Once Broken Faith

by Seanan McGuire

  “All I’m going to do is go up to the tower and ask Walther about the elf-shot,” protested Quentin. “I can do that on my own. I’ll stick to the servants’ halls, and if I get stuck, I’ll ask the knowe where I’m supposed to be. You can’t be the only one who knows how that trick works. I’ll be fine.”

  “If you get yourself killed, I’m telling your parents,” I said.

  Quentin smiled. “If I get myself killed, I’ll tell my parents myself.”

  “You would,” I said, and resisted the urge to ruffle his hair. He was getting too old for that. He was getting too old for a lot of things—like letting me protect him.

  Oh, who was I kidding? He’d been born too old to let me protect him. He’d just been willing to pretend for a while. As I watched him walk back to the door we’d arrived through, I couldn’t shake the feeling that pretending time was over, and he was finally prepared to face the world for what it really was. Dark, complicated, and unforgiving. He glanced back once, offering me a quick, encouraging smile. Then he was gone, slipping through the door, back into that narrow stairwell full of stars, and I was alone in the courtyard with a frightened little girl and a woman who’d seen the death of empires.

  I turned to look at the Luidaeg. Her lips were twisted in a small moue of understanding; her eyes were kind. “It’s never easy when they grow up on you,” she said. “Believe me, I’m an expert on people growing up and leaving you behind. But he’s a good kid. You’ve trained him well. So have I, if you count destroying his ability to feel healthy fear as ‘training’ him. He’ll be fine.”

  “I hope so.” I stood. “You said you could knock me out. Can you guarantee I’ll wake up again without sleeping a full eight hours? I have work to do.”

  “You can’t storm around the knowe waking kings and queens at your leisure.”

  “Watch me.”

  The Luidaeg snorted. “Spoken like a true changeling. These are people who don’t like to be inconvenienced. They’ll be furious if you drag them out of bed in the middle of the day.”

  “Ask me if I care.” I spread my arms, not looking away from her face. “A man is dead. A woman has been elf-shot. I don’t know if the two are connected. I don’t know how they could not be. I don’t have a fingerprint kit or a clue. I didn’t get to go talk to the servers because I got dragged back to the conclave. If interviewing Dianda gets me something I can use, that’s what I have to do—and if I’m willing to disrupt her dreams to ask my questions, why wouldn’t I interrupt someone else’s way less enchanted sleep? They can always nap on the way back to their own damn Kingdoms.”

  “When you decide it’s time to make enemies, you don’t fuck around,” said the Luidaeg. “I’ve always respected that about you. Karen? You sure you’re all right with this?”

  There was something in her tone that I recognized, and it stung: she was talking to Karen the way I’d always spoken to Quentin, to Raj, to the flock of teenagers that fell into and out of my life like so many lost puppies looking for a home. She was checking to make sure Karen felt safe and protected. I was Karen’s aunt. I should have been the one she turned to. But I wasn’t. Faerie’s greatest monster was.

  I was never going to get used to the idea of being jealous of the Luidaeg.

  Karen bit her lip and nodded. “I am,” she said. “Auntie Birdie needs me, and what’s the point of me having this weird power if I don’t use it to help the people I care about? It’s already ruining my life. I may as well get some good out of it.”

  “Good girl,” said the Luidaeg, and touched Karen’s hair with an almost proprietary hand. Then she turned, walking back toward the open door to their shared chambers. “Come on, both of you. I don’t have all day.”

  Karen and I exchanged a glance before we both stood. She slipped her hand into mine, her fingers cool against my skin, and we trailed across the courtyard, following the sea witch to whatever fate awaited us.

  Arden had apparently been assigning suites based on status and how dangerous it would be to piss the occupants off. The Luidaeg was the most frightening person currently in the Bay Area, and so she got the nicest chambers. The door from the courtyard led into a beautifully decorated room larger than my old apartment, with redwood floors and walls papered in velvety paper patterned with tangled blackberry briars. The furniture was elegant and rustic, all plain, varnish-stained wood and comfortable looking cushions. One entire wall was made of stained glass panels, all of them set to slide open, if the occupants desired, and reveal the good green world outside.

  “Whoa,” I said. “And I thought Quentin and I had a nice room.”

  “Ask your kitty-boy to show you where he’s supposedly sleeping; the monarchs get the really good spots,” said the Luidaeg, walking onward. “Come on. The kitchen’s this way.”

  “Wait—you mean you have an actual kitchen?” The idea that every large suite would have its own kitchen seemed improbable in the extreme, both logistically and because it would have put an awful lot of royal poison tasters out of work. When you lived in a feudal society mostly controlled by functional immortals, losing your job was a big deal.

  “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.

  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 p
articular 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.”