Rosemary and Rue

“Not my choice.”


“Even so.” She rose, inclining her head toward me. “I will return with tea and, I think, a robe for you to wear. You will rest here a while before I allow you to leave. Foolish child.”

She stepped onto the water and was gone, leaving only the faint scent of hibiscus and water lilies in her wake.

“Swell,” I said, and flopped backward into the moss to wait.





SIXTEEN



THE ROBE LILY BROUGHT fit pretty well, even if it left me feeling more exposed than I’d been before. Nudity is fine—not my favorite thing, but fine. Clinging silk robes meant for someone six inches shorter are less fine. The hem stopped at mid-thigh, and the neckline barely covered my chest. To make matters worse, or at least more mortifying, the whole thing was a rosy shade of cream: taken as a whole, I felt like the star of some demented piece of fantasy porn.

The poultice swaddling my left shoulder would kill that idea pretty quickly. I could move the arm more easily than when I first woke—changelings don’t recover as fast as purebloods, though we bounce back faster than humans—but I wasn’t sure the improvement would be enough. I couldn’t move it fast enough to do anything useful, and heavy lifting was definitely out of the question for a few days. I wouldn’t have worried about it before people started shooting at me. Now that they’d started, I had plenty of reason to worry.

Whoever killed Evening and set a Redcap on my trail wasn’t going to back off. If there’d been any chance of that, it died when the man started taking shots at me on a public street. Whatever the game was, I was in it until it was over.

Lily kept moistening the moss around the poultice, refusing to let me move more than I had to in order to reach my tea. The combination of my body’s natural defenses and Undine water was helping, but movement wasn’t easy. I hadn’t even been able to help her wash the blood out of my hair. She’d pulled it into a braid when she was done, tying it off with a strip of fabric torn from my irreparably stained blouse. I still looked like hell, but it was one of the outer circles, and the fact that I didn’t seem likely to drop dead any second was a definite improvement.

“Drink this,” said Lily, handing me another cup of tea. “It will help.”

It smelled like rosehips and hibiscus, just like the last eleven batches. I took it, asking, “Am I going to be done drinking this stuff any time soon?” I understood the logic. The tea was helping me recover the blood I’d lost, and it was forcing Undine water into my system at the same time. That was fine. It didn’t make the idea of drowning in syrupy floral tea any more appealing.

Lily gave me a stern look. “You’ll be done when I say you are.”

“Right.” I took a sip, grimacing. There was a good reason for me to drink the tea. Still, I would’ve killed for a cup of coffee.

More gently, Lily said, “I’m sorry if I’m fussing, October, but I don’t wish to see you killed for your hastiness. Not if I can help you by keeping you here.”

“I’m not being hasty, Lily. I have a job to do.” The Undine take a long, slow view of time. To Lily, a year and a day were very much the same.

“You’re not? Does that mean you had to be fished out of the viewing pool over nothing? How curious. I should have realized you’d intended to collapse there from exhaustion and overabuse and insisted you be put back again. I apologize.”

I sighed. “Lily, being hasty doesn’t usually get you shot.”

“I see. So I suppose you paused to think through whatever actions did lead to your being shot before you took them?”