Page 65 of A Killing Frost

“Oh, does it burn?” she asked. “That’ll be the poison doing its work. My little dogsbody, as you call him, has a nimble mind but no imagination. It’s been easy enough to influence him since all he knows how to do is bleed the world around him for his own benefit.”

“He’s been using more and more of your blood because you wanted him to, hasn’t he?” Evening didn’t answer. She also didn’t deny it or look away. That was something of a relief since the wave of rage that washed over me made it easier to ignore the pain. “It’s the blood. The more he uses, the more you can tell him what to do. Even elf-shot, you’re still pulling the strings.”

“The humans have a fairy tale about me, did you know that?” She smiled again, more magnanimously. It was probably easy to be magnanimous, now that she thought she was winning. “They say I ate a poisoned apple and spent a century asleep in a coffin made of glass, until I was brought back to the land of the living by the mercy of true love’s kiss. I didn’t love the man. He just happened to lay his shameful little fetish at my perfect feet as the effects of the poison left my system, and so I woke up and allowed him to be useful.”

“I’d heard rumors,” I said warily. The connection between Eira Rosynhwyr and Snow White was more than just skin-deep. The people of the mortal world had seen a beautiful woman with skin as white as snow walking through the forest, untroubled by the frost, and they had explained her to themselves, spinning a story to suit the facts they had and replace the ones that they were missing. That’s mortal magic. They patch the holes in the world with words, and sometimes those words can hold long after the truth has worn away.

“I’m strongest when I’m sleeping,” she said, still with that smug little smile on her lips. The desire to slap it off was stronger than I wanted to admit. “Out of all my siblings, even Amy, I’m the one who understands the blood we were gifted by our parents the best. I can see what it intends, not just what it is. And I can order it to conceal the things I don’t want to share. Simon has been in communion with me since he was foolish enough to take my sister’s bargain and remember what it means to be mine. Every time he’s let me past his lips, he’s been listening to me as he will never listen to anyone else. I told him how to brew the elf-shot from what he could find growing in my lands. I told him which roses to gather, which streams to attend upon, and how to patch the empty places with my blood. Sleep is my gift.”

I stared at her. “Your blood is in the elf-shot he’s using.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that.” She took a step toward me, the fabric of her dress fading and almost drifting away with the motion. “I’m inside you now, little blood-worker girl, and no matter how strong you think you’ve become, you’re never going to be as powerful as I am. I was the first of our kind. Without me, you’d have had no one to learn from.”

“You’re wrong,” I said, and refused to step backward. She didn’tget to intimidate me. Not here, not now. Not ever again. “Oberon would have been there even if you’d never been born.”

“And where is he now? My precious father, who loved his children so dearly that he left us the second he had the opportunity to do so? I suppose you’d know something about absent fathers, though, wouldn’t you? Born of Amandine’s line. Tam Lin couldn’t wait to run. Not once Maeve’s Ride was broken by your grandmother.” She paused, smirking.

Clearly, she thought she’d just dropped a bombshell, something that would stun and disorient me. That seems to be the real reason purebloods are so obsessed with keeping secrets: they treat them like weapons, assembling their armories one blade and bludgeon at a time, only to deploy them when they can do the most damage. Too bad for Evening that I already knew who my grandparents were, and who they weren’t. Janet had been pregnant when she’d gone to break the Ride, and the strain of the magic she’d been barraged with had been enough to make her lose the baby. It would have been mortal if it had lived, and like all mortal things, it would have been long since gone. The Ride was centuries ago, after all.

“Your father and my mother’s father are the same man,” I said patiently. “If he was absent for her, he was absent for you as well, and I don’t see how it has anything to do with me. Oberon vanished after the Ride was broken.”

“You mean Oberonleft. Maeve was taken, my mother was banished, and Oberon left us to fend for ourselves, after chasing us out of our rooms and locking the doors to trap us here like naughty children. He laid down what bindings he thought were essential to keep us from killing each other in his absence, and then he was gone, and we had no one left to protect us. We were children, and our parents abandoned us.”

“Children” seemed like a funny way to describe a group of immortal, ageless fae, many of whom had children and grandchildren of their own by the time Oberon left—and some of whom had already, like the Luidaeg, buried those descendants. But for Evening, who had always possessed Titania’s protection and what passed for her approval, it must have been a shocking, almost unendurable change. It didn’t make me feel bad for her, even though that was clearly what she’d been trying for. It did make me feel like I might be able to understand her just a little bit better.

“I don’t know why Oberon left, or why Titania was banished; I’m not entirely sure why Maeve disappeared, because you all hint at it and talk around it, instead of saying anything simply. I know it had something to do with the breaking of her Ride.” I shrugged. “If you want to explain, it’s not like I have anywhere else to be right now.”

The pain in my chest was getting worse and worse, making it increasingly difficult to concentrate. I didn’t like that. I tried to turn my awareness inward, to make sure I wasn’t involuntarily changing the balance of my blood again, but my magic refused to respond. It wasn’t there to listen to me. I lifted my hands and stared at them, wide-eyed.

Evening laughed, the sound of ice breaking at the edges of a frozen lake, sharp and beautiful and terrible, all at once. “You’re in my domain now, traitor’s child. You have no power that I do not choose to grant you.”

“That’s real nice of you, Ms. Winterrose,” I said, lowering my hands and glaring at her. “It’s because your blood is currently inside me, right? Well, it isn’t in my veins, and unless you have a way to stop me healing, it won’t be there for long.”

“Oh, October, October, don’t you understand how dreams work?” Her smile was sweeter, and smugger, than it had ever been before. She took another step toward me. “You can dream foryearsin a single night—not even a night. Most dreams last only minutes when they’re measured outside the sleeper. Out there in the waking world, you haven’t even hit the ground yet. I have all the time with you I could possibly need. By the time I allow this dream to end, you’ll be mine as sure as Simon is, and your only wish will be to fulfill my deepest and cruelest desires. As soon as he shot you, you belonged to me. There was no other outcome left.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s it? That’s your grand and glorious plan? To get me elf-shot so you can use the presence of your blood inside my body to manipulate me? Don’t you ever come up with anything new? At least last time, you managed to get me to swallow it myself. This is sort of cheating, don’t you think?”

“Mock me all you like, child, you’ll have time enough to regret it. No roses here for you to pull, no herbs to gather; I could tell you ‘lady, let alone,’ but it would make no difference, not when your transgressions are so dire.”

I blinked, taking a step backward. “Wait—say that again.”

Evening looked confused. “Mock me all you like; you’ll have time enough to regret it?”

“No, not that part—the part about leaving things alone. Where have I heard that before?”

“It’s what the man who would have been your ancestor, had your grandmother not bewitched my father with her mortal charms, said when he found her stealing roses from his good green wood.”

The ballad—of course. It was a line from the ballad of Tam Lin, the song Amandine used to sing me when I reallywasa child, the song that commemorated the devastation my family had accidentally unleashed on Faerie. “She had not picked a rose, a rose, a rose but barely one,” I said slowly. “When up there came the young Tam Lin, said ‘lady, let alone.’” But where had I heard that recently?

Evening stepped toward me again, expression growing impatient. “No more foolishness. It’s time for your education to begin.”

The pain in my chest was growing intense enough to make everything else seem irrelevant. It was like someone had scooped out my lung and replaced it with a burning ember, scorching my ribs and charring the flesh around it. I gasped and clutched my chest, dropping to my knees in the soft, unseen sand of the beach. Above me, I heard Evening’s disdainful laughter.

“Really, October? Feigning a heart attack to avoid the inevitable? You may as well surrender now, for nothing is going to change what’s coming.”

My heartbeat was perfectly normal. I raised my head. “This isn’t a heart attack,” I spat.

“Well, what is it, then?”

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