The Winter Long by Seanan McGuire

mouthful of snakes, all twisting and venomous. “I need to know the truth, and I need to know it now.”
    â€œNo,” he said, and I didn’t hear any lies in that word, only rock-solid conviction. “I swear to you, October, I did not know. My association with the Torquill line goes back centuries, but it was broken after the Great Fire of London, when they ran and left me behind in a city full of ghosts. I never even knew that Simon had married, and to be quite honest, I did not
care
. He is beneath my notice, save for where he endangers you.”
    I searched his face, looking for any hint of dishonesty. I didn’t find it. I relaxed, the tension going out of my body. Tybalt put an arm around me, and I leaned close, grateful for his warmth.
    â€œI won’t claim never to have lied to you, but I have not lied to you since we decided to try taking this relationship seriously,” he said quietly. “I love you. Lying to you would be a mistreatment of what that love means.”
    I laughed, a cold, jagged sound. “None of the other people who say they love me seem to feel that way.”
    â€œThen they are not very good at loving,” he said. “We will go to your mother. We will see that she is fine. If Simon troubles her, perhaps that will pull her out of the fog. We know she can rise, when she feels the need.”
    â€œI know,” I said. “I’m just worried.”
    â€œThat is because you are a good daughter.” Unspoken was the fact that he didn’t think Amandine was a very good mother. I loved him even more for that—both for thinking it, and for not saying it out loud.
    She did the best she could with me. It’s just that what she wanted for my life and what I wanted were always different things. I would have broken myself trying to be the daughter she wanted me to be. In the end, I did the only thing I could have done—the only thing that stood any chance of saving us both. I ran away.
    I leaned closer to Tybalt, resting my head against his shoulder as I watched Quentin, who was apparently half Snow Fairy, kicking his way through the glittering yard. “We really need to take him skiing,” I said.
    Tybalt snorted. He pulled me closer and pressed his cheek against mine, only to draw back and look at me disapprovingly. “You
are
cold,” he said. “Can I convince you to reconsider your position on properly outfitting yourself for this expedition?”
    â€œMom’s tower isn’t far, and it’ll be closer if I have genuine need to get there,” I said. “I’ll be cold, but I’ll live.” The Summerlands are the last layer of Faerie to remain accessible. They’re both larger than the mortal world and smaller, following some strange set of physical laws that no one has ever been able to adequately explain. My friend Stacy’s oldest daughter, Cassandra, is majoring in Physics at UC Berkeley, in part because she’d like to be able to figure out how the Summerlands can bend space the way they do.
    Living in the mortal world makes it easy to forget that Faerie doesn’t follow the same laws. Maybe that sounds a little pat—I mean, my boyfriend is a cat in his spare time, and my sister was originally the physical embodiment of my impending death—but those things are normal to me. Unlike snow in California, and land that can expand and contract like a rubber band according to the needs of the people who use it.
    The one thing that never changes is the size of a claimed demesne. Shadowed Hills had set boundaries and borders. No matter what happened, it remained the same size. Technically, the same could be said about my mother’s tower, but it was a pretty small chunk of real estate: the tower and grounds occupied a patch of land scarcely larger than the footprint of my own Victorian house. I guess that’s one of the side effects of building upward, rather than outward.
    The door