Rosemary and Rue

“Of course.” Leaning forward, Simon pressed a kiss against my forehead and whispered, “I’ll make sure someone finds your car in a week or two, once they’re ready to give up hope. Wouldn’t do to make your family wait for you too long, now, would it?”


If I could have, I would have screamed. All I could do was snarl behind clenched teeth, breath coming hard and fast as panic gripped me. I had to get out of there. Cliff and Gilly were waiting for me, and I had to get away. I just couldn’t see how. I couldn’t even drop the don’t-look-here that was guaranteeing no one would see what was happening. I was bound too tightly.

Simon stood, putting his hand on top of my head and shoving downward, whispering and moving his free hand in a gesture I couldn’t quite see. I made one last wrenching attempt to pull away. Oleander laughed again, the sound cold and somehow distant, like it was being filtered through a wall of ice. Without any warning or fanfare, I forgot how to breathe.

All magic hurts. Transformation hurts more than anything else in the world. I gasped for breath, trying to break out of Simon’s enchantment. My own meager powers were giving way, and I felt myself warping and changing, melting like a candle left too long in the sun. His binding relaxed as the change entered its final stages, and I flopped against the path, gills straining for another breath, for anything to keep me alive for just a few more seconds. My eyes were burning so that I could barely focus, but I could still see Simon, right at the edge of my vision. He was smiling, and Oleander was laughing. They were proud of what they were doing to me. Oberon help me, they were proud.

“Hey!” shouted a voice. “What are you people doing?” Then there were strong hands underneath me, boosting me off the wood, down into the water. I dove, driving myself deep into the water, away from the air, from the fear, from my own existence. The instincts of my new body took me into the cool darkness under the reeds while I was still trying to make my head stop spinning. All of the other koi watched with disinterest, and promptly forgot that I hadn’t always been there. Fish are like that.

All fish are like that, and thanks to Simon, I was one of them. I managed to force myself back to the surface once, frantically looking for help, and not finding it. Simon and Oleander were gone. I was disposed of, as good as dead, and they didn’t need to worry about me anymore. The fish I had become was taking me over, like ink spreading through paper, and as it pulled me down, nothing really mattered. Not Sylvester and Luna, not Cliff, waiting forever for me to come home. Not my name, or my face, or who I really was. Not even my little girl. There was only the water, and the blessed darkness that was my home now, the only one I’d know for fourteen years.





ONE



December 23, 2009: fourteen years, six months later


There’s fennel for you, and columbines;

There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. . . .

You must wear your rue with a difference.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet





DECEMBER HAD COME to San Francisco in fits and starts, like a visitor who wasn’t sure he wanted to stay. The skies were blue one minute and overcast the next; tourists overheated or shivered in their prepacked wardrobes, while residents traded sweaters for tank tops and back in a single afternoon. That’s normal around here. The Bay Area exists in a state of nearly constant spring, where the color of the hills—brown with a strong chance of brushfire in the summer, green and suffering from chronic mudslides in winter—is the only real difference between the seasons.