Once Broken Faith (20 page)

“Yup.” The Luidaeg looked over her shoulder and smirked at me. “I'm reasonably sure this is where the parents of the current monarch are supposed to stay when they come to visit. ‘See Mom, see Dad, I still respect you, even if I
really
don't want to give back the throne.' We're in here because no one wants to tell me I can't fix my own dinner if I feel like it, but they want me near the communal food sources even less.”

“Gotcha,” I said. In the normal course of things, assuming fewer murders, Kings and Queens were made when their parents got tired of being in charge and stepped aside in favor of a younger generation. It
happened more often than most people would think. Yes, purebloods enjoyed having power, but after a few centuries of not being able to travel or take a weekend off, finding something else to do started to seem extremely attractive. And there was always the option to wander away for a century or two, come back, claim the throne was still yours by right, and lead a dandy war against your own kid. Fae parents weren't always as attached to their adult children as my human upbringing told me they ought to be. I guess when you were a thousand years old, your eight-hundred-year-old kid looked less like your baby, and more like the competition.

The kitchen matched the front room for elegance and simplicity: all redwood and polished California quartz, with an old-fashioned stove and an actual icebox instead of a refrigerator. “I hope Arden can convince her staff to modernize this place,” said the Luidaeg, going to the sink and turning on the water. “Faerie has embraced the idea of indoor plumbing and using small quantities of ice, rather than turning entire towers into eternally frozen storage boxes for our vegetables. It's not unreasonable to want a microwave.”

“Ice is modern?” asked Karen blankly.

“Honey, when you've lived as long as I have,
everything
is modern. The idea of being a teenager is modern. In my day, you'd have already been declared an adult, thrown out of your parents' house, and left to fend for yourself.” She opened a drawer. Empty. She scowled at it, closed it, and opened it again. This time it rattled as the small jars filled with herbs and oddly-colored liquids knocked against each other. She began pulling them out and lining them up on the counter. “This idea that Faerie should always be a twisted mirror of the human medieval age is proof that sometimes, people don't like change. I love cable. The Internet is amazing. Not having my ice cream melt is amazing. Hell,
having
ice cream is amazing. There was a time where you either found a Snow Fairy
or you waited until November—and even that's a new word, as we measure such things. Anyone who says the past was perfect is a liar and wasn't there. Everything that thinks can aspire, and everything that aspires wants something better than what they've left behind them. Get me a bowl.”

It took me a second to realize her last comment had been aimed at me. I started opening cupboards, finally finding the one that held the dishes. As befitted the setting, they were made of carnival glass, brightly colored and sturdier than they looked. Thank Maeve. If they had been as fragile as they should have been, I would have broken them just by opening the cupboard.

The Luidaeg took the bowl I offered her without comment, beginning to open jars and dump their contents into it. The smell of rosemary and honey tickled my nostrils.

That reminded me. “How come I can name smells I've never smelled before?”

“You're going to have to be more specific than that, weirdo,” said the Luidaeg, adding a sharp-smelling lichen to the bowl.

“Patrick Lorden. His magic smells like cranberry blossoms and mayflower. I've never smelled either of those things before, but I knew what they were as soon as I smelled them clearly. Why?”

“Because magic lives in blood, and that means your magic is abnormally sensitive to the magic of others,” said the Luidaeg. “If you've ever heard the name of a smell or a sensation, your magic will dig it out of the wet mess you call a brain and serve the word up to you on a silver platter. If you haven't, you'll keep getting details until someone tells you what to call it. I have no idea what Dad was thinking when he made you people. We didn't need bloodhounds with an attitude, we already had the Cu Sidhe.” She waved her hand over the bowl. The smell of sea foam filled the air, accompanied with a
biting overlay of salt that made the back of my throat ache.

The liquid in the bowl turned black, and then red, and finally a clear gold, like the finest honey in the world. The Luidaeg held it out to me.

“Drink this,” she said.

I took the bowl and brought it to my lips. Whether or not it was wise to drink a potion prepared by the sea witch didn't matter: she and I had passed that point a long time ago.

The potion tasted like apple cider, with just a hint of rosehip tea.

I was asleep before I hit the floor.

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.