Page 24 of A Killing Frost

I returned my attention to Sylvester. “Okay...”

He looked at me, almost sternly. “Five hundred years, October. You can’t fathom how long a time that is to wait for something.”

“I know I’m not as old as you are,” I said. “That doesn’t make my heart less breakable.”

“Our Firstborn told the Daoine Sidhe it was our duty to spread across Faerie, to carry the sword and the crown and protect the worlds Titania had granted into our care,” he said slowly. “Almost five hundred years I waited for a child of my own. I had all but given up hope when Luna told me she was expecting. Rayseline was the culmination of centuries of dreaming.”

“She still is,” I said sharply. “She’s still your daughter, she’ll still love you when she wakes up. She needs help, she needs support, but she’s not lost to you just because she’s different now.”

“She was perfect,” said Sylvester.

I’d never wanted to slap my own liege as badly as I did in that moment. “If she was perfect before, she’s perfect now,” I said. “She did bad things, and she made some bad choices, but that doesn’t change who she is, and she is your daughter. No matter what her blood says or what face she wears, she’ll always be your daughter. She’s waiting for you to give her permission to wake up and comeback to the world. A lot of the things that were hurting her aren’t here anymore. No more Oleander. No more impossible biology making it hard for her to think.”

Even in Faerie, where the laws of nature sometimes seem less suspended than expelled, some things were never meant to happen. Rayseline Torquill was one of those things. Her father, Sylvester, was a mammal. Her mother, Luna, was a plant wearing a mammal’s stolen face, looped and knotted and barely staying in place. If not for the Kitsune skin Luna had taken in order to escape her father’s lands, Raysel could never have been conceived. Plants and mammals aren’t meant to have children together, and the stresses of Raysel’s impossible dual nature had been tearing her apart.

She might have been all right if her uncle hadn’t abducted her as a child, casting her into formless magical darkness for more than a decade. The isolation and sensory deprivation had broken something in her, letting the little fractures of her nature take over and become dominant. That was why her mother had asked me to offer her the Changeling’s Choice—not normally something that applies to purebloods, who don’t have to decide between the human and fae worlds. In Raysel’s case, the choice was between her father’s heritage and her mother’s.

She chose Daoine Sidhe. Not sure that was the right way to go, considering the Firstborn it left her with, but it meant when she woke up, her body and mind would no longer be at war with themselves. She had a chance.

Sylvester just needed to accept the future he and his daughter could have together now, instead of mourning the version of it that he felt he’d lost.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

Sylvester flinched before looking at me and saying, “It’s my knowe. I could ask you the same thing.”

“I need Luna’s help.”

“Why?”

Telling the truth was a risk, but it was the best chance I had. “I have to find your brother before I can get married,” I said. “Legally, he’s my father.”

To my surprise, Sylvester smiled. Then he started to laugh. He sounded genuinely, enormously entertained. I blinked, taking astep backward. My shoulder bumped against Quentin’s, who shot me a baffled look. I matched it with one of my own. Whatever this was, I didn’t understand it at all.

Sylvester stopped laughing and wiped his eyes with one hand. “Oh, October. October. You asked once why I didn’t tell you more about your mother. This is why. I loved you too much to let you become yoked to that man the way you have.”

I blinked again. “Yoked? Because pureblood law doesn’t want to admit my actual father existed? I don’t think my ignorance would have changed that.”

“Perhaps not. But if you knew nothing of your mother’s marriage, your ignorance would have prevented anyone using my brother against you.”

“Maybe not. Doesn’t matter. I know what I know, and I need Luna to open a Rose Road for us.”

Sylvester frowned. “Why?”

“Simon’s got to be looking to wake up Eira. He lost his way home, which means all he can do is go deeper into the metaphorical woods. She’s his wrong direction. Always has been. If we go to where she’s sleeping, I can sniff out any traces of his magic, and know whether he’s been there.”

“Luna opened him no roads.”

“Luna isn’t the only Blodynbryd, and Simon is better at blood magic than you,” I said. “He knows how to borrow from blood. I’ve seen his handiwork. If he could bleed a single Blodynbryd, voluntarily or no, he could get access to the Rose Roads for his own purposes.”

Sylvester didn’t look surprised or horrified by that proclamation. He just looked tired. “I see,” he said. “Luna will be here shortly, but if you wish to be allowed to speak with her, there’s something you must do for me.”

I frowned. “Has she been listening through the roses this whole time?” Blodynbryd are intimately connected to the roses that belong to them. It makes them vulnerable; Raysel nearly killed her mother by salting the gardens and choking out the roots of Luna’s roses. It also makes them excellent, terrifying spies. If there’s a rose nearby, they could be watching you.

Sylvester nodded. “She told me to come,” he said. “I don’t know how you found this room, but as soon as you entered it, she knew.”

“We didn’t find it,” I said. “The knowe brought us here.” Next to me, Quentin nodded his confirmation.

“Then the knowe wants this as much as I do,” said Sylvester. “If you want to speak to Luna, you must first speak to Rayseline.”

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