Rosemary and Rue

Manuel frowned. “If you haven’t seen Bucer, how did you . . . ?”


“I just know. All right?” I knew it all: every little detail, from the way it felt when the blood started filling her lungs to the bite of iron against her skin. I knew everything except for who did it, and that was the thing I needed to know more than anything else.

“I’m sorry,” said Manuel. “I should’ve known you’d know. They always know up there.” Up there. So they were still using that charming euphemism for the pureblood holdings in the city, were they? I hadn’t liked it when I was living in the changeling slums, and now that I was doing my best to abandon fae society altogether, I still didn’t like it. It’s not hard to marginalize people when they’ve already done it to themselves.

I came back from pondering that reminder of my roots just in time to hear him finish, “... but she was good to us, and we’ll miss her. We’ll always miss her.”

My dislike of his language slipped into my tone, making me sound harsher than I intended when I said, “We’re talking about the same Evening here, right? Daoine Sidhe, dark hair, didn’t give a damn about anything she didn’t own?”

That seemed to galvanize him. He straightened, eyes narrowing to slits. Insulting Evening was apparently worse than insulting his sister, and I once again found myself doing some rapid rethinking about someone I thought I knew. What could Evening have done to inspire that reaction in a back-street changeling kid who probably hadn’t seen the inside of a school since he was eight?

“The Winterrose was a friend of the boss. She did many things for us here . . . ma’am.” He used “ma’am” like it was a dirty word. Only the barest of margins saved it from being an insult, and that gap was shrinking.

“Cool it, Manuel,” I said, raising my hands. “I didn’t mean to piss you off. Evening and I were friends for a long time, even if we didn’t always act like it. I’m going to find out who killed her, and they’re going to pay.”

The anger in his eyes faded, soothed by the promise of revenge. “I just wish we’d known sooner. If someone had told us . . . we could’ve saved her.” He sounded so sure of himself, secure in his misplaced faith. Part of me wanted to shake him, but the rest of me wanted to swaddle him in cotton and hide him somewhere where the world would never take that faith away from him. The world isn’t a nice place—ask anyone.

Ask Evening.

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” I said. I hated myself for the words, but I wasn’t willing to lie to him, not even by omission. Not about this. “We couldn’t have saved her.”

“We could have kept her alive, gotten her to someone . . .”

“She was killed with iron.”

He froze. “Iron?”

“Yes, iron. We couldn’t have saved her.” The sound of the door opening saved me from his response, and I turned, painfully glad for the distraction. Maybe he was going to grow up someday; that didn’t mean I needed to watch.

Dare stood in the doorframe, trying to look cocky and unconcerned. She was failing. Maybe it was the red welt on her cheek that spoiled the effect, already darkening around the edges toward the bruise it would become. “The boss-man says he’ll see you now, but you better hurry if you want him to keep on waiting.” There was a panicky look in her eyes: those were Devin’s words, not hers, and she expected to be the one that got punished for them. The old bastard never changed.

Maybe that’s why I loved him for so long.