Rosemary and Rue

“Done.”


“I’ll even give you a freebie before you start: I don’t know who decided to prune the Winterrose. Now ask away.” The Luidaeg settled in her chair again.

That took out my first question, and any chance of an easy answer. Crap. I’ve never been very good at guessing games. “First question: what exactly is a hope chest?”

She blinked at me, surprised. “A hope chest?” she echoed. When I nodded she asked, “A real one or an imitation?”

“Is that your question?”

“No, that’s me getting the information I need to answer you,” she said, sourly. “Clarification is in the rules, remember? Now, is it a real hope chest?”

“I think so.”

“The four sacred woods interlocked, carved with knives of water and air? Did it burn your fingers when you touched it?”

“How did you know I’d—”

“Come off it. You really think I can’t see the signs, once I look for them? What is it? What can it do? Well, first off, the stories are true—some of them, anyway. The first hope chest was a gift from Oberon to Tita nia, to allow her to adjust her Court to her desire. She passed it along to the first of her half-blood children, and somewhere along the line, there were more of them. No one knows who made the later ones. I don’t know, so don’t ask.

“A hope chest can shift the balance of the blood. So, yes, it can make you human, if that’s what you were thinking; it can also take you the other way.” Her smile was sharp. “I don’t recommend that road, Amandine’s daughter. You’re not ready for the consequences yet.”

“Oh,” I whispered. I’d touched it: I’d held the power to choose one world over the other. Why did that scare me? “Next question: why did you heal me?”

“Devin paid me.” The Luidaeg shrugged, tossing her empty can aside. “They were going to burn me at the stake about sixty years ago, and he managed to stave it off. I’ve owed him since them. He gave me a chance to pay that debt, and I took it.”

“Iron wounds?”

“I won’t even charge you for that one, half-blood. I wanted my freedom pretty bad.” She shook her head. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, any kind of captivity is chafing.”

“Did he tell you why?” It was a shot in the dark: there were only so many roads this could go down, and none of them looked good. At least I was probably safe on this one.

The Luidaeg smiled. “Oh. Finally, a good question.”

“What?” I didn’t like that smile.

“Why did he ask me to heal you? Why did he let a demon out of his debt for something so small? He said,” she continued in Devin’s voice, “I’m not done with her yet. She hasn’t found it. Now heal her, or I’ll see you burn!” She chuckled, returning to her own voice. “Like he could. Jerk.”

The bottom dropped out of the world. “What?”

“Don’t like that answer? Sorry; I promised you the truth. How you take it is up to you. Last question.”

I stared at her. She smiled. Then I swallowed, hard. I knew what came next, but that didn’t stop me from wishing I could ask her for just one more thing: just one bit of proof that my sudden suspicion was wrong. “No,” I said, and tossed her the key.

She caught it, blinking. “No? What do you mean no?”

“No, I won’t ask now. Later.” An image was coming together in my mind, sickeningly obvious now that I was letting myself consider it. Blood was where this started: Evening’s blood on the carpet, my blood on the concrete, the blood of an assassin and an innocent man drying on the grass at Golden Gate Park. Everything looped back to the beginning of everything else, like the metalwork on Evening’s key. It all came back to blood and roses.

Sometimes I think everything in Faerie boils down to one of those two.