Nearly everything I knew about the fey was information I’d been told or read. Nearly all, because, for a brief moment at the height of summer, I’d been in Arcadia and met the Winter Queen. It was into that memory that I delved.

It had hurt. The moment when my heart had stopped and I’d felt the bond between Cécile and me sever almost completely, the few frayed threads doing nothing to combat the feeling of loss. The empty void in my mind where my sense of her, and all her kaleidoscope of emotions, had lived.

Darkness.

Then the scent of grass and flowers and rain had filled my nose, and I’d opened my eyes to meet the verdelite gaze of a woman, her breath icy against my cheek. “Greetings, mortal.”

I’d tried to scramble back, but my wrists and ankles had been bound to the earth with ice, which, inexplicably, I couldn’t break. I reached for my power, but it wasn’t there.

“The last fleeting moment of consciousness of a soulless thing has no magic, mortal.” She smiled, revealing a mouth full of fangs. “You’ve little time – she has little time – and we’ve much to discuss.”

Cécile. If I was dead, then she… “Who are you,” I demanded, though I already knew. This was Arcadia. We were in a meadow, and all around things grew lush and fragrant. Alive. Except, where her hands rested, the grass was brown. Death snaked out and away from her, leaves changing color and falling from the trees, petals withering into dried little husks. Which should not be possible. Not at the height of summer, in the depths of my uncle’s court.

Winter.

“What do you want?” I demanded, trying to maintain focus. But it was hard, because I was dead and I had not been through with life. There had been so much left to do, and Cécile…

Winter ran one clawed finger down my cheek, and I felt the burning cut of cold. The silver lace of bonding marks covered her knuckles, the back of her hand, her wrist. “It is a cruel thing,” she whispered, “to be tied to the one whom you hate. To battle and war for eternity while knowing you will never see your enemy’s demise, for it would also be your own.”

“That’s not an answer,” I snarled. But the bravado was false, because I could feel myself fading. Soon I would be nothing, and Cécile… Please live, I silently pleaded. Please try.

Amusement filled the fairy queen’s gaze, and she said, “Summer was in the bloom of its power those many millennia ago when He allowed his brother, and his brother’s warriors, to wander in your world unchecked. He was so convinced of his invulnerability with me quelled and chained to his throne that he did not see the danger. But I did. And it was a sweet thing indeed to watch him lose so much out of his own arrogance.”

Her eyes were bright and vicious, and I wanted to tell her to get on with it. To tell me what it was that she wanted, because she would not be wasting her time on this conversation if moments later I’d cease to exist.