Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire Page A

killers before I found myself drowning in her curse instead of pond water.
    And all that would have to wait, because I had more immediate duties to fulfill. There were rites to be observed, words that needed to be said, for the sake of the ones who hadn’t died. The purebloods don’t take death easily. Something has to cushion the blow. Beyond that, there was the simple fact that a woman had been brutally murdered by someone who clearly knew her nature. Humans don’t carry cold iron knives—they’re heavy, clumsy things, and modern technology is so far beyond them that they only appear in fae hands. Whoever killed Evening made sure her death would be as painful as possible. That made this a matter for her liege, and that meant I had to go someplace I really didn’t want anything to do with: the Court of the Queen of the Mists, monarch of Northern California.
    The current Queen of the Mists didn’t take the throne under the world’s most auspicious circumstances; she became Queen in 1906, when the great San Francisco earthquake took out half the fae in the city, including her father, King Gilad. She’d been raised somewhere outside the Court, and no one ever knew her mother, but Evening—who was already Countess of Goldengreen—supported her claim, and no one really wanted to argue. She’s been in charge ever since, first from her Court in North Beach, and, after her first hollow hill was destroyed, from her Court by the Bay. No one knows her name, or where she grew up, or much of anything about her, really, beyond the fact that she’s the Queen, and her word is law.
    She and I have never gotten along. Sylvester and Evening were the ones who insisted he be allowed to knight me for services to the Crown when her original Court was destroyed; the Queen was all for throwing me out with the rest of the changeling rabble. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s a mixed-blood—her heritage is a strange blend of Siren, Sea Wight, and Banshee—or maybe she’s just a snob, but the woman has never liked changelings, and titling me went against all her sensibilities. She did it anyway, because the services I’d performed were too large to be ignored, and because Evening was pushing for it. I don’t think the Queen has ever forgiven me. I’ve made it a rule to stay out of her presence as much as possible, just to avoid reminding her that she’s unhappy.
    It doesn’t help that changelings form the lowest rung of fae society; we’re too mortal to belong and too fae to be sent back to our human parents with a pat on the head and a “have a nice life”—assuming our human parents are still alive after we’ve been in the Summerlands long enough to realize how raw the deal there can be, which is by no means guaranteed. Most of us wind up spending the centuries as hangers-on in the various Courts of Faerie, following our immortal relatives and begging for crumbs like puppies until our own mortality catches up with us and we crawl off to die. That’s the way the game is supposed to work. Only I’ve always refused to play by those rules, and it hasn’t exactly endeared me to the higher echelons of the nobility.
    It was late enough that there were few cars heading for the bay. Some places are too cold to take a date on a December night, even in a city whose fame is based around an icy ocean and constant fog. Since freezing to death isn’t conducive to having a good time, the tourists had set their sights farther inland, leaving me with a clear shot at my destination: a little cluster of streets and crumbling businesses about six miles down the coast from Fisherman’s Wharf. The beach I was aiming for wasn’t part of any nature preserve, coast trail, or tourist attraction. It was just a small, stony stretch of ground on the inside curve of the coastal wall, isolated enough to be forgotten and important as all hell from the faerie point of view.
    There were no street vendors or tourist traps where I was headed: just the