Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan by Seanan McGuire Page B

and a road-worn wool sweater at least three sizes too big for her. "The Ocean
Lady let you through?"
    "That, or this is the single most irritating hallucination I've ever had," I
answer, watching her carefully. She's clean, this little routewitch with her
close-clipped fingernails and her fountain-fall of black silk hair. Most
routewitches don't bother with that sort of thing. The road dresses them in
dust, and they wear it proudly, carrying the maps of where they've been in the
creases of their skin. But a routewitch who doesn't swear allegiance to any
single route, to any single road...she'd need to be clean. I quirk an eyebrow
up, and take a guess: "Am I addressing the Queen?"
    "I guess that's up to you, isn't it?" she asks.
    Stupid routewitches and their stupid rituals. I take a breath, and say, as I
said to the man at the gate, "My name is Rose Marshall, once of Buckley Township
in Michigan. I died on Sparrow Hill Road on a night of great importance, and
have wandered the roads ever since. I've walked the Ocean Lady down from Calais
to visit the Queen, if she'll see me. I have a question for her to ask the roads
for me."
    She raises her eyebows, looks at me thoughtfully, and asks, "Is that all?"
    My patience is anything but infinite. Scowling, I say, "Who does a girl gotta
blow to get herself a beer in this place?"
    And the Queen of the North American Routewitches smiles.
    ***
    They have good beer here, these routewitches do, and their grill is properly
aged, old grease caught in the corners, the drippings of a hundred thousand
steaks and bacon breakfasts and cheeseburgers scraped from a can and used to
slick it down before anything starts cooking. The plate they bring me groans
under a triple-decker cheeseburger and a pile of golden fries that smell like
summer nights and stolen kisses--and they
smell
, even before the
platter hits the table. I look to the routewitch Queen, silent question in my
eyes.
    "Eat up," she says, reaching for her own plate. "The Ocean Lady doesn't feel
the need to withhold the simple joys from anyone who's brave enough to walk this
far along her spine."
    "I may have to take back a few of the things I said while I was walking." The
fries taste better than they smell, which may be a miracle all by itself. The
Queen is already eating, ignoring me completely now that she has a meal in front
of her. I don't know much about routewitch etiquette, but I've learned to go
with the flow of things. If she wanted to eat before we talked, well, at least
contact had been made.
    The other routewitches settle all over the room, some of them sitting at
tables, some perching on the bar. A few even sit on the floor. They break out
decks of cards and tattered paperbacks, fall into hushed conversations, down
shots of whiskey, but they're watching us. Every eye in the place is on the
Queen, and on the uninvited guest who's come to try her patience.
    The Queen looks up, sees me watching them watching us, and laughs. "Don't
worry," she says, fingers grazing my wrist at the point where my resurrected
pulse beats strong and steady. The half-life of the hitcher extends here, it
seems, and I didn't even have to swipe a coat. "They get protective of me
sometimes, and your reputation is a little...mixed."
    I bite back a groan, grinding it to silence between my teeth. When I'm sure
it's gone, I say, "I thought you, of all people, would know that I'm not like
that."
    "We know what the road tells us, Rose, and what the road tells us is that
your story is still being written." She dips a fry in the smooth white surface
of her vanilla milkshake and raises it, glistening, to her lips. "The Lady in
Green is just as real as the Phantom Prom Date, on the right stretches of
highway. They watch to be sure the right one has come to visit."
    This isn't a new concept—the idea that stories change things, rewrite the
past and rewrite reality at the same time—but it's jarring all the same,