A Red-Rose Chain

“He’ll leave you before this is done, you know,” murmured the false Queen’s voice, from deep inside the mist. The air smelled of rowan and tasted of the sea, an indefinable flavor that was salt and rot and petrichor and a thousand other things, all of them mingled into a single element. “He’ll leave you to drown, and he won’t be there to save you.”


“I’ve never needed to be saved before.”

“Oh, my dear. My dear, my delusional darling, no. That’s where you’re wrong. You have never been the golden-haired girl in skirts of green, and you are always the one who must be saved.”

As suddenly as it had come, the mist was gone. My hand was back on Tybalt’s arm, and he was frowning at me, eyes narrowed in anger and suspicion. I forced myself to keep my chin up, not allowing myself to look down at my clothing. I could already tell, from the feeling of fabric hanging around my legs, that it had been changed.

“You know I hate it when you do that,” I said, eyes fixed on the false Queen. She was reclining in her seat, a smug expression on her face. There was a time when that look would have caused me to compare her to a cat, but I had gotten to know the Cait Sidhe a lot better since then—all sorts of Cait Sidhe, not just my childhood friend, Julie—and I knew no cat could ever match her for underhanded treachery. They could be deceitful, sure, but it wasn’t the same thing.

When the Cait Sidhe came to kill you, they did it with tooth and claw, and they did it in the open. They didn’t do it with words and dresses and slander.

“Do you?” she asked, her eyes widening theatrically. “I don’t believe you ever told me so. Then again, perhaps that’s because in the past, when I gave you the gift of a better wardrobe, I was still recognized as rightful Queen of the Mists. It’s rude to argue with your monarch, isn’t that so? So you must have stayed silent, and now I have overstepped. How terrible. Imagine how this could have been avoided with better communication. Then again, many things could have been avoided with better communication. You could, for example, not have gone looking for an imposter to steal my throne away from me.”

I blinked at her, momentarily nonplussed. To cover the silence, I looked down at myself, finally giving her the satisfaction of acknowledging what she’d done.

My jeans, blouse, and bodice were gone, replaced by a pine-green velvet gown straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. It was embroidered with gold heraldic roses around the long, trailing cuffs and square neckline. The underdress was pale gold, a few shades lighter than the embroidery, and had its own line of primroses in heather green stitched across the neckline. I kicked out one foot, sending several skirts rustling out of the way, and revealed a green slipper that matched the gown.

“You always did have an excellent sense of color,” I said, looking up again. “You know it didn’t go down like that. You didn’t leave me any choice.”

“I left you the world, October.” The coy theatricality bled out of her eyes, leaving them icy and filled with the moonstruck madness that had always been her stock in trade. It seemed colder than it used to be, less fragmented and more simply wild. I had done that to her. The weight of it seemed to strike me all at once. So much of who she’d always been was in her blood, in the jagged places where her various heritages rubbed up against each other. And yes, sometimes those edges were sharp enough to cut her, or to cut the people around her, but they’d been hers, and I’d taken them away from her without her consent.

The false Queen wasn’t the first person whose blood I had changed. She wasn’t even the most recent. But she was the only one whose blood I had changed without her consent, against her will, and while I had done it to save both myself and the people I loved, I suddenly found myself wishing there had been another way. There was a time when I would have found another way, because I wouldn’t have had any other choice. Back then, I was too human to have transformed her the way that I had.