“Don’t get too used to it,” I said. “We’re all here now.”
“Yes,” said Tybalt. “I suppose we are.”
We started up the hill, the Luidaeg in the lead. Getting into Shadowed Hills from the mortal side of things usually requires a complicated series of actions, all of them designed to be virtually impossible to perform by accident. The Luidaeg ignored them completely. She just climbed straight toward the summit of the hill, never turning, never looking back. We mimicked her. The worst that would happen was we would need to go back down and start over, but I didn’t think that was going to be a problem. The Firstborn have a way of shaping Faerie to fit their needs.
When we reached the burnt-out old oak tree at the top of the hill, the Luidaeg stopped, sighed, and snapped her fingers. The sound was louder than it should have been, gathering echoes as it bounced off the trees around us and finally returned, remade by distance and the acoustics of the park into the sound of a key turning in a lock. The door to Shadowed Hills appeared in the hollow of the oak, swinging slowly open in silent welcome. The Luidaeg lowered her hand and smirked.
“See? All you have to do is know how to talk to them.” With that she stepped through the open door and into the hall beyond. I followed her, and Tybalt followed me, both of us tensed against the potential for attack.
The hall was empty. The air still smelled of roses—the air in Shadowed Hills always smelled of roses—but the floral perfume was underscored by a hard, frozen note, like it had snowed recently inside the knowe. That would be Evening’s doing. I could smell the traces of her magic everywhere, overlaid on the cleaner, less corrupt workings of Sylvester and his people.
The Luidaeg turned back to look at us, all traces of levity gone from her expression. Her eyes were solid black again, like the eyes of a shark. “From here, we must be careful,” she said. “Remember what she is. Remember what she can do.”
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded once, tightly, and walked past her as I started toward the throne room where Luna and Sylvester received their guests. It seemed like the most likely place to find a power-hungry Firstborn who had instructed her children to go off and acquire glory in her name. The Luidaeg and Tybalt walked behind me, forming the other two points of our small triangle. Having them there made me feel a little better—I wasn’t going into danger alone. Not this time.
There were no guards at the vast doors to the throne room. That didn’t strike me as a good sign. I pushed the left-hand door open, trying to keep my arms from shaking under its weight, and started into the familiar vast, over-decorated space on the other side. My sneakers were silent against the checkerboard marble of the floor.
And there, on the other side of the room, in the throne that was meant to belong to Sylvester Torquill, sat Evening Winterrose. The sight of her took my breath away. Even seeing her in Goldengreen hadn’t prepared me for this, for Evening in her element, strong and untouchable and restored to us, because even death couldn’t hold her, not Evening. I’d been foolish to think otherwise.
A small part of me—the part that had struggled against the mists in Blind Michael’s lands and the sweet spell of love cast by my Gean-Cannah almost-lover—screamed that the floor wasn’t really falling away, that Evening wasn’t really the most breathtaking thing I’d ever seen. This was all trickery, treachery, the sort of illusions that I’d encountered before.
She was wearing a red satin dress, the color of rose petals, the color of blood on the snow, the color of apple skins in the winter. It was a confection of floor-length layers and gathered falls. Her seamstress had been clever, because when Evening moved—even the slightest twitch—all that gathered cloth fluttered like feathers in the wind, revealing myriad small cuts and smaller dagger-points of deeper red silk, red as danger, red as dying. Against the cloth, her skin truly was as white as snow, and her coal-black hair seemed on the verge of bursting into flames. Then Evening looked at me and did the most terrible thing of all.
She smiled.
“There you are,” she said sweetly. “I was wondering when you’d find it in your heart to come and visit me. A little bird told me you’d stopped by the knowe and then left without even saying hello. Really, October, is that any way to treat someone who’s been your friend for as long as I have? It seems uncommonly rude. I always thought you were more polite than that. It seems I overestimated your mother’s teaching of you.”
The urge to abase myself was strong. I dug my fingernails into my palms, bearing down until the pain allowed me to center myself and say, in a tense voice, “That’s Sylvester’s throne.”
“What, this old thing? He said that I could borrow it for a time, since my own holdings have been closed to me.” A frown flitted across her face. “That was really most unkind of you, to help that half-breed stripling take my place as his own. What must his parents have been thinking? Land and sea together, it’s a mixture meant for disaster, don’t you agree?” Her words were directed to me, but her eyes went to the Luidaeg, making it clear who her message was really intended to reach.
“That’s Sylvester’s throne,” I repeated. “He didn’t give it to you willingly. If you have to compel someone to give you what you want, it’s not really yours.”
“Isn’t it? Because it seems pretty real to me.” She leaned back in the throne, resting her hands on the arms like she had been sitting there for years. “It doesn’t matter how you get the things you own. What matters is that you keep them.”
There was something very wrong with her logic. I swallowed hard, and asked, “Why are you here, Evening? You weren’t dead, but you let everyone in the Mists believe you were. You left us. Why are you back?” Tybalt and the Luidaeg were a silently reassuring presence at my back. I wondered why they weren’t saying anything, but only distantly; the bulk of my attention was reserved for Evening. Even though my head felt heavy and stuffed with cotton, I knew that taking my eyes off of her would be a terrible idea.
The smell of winter roses was so heavy in the throne room that it was cloying, worse even than the smell of the Luidaeg’s magic in the enclosed cab of my car had been. I dug my nails a bit deeper into my palms, trying to find that pure vein of agony that would grant me laser focus, even if it made me suffer later.
“Come here, October,” said Evening. “Let me see you.”
I had taken two steps before I realized I was going to move. “Why should I?” I asked, stumbling to a stop.
“Because you don’t want to make me come to you,” she said.
That was so reasonable that I started walking again. I tried to make my legs stop moving, and they refused me; they had listened once, and it wasn’t their fault if Evening made a better case than I did. My head was swimming, as much with the smell of roses and smoke as with the brute reality of her presence, and all too shortly I was standing on the dais in front of her, near enough that she could almost have reached out to touch me.
“Oh, rose and thorn, you’ve changed,” she said, and stood, stepping forward so that we were almost nose to nose. It was startling to realize that we were virtually the same height. She had always seemed like she should have been taller than me when she was standing on her own. “Do you even know how much you’ve changed? Don’t answer that.”
To my dismay, I found that I couldn’t. The Luidaeg had said that Evening would have to work hard if she wanted to have me; well apparently, I had been deemed worth the effort. Lucky, lucky me.
Evening reached out and ran her hands down my hair, the fingers of her left hand lingering on the tip of one sharply-pointed ear. Her skin was cool and faintly silky, like the petals of a rose that had been blooming entirely in the shade. Whatever masks she’d once worn for my benefit, they were disappearing now, washed away and replaced by the simple reality of what she was. Firstborn. Fairest of them all. “Look at you,” she mused aloud. “I’d never catch you so easily now. Your arrogance is the same, but your blood . . . do you know what you are?”