Once Broken Faith

THIRTEEN

I SAT UP WITH A GASP, looking frantically around me. I was in my room in Amandine’s tower, lying atop the covers on my narrow bed, the ridges of the blankets digging into my butt and thighs as I put more weight on them than I’d possessed when I slept here on a regular basis. My clothes were gone, replaced not by finery or court gear, but by my favorite pair of jeans from when I was a teenager, the denim worn so soft that it was like wearing air, and a T-shirt advertising a 1994 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Tempest.

“Hi, Auntie Birdie.”

I turned. Karen was sitting in the reading nook, wearing her white dress. I didn’t know whether that was her choice, as the oneiromancer, or mine, as the one who’d presumably started this dream; I decided it was better not to ask. “Hi, pumpkin,” I said. “Are we asleep?”

“The Luidaeg made me help her carry you to the bed,” she said, and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know why she couldn’t have knocked you out there instead of in the kitchen, but she thought it was funny when you fell on the floor.”

“That, right there, is your answer.” I slid off the bed. As always when I was dreaming in concert with Karen, the motion felt real. Even when I knew I was asleep, even when the ceiling melted or the floor turned into butterflies, it felt absolutely right, like this was the way the world was always supposed to work. “When you’ve been alive as long as she has, you take your humor where you can get it. Do you need to do anything before you can take us to Dianda?”

“Yes. No. It’s . . . complicated right now.” Karen stood, and was suddenly standing in front of me, without visibly crossing the space between us. Lowering her voice, she said, “You can’t mention any of her things, or even think about her too hard, or she might find us. She’s always asleep. She’s always watching.”

I frowned, bemused. “Who are you—”

Karen’s eyes widened in panic. I stopped talking. Everything was suddenly clear.

Evening. Karen was attending the conclave as Evening’s representative; Evening, who had been elf-shot, Evening, who could access Karen through her dreams. Evening, who might be listening to us even now.

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t think about her, or any of her things.”

“You will,” said Karen, sounding resigned. “You would have even if I hadn’t said anything. But at least now you were warned, I guess. Take my hands and hold your breath.”

This time, there was no need for me to ask why. We were going into the dreams of a mermaid, and there was no reason to assume Dianda would be dreaming of dry land. She was born to the sea. Everything else was inconsequential. I slid my hands into Karen’s and breathed in deep.

No sooner had I filled my lungs with as much dream-air as they could hold than the water appeared around our feet, quickly rising to mid-calf. I shuddered, swallowing the urge to panic. Panic would do me no good. This wasn’t real. This was a dream—a terrible, cruel, necessary dream—and all the wetness in the world couldn’t send me back into the dark at the bottom of the pond. The water kept getting higher, cold and smelling of salt, cupping my thighs and then my hips like the hands of a lover.

Karen smiled encouragingly. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay. It’s just a dream.”

She didn’t say it couldn’t hurt me. If anyone would know that for a lie, it was her. Dreams can do damage even when they’re not dreamt in the company of an oneiromancer. And then the water closed over my head and the light slipped away, leaving us floating in the dark. The current pulled Karen’s hands from mine. I flailed, grasping wildly for her, only to realize that my arms were withering, becoming fins, stubby and useless for anything but moving through the watery deep. The salt stung the gills that opened in my neck. Koi were freshwater fish. I had been condemned to the pond; never to the sea. Never to the sea.

As with all dreams that Karen walked through, this one felt absolutely, inalienably real. I was a fish again, scaled and sleek and helpless, trapped beneath the crushing weight of the water. I swam, panicked, looking for the surface, for the air, for anything that would keep the next step of Simon’s spell from taking hold and changing me completely. When he’d originally transformed me into a koi and abandoned me to my prisoning pond, the spell had changed my mind along with my body. I don’t really remember anything about the fourteen years he stole from me. I spent those years as a fish. Fish don’t want, or wonder, or dream about going back to their families. Fish just exist, trapped in a moment that never ends.

Someone grabbed me. I thrashed harder, trying to pull away. The hands tightened, lifting me until one of my frantically searching eyes was level with Dianda Lorden’s face. She looked different, viewed underwater through a fish’s eyes. She was always beautiful, but here, like this, she was transcendent. There were glittering specks on her skin, places where microscopic scales caught and threw back the light. Her hair floated around her head like a corona, each strand seeking and finding its perfect place. She peered at me, dubiousness and confusion written plainly on her face.

“Toby?” she said. The fact that we were underwater didn’t seem to be interfering with her ability to speak. That was a good thing, I supposed, although I wasn’t sure how I could hear her. Did fish even have ears? “Stop messing around and turn yourself into something useful already.” She let me go.

I hung in the water in front of her, not swimming away, trying to figure out how to do what she wanted. This wasn’t my dream anymore. I didn’t dream myself wet and scaled and . . . wait. That wasn’t true. Sometimes I dreamed myself all of those things, because bad dreams could happen to anybody. Sometimes the pond was inescapable. So this was my dream, on some level.

I’d joined Dianda in the ocean in the real world once, courtesy of a transformation spell designed by the Luidaeg. It had turned me into a Merrow in every way that counted, including the ability to go from my natural bipedal shape into something a little more Disney-esque. There had been a particular sideways way of thinking necessary to trigger the transformation, like stretching a muscle that was less a reality than it was an idea. I couldn’t close my eyes—fish didn’t have eyelids—but I let my vision go as unfocused as biology allowed, and reached into myself for that stretching feeling.

There was a pop, like my entire body had been replaced by rapidly bursting bubbles, and I expanded, instantly and painlessly, into the Merrow form the Luidaeg had spun for me. My legs were still missing, replaced by a great sweep of calico scales and ending in a set of powerful flukes, but I had hands, I had arms, I was the next best thing to myself again. Even my tacky Shakespeare shirt was back. I did a somersault in the water, resisting the urge to whoop.

When I stopped flipping, Dianda was looking at me flatly, arms folded over her chest. Her hair was longer than I was used to, I realized, cut to conceal her gills, and her top was an elaborate confection of pearls and watered blue silk that shimmered in the light filtering through the water. She caught me staring, and said, “This is how I looked when I met Patrick. I was dreaming of our first date when the whole place flooded and you showed up. You are Toby, aren’t you? Because I swear, if I’m just dreaming about your pasty face when I could be dreaming of my husband, I’m going to murder you when we both wake up.”

“I’m really me,” I said. My words, like hers, carried clearly through the water. “My niece is an oneiromancer, remember? She brought me into your dreams because I needed to talk to you. Do you have time to talk to me?”

“Time?” Dianda chuckled bitterly. “I have nothing but time. And really, I should thank you for interrupting. None of my dreams ever get to the good stuff. They get close enough that I start to think maybe taking a long nap won’t be the worst thing ever, and then bam, they break up and turn into something else. I don’t normally dream like that. Something’s wrong.”

“Yes,” I agreed. The elf-shot spell was originally just supposed to knock people out, but it had been around for centuries, and there were lots of different variations. Some of them included a slow poison, one that would kill the sleeper long before their enchanted slumber came to an end. Others had been tooled to condemn the victim to a hundred years of nightmares. What Dianda was describing wasn’t quite that bad, but was possibly even crueler, in its own strange way. A hundred years of unfulfillment, of stories that never reached their natural endings . . . that would be enough to make anyone suffer.

“So what did you want to talk about?” Dianda did a lazy loop-de-loop, flukes trailing like a veil in front of her face before she resumed her formerly upright position. “It’s not like I have any appointments to get to.”

I frowned. “I thought you’d be more upset.”

She shrugged. “I’m livid. So mad I can’t even think about it without losing my temper. But there’s nothing I can do. Either Arden will let them wake me up, or she won’t. If she does, I go home to my husband and son. If she doesn’t . . .” For a moment, her bravado cracked, and I saw how frightened she was. “Dean is a landed Count with a knowe of his own, because of you. Patrick and Peter can go to him, and he’ll take care of them. He’s a good boy. He’ll protect his family until I wake up and can fight to reclaim my demesne from whoever seizes it in my absence.”

“Peter’s a Merrow, like you,” I said. “He could claim your place when he gets older.”

“Please. You know better than that. No matter how often I claim him as my heir, Peter’s a mixed-blood, just like his brother. It doesn’t matter how Merrow he looks. The Undersea will eat him alive and spit out his bones. I knew when I married Patrick that if we had children, I would have to be absolutely ruthless in order to protect them. I forgot that ruthlessness is a fulltime commitment. I dropped my guard. Now we’re all paying the price.”

“About that.” I swept my arms through the water, stabilizing myself. There was a flash of light off to one side, and I glanced in that direction long enough to see Karen, now equipped with a white-scaled, black-fluked mermaid tail, swimming delighted loops through Dianda’s dream ocean. Kids are kids, no matter what kind of magic they have. I looked back to Dianda. “You were facing the door when you were shot. Did you see the person who shot you?”

“See them? Reef and bone, I was about to get out of the water and strangle them when they put that damn arrow in my arm,” said Dianda. “It was that Daoine Sidhe with the green hair. What’s his name, Michel. From Starfall. I don’t even know where that is.”

“Idaho,” I said automatically. “It’s inland. Very inland. I don’t think they even have any big lakes. There was no way you would have met him before this. Did you, I don’t know, drown one of his relatives? Insult his clothes? Anything that might have made him think putting you to sleep for a hundred years would be a good idea?”

“The only Daoine Sidhe I’ve ever threatened to drown was my husband,” said Dianda. “He likes it when I get threatening.”

“Please don’t finish that thought,” I said. “You’re sure this man had no reason to hold a grudge against you.”

“On Maeve’s bones, Toby, if I’ve done something to wrong him or his family, I don’t know about it. We had a fight at dinner, but that’s all,” said Dianda. “I was waiting for Patrick to come back and suddenly there was this green-haired bastard in my room. I felt the arrow hit my shoulder, and then everything went away. I didn’t really understand what had happened to me until you appeared.” She glanced away, off into the watery blue.

Karen’s lucid dreaming effect. It was hitting Dianda also, turning a series of unpleasant, unfulfilling dreams into a prison. It took everything I had not to wince as I realized what I’d inadvertently done to her. “We’ll be leaving soon,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you’ll go back to normal dreams once we’re gone. And we’re working on getting Arden to let us wake you up.”

“She won’t. Not until the High King says she’s allowed to use your precious cure that way—and if he doesn’t, I guess I’m spending the next century or so napping at Dean’s place. He’s a good boy. He’ll take good care of me.”

“It’s not going to come to that.”

Dianda shrugged. “If it does, it does. Patrick and I have dealt with every obstacle Faerie has thrown at us this far. What’s one more? Goldengreen is as good a crypt as anything e—”

She stopped mid-word as Karen flung herself between us, gills flared and eyes wide in her paler than usual face. “Aunt Birdie, you promised,” she wailed, and then a giant, unseen hand was grabbing the bottom of my tail and yanking me downward.

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.