Once Broken Faith (21 page)

Through the bubbles that rose up to curtain my face, I could see Dianda and Karen similarly descending. In the moment, I had bigger concerns, like the fact that I couldn't breathe anymore: we were moving so fast that my gills were finding no oxygen in the water around me, and I was choking. I was surrounded by water, and I was going to drown.

Keeping the panic from rising up and overwhelming me took everything I had.
This is just a dream,
I thought fiercely.
This is just a dream; you can't die here. You're going to wake up.
But was that true? There might not be a horror movie monster with knives on his hands waiting to steal my soul, but having Karen in the dream meant it felt just as real as the waking world. Could we die if we died while she was dreaming with us?

The thought had time to form before there was one last, convulsive yank, and we were falling through dry air, suddenly devoid of oxygen. I took a greedy breath, coughing as the last of the water in my gills was knocked loose. Then Dianda screamed, high and shrill and uncharacteristically terrified. I turned toward the sound, and realized we weren't falling through a void: we were falling toward the ground. A vast meadow filled with rose briars had appeared beneath us, thorns reaching up as if to welcome us home.

“Auntie Birdie!” shouted Karen. I didn't turn, just flung my hand out in her direction, while I reached for Dianda with the other hand. Mermaids were designed to be aerodynamic, but not to land safely on solid ground. If she fell without us . . .

Her fingers strained toward mine. I leaned, clasping my hand around her wrist just as I felt Karen grab hold of me—and with Karen's touch, gravity seemed to lose most of its urgency. We drifted, like strange, finny feathers, down to one of the few clear spots in that field of briars. Where we promptly collapsed in a heap, since none of us was exactly equipped to stand up.

“Oh, for Oberon's sake,” snapped Dianda, squeezing my hand hard enough to hurt. “Focus and shift.” There was no scent of amber and water lilies as she changed forms, her top extending into an elegant, old-fashioned gown when the magic took hold. This was a dream. Normal rules did not apply.

But some things still worked. I reached deep, looking for the tension that would give me back my legs. I knew it was there, however hard it might be to find; all I had to do was remember the feeling of the change. Everything tingled, and then I was standing, pulling Karen to her newly-recovered feet. My jeans and sneakers were dry, unlike my shirt and hair. I felt like I'd been overenthusiastically bobbing for apples.

Karen was back in her white dress, and looked like she was scared out of her mind. “I can't wake up,” she whispered, clinging to my arms. “You promised, and now she knows we're here, and she's not going to let me wake
up
.”

“Who knows—oh.” I stopped myself, realization sinking in. “Of course.” Karen had cautioned me not to think about Evening if I could avoid it; not to think about the things Evening considered to be her own. Evening was the Firstborn of the Daoine Sidhe. Patrick and Michel were both Daoine Sidhe; by the old rules of Faerie, they both belonged to her. Maybe that wouldn't have been
enough, but Goldengreen had been her demesne once, before she faked her own death and left the knowe standing empty. Invoking it by name had been the last straw.

I should have warned Dianda.

The air around me tasted like roses. I peeled Karen's hands away from my arms and turned, shielding her with my body as much as I could. As I'd feared and expected, Evening was standing in the field behind me, head cocked to the side, a smile painted on her lips. She was wearing a dress of rose petals in red and pink and sunset orange, arranged into a gradient and stitched together with tiny loops of silver wire. Flashes of snow-white skin showed through the gaps, pale enough that I would have called her a corpse if she hadn't been moving, and breathing, and looking at me.

“That took you less time than I had expected,” she said. “Well
done
, October.”

“Leave my niece alone,” I said.

Her smile faded. “I thought I taught you better than that,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You were meant to know how to respect your betters, not flap your tongue like a bird's wings and think it would help you fly away.”

I blinked. “Wow. Did you level up in ‘pretentious' after we shot you, or are you going with the whole ‘dream logic' bullshit? Karen is
mine
. Her mother is my best friend, and I'm her honorary aunt. That means hands off. She's not going to help you wake up.”

Evening actually laughed. “You have no idea what you're talking about. Karen—such a bland name; there's no majesty in it, no mystery. It means ‘pure,' you know. Such irony, when you consider where she comes from. But none of that matters, because your little Karen isn't yours to claim, and she isn't here to help me wake up. She's here to make sure you people don't destroy my greatest creation in the name of ‘playing fair.'”

“Uh, not to be pushy or anything, but who is this
lady?” asked Dianda. She stepped up next to me, adding her body to the screen blocking Karen from Evening's view. I'd never been more grateful to her. “She looks like she could use some sun, and maybe a good kick in the teeth.”

“Dianda Lorden, may I present Evening Winterrose, better known in some circles as Eira Rosynhwyr, the Firstborn of the Daoine Sidhe, and the woman who locked the wards at Goldengreen.” I gestured grandly toward Evening. “I'd call her names, but none of them would be suitable for mixed company.”

“Wait—that's Evening Winterrose?” Dianda shook her head. “It can't be. Evening's dead, and she never looked that much like a waterlogged corpse. She was pale. She wasn't bloodless.”

“I may have played down a few aspects of my appearance when I walked among my inferiors,” said Evening. “Hello, Dianda. Still the little Merrow slut who thought mixing her bloodline with my own would somehow make her worthy of a throne. How
is
dear Patrick? Is he tired of you yet? I expected better of him than I got. Marrying a mermaid and running off to sea . . . such a disappointment.”

“I take it back,” said Dianda. “That's Evening.”

“Unfortunately,” I said. “Why are you harassing my niece, Evening? Why don't you want this cure getting out?”

“There you go, assuming she's yours again,” said Evening. She looked at me tolerantly, like a mother facing a recalcitrant child. “What's a hundred years to me? It's inconvenient, and I would rather be awake, but not if that wakefulness comes with the unmaking of my greatest creation. A hundred years is nothing. Long enough for your alchemist to find another calling, and for you to get yourself killed when one of your ‘adventures' goes awry. I'll wake to a world that still respects my strength, and I'll carry on like nothing had ever changed. You can't win. I already have.”

“If a hundred years is nothing to you, if you can just wait me out, why did you come back in the first place?” It was something I'd been wondering since the moment I'd first seen her again, back from the dead and never really on my side. Maybe now, in this dreamscape, she would actually tell me.

Evening cocked her head to the side. “You don't know, do you?” This time her smile was slow and poisonous. “Oh, this is going to be beautiful. You're stumbling from goalpost to goalpost, triggering all manner of dangerous things, and you have no idea. I came back because you opened certain doors and put certain pieces back on the board, and I wanted them. Maybe I can't have everything I want right now, but I'm not sorry I tried. I'm only sorry you survived.”

“Leave my niece alone.”

“Or you'll do what? Have me elf-shot and abandoned on one of Maeve's ancient Roads? Please. Unless you're willing to kill me, and have all my descendants know that you, October Daye, daughter of Amandine the Liar, murdered the mother of the Daoine Sidhe, there's nothing else you can do. Go pick yourself a rose, little girl. That's always worked out so
well
for your family.”

I narrowed my eyes before doing the worst thing I could think of, and turning my back on her. “Honey, can you wake us up?” I asked, focusing on Karen.

“Don't ignore me,” snapped Evening. “You have no right to ignore me.”

“I told you before that I can't,” whispered Karen. “Not if she doesn't want me to. She's . . . she's stronger than I am.”

“Not here she's not,” I said. “This is
your
dream, Karen, not hers. Maybe she can pull you in, but she can't make you stay. Believe me, and get us out of here.”

She bit her lip as she looked at my face, searching for some sign that I was wrong. Then she seized my hands. “We're going to wake up.”

“That's right.” I looked to Dianda. “You should snap back to your own dream as soon as we're gone.” I wasn't sure of that—I wasn't sure of anything where this magic was concerned—but it seemed likely, and if dream logic held sway here, Dianda would probably do whatever she thought she was supposed to do.

“If I don't, I'll just need to find something to hit,” said Dianda mildly. “The lady who locked the wards at Goldengreen and kept me away from my son when he needed me should make a great target.”

The wisdom of punching one of the Firstborn was questionable. But again, this was a dream. “Just don't get hurt before we can wake you up.”

“I won't,” said Dianda. Her face twisted into something feral and terrifying. “Make sure that Michel boy is still breathing when I get back. I want to have a talk with him.”

He wasn't going to enjoy hearing whatever she had to say, but that didn't matter, because the field of roses was going hazy around the edges, until the only solid thing remaining was Karen's hand holding fast to mine. Someone played a fiddle tune, far on the edge of my hearing, and the air smelled like ashes. Evening shouted, a wordless cry of fury as she realized we weren't going to look at her again. And the dreamscape dissolved around us.

I
OPENED MY EYES.

The bed beneath me was so soft that it was like sprawling on a cloud, and the bedroom was a sea of rainbows, thanks to the stained glass panels covering the walls. I sat up, moving from a beam of green light to a beam of red. The motion dislodged Karen's arm, which had been slung loosely across my chest like she'd been hoping to keep hold of me in the dream world by keeping hold of me in the real one. Her breathing was smooth and level, and she didn't look distressed. That didn't necessarily mean anything. Not everyone wears their nightmares on the outside.

“Oh, good; you're awake,” said the Luidaeg. I turned. She was standing in the doorway, a carnival glass bowl tucked into the crook of her arm. She had a wooden spoon in the opposite hand, and was vigorously stirring the bowl's contents. “Before you start yelling at me, the spell I hit you with was designed to keep you under until you decided to wake up, not a moment longer. So I didn't knock you out until afternoon on purpose.”

I stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending. Then I gasped and slid out of the bed, staggering slightly
as my legs protested the speed of my getting up. “What time is it?”

“Almost four.”

The whole conclave would be starting to stir. It wasn't safe. “Where's Quentin? He was supposed to go talk to Walther. He must be worried sick by now—”

“Nope,” said the Luidaeg. “He found your pet alchemist, the elf-shot is being analyzed, and there was nothing else he could do to help, so he came back here, after finding your kitty-boy and telling him what was going on. Smart kid. I would have hated to kill your betrothed when he busted in here and accused me of attacking you. We made it through the day with no injuries and no nonconsensual enchantments. Quentin's asleep on the couch in the front room. I guarantee I can have him up in five minutes. Maybe less.”

“Please don't stab my squire.” I scrubbed at my face with one hand, trying to clear the last of the cobwebs away. Karen was still sleeping. I didn't know whether or not I should be concerned about that. “He functions best unstabbed. So do I, if you were wondering.”

“I'm not going to stab Quentin without an excellent reason,” said the Luidaeg. “I
like
Quentin. People I like are at the back of the line for stabbing.”

“All right, if you're not planning to stab him, how are you going to get him up?”

The Luidaeg hefted her bowl. “I'm making pancakes.” With that, she stepped back out of the room, leaving me alone with Karen. I turned to look at my niece.

Sleep had stripped away her defenses, rendering her small and fragile. Her hair covered half her face like sea foam covering the beach, one inky tip resting across her lips. More than ever, it struck me how little she looked like her parents. That, combined with her unlikely, inexplicable magical gifts, made her seem like a changeling in the mortal sense—a child who shouldn't have been where she was, who belonged to different parents, in a different world.

None of that mattered. Her parents loved her. Her brothers and sisters loved her.
I
loved her, and if she'd grown up somewhere else, with people who were better equipped to understand her oddities, she wouldn't have been my niece.

Leaning over, I brushed her hair away from her face and let my fingers rest against her cheek. She made a small, grumpy noise, stretched, and opened her eyes, blinking blearily before she smiled at me.

“Hey, Auntie Birdie,” she said. “We did it. We got out of Dianda's dreams.”

“We did,” I agreed solemnly. I paused. “Karen . . . can Evening invade
any
dream you're walking through?”

Her face crumpled like a discarded sheet of paper, her eyes going shuttered and shifty. “She found me when I was visiting Anthony. He's been having trouble with math, so sometimes I go into his dreams and tutor him. Math can be fun, if the world changes to make it easier to understand. We were doing fractions with dinosaurs and continents when this
woman
was just there, and she said Anthony had to go because the adults were talking now, and she pulled me out of his dream and into hers. I couldn't get away! I tried and I tried, and she followed me. I know so many tricks, when I'm in dreams. I know so much more than I knew when B . . . when Blind Michael took me. And it didn't matter.”

“She's Firstborn,” I said softly. “It's natural that she'd be stronger than you. There's no shame in being beaten by someone who's that much stronger.”

“But no one's supposed to be stronger than me when I'm dreaming,” she said, with all the petulance and resentment of a teenage girl whose one true stronghold has been invaded. “I want her to stop. She doesn't want the elf-shot to be fixed, but I do. I want her awake. I want her out of my mind.”

I put my arms around her, and for a moment, I didn't say anything. I wanted the elf-shot cure to be distributed,
despite what Theron and Chrysanthe had said about people getting careless around changelings. They were insulated, living in a community where changelings were the majority, where they were respected and prized and considered valuable. For the rest of us, a cure for elf-shot wasn't going to make that big of a difference, because people were already careless with changelings. And I wanted the sleepers awake. I wanted Raysel to have the chance to learn what it was like to live with a body that wasn't ripping itself apart. I wanted Dianda to threaten and laugh and love her family. I wanted a lot of things, and I wanted them as soon as possible. But I'd never wanted to wake Evening Winterrose, the woman I'd once considered my friend—the woman who'd cost me everything.

Karen must have heard the conflict in my silence, because she tilted her head back, meeting my eyes, and said, “No matter what we do, we can't all win. This isn't the kind of game that works like that.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But we can sure as hell try. Come on, sweetie. The Luidaeg's making pancakes. Not everyone can say that the sea witch made them breakfast.”

That actually earned me a giggle—oh, small mercies—as Karen slid out of the bed and followed me from the bedroom to the front of the suite. Quentin was on the couch as promised, his head pillowed on one arm and his knees drawn up against his chest. He looked like a discarded marionette, and I had never felt the weight of my duty to him more. He was my responsibility, and I was going to take care of him if it killed me.

From the kitchen came the hiss of batter hitting a griddle, followed by the hot flour and butter smell of pancakes cooking. Quentin sat up, eyes still closed. “I'm awake,” he announced.

“Good,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”

He cracked one eye open. Then he opened the other, and said, “You're awake and you're not pancakes.”

“Those are both true and things that you know, but it's not good enough,” I said. “What did Walther say?”

“The elf-shot that put Dianda to sleep was about as close to generic as you can get. No hidden poisons, and the only add-on is something that will frustrate her dreams without turning them into nightmares. She'll sleep for a hundred years and wake up feeling rested and probably super-pissed.” Quentin shrugged. “He said the cure would counter the elf-shot—no problem—if he was allowed to use it, but since he's not, she's just going to nap.”

“We'll see about that,” I said. “Dianda was able to tell us who elf-shot her.”

“Oh,” said Quentin. “Wow. What are we going to do about it?”

“We're not going to do anything,” I said. “I'm going to go talk to the High King.” I barely caught myself in time to keep from saying “your father.”

Quentin saw my correction in the way my eyes tightened. He grimaced. “Karen knows,” he said. “She knew before you did.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I walk in dreams,” said Karen. “Um. Not to be creepy or anything, but if I've visited you while you were dreaming, you probably don't have that many secrets from me. I try not to visit people I don't know. It seems rude. And I always let people know that I'm there.”

“Not actually reducing the creepy factor by that much, but I appreciate the warning,” I said, feeling the tips of my ears turn red. Some of the dreams I'd had about Tybalt before we'd finally managed to make our relationship more formal had been, well, inappropriate for teenage girls. Some of the dreams I'd had
since
then made those look positively tame. I had never really considered this aspect of Karen's dream-walking before.

I also hadn't considered what it meant to have Quentin forming all his friendships and allegiances here on
the West Coast, rather than back home in Toronto. When the time came for him to become High King, was he going to try to carry half the kids I considered mine to take care of away with him? Was he going to try to take
me
? And if he did, would I be able to tell him “no”?

“What about Dianda's injuries?” I asked, to distract myself from the question.

“Their Majesties approved Queen Windermere's request to have Duke Torquill summon Jin from Shadowed Hills,” said Quentin. “Jin was able to heal the wound left by the arrow.”

“Good,” I said, once I had finished working my way through the chain of monarchs in the sentence. Jin was here. That was one worry off my long and growing list.

The smell of bacon joined the smell of pancakes. Both teens lit up, beaming at the air behind me. I turned. There was Tybalt, a smile on his face and a tray in his hands, laden with bacon, cinnamon rolls, and various sliced fruits.

“Breakfast is to be an informal affair, eaten largely in private rooms and not forcing any of us to deal with one another before absolutely necessary,” he said. “I thought you might like food. The, ah, fruit may be a little frozen. I tried to move quickly.”

“You brought breakfast through the Shadow Roads,” I said. “I can't decide if that was romantic or really, really stupid.”

“Always elect for the blessed ‘both,'” said Tybalt.

“Both it is, then,” I said, and reached for a cinnamon roll. The outside was cool to the touch and the frosting had iced over, but I could still feel the warmth inside the pastry. He really had moved quickly. “How did you sleep?”

“Poorly and alone, but you're forgiven, as you had things to do,” said Tybalt. “I thought perhaps the lady sea witch would be less inclined to transform me into something unpleasant if I brought her bacon. Not that I think
you
would be so easily bribed,” he added, attention shifting to Karen, “but in case you had considered it, I note that there are chocolate croissants buried beneath these more pedestrian pastries.”

Karen giggled. I rolled my eyes.

“Stop flattering my niece and put down the tray,” I said. “We need to go see the High King.”

Tybalt raised an eyebrow. “Am I nothing but a taxi service to you?”

“No,” I said. “Danny, who actually has his license, is a taxi service. You're more like a transporter from
Star Trek
. Me and you to beam up, Scotty.”

He looked at me blankly. Karen covered her mouth with one hand. Quentin started to snicker.

“Sometimes I wonder if you've ever actually encountered the English language,” Tybalt said, putting the tray gingerly down on the nearest flat surface. Quentin and Karen fell upon it, moving with the speed and efficiency known only to hungry teenagers and the occasional swarm of locusts. Then they took off for the kitchen, carting their ill-gotten gains with them.

“I'll tell the Luidaeg you're leaving!” called Quentin, before ducking through the door and out of sight.

Tybalt shook his head. “I think that's the first time I can remember when he didn't demand to come with you on the dangerous errand.”

“I don't think he wants to spend too much time around his folks; there's always a chance someone would notice the family resemblance,” I said. “Besides, breakfast is available. He's a black hole with legs. He'll catch up with us later, after he's eaten three pounds of bacon and so many pancakes that the thought makes me feel sort of sick. Now come on. We really, really need to get to the High King.”

“Without a change of clothing?” Tybalt gestured to my outfit. “Not that I have any issues with your attire—you look lovely, as always, and even more lovely now
that you're rumpled—but there's something to be said for not appearing before the ruler of this fair land in the trousers you wore yesterday.”

“He knows I was working all day, and I'll change before the conclave,” I said. “This is important.”

Tybalt paused to search my face. I knew what he was looking for—signs of strain, of worry, that I needed something other than a quick, private transit to another part of the knowe—and so I didn't look away. I met his eyes instead, letting him see everything he wanted. For once, thanks to the Luidaeg's little sleep potion, I wasn't absolutely exhausted. I'd even eaten two bites of a cinnamon roll. For me, that was the next best thing to “in fighting trim.”