Rosemary and Rue (19 page)
Authors: Seanan McGuire
Lacey jumped onto the bed, strolling up to butt her head against my chin. At least someone was having a good day. Of course, the cats would have a good time in nuclear winter, as long as somebody was left to feed them. I scratched her behind the ears and sighed. If the cats could get up, so could I.
Pushing the cat off my chest, I levered myself out of bed. “I already fed you, Lacey, stop pretending I didn’t. I need a shower before . . .”
The sentence died as phantom rose branches slapped me across the face and throat, driving invisible thorns deep into my skin. I bent double, too surprised to stop myself from screaming.
Sylvester warned me once about how badly a binding curse could hurt you if you didn’t do what it demanded. That didn’t mean I really understood him until now. Every breath hurt. It felt like my skin was being peeled away, and the world was drowning in the cloying stench of roses. I struggled not to fall over, gagging on the scent. Inaction wasn’t an option: not with the knives of Evening’s command digging into me.
Squeezing my eyes closed, I said, “I know. I’m doing it. Please? Wait.” The stinging receded, although I could still feel thorns brushing my skin. That didn’t matter—I could think and move again. That was all I needed.
Getting out of the grimy ball gown was a challenge. Forcing myself through the process of showering and getting dressed was harder. I kept stumbling, catching myself against the walls as I tried to remember how things like pants worked. The cats milled around my ankles throughout the process, but I didn’t pay them any attention; my thoughts were far away, reviewing Evening’s death over and over again. I hadn’t dreamed of her. I’d thought that was a mercy, but it turned out the dreams were just waiting until I was awake. Lucky me.
After half an hour of tripping over my own feet, I was finally dressed, wearing clean jeans, a plain white shirt, and a loosely knit gray sweater for warmth. The sky outside was gray with clouds, making me really start to miss my coat. Unfortunately, I didn’t think going to the Queen’s Court to ask for it back would be a good idea. After a moment’s hesitation, I shoved the key I’d taken from the rose goblin into the pocket of my jeans.
The cats were crying to be fed. “I still say I fed you already,” I said, as I filled their dish before making myself a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich, acting under the sadly reasonable assumption that I wouldn’t get another chance to eat. To my surprise, the food went down easy, and I made myself a second sandwich before heading into the bathroom to fit my human disguise into place.
Maybe being cursed is good for me, because the spell came together the first time I tried it, blunting the too-sharp angles of my ears and cheeks into something more realistically human. I left my hair loose, blunting those angles still further.
“I can do this,” I said to my reflection. It didn’t contradict me.
The cats were on the couch when I left the bathroom and watched impassively as I strode through the apartment and out the door, grabbing my keys off the counter as I passed. Resetting the wards took a matter of seconds, the magic coming, again, with surprising and unsettling ease. There were wild mushrooms growing on the narrow strip of grass beside the door. I paused to pick a few, tucking them into my pocket. You never know what you’re going to need.
There was no one in sight as I walked to my car. It was too close to Christmas. Everyone was either at work, shopping, or with their families, not hanging around the parking garage, and that was fine with me. I was already planning to see enough unfriendly faces. Evening’s curse relaxed when I started moving; there was no need for it to hurt me when I was actually getting things done.
Taking one last breath to steady myself, I climbed into the car, put the key into the ignition, and started for the freeway.
Shadowed Hills is the largest Duchy in the Bay Area, consisting of the area around Mt. Diablo. That mountain defines their boundaries; if you can see Mt. Diablo, odds are good you’re in the Duchy. It’s one of the largest political entities in the Kingdom of the Mists, but it makes up for it by having several semi-autonomous Counties and no political aspirations whatsoever.
Still, it’s big enough to support some pretty spectacular architecture. Maybe that’s why, as if to spite the expectations of anyone who might come to visit, the Torquill knowe is located in a park called Paso Nogal in the sleepy suburb of Pleasant Hill, about twenty miles outside the boundaries of the Mt. Diablo State Park. It would take a little less than an hour to get there, driving counter-commute. Getting into the knowe might add another twenty minutes. They’re big on security, and I couldn’t blame them; not after what happened to Luna and Rayseline.
I pulled into the parking lot at Paso Nogal and got out of the car, actually somewhat grateful for the cold. From the look of the grass, it had been raining, and that had driven off the bored teenagers that might otherwise have been spending their Christmas vacation hanging around in the park. Silently blessing the weather, I began the trek up the side of the nearest hill.
The Torquills believe in taking precautions: entering their knowe requires jumping through a series of metaphorical hoops that range from silly to annoying. I stopped to catch my breath after walking up the largest hill in the park, crawling under a cluster of hawthorn bushes, and running six times counterclockwise around an oak tree. The ground was slick and muddy, but at least the rain had stopped. My one and only trip to Shadowed Hills in the rain convinced me years ago that there was nothing that pressing.
Once I was sure I wouldn’t collapse, I turned, knocking on the surface of a nearby stump. The sound echoed like it was rolling through a vast hall, and a door swung open in the hollow oak nearby. Smoothing my shirt and brushing my hair away from my face in a gesture that was half anxiety, half courtesy, I stepped through into the knowe of Shadowed Hills.
Whoever built the knowe had very firm ideas about how space was meant to be used—lavishly and without limits. The knowe meets and exceeds the physical limitations of the hill that supposedly contains it; there are rooms that haven’t known footsteps in more than a decade, places only children remember, hidden passages and gardens that haven’t been tended since we lost our Lord and Ladies. It wasn’t opened in Paso Nogal, I know that much. Sylvester shifted the doors there at some point in the last two hundred years, connecting otherwise unrelated locations in the mortal world and the Summerlands.
Evening told me Sylvester took my disappearance as a dark omen and sealed the knowe, swearing not to step outside until his family came home. I can’t blame him. He and Luna were a perfect match, and losing her might have killed him. Instead, it just drove him insane. His seneschal ran the Duchy in his place, and Shadowed Hills fell into despair. Among the fae, the King is the land, and in Shadowed Hills, the King was mad.
That madness broke when Luna came home. Of all the news Evening relayed while she explained the things I’d missed, that was the only part that made me smile. Walking through Shadowed Hills for the first time since I’d come home, it was like there’d never been anything broken there at all. It was the same now as it had ever been. Everywhere I looked there was too much gilt, too much velvet, and generally too much of everything. Even the windows were ringed with garlands of silver and pale blue roses. The smell made me cringe, but you can’t have Shadowed Hills without roses—not with Luna there. She’s the Lady of the Roses, and the Duchy reflects her as much as it reflects Sylvester.
People bustled past in all directions, purebloods and changelings alike, displaying the frantic activity needed to keep a Ducal Court running. None of them knew me, and so none of them stopped to ask why I was there. I stopped and opened a door at random, looking into a small room with dust piled several inches thick on the floor. A donkey-tailed maid brushed by me with a reproachful look, beginning to sweep up. I smiled wanly, moving on.
Evening didn’t tell me where Luna and Rayseline had been, and I hadn’t pressed; I got the impression from the things she wasn’t willing to say that they still didn’t quite know what had happened. Luna and her daughter were gone, and then they weren’t. Sometimes that’s how it works. It’s one of the downsides of living in a land that sometimes seems like it’s based on a children’s story.
A footman met me at the end of the hall, sneering at my clothes. I sneered at him in return, although I had to admit that he was probably more justified. He was dressed in the blue-and-gold livery of Shadowed Hills, ready to receive anyone up to Oberon himself, and here I was, in jeans. Not exactly Ducal Court material.
“Would my lady care to state her business?” he asked.
“Your lady is here to see the Duke. How would you like her to go about doing that?”
He gave me another, even more disdainful look. “Perhaps my lady would care to change first.”
“Certainly,” I said. There are ways of following form that need to be obeyed. Changing for Court when asked to do so is one of them.
The footman waved toward a door off to the right. Offering a shallow bow, I walked over and opened it.
The room on the other side was larger than it had any right to be, walls mirrored and reflecting an infinity of weary-eyed women draped in the thin flicker of a hastily-spun illusion. A table at the center of the room was heaped with leaves, feathers, flower petals, and carded spools of spider-silk. The implication was plain, by fae standards: if you couldn’t make a workable glamour from what was offered there, your business probably wasn’t that important. It’s a subtle sort of pureblood prejudice, and one of the few that still hangs on in Shadowed Hills. I took a deep breath, letting my disguise wisp away until an equally-weary changeling blinked at me from all those myriad reflections, ears pointing through uncombed brown hair. Time to make myself presentable for the nobility.
After studying the table’s contents, I selected a handful of leaves and a spool of spider-silk. Artistry in dresses takes seamstresses and the resources to hire them. Most changelings aren’t that well off, and so we wind up using an endless stream of disposable illusions and short-term transformations, crafting couture from whatever raw materials the various Courts are willing to provide. As long as we don’t come out looking like kitchen help, we do okay.
I closed my eyes and crumpled the leaves in my hands, mixing them with spider-silk until they formed a gummy paste that stuck my hands together. Once the mess stopped crackling as I squeezed it, I ran my hands down the sides of my torso and hips, picturing a simple cotton dress in golden brown—I’ve always looked good in that color—with matching slippers sensible enough to run in. One night in heels was enough to hold me for a while. The scent of copper and cut grass grew thick around me, almost banishing the taste of roses as the spell took shape.
The gummy feeling on my hands faded, replaced by the swish of heavy skirts around my suddenly bare legs, and the absence of hair brushing against the back of my neck. With a final burst of copper, the spell snapped closed, sending me reeling. Even as fresh as I was, casting a spell that complex was enough of a strain that it took a moment of leaning heavily against the laden table before I could get my eyes to focus on the mirrors. Once they did, I studied myself, and sighed.
The dress was wrong.
I’d been aiming for cotton, and I wound up with velvet; the neckline was substantially lower than I’d intended, and the bodice was embroidered with climbing ivy, making it look even more like I’d been trying to draw attention to something other than my eyes. The slippers were practical, thankfully, but they were embroidered to match the dress. Even my hair was wrong, pinned up in an elegant series of layers that made it almost look like it was something other than stick-straight. I glared at my reflection. It didn’t change.
It wasn’t what I’d intended, but it was a decent dress, and I didn’t feel like crafting a new one. It would have to do. Turning, I left the room.
Despite exiting through the door I’d entered by, I stepped out into a different hallway altogether. The footman who had ushered me in was gone, replaced by a page standing at rigid attention in front of the audience chamber doors. His starched tunic and breeches were probably real, unlike my dress: this kid was definitely upholding the dignity of his office. Ah, well; he’d probably loosen up as he got older.
His expression hardened when he saw me, eyes settling on the dull points of my ears. Not just young; young enough to think changelings had no business at Court. Interesting.
Sometimes the best way to deal with prejudice is to ignore it. “Morning,” I said. “Here to see Sylvester.”
“And you are?” he said, giving me the sort of look usually reserved for people with contagious diseases and unpaid bills. There was something familiar about him. He had the blond hair and blue eyes common in young Daoine Sidhe, and looked like he was maybe fourteen years old.
“Sir October Daye of the Kingdom of the Mists, once of the Fiefdom of Home, Knight of Lost Words, sworn to Sylvester Torquill, daughter of Amandine of Faerie and Jonathan Daye of the mortal world,” I said. My full title takes far too long to say, and I’m just a knight. When the real nobles get going, it can take hours. “Also an old friend of the Duke and Duchess, so are you going to let me by, or should I sneak in through the kitchens?”
The page blinked, once, eyes narrowing. “Oh,” he said. “It’s
you
.”
you
.”
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