Page 53 of A Killing Frost

California doesn’t allow private ownership of actual beaches. The Summerlands overlay California, but they’re not subject to mortal laws. The Luidaeg began walking, her dress frothing around her ankles like kicked-up water. It was a beautiful effect and would have been lovelier if it hadn’t been so unsettling. It was getting harder to ignore how much it looked like she’d stolen a strip out of the sky.

Fae, especially the more powerful purebloods, love forcing random pieces of nature to behave like couture. Gowns made of living butterflies, or feathers, or strips torn out of the wind, aren’t uncommon. But convincing the sky to stay that dark and wrap itself around her so tightly, without turning clear or wisping away, was a display of casual power more blatant than she normally bothered with. She was the Luidaeg, the sea witch, immortal and unstoppable.

And if she was showing off, even to this degree, she was afraid. I didn’t like that. Anything that worries the Luidaeg is something lesser fae should stay far, far away from. I hurried to pace her. The ocean beside us was perfectly calm, a flat sheet of black glass stretching all the way to the unseen line of the horizon. The conflicting light from the half-dozen moons overhead glittered and danced across its surface, painting it with rainbows, beautiful and cold.

“Do you think he’s going to wake her up?” I asked.

She glanced at me, and her eyes were glass-green, devoid of the darkness that sometimes lingered there. “I think he’s going to get a nasty surprise if he does, since he’s the reason she’s asleep, andshehas no prohibitions against killing her mother’s descendants. Or my mother’s descendants. She can murder with impunity because who’s left to stop her? Only me, and I’m bound too tightly to raise a hand in anyone’s defense.”

Something we’d learned all too well when Evening had literallykilled her, leaving her body discarded on the floor of her apartment. I had arrived before the night-haunts, and it says something about my life that my first response had been to bring her back from the dead. It says something else about my life that it hadn’t been the first time I’d done something like that—although it had been the first, and so far only, time with one of the Firstborn, and it had exhausted me in ways I hadn’t had the words for. One of the first things she’d said upon waking up was that she hadn’t been dead for long enough: her geas still bound her. Meaning if Simondidwake Evening, the Luidaeg wouldn’t be able to fight her.

Meaning also that she couldn’t help me against Simon himself. The only way she could hurt a child of Titania was if they knowingly and willingly entered into a bargain with her. Once that was done, the rules changed, at least for the duration of their exchange. So while removing Simon’s way home had absolutely hurt him—and was still hurting him according to any reasonable means of measure—it hadn’t violated her geas.

My mother is a nightmare and my sister isn’t much better, but whenever I have to think too hard about the family politics among the Luidaeg and her siblings, I’m very, very glad my family is the way it is. Sure, it would be better to have a mother who didn’t lie to me and kidnap my fiancé when she wanted things, and a sister who didn’t think I was vermin for being part-human, but given the choice between them and Evening, I’m happy to stick with what I have.

The beach continued in a straight line for what seemed like forever, silvery sand glistening in the moonlight. Ahead of us, I saw what looked like a palace made of delicately interwoven seashells rising out of the surf and towering over the cliff that provided it with partial support. The shape of it wasn’t familiar from this angle, but its planes and faces gleamed with pearlescent light, pale pink and impossibly iridescent. I had never seen it before. I knew it all the same.

“Goldengreen?” I asked, glancing to the Luidaeg for confirmation.

She nodded. “My sister wanted her privacy, so she drove its foundations deep into a place I had already gone to great lengths to hide. From everyone buther, of course, since there’s no trueprivacy between sisters.” The loathing in her voice was palpable. “Technically, Goldengreen is built on my own claimed, unceded land.”

“You never told me that.”

“It never came up.”

Her simple dismissal stung. I’d been the custodian of Goldengreen for long enough that I should have known if I was risking offending the Luidaeg by performing my duties. “Is there any way to move it, now that it doesn’t belong to her anymore?”

“Not without destroying and rebuilding the knowe, and I never got the impression you wanted to do that.” We were getting closer, the walls of Goldengreen rising above our heads. As was often the case in the Summerlands, the distance we were walking and the distance we’d actually traveled didn’t quite add up. No one really knows how big the Summerlands are, but while locations on that side of reality will roughly correspond with locations in the human world, they’re not quite built on the same scale.

“No,” I said quietly. “No, I don’t want to do that. I wouldn’t want to do that, even if Goldengreen still belonged to me. It’s not the knowe’s fault that it was built by a bad person.” None of us can be blamed for who our parents were. And if the knowe was truly as alive as I had always believed them to be, Evening was its mother. Talk about fruit of the poisoned tree.

Instead of heading for the cliff or a previously unknown exterior staircase, as I had expected, the Luidaeg led me around the wall of the knowe, to the place where the cliff wall extended out over the water and formed a gentle slope. “This is the part you’re not going to like,” she said.

“As opposed to all these other parts that I’ve absolutely adored?”

“If we don’t want to climb half a mile of cliff face—and we don’t, these walls weren’t designed to provide easy handholds, and falling is just going to slow us down even more—then we need to go in through the cove.”

Her meaning hit me like a hammer. I took an involuntary step backward, eyes going wide. “What? No! There has to be another way in!”

“Not one that will get us there with any speed, and I thought you wanted to save the kid.” She raised one hand, studying her fingernails. “You planning to tell me I’m wrong?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Who the fuck told you Faerie was fair? You should deck them the first time you have the opportunity because they didn’t do you any favors with that one.” She lowered her hand. “That mean you’re good to go for a little swim with me?”

I hate water. I’ve managed to get past most of my issues—I let people in now, I try not to charge into danger without consideration for the people around me who care and would be hurt if I went and got myself killed—but I still hate water. Even the thought of submerging myself can bring back full-body flashbacks to the moment when my gills opened and my lungs stopped working and the land rejected me for what felt like it was going to be the rest of my life. I don’t remember much of the fourteen years I spent swimming in the Japanese Tea Gardens. Fish don’t have the best sense of time. I remember enough to know that there’s a reason I wake up sometimes in a cold sweat, with a heart that’s beating too fast to let me go back to sleep, and why I can’t take baths anymore. The water is death.

And the sea witch was looking at me with barely disguised impatience, waiting for me to get over myself. I swallowed hard and asked, “Do I have to turn into anything?”

“I know you think I can do whatever I want, but those potions I mix up aren’t just for show; the accessories matter when I’m doing big magic and want it to last more than a few minutes. All I could turn you into without proper preparation is something simple, and I don’t think either of us wants that.”

A fish. She was saying she could turn me into a fish without access to her tools, and she was right: there wasn’t much in the world that I wanted less than I wanted that. Quentin being hurt badly enough that we couldn’t save him made the list. I closed my eyes, trying to focus on my breathing, and keep myself from losing control of my nerves. “All right, then,” I said. “Do it.”

There was a pause. When she spoke again, there was a hitch in her voice. “October... Toby... you do understand what you’re asking me to do, don’t you? It’s a small enough thing that we don’t have to make a bargain for me to do it, but it’s still going to be—”

“We have to get under that wall, and I can’t swim well enough to make it,” I said, cutting her off, not opening my eyes. “Whateveryou’re going to do, do it now. Before I come back to my senses.” I paused before adding, in a very small voice, “Please.”

“If you insist,” said the Luidaeg. She clapped her hands, and the smell of the sea, which had already been all around us, rose and grew until it was overwhelming. Until I was choking on it.

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