Once Broken Faith

by Seanan McGuire

  “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 w
arned 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.

  FOURTEEN

  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.