Page 21 of A Killing Frost

“Why the hell not?”

“His Grace asked—”

“That I stay away for a little while, I know. I was there. It’s been a year, Etienne. In case you forgot, I’m a changeling, I’m mortal, I pay attention to the passage of time. Ayearis long enough to qualify as ‘a little while.’ Anything longer than a year would be a ‘a long while,’ and that’s not what he said.” I crossed my arms and glowered. “He alsoaskedme to stay away. He didn’t order. He didn’t command. He certainly didn’t bind. I am a knight of Shadowed Hills, and I am exactly as free to walk through that door as you are.”

“More, maybe,” said May, in a pleasant tone. “Because Quentin and I won’t try to stop her, and she’s armed, which is two things she currently has over you.”

Quentin didn’t say anything. He just stepped forward and glared at Etienne.

Etienne held his position and his posture for a long beat before he sagged and sighed. Quentin seemed to have been the last straw for him. While I’m Quentin’s knight, there are things I’m not equipped to teach him, and he’d been traveling to Shadowed Hills twice a week for lessons in swordsmanship, etiquette, and the intricacies of Daoine Sidhe magic for almost as long as he’d been living with me. Having one of his students clearly prepared to move against him while he was telling another that she was no longer welcome in her home had to hurt.

He stepped to the side. “You have my apologies. When I said I could not let Sir Daye in, I was unaware of the minutiae of the situation.”

I took pity. Etienne’s greatest flaw has always been his rigid obedience to the rules. It doesn’t make him a bad person. It doesn’t even make him a bad friend. It just makes him someone who needs an excuse to misbehave. It’s hard for him to go against orders, even under the best of circumstances, and this was not that.

“It’s cool,” I said, and stepped inside, Spike at my heels. It rattled happily as we crossed the threshold into the knowe, and three more rose goblins popped out from behind the bookshelves, rattling their own thorns in answer. I felt a pang of something close to shame. By staying away, I had kept Spike away as well, and this was where its family lived.

It hadn’t been my intention, or my choice. I looked over my shoulder at Etienne and the others.

“Well?” I asked. “Are you coming?”

They came. All three of them, Quentin in the lead and Etienne bringing up the rear. He closed the door behind himself, and it melted away, leaving a smooth expanse of wall behind.

“His Grace and the Duchess Luna are in the Moon Garden,” he said, voice back to perfect formal precision.

I nodded. “That’s the one past the main library, right?”

Luna has always been a gardener by both choice and calling. It’s one of many things that started making more sense when I found out she was a Blodynbryd, and not a Kitsune as she’d led us all to believe. Her mother is Acacia, Mother of Trees, and she’s a sort of Dryad in her own right, tied to the rosebushes growing on the land she’s rooted herself to, rather than an oak or an elm. For her, gardening is a song, something that lets her call the living world into focus. Plants thrive under her hands, and she finds peace in the action. Even when she was swaddled in a stolen skin, she’d found peace in it.

Hopefully, the fact that she was in one of her gardens would improve her mood and keep her from getting too pissed when she saw me. I waited for Etienne to nod in the affirmative, and then took off down the hall, following the half-familiar curvature of the knowe, which rearranged itself on a regular basis. Quentin and May paced me, keeping up with ease. This had been home for both of them, in their own ways. I wasn’t the only one who’d been in a form of exile.

We passed the large, ornately carved doorframe to the banquet hall, a room that had only been used for Beltane Balls in my lifetime, and started down a narrower hallway with wooden walls and a scuffed maple floor. Halfway down it, I paused, frowning.

“I don’t think this is the way to the library,” I said.

“At last she gets it,” said May.

I blinked at her. “Why didn’t you—?”

“The knowe is taking us somewhere,” she said. “Every turn you’ve made has been the right one, and normally I would expect the library to be somewhere around here. It doesn’t move much. But instead we’re someplace I don’t know, and that tells me the knowe is deciding how this is going to go.”

I glanced at Quentin. He shook his head.

“The servants’ markings say we’re moving toward the library,” he said. They were small flowers carved into the wainscoting and the decorative flourishes on the walls, all but invisible to theuntrained eye, intended to make sure the small army of maids, courtiers, and servers who kept the knowe operational would always wind up where they needed to be instead of wandering in endless, bewildered circles. “I have no idea where we are.”

Well. Wasn’t that fun. I looked up at the ceiling. “We’re sort of in a hurry here,” I said.

There was no response. There never is, when I’m addressing the knowes.

I sighed heavily. “May as well see where it wants us to go,” I said, and resumed walking down the hall. May and Quentin followed, and for a while, the only sound was the scuff of our feet against the floor.

There was a soft chiming, like a crystal bell being rung, and a door literally appeared in the wall ahead of us. As befit the sound of its arrival, it was made of cut crystals set into a silver weave, seemingly too loose and open to hold them in place, so they appeared to hang suspended on nothing but air. When I looked closer, I could see the finest of silver wires connecting each of them to the lattice, keeping them in place.

“Do you know this door?” I asked.

Quentin shook his head. After a pause, so did May.

“I think someone I was once knew it,” she said, in an uncertain tone. “I mean, part of me feels like it’s familiar. But there’s no memory associated with the feeling. Just this sort of itch of recognition.”

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