Page 51 of A Killing Frost

“No,” I said, slowly lowering my hands. “I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

“Ah.” The Luidaeg smiled like I had just passed some particularly difficult test in an unexpectedly clever way. “Why did you do this?”

“Sylvester said he’d only let me talk to Luna if I’d talk toRayseline first, about whether or not she was ready for them to wake her up,” I said. “Every other time I’ve been able to speak to someone who’s asleep or enchanted, it’s been because I was changing their blood. There’s nothing left in her to change. I guess my magic needed something to grab onto, and it grabbed onto itself.”

“That’s not a great habit to get into. You’re going to run out of humanity sooner or later, and you never know when being able to make yourself more resistant to iron or immune to certain types of spells might be an advantage,” she said.

I blinked at her. The idea of humanity as an active advantage had never occurred to me. “Trust me, it’s not something I was planning to do on a regular basis. Shifting my blood is painful, and I’m not very good at it, which makes it hard to do things with any sort of precision. And it’s not like anyone can teach me how to do better.”

“I know Amy won’t, but your sister might be able to,” said the Luidaeg, as casually as if that wasn’t the most ludicrous thing in the world. August and I weren’t friends. We were only sisters on a technicality. She certainly wasn’t going to teach me how to better control the magic we’d inherited from our mother. The Luidaeg looked at my expression and shook her head. “I know you hate her. Believe me, I have a lot of experience with hating sisters. I don’t expect you to be her friend. But she may be the only other person in the world right now who understands how to use the tools you’ve been given, and that understanding is powerful. It could help you. At some point, one of you is going to need to swallow your pride and figure out how to get through this. So you went to Shadowed Hills, and you burned out half of your remaining humanity in order to talk to Rayseline. What did she say?”

I blinked, almost startled by the sudden shift back to the original topic. “Um. She’s willing to wake up, if I’m willing to testify for her. I think they’re finally going to give her the cure. Luna came in. She opened a Rose Road for us, and she banished me from Shadowed Hills. I’m not welcome in my own liege’s halls until she changes her mind, and I don’t think she’s going to. From there, we followed Spike into the roses. He found an opening, and we went through it, and we fell, all the way to the ground in a pitch-black little bubble-realm. The one where Simon had kept Luna and Raysel. He’d anchored it to the Rose Roads.”

“The failure was always good at borrowing and bending magic, when he had access to the blood that held it, and he had Luna,” said the Luidaeg grimly. “Go on.”

“I broke the realm enough that we were able to get out of it, and then I... I called on your mother, and she answered. Luidaeg, Maeve answeredme.” I stared at her in brief and burning awe. Now that I wasn’t actually in the moment, the importance of it was settling across my shoulders like a heavy shawl, weighing me down. “She was listening, and she helped us.”

“Mom always listened to travelers. She said her sister wouldn’t do it, and her husband could only hear the ones who belonged to him, so it fell on her,” said the Luidaeg. “No one ever said the Three were dead—or, sorry, no one who would know what the hell they were talking about ever said they were dead. I’m sure someone, somewhere, said it at least once.”

I frowned. “If you’re sure, how is that not lying?”

“I walked it back before it could hurt me, and I didn’t intend to lie when it came out of my mouth, and I’m not the topic right now—you are, and where Simon may have taken Quentin. I want that kid back as badly as you do. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to act like any of them are expendable.”

Her words hit home, and I winced. This was taking too much time. It didn’t matter if every piece of it had been absolutely essential, time was the one thing we couldn’t beg, barter, or buy more of, and every minute we wasted trying to decide what to do was another minute that Simon had to do whatever he wanted, unchallenged and unopposed. I swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, and said, “We were back on the Rose Roads, thanks to Spike, and we kept walking until I realized the roses didn’t look or smell the same anymore. That was when I called on your mother, and she answered me, and we found our way into the shard realm where your sister is sleeping. It was still a forest, like it had been before, and still too warm to be comfortable, but everything was shrouded in this weird thick mist that wasn’t there when I went with you.”

“She’s always done that when she slept,” said the Luidaeg. “She’s not the only one of us, either. You know how the King is the land in the Summerlands? Well, it’s worse for a Firstborn in their own realm. When Cailleach Skerry was mine to call my own, it would flood and surrender itself to the sea every time I slept. After my children died, the waters failed to recede, and it was lost. I wonderif it’s going to come back now that the Roane are home again. As long as the mist remains thick and unchanging, my sister is safely unconscious.”

“I’m surprised it wasn’t cold. She’s a winter-thing, isn’t she?”

The Luidaeg hesitated, and then said, “That’s a very human way of looking at the seasons. Remember that Titania was the Summer Queen. She’s a creature of feast and harvest, growth and plenty... and decay and destruction. The summer isn’t only about good things. Humans just think of it that way because they fear the cold. Roses don’t bloom as well in winter. Apples don’t ripen. My sister was always a summer creature.”

“Well, then she’s living up to her origins. She’s asleep, and Simon was there when we arrived. I know neither Luna nor Ceres would have voluntarily opened him a Rose Road, so he must still have some of Luna’s blood to work with. He had a bow and arrow and elf-shot he’d brewed himself from the herbs and simples growing near the bier. He said it was powerful stuff. Walther’s confirmed it. May was already injured, and I didn’t want Quentin getting hurt, so we tried to talk to him like rational people.”

“That’s where you made your biggest mistake,” said the Luidaeg. “Simon’s way home has always been an external one. He’s a kind man, and he can be a good man when the situation allows for it, but he’s never been a generous man. His essential selfishness shines through unless he cares. Without knowing who you are to him, he won’t care about you.”

“Luidaeg, he didn’t even remember being married to Mom,” I said. “Everyone says they were together for literally centuries. How could one spell make him forget that much of his life?”

“Not forget,” said the Luidaeg. “Revise. It remade his memory to give him the life he would have had if he’d never found his way home in the first place. He’d always been at risk of losing it. His relationship with his brother was never as strong as it was with his sister; Sylvester cared more, in those days, about being seen as a pureblood scion on a noble line, and claimed Glynis Torquill as his mother, forcing Simon to do the same. Simon never fully forgave him.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

“Because Celaeno Torquill was the woman who carried the boys beneath her heart for nine long months, and it was her bodythat bore them, and her hands that held them to her breast. Sylvester couldn’t forgive her for the crime of being mortal, and Simon couldn’t forgive his brother for the sin of refusing to be known as changeling-born.”

“I... wait.” I knew surnames had come from the human world, not out of Faerie; even this many centuries removed from our King and Queens, there hadn’t been so many of us that we needed to track our family lineages that carefully. Quentin was a Sollys because his mother had been born a changeling. I had just assumed the Torquills had a mortal ancestor further back along their family tree, someone long forgotten, their mortality purged by a hope chest in the days when such things were more common, and less likely to be dismissed as little more than legend.

The Luidaeg nodded. “The Torquill brothers were born as changeling as you were. Their parents took the mortality out of them while they were too young to remember, and Amy’s first great act of blood magic was noticing its absence while they all played in the garden, and no one who was there could ever say whether she’d understood what she was asking, or what she might be capable of doing. That was when we realized she would have to be hidden. If Faerie knew a living hope chest walked among us...”

Sometimes it was hard to learn new things about my mother. They always left me wishing she’d been a better person, because she’d been through so much when she was younger that made me wish I could go to her now, and hold her, and tell her she had value beyond what she could do for other people. Unfortunately, the damage ran too deep, and there were no reassurances I could offer that she’d be able to hear.

I stood and stared at the Luidaeg in silent shock as she continued, “Your mother’s love was never good for him, but it was the best thing he’d ever found for himself, and he anchored himself by it for so long that as long as he remembered her, he could never be entirely lost. Almost, yes, but not all the way. So the spell took that from him, and with it, took August, and anything else he might hold onto.”

“Your magic can be cruel, Luidaeg,” I said, not quite admonishing, not quite forgiving. “He wasn’t attacking us, and I thought maybe if I could convince him he was doing this for Patrick—he still remembered Patrick—he’d be able to come back here with me,and give me permission to get married, and then go back to waiting for his patroness to wake up until the heavens fell down.”

“An exciting plan,” said the Luidaeg. “How were you planning to convince him?”

“He thought Patrick was dead.” I still wasn’t sure he’d known Patrick wasn’t before the Luidaeg cast her spell. It was precisely the kind of casual cruelty both Evening and the false queen thrived on. “I promised him that Patrick wasn’t, and thought that might be enough. It wasn’t. He wrapped me in rose briars and stole a taste of my blood to convince himself that I was telling the truth. But he saw himself stabbing your sister with the elf-shot arrow, and decided we’d been able to manipulate my blood memories somehow.”

“Is that all?”

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