“Simon. I had hoped you would do us the honor of attendance this day. My lady, the Queen, has remarked often on your absence.” She had an accent. Since when did my mother have an accent? She sounded Scottish, rolling her r’s and burring her t’s in a sweet, lilting rhythm.
She’s never had an accent, I thought fiercely. The scene took on a red tint as I resisted it. Accents don’t just disappear. Don’t lie to me, Simon. Don’t you dare.
I can’t. Not here, not in the blood. The thought was wistful, and almost intrusive in its immediacy. This was no memory: this was Simon answering me without saying a word. Her accent faded, and then she put it aside like a toy she no longer wanted to play with. Centuries and the desire not to stand out as foreign when walking among the humans will work wonders on even the deepest habits. But when I first loved her, when she was Amandine of no particular family line, she was born in Scotland, and raised there for the better part of her youth.
The ballroom had frozen, Amandine still smiling at Simon’s memory of himself. This must have happened centuries ago. She hadn’t aged a day.
Okay, I thought. I believe you, but . . . we can’t linger here. I need to know what I need to know. The fact that you thought my mom was hot doesn’t really matter.
I felt his laughter. Oh, October. The fact that I thought your mother was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen matters more than you can know. Let go. Come back.
Letting go of my confusion and diving back into the blood memory was almost impossibly hard. The smell of smoke and mulled cider assaulted my nostrils as the ballroom scene blurred and disappeared around us, replaced, briefly, by Simon and my mother standing in front of a man that Simon’s memory identified as the then-High King of North America, their hands joined, their eyes fixed only on each other. More than a hundred years had passed between those memories: I knew that, even if I didn’t know how I knew. It was just . . . obvious.
The scene dissolved. Amandine’s tower appeared, the door standing open to reveal a garden riotous with color. Red roses, golden daisies, purple spires of love-lies-bleeding—it was like looking into an amateur version of one of Luna’s projects, fiercely alive and just as fiercely beautiful. Mother’s gardens had never looked like that while I lived with her . . . but this memory was long before me, wasn’t it? Because there was Amandine, her belly huge with a baby I had never met, smiling indulgently at Simon.
She chose me, she chose me out of everyone she could have chosen in the world, and I will not disappoint her; I will be the man she needs, and the father that our child deserves. I will always be there for her. I will be there for both of them. Nothing in this world or any other could make me fail them.
Another flicker, and the Amandine who raced through our/my field of vision wasn’t pregnant anymore. The little girl she pursued had silvery braids that glimmered red, like the reddish gold I sometimes saw in wedding rings. Amandine pounced, and the little girl laughed, twisting in her mother’s arms to bury her hands in the pale waterfall of Amandine’s hair.
The scene froze.
“Even here, there are holes in what I can say.” The voice came from beside me, not inside my own head. I turned. There was Simon—but he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on his wife and daughter, and there was a look of heartbreaking yearning on his face. I think that if I had killed him in that moment, looking at that scene, he would have died thanking me. “The bindings I am under are very strong. She made sure of that.”
“You can say ‘she’ without flinching now,” I said. “Can you tell me if I get something wrong?”
“I believe I can, yes.” Simon sighed deeply. “We were so happy. What happened to us?”
“Near as I can tell, Evening Winterrose happened to you.” I didn’t mean to snark: it was almost automatic at this point. I still hated him for what he’d done to me—I wasn’t sure there was anything that could make me hate him any less—but I was also starting to feel strangely sorry for him. Maybe that was a sign of growing maturity. Maybe it was a sign that I was just too tired to care. “She’s the one who geased you, right? Just so we’re absolutely clear.”
“Yes.” The scene changed. In an instant, the little girl was a long-limbed teen, sitting at the table with her mother, a smile on her face as they shared a plate of fruit and cheese. Looking at them, I felt sorrow, and an overwhelming jealousy. Amandine had never been easy with me. Not like that. Not like she was with the daughter that she’d lost.
“Did you know Evening was the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn?”
“Not at first.” Simon’s voice took on a new level of bitterness. “I had my suspicions—things she’d said, things she’d done. Even the way she looked at my wife. I asked Amy once if—” He stopped speaking.
The silence stretched on for long enough that I started to worry. I turned back to him, and he was gone, replaced by the tower wall. “Simon?” A red veil began to cloud my vision. Something was wrong.
Spoke too soon can’t say can’t say can’t say her name . . .
The scene in the tower accelerated, the teenager becoming a young woman, arguing with Amandine, storming out; Amandine following her, and then the tower itself disappearing, leaving me floating in the endless red . . .
“Simon! It’s okay, you don’t have to say her name! Just focus, okay?” I tried to search through the red for the oranges and smoke combination of his magic, and as I did I realized that here, in his heart, there was no citrus sharpness or rot; just the sweet smells of mulled cider and extinguished candle flames. That was what his magic had been, once, before Evening corrupted him. “Come back to me.” I pulled harder on the blood, calling on the thin line of his magic.
Beside me, Simon gasped. I turned to face him. We weren’t in the tower anymore: we were standing in the trees, vast evergreens reaching for the sky on all sides. He was breathing heavily, his hand pressed to his chest like he was trying to keep his heart from stopping.
When he recovered his composure, he said, “My apologies, October. That was somewhat more . . . bracing . . . than I had expected.”
“I’ll be more careful,” I said. “Just breathe, okay?”
“I will do my very best,” he assured me.
“Okay. So . . . you knew that Evening was Firstborn, or at least you suspected it. And this was after you and Mom were married. What changed? How did Evening get her claws into you?”
There was a long pause. Then, in a voice that sounded like it was breaking into a million pieces right in front of me, Simon whispered, “There she is.”
I looked to the trees. The girl with the gold-red hair was stepping into view, wearing a dress the color of corn husks, a candle in her hand. I recognized its mottled calico pattern. She’d gotten it from the Luidaeg. She lingered for a moment, looking around herself like she was waiting for a sign. Then she continued forward, disappearing into the tree line.
“When August was . . . lost . . . we both dealt with our grief in our own ways,” said Simon haltingly. His words sounded strange at first, until I realized there were traces of an almost British accent seeping into them, like some long-buried wound was being torn open. He was focusing so hard on what he was saying that he didn’t have the energy to focus on how it was being said. “Your mother was . . . it’s hard to be of the First, and she had it harder than her siblings, because she was born so soon before Oberon and his wives left us. Her father was not here to teach her how to manage her strengths, or how to compensate for her weaknesses. She was unprepared for the reality of a situation she couldn’t change.”