe, broken by the loss of one woman. His best friend, equally broken.