The Winter Long

“Everyone but Alex, since he still can’t go out at night. Even April, although she’s having trouble with some of the local redwood Dryads.” Li Qin sighed. “They’re a little snobby where she’s concerned, and she doesn’t handle it as well as she might.”


“Are we talking tears or declarations of war?” April O’Leary was the Countess of Tamed Lightning, and the world’s only nonorganic Dryad. Her tree had been destroyed to make room for a housing development, at which point her adoptive mother, January, had transplanted her into a computer server to save her life. The result had been a quirky, slightly alien individual with a strange sense of humor. She was doing an excellent job with her County, so far as I knew. That didn’t mean she was equipped to do an excellent job with a bunch of leaf-brained tree huggers who thought she was an abomination.

“A little bit of both,” said Li Qin. She sounded aggravated on April’s behalf. It was a natural response. Li Qin was January’s widow, after all.

There was a soft displacement of air behind me, accompanied by the smell of redwoods and blackberry flowers. I knew who was there even before Sylvester offered a shallow bow and a mild, “Your Highness,” to the new arrival.

I turned, already smiling, to face our new Queen in the Mists, Arden Windermere.

She was wearing a flowing gown in a shade of frosted white that matched the blackberry flowers woven through her purple-black hair. Her mismatched eyes—one brilliant blue, one mercury-silver—were striking enough that she didn’t need makeup to set them off. She looked like the Queen she was. She also looked profoundly uncomfortable. I guessed that was natural. Arden had been living outside Faerie for her entire adult life, spending more than a century hidden in the mortal world. She’d been back for less than six months, and in that time she’d become Queen and taken on responsibility for a whole Kingdom. Being surrounded by so many of her subjects at once had to be hard on her nerves.

“There you are,” she said, and grabbed my hands, pulling me with her into a gateway that suddenly opened in the air. The world shifted around me as her portal deposited us outside. I yanked my hands away, as much to get my balance back as in protest of her treatment.

We were standing on a slanted rooftop, the shingles beneath our feet ripe with healthy green moss. Redwood saplings had rooted on some of them, straining toward the Summerlands sky above us. I looked around. Adult redwoods grew on every side, some of them ascending from the forest floor far below, others growing from the palace on which we stood.

Arden herself was sitting on the roof when I looked back to her. I blinked.

“Uh, Your Highness?”

“What took you so long?” She hugged her knees, looking up at the moons overhead. “I thought you’d be here earlier.”

“I don’t like parties.” I paused. “And . . . I’m guessing neither do you.”

“I don’t know how to behave at something like this.” Arden shook her head. “Everyone’s looking at me, expecting me to be their Queen, and I just want them to tell me how long I’m expected to stay before I cut and run. I could barely make it through staff meetings at the bookstore without losing my cool. How am I supposed to be in charge of something like this?”

Cautiously, I moved to sit beside her. “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve been doing pretty well with the whole Queen thing. I can’t imagine throwing one party would be that much harder.”

“Then why don’t you do it and report back?”

I frowned a little, leaning on my hands as I looked at her. It occurred to me that Arden didn’t have that many friends. There was Madden, the Cu Sidhe from Borderlands, but . . . that was it, so far as I knew. She’d gone from being a bookstore clerk to being Queen essentially overnight, and she’d been outside Faerie since she was a child. When would she have had the time to make friends? “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I hate parties. You hate this party. I’ll pretend to like parties if you’ll pretend to like this party, and maybe together we can fool the rest of the Kingdom.”