Page 41 of A Killing Frost

“It had probably been decades since anyone had thought to take such liberties with her,” said Simon. “A Duchess of the Undersea is not someone to toy with, especially not one who’s been able to hold onto her domain for a full century. That long without being deposed will have shaped the already-fearsome woman I knew into a force to be reckoned with. Anyone with sense would dread her wrath.”

“I certainly do,” I said, unable to keep the statement from coming out fondly. I was still sort of pissed at her, but Dianda was a menace by any reasonable standard. She was remarkably restrained for an Undersea noble, at least according to everyone I knew who had much to do with the Undersea, and I attributed her good behavior to the influence of her husband, who probably wouldn’t have been comfortable with her going around assaulting people all the time, whether it was culturally appropriate or not. They both made concessions when they got married. He moved to the bottom of the sea, where the environment wanted him dead, she stopped punching people quite as much.

“Wise.” Simon turned to gaze at the roses as we walked. “Some of what I saw in your blood was... confusing. Difficult to believe.”

“But it was blood memory, which means it’s true.”

“Indeed. Blood memory can’t be altered, unless it’s by someone as powerful as my lady. And you are nowhere near her league.” He turned to look behind us, firing an arrow before I had a chance to react. There was a soft sound of impact, followed by the much louder sound of someone crashing to the ground. Quentin yelled in wordless dismay, telling me who Simon’s target had been.

I grabbed my knife and had it almost out of the sheath before Simon shoved me away, sending me staggering into the nearest wall of roses. I didn’t fall through into the void beyond the Rose Road, which was a good thing. I did get stabbed by several hundred tiny thorns, drawing more blood than seemed possible for a garden verge, which was the opposite of a good thing.

“Simon! What the hell are you doing?” I tried to lunge for him. The thorns snagged in my skin and my clothing—and my hair—refused to let go. The vines had yet to wrap around my arms, but they were still intentionally restraining me.

“What must be done,” snarled Simon, grabbing Quentin and yanking my squire back, until he rested against the other man’s chest. Quentin had gotten substantially taller over the past few years. He was still shorter than Simon himself, and when Simon produced a second arrow, resting its point against Quentin’s cheek, Quentin froze, eyes going wide and cheeks going pale. He strained both against the arm that was locked across his neck, and to pull his face away from the arrow.

“Don’t move too much,Prince Sollys,” said Simon. “You wouldn’t want to cut yourself. And as for you,October, when you let Amandine modify the memory in your blood, you should have been more careful. She left in some things you probably didn’t want me to see. She inserted others you should have known I would never believe. Married to your mother? Foul enough, but to claim I was the one who cast my lady into slumber...” He shook his head. “Blasphemy. Vile slander. I couldnever.”

Oh, oak and ash. He’d seen himself being the one to elf-shoot Evening. Of course that would seem unbelievable right now. He was too deep in her thrall.

“Simon, please,” I said. “Let my squire go. We can still salvage this.”

“Let the Crown Prince of the Westlandsgo? When I know there’s a cure for elf-shot? When my lady could wake tomorrow, tonight, and not in a century’s time? I think not. This child will be the coin that buys me everything I’ve ever wanted. I’ll have my lady and my place back, and she’ll help me locate Oleander.”

“You know it’s not going to happen like that,” I said, still struggling against the thorns. They were definitely working their way deeper, fighting to keep me in place. I kept my eyes on Simon. The rose in his pocket had blood on its thorns now, and I was willing to bet it was mine. He’d saved it for the moment when he needed me out of the way. “You said it yourself, we have a cure. If all you can threaten him with is elf-shot, Queen Windermere’s army will take you down and wake him after the fact.”

“Ah, but that’s ordinary elf-shot. As we’ve already discussed, mine is more powerfully brewed. There’s no guarantee your ‘cure’ would work, or that the target would survive.”

“Toby, he shot May,” said Quentin miserably.

“I know,” I said. “Just hold still. Don’t give him an excuse to shoot you.” May couldn’t be killed. Even Simon’s extra-specialterror-blend elf-shot wouldn’t be enough to take her away from me. I thought. I hoped. Honestly, it was difficult to say. As was so often the case, we were in uncharted waters.

Simon looked at me and smiled. It seemed like a sincere expression, close enough to the man I’d been getting to know that for half a heartbeat, I could almost let myself believe in it. I sagged, ceasing my fight against the thorns.

“The people who sent you to find me did you no favors,” he said, voice almost kind. “They should have built you a better set of false memories. Something with no lies too big for me to swallow. But I’m grateful to you all the same. Patrick is alive. I believe that much—no one could have modeled the man so well without proof—and I might never have known that without you.” He began walking backward toward the other wall of roses, pulling Quentin with him.

I resumed my struggles, drawing more blood as the thorns worked their way deeper into my flesh. Try as I might, I couldn’t break free.

“Simon!” I yelled. “If you do this, I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth! Don’t think for a second that I won’t!”

He smiled again, and once again, the expression verged on kindness. He was so much the man I’d come to find that it hurt, because he wasn’t that man at all. Not right here, and not right now. Right here and right now, he was someone else altogether, and I didn’t want to hold this against him after we brought him home, but I knew I was going to.

I knew it as he pulled Quentin up against the roses, and as the roses unfurled, the vines unlinking, the flowers spreading until they had created an opening wide enough for a man to walk through, dragging a half-frozen teenager with him, and I was alone.

The thorns were digging in too deep, and the pain was making it hard to focus. I closed my eyes, inhaling the scent of my own blood, and followed it to the root of the spell Simon had cast on the roses. It was simple sympathetic magic, tying their thorns to the rose he was carrying, and since that rose was somewhere else now, it was even simpler for me to snap the threads binding them together. The strange tension went out of the vines holding me, and I was able to pull myself free, only losing a little more blood in the process.

I spun on my heel and ran for the spot where May had fallen.She was crumpled in a heap on the leaf-strewn floor of the Rose Road, an arrow sticking out of her shoulder. The bastard. The predictable, enchanted bastard.

With normal people, leaving the arrow in place would have been the right thing to do. May wasn’t normal people. May was a Fetch, and more, May wasmyFetch, meaning the rules for her were different. I gathered her into my arms, lifting her off the ground, and snapped the arrow’s shaft off about six inches from her body, gouging my palm in the process. My blood made the remaining arrow slippery and hard to hold as I grasped it, adding splinters to my current list of complaints, and shoved as hard as I could. May didn’t react, not even to twitch or gasp. She was under that deep.

The arrowhead emerged from her back. I kept pushing, careful not to let it touch my skin, until enough of the shaft had passed through her body for me to grab it and pull the entire arrow free.

She bled. That was a good sign—it probably meant the elf-shot hadn’t killed her after all, since corpses don’t bleed—and also a bad thing, since I had no medical supplies. Lowering her to the ground, I grabbed my knife and used it to hack off the bottom of her already-shredded shirt, which had been so horribly damaged by the tree branch that it was destined for the rag bag no matter what I did to it now. It only took a few seconds to come up with a functional cloth bandage.

Of course, it was already soaked with blood, but at least that blood was dry. I wrapped it around her shoulder, packing the wound. The hole in her stomach was almost closed, skin stretched taut and new across an abdomen slightly too concave to contain all the organs it was supposed to hold. Maybe this was a good time for her to take a little nap. It would give her body time to recover from the hell it had been put through since we left.

May would be unconscious until I could get her to Walther, the only alchemist I knew who stood a chance of brewing a version of the elf-shot counteragent strong enough to contend with elf-shot brewed in the presence of Eira Rosynhwyr. I refused to let myself think of her being asleep any longer than that. I no longer had a model for any version of my life that didn’t have May in it, the sister I’d never gone looking for, the one I’d never realized I was going to need.

My heart was beating too fast, but my eyes were dry as I gatheredher in my arms and stood. She was the same height I was; cradled against my chest like this, she felt much smaller. She had always been my responsibility. I was the reason she existed, in more ways than one.

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