Seanan McGuire - Rosemary and Rue

I sighed. “Lily, being hasty doesn’t usually get you shot.”

“I see. So I suppose you paused to think through whatever actions did lead to your being shot before you took them?”

“I . . .” Lily narrowed her eyes, and I stopped, reviewing the events of the afternoon in my head. I hadn’t been thinking, or even acting: just reacting. I’d been reacting since I heard Evening’s voice on my answering machine. Looking away, I said, “No.”

“I didn’t think so. People have been trying to kill you for as long as I’ve known you; it seems to be a normal part of your existence, and I’ve grown resigned to that fact. Even so, I’ve never seen you giving so little care to evading their efforts. It almost seems like you want them to catch you.”

“Lily, I—”

“No,” she said, and I stopped, run up against the wall of her implacability. “You forget, how well I knew your mother. Amandine’s excuses were always very much like yours. Nothing you say will be new to me.”

I raised my eyes, and she met them without flinching. Her lips were curved in a faint, sad smile, creasing the scales that ran across her cheeks. “Maybe not. But you always let her go.”

The smile softened, growing sadder and more accepting at the same time. “I always regretted it, as well.”

“We do what we have to.”

“As, I suppose, we must.” She sighed. “Ah, well.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now you leave me. Even if I could hold you here against your will—even if I would, after what we’ve been through together—the Winterrose has bound you, and I can’t defy the law so directly. The sun will be down soon.”

“. . . down?” I asked, staring at her. “Lily, it was night when I got here.” Fleetingly, I wondered how much work I’d managed to miss.

“Time passes, October,” she said. I didn’t have an answer to that. Lily looked at me levelly and continued, “Once the sun is down, Marcia will summon a taxi for you, and I will have one of my handmaids escort you to the edge of the park. Once you have left my lands, you may do whatever you feel is needed, and I will have done what hospitality demands.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I am not done.” Her tone sharpened, becoming colder. “I wouldn’t let you go at all were it not for the binding, and had you not been my unwilling guest once before; understand that. Your mother will not forgive me for your death.”

“My mother hasn’t left the Summerlands in twenty years,” I said, unable to stop myself. “I doubt she’s going to come out to yell at you.”

“I think you might be surprised by what she would do.” I looked at her and couldn’t think of a single way to answer that. So we just sat and drank our tea while the silence stretched out between us, until Lily raised her head, acknowledging some unseen sign.

“The sun is down,” she said, and stood, moving with fluid grace. “Come, October. It’s time to go. I just hope, for your sake, that you’ve rested well enough.”

I pushed myself to my feet and followed her, pausing to take my bloody clothes from a Puca with drag onfly wings and white-blind eyes. She looked familiar, like someone I’d known once, but I didn’t ask. The stories you find in the independent knowes usually aren’t pretty ones.

Lily stopped, looking at me. “You should dress,” she said. “It’s cold outside, and you aren’t as accustomed to it as I am.”

“True,” I said. No one is as accustomed to cold as the Undine, unless you count the various breeds of snow fae. Lily could walk naked in subzero temperatures and not be bothered.

Pulling my jeans over the bottom of the too-short robe turned it into a slightly tasteless, expensive-looking silk blouse; pulling my sweater on, bloodstains and all, made me feel a little more like I was in control of the situation, despite the hole through the left shoulder. Not being dressed like an escapee from a faerie whorehouse will do that for me every time. I would have put my bra back on, but that would have required removing the robe; I wadded it into a ball instead, shoving it into the waistband of my jeans. My left arm bent reluctantly, but it bent. I’d have to be satisfied with that. Nodding to myself, I followed Lily through the darkness and back into the world of men.

Night had chased away the tourists, filling the shadows with a different kind of crowd. There are no fireflies in California, but points of light still danced over the surface of the water, darting away from ambitious fish. There are benefits to a pixie infestation; fireflies don’t pierce the night with glittering laughter or spin each other through ornate midair ballets. White Christmas lights were strung through the branches of the trees, providing brighter, more constant illumination. Pixies who had tired of aerial acrobatics perched on the cords, and clusters of the more human-sized residents were scattered along the pathways, talking and laughing. The Tea Gardens are always at their best when no one but the night-side inhabitants are there to see them. That’s when no one—and nothing—has to hide.

The conversations quieted as we drew close, and I could feel eyes on my back as we passed. I didn’t turn. Some things are better left alone, and that includes questions from the people who lost their home for fourteen years because it had become my prison. I’m sorry, and I’d undo it in a heartbeat, if I could . . . but I was learning more and more each day that looking back never solved anything.

Lily’s promised handmaid was sitting balanced on the low wooden fence beside the gate, chatting with a tall, brown-haired man whose eyes were ringed with the characteristic gleam of faerie ointment. I stopped, eyes widening.

“Juliet?” I asked.

The woman turned toward the sound of her name and smiled, revealing oversized canines behind cherry-red lips. Narrow stripes ran up the sides of her face, vanishing into the gold-and-brown streaks of her hair. “Hey, Tobes,” she said, sliding down from the fence with hip-shot ease, half smirking at me. “Surprised much?”

“Julie,” I said, almost in a whisper. Somehow, we closed the distance between us; somehow, I was hugging her, laughing so hard I was almost crying—or was that crying so hard that I was almost laughing? Julie had her arms around me, and was doing much the same, with the added rumbling undertone of her purr. The man she’d been talking to stood back, out of the way, watching our reunion with a small, puzzled smile.

Finally, I pushed Julie out to arm’s length, staring at her. “What are you doing here?”

“The usual.” Julie shrugged, rolling her eyes to indicate that the usual was nothing of any real importance. “Uncle Tybalt’s in another snit, so I’m here, playing handmaid until it’s safe to go home.”

“What’d you do?”

She grinned again. “I bit him.”

“Good for you.” I squeezed her upper arms, returning her grin with one of my own. Julie’s a Cait Sidhe changeling, the result of a dalliance between one of Tybalt’s courtiers and a mortal woman. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Julie flunked the Changeling’s Choice in the most dramatic way possible. There was an accident—I never got the details—and her mortal mother was killed, while Juliet, at the age of six, tapped into her racial talent for shapeshifting. The police who came for the cleanup found a body, but no little girl. Julie was already in the hands of her father’s family.

It took them years to lure her back to human form. From what I’ve heard, Tybalt tried everything, until finally, one day, she just changed. That’s been their relationship ever since; as her de facto uncle, he tries to make her follow the laws of the Court of Cats, and she pretty much ignores them, right up to the point where she gets tossed out on her tail. Again. She was a bitter, resentful, maladjusted kid who grew into an equally maladjusted teenager; it was only natural that we’d become friends the day we met. She had a lot of anger in her, and she knew how to express it. As someone who’d always been better at repression than expression, I envied that.