The Winter Long

The Winter Long by Seanan McGuire




This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to Tanya Huff.

       Thank you for making so many things possible.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:


Welcome to The Winter Long.

This book was one of the first I fully plotted, back when this series was a glimmer in my eye and a fantasy for the future. Everything I have done with October’s world to this point has been for the sake of getting here, to the book that you now hold in your hands. I am incredibly excited to be at this point, to have gotten this far into Toby’s story—and make no mistake, there’s still so very far left to go.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for trusting me to tell you this story, which has been with me for so long. Thanks to the Machete Squad, who are a constant in my life, and who keep me together when things get hard. Thanks to Amanda and Michael, and to Aislinn (welcome to the world, my skeleton girl; we are going to have a lot of fun). Thanks to the Disney Magic Bitches, who have endured another unnumbered series of Disney excursions, including possibly the best birthday party I have ever had, and to my darlings, Vixy, Amy, Brooke, and Shawn, who knew I was a scorpion when they picked me up.

My editor, Sheila Gilbert, is the best I could have wished for, and my agent, Diana Fox, is still my personal superhero. Thanks also to Josh Starr at DAW, who is the most frequent target of my random mid-week phone calls, and to my cover artist, Chris McGrath, for bringing Toby so beautifully to life. And thanks to the crew here on the ground: Christopher Mangum, Tara O’Shea, and Kate Secor.

My soundtrack while writing The Winter Long consisted mostly of Night Visions, by Imagine Dragons, Queen of Spindles, by Talis Kimberley, Baptized, by Daughtry, endless live concert recordings of the Counting Crows, and random episodes of Welcome to Night Vale. Any errors in this book are entirely my own. The errors that aren’t here are the ones that all these people helped me fix.

Now grab your coat. It’s going to get a little chilly in here.









ONE


December 20th, 2012

For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep

Seeming and savor all the winter long.

Grace and remembrance be to you both.

—William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale.

THE WOODS WERE DARK, filled with strange shadows. They twisted and swirled independent of any light source, making the space beneath the towering sequoias look treacherous and wild. Not much in the way of illumination could trickle all the way down through the tightly-laced branches to ground level; the few streaks of moonlight that had managed to reach us were washed out and thin, managing to seem almost darker than having no light at all. Everything was permeated by the smell of redwood sap and the sea.

We had arrived as a group, May, Jazz, and Quentin packed into the backseat like sardines, me behind the wheel, and Tybalt sitting rigidly next to me. He didn’t really like cars under the best of circumstances. He liked them even less when there were multiple other passengers, since that meant he couldn’t respond to an accident by yanking everyone safely onto the Shadow Roads. Call it a quirk brought on by being several hundred years older than the internal combustion engine.