The Winter Long
Page 67
It was really a pity that I’d met her. “I need to touch her skin if I’m going to do this,” I said. “Can you open the coffin?”
“Of course,” said Luna. The vines writhed again, this time twisting and grasping until they had somehow lifted the lid entirely off of Rayseline’s glass prison.
I breathed in, tasting the strange mixture of her heritage under the floral scents that dominated the room. Then, after one last uneasy glance back at Tybalt, I climbed into the still-writhing morning glory vines and started to wade toward Rayseline.
Luna might have wanted me to help her daughter, but the plants she controlled were nowhere near as sure about the idea. Vines tangled around my waist and legs, slowing my progress and threatening to send me face-first into the undergrowth. I gritted my teeth and forged on, trying not to break or uproot any of the individual tendrils as I made my way to the coffin.
“That’s quite enough,” said Luna. The vines let go of me so abruptly that I wasn’t braced for it. I stumbled, falling forward, and caught myself against the coffin’s edge. I glanced back. Luna was looking at me coldly. “Fix her.”
“I’m not a switch, okay? You can’t flip me on and off.” I straightened, pulling the knife from my belt. “This is going to hurt her. I don’t know whether people who’ve been elf-shot usually scream, but Gillian did, so there’s a chance Raysel might. Scream, I mean. If that happens, you need to stay where you are. Don’t try to touch her, and don’t use your plants to try to throttle me. I have to finish once I start.”
“If I think you’re hurting her on purpose, you’ll never be seen again,” said Luna, and there was a coldness in her voice that I’d heard before from her mother, Acacia. It was impossible not to believe her.
And I couldn’t let that matter. “You’re the one demanding I perform blood magic on your daughter while she’s unconscious and can’t consent,” I snapped. “Is it going to make her life better? Maybe. It’ll stop her blood from warring with itself, and that’s something anyway. But any pain she suffers is on you. Now are you sure you want me to do this?”
For a moment—just a moment—Luna looked fragile and uncertain, and in that moment she was more like the Luna I had known for most of my life than she had been since Raysel poisoned her. Then the moment passed, the shutters on her face falling closed again, and she said, “Yes. She is my daughter. She is lost. Now save her.”
I sighed. “Right.” I turned my back on her as I raised my knife and slashed the palm of my left hand in a quick, unhesitating gesture. Pain followed the blade, and blood followed the pain, welling up hot and red in my palm. I clamped my mouth over the wound, filling it before I could start to heal. The smell of my magic rose around me, cut grass and bloody copper overwhelming everything else.
When I had changed the Queen of the Mists, she had been awake and fighting me. It had been the same with Chelsea. With Gillian, though, she had already been elf-shot before I started to work my magic. I kept that in mind as I swallowed the blood, leaned forward, and pressed my lips against Raysel’s forehead, starting to search for the tangled threads of her heritage.
Choose, I thought. Tell me what you want, because I don’t want to make this decision for you. Tell me what comes next.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Raysel’s voice came from directly behind me. I opened my eyes. Her body was still in front of me, but the glass coffin was gone, replaced by a bier of roses. I straightened, turned, and saw two women standing there.
Both of them were Rayseline.
One was shorter than the Raysel I knew. Her skin was a delicate shade of rose petal pink, and her hair, while still the color of fox fur at the roots, shaded paler and paler until it was white at the tips. She was her mother’s daughter. The other was tall and pointy-eared, and there was a scowl on her overly perfect face. She had always looked predominantly Daoine Sidhe, but the edges of her had been . . . blunted, for lack of a better word. That softness was gone now, replaced by hard angles and a subtly altered bone structure that spoke with absolute clarity to her heritage.
Tybalt and Luna were gone. We were standing in the middle of an endless riot of roses, real and unreal at the same time, until the two concepts ceased to have any meaning at all. There were three Raysels. This was going to be like Gillian, then: she was going to have a choice.
“Well?” demanded the Daoine Sidhe version. “What are you doing?”
“I’m here to offer you a choice,” I said, trying not to feel self-conscious about my bloody lips and borrowed sweater. “Your mother asked me to.”
The Blodynbryd’s eyes widened. “Why would my mother ask you to do anything for me? I tried to kill her. I’ll probably try again when I wake up.” The statement was devoid of malice: it was just something she was going to do, whether she wanted to or not. It was inevitable. “She shouldn’t be doing me any favors.”
“Uh, she sent me here, into your . . . I don’t know, dreams, whatever this is, so that I could pull you into a shared hallucination where I would ask you what you wanted to be. The end result is going to be a lot of pain.”
“Way to candy coat things for me, Toby,” said the Daoine Sidhe, actually looking slightly amused. I must have looked nonplussed, because she continued, saying, “I think a little more clearly here. I think it’s because I’m not awake, so I can take my time figuring stuff out. You know how that is.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, and held out my hand. “I don’t think we can stop being here if you don’t make a choice.”
“What kind of choice?” asked the Blodynbryd, as both of them waded toward me through the roses. “Are you here to wake me up or something? Because I have to say, you’re not really my idea of Prince Charming.”
I laughed despite myself. “No. I don’t think you’re going to be waking up for quite a while.” Admitting that out loud sobered me right back up again. “But your mother thinks you’ll have an easier road back to health if your blood isn’t warring with itself. She wants you to be either Daoine Sidhe or Blodynbryd.”
“She didn’t just tell you what to turn me into?”
“She sort of did,” I said, thinking back to Luna’s words to me in the garden. “But that was before I wound up here. Now that I can talk to you, I guess that means the choice is yours. What do you want to be?”
“Of course,” said Luna. The vines writhed again, this time twisting and grasping until they had somehow lifted the lid entirely off of Rayseline’s glass prison.
I breathed in, tasting the strange mixture of her heritage under the floral scents that dominated the room. Then, after one last uneasy glance back at Tybalt, I climbed into the still-writhing morning glory vines and started to wade toward Rayseline.
Luna might have wanted me to help her daughter, but the plants she controlled were nowhere near as sure about the idea. Vines tangled around my waist and legs, slowing my progress and threatening to send me face-first into the undergrowth. I gritted my teeth and forged on, trying not to break or uproot any of the individual tendrils as I made my way to the coffin.
“That’s quite enough,” said Luna. The vines let go of me so abruptly that I wasn’t braced for it. I stumbled, falling forward, and caught myself against the coffin’s edge. I glanced back. Luna was looking at me coldly. “Fix her.”
“I’m not a switch, okay? You can’t flip me on and off.” I straightened, pulling the knife from my belt. “This is going to hurt her. I don’t know whether people who’ve been elf-shot usually scream, but Gillian did, so there’s a chance Raysel might. Scream, I mean. If that happens, you need to stay where you are. Don’t try to touch her, and don’t use your plants to try to throttle me. I have to finish once I start.”
“If I think you’re hurting her on purpose, you’ll never be seen again,” said Luna, and there was a coldness in her voice that I’d heard before from her mother, Acacia. It was impossible not to believe her.
And I couldn’t let that matter. “You’re the one demanding I perform blood magic on your daughter while she’s unconscious and can’t consent,” I snapped. “Is it going to make her life better? Maybe. It’ll stop her blood from warring with itself, and that’s something anyway. But any pain she suffers is on you. Now are you sure you want me to do this?”
For a moment—just a moment—Luna looked fragile and uncertain, and in that moment she was more like the Luna I had known for most of my life than she had been since Raysel poisoned her. Then the moment passed, the shutters on her face falling closed again, and she said, “Yes. She is my daughter. She is lost. Now save her.”
I sighed. “Right.” I turned my back on her as I raised my knife and slashed the palm of my left hand in a quick, unhesitating gesture. Pain followed the blade, and blood followed the pain, welling up hot and red in my palm. I clamped my mouth over the wound, filling it before I could start to heal. The smell of my magic rose around me, cut grass and bloody copper overwhelming everything else.
When I had changed the Queen of the Mists, she had been awake and fighting me. It had been the same with Chelsea. With Gillian, though, she had already been elf-shot before I started to work my magic. I kept that in mind as I swallowed the blood, leaned forward, and pressed my lips against Raysel’s forehead, starting to search for the tangled threads of her heritage.
Choose, I thought. Tell me what you want, because I don’t want to make this decision for you. Tell me what comes next.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Raysel’s voice came from directly behind me. I opened my eyes. Her body was still in front of me, but the glass coffin was gone, replaced by a bier of roses. I straightened, turned, and saw two women standing there.
Both of them were Rayseline.
One was shorter than the Raysel I knew. Her skin was a delicate shade of rose petal pink, and her hair, while still the color of fox fur at the roots, shaded paler and paler until it was white at the tips. She was her mother’s daughter. The other was tall and pointy-eared, and there was a scowl on her overly perfect face. She had always looked predominantly Daoine Sidhe, but the edges of her had been . . . blunted, for lack of a better word. That softness was gone now, replaced by hard angles and a subtly altered bone structure that spoke with absolute clarity to her heritage.
Tybalt and Luna were gone. We were standing in the middle of an endless riot of roses, real and unreal at the same time, until the two concepts ceased to have any meaning at all. There were three Raysels. This was going to be like Gillian, then: she was going to have a choice.
“Well?” demanded the Daoine Sidhe version. “What are you doing?”
“I’m here to offer you a choice,” I said, trying not to feel self-conscious about my bloody lips and borrowed sweater. “Your mother asked me to.”
The Blodynbryd’s eyes widened. “Why would my mother ask you to do anything for me? I tried to kill her. I’ll probably try again when I wake up.” The statement was devoid of malice: it was just something she was going to do, whether she wanted to or not. It was inevitable. “She shouldn’t be doing me any favors.”
“Uh, she sent me here, into your . . . I don’t know, dreams, whatever this is, so that I could pull you into a shared hallucination where I would ask you what you wanted to be. The end result is going to be a lot of pain.”
“Way to candy coat things for me, Toby,” said the Daoine Sidhe, actually looking slightly amused. I must have looked nonplussed, because she continued, saying, “I think a little more clearly here. I think it’s because I’m not awake, so I can take my time figuring stuff out. You know how that is.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, and held out my hand. “I don’t think we can stop being here if you don’t make a choice.”
“What kind of choice?” asked the Blodynbryd, as both of them waded toward me through the roses. “Are you here to wake me up or something? Because I have to say, you’re not really my idea of Prince Charming.”
I laughed despite myself. “No. I don’t think you’re going to be waking up for quite a while.” Admitting that out loud sobered me right back up again. “But your mother thinks you’ll have an easier road back to health if your blood isn’t warring with itself. She wants you to be either Daoine Sidhe or Blodynbryd.”
“She didn’t just tell you what to turn me into?”
“She sort of did,” I said, thinking back to Luna’s words to me in the garden. “But that was before I wound up here. Now that I can talk to you, I guess that means the choice is yours. What do you want to be?”
