Rosemary and Rue

He laughed, unsteadily, and said, “October, is it? Well, October, I have a question for you. It’s a very important question, so I need you to think hard before you answer. Can you do that for me?”


“I can try,” I said, frowning. “Will you tell me if I answer wrong?”

“There are no wrong answers, October. Only right ones.” The door—the real door—opened, and my mother stepped into the room. She froze when she saw Sylvester kneeling in front of me, holding my hands, but she didn’t say a word. Tears started rolling down her cheeks. I’d never seen her cry before.

“Mommy!” I shouted, trying to pull my hands free, to run to her and stop those tears.

Sylvester tightened his grip. “October.” I kept tugging. “October, look at me. You can go to your mother when you answer me.” Sniffling and sullen, I stopped pulling and turned to face him. “Good girl. Now. Are you a human girl, October? Or are you fae?”

“I’m like Mommy, I’m just like Mommy,” I said, and he let me go, and I ran to her. She put her arms around me, still crying, and she never said a word. Not when Sylvester stepped up to kiss her cheek and whisper, “Amandine, I’m sorry,” not when the ones who had accompanied him grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her, and me, through the hole in the wall. It closed behind us, but not before I saw my bedroom burst into flames, wiping away the traces of our passing.

My human life was over the moment they found us; the only real question was whether I went to live with the fae, or whether I learned firsthand how cold immortal “kindness” can be. Changelings don’t grow up in the human world. It simply isn’t done. If I’d chosen to stay human, there would have been an accident, something simple, and my grieving mother could have stayed with her husband in the mortal world. Instead, I chose Faerie and condemned her to the Summerlands. That’s when she stopped being the mother I knew: I couldn’t fill the hole my father left in her heart, and so she never let me try.

Sometimes I wonder if the ones who choose to die aren’t making the right decision. No one told me “changeling” could be an insult, or that it would mean living trapped between worlds, watching half your family die while the other half lived forever, leaving you behind. I had to find that out on my own.

I tried to fight free of the dreams, surfacing just far enough from the unsettling memory of my Changeling’s Choice to actually believe I might be able to wake myself up. I could handle collapsing at work, I could go and talk to Sylvester’s page, anything, I would have taken almost anything over the dreams of my childhood and the choice I didn’t mean to make. Almost anything . . . except for what I got. I slid back into those golden-tinted dreams . . .

. . . and back into the pond.

I dream the fourteen years I lost to Simon’s spell often, although there aren’t many specifics; my memory of that time is a long blur of ripples through the water, and that’s probably a mercy. A few things stand out, but not many: the first light of day coloring the water; humans walking by on narrow wooden pathways; frantically circling at the surface of the water twice a year, on the Moving Days, even though I didn’t know why. I never saw any pixies on Moving Day, but I didn’t understand what their absence meant. I didn’t understand much of anything.