Once Broken Faith (19 page)

A section of the wall in front of us—redwood, carved in flowers and dragonflies and even a few fat banana slugs, down near the floor—swung open like a door, welcoming us into the hidden stairwell on the other side. Quentin stared at it.

“I am never, ever going to be comfortable with the way you do that,” he said.

“You don't need to be comfortable, you just need to come with me,” I said, and stepped through the impromptu door, into the gloom on the other side. Quentin followed, and the door swung shut behind us.

Fae eyes are better suited to seeing in the dark than human ones, which makes sense, since fae are largely nocturnal. Even so, we need a
little
light to be able to see where we're going, and with the door shut, the darkness on the stairs was absolute. I was opening my mouth to ask Quentin to call a ball of witch-light when something glimmered to life near the top of the wall. Lights. Tiny pinprick lights, coming on one at a time, until the carved redwood sky was bright with stars. I could even recognize constellations, although none of them were mortal. This was a reproduction of a Summerlands sky. Half a dozen moons were represented, their lights filtered through thinly sliced gemstones, so that they glowed cherry, or orange, or creamy gold.

“Wow,” said Quentin. “Do you think . . . did the
knowe make this for you?” He sounded almost awed, and more than a little unnerved. He had been born to the nobility, and the idea that the knowes would listen to a changeling when they might not listen to a King was probably disconcerting.

I wanted to tell him the knowes would listen to him, too, when he needed them to, because he treated them with respect; because he'd been with me for so long that he had started believing that they were living things, which was all they seemed to want, at least so far as I could see. This wasn't the time. “I think this stairwell was always here, but might have gone somewhere else in the knowe,” I said. “It's easier with a place like this, where no one really remembers how things are supposed to fit together. It makes it easier for the knowe to decide what it wants to be without attracting attention to the fact that it's been changing.”

“These are really beautiful carvings,” said Quentin. “I hope the stairs stay where they are, so people can see them.”

Was it my imagination, or did the stars in the wall glitter marginally brighter? “That would be cool,” I agreed, and kept walking.

The stairs ended at a door which, when opened, led us out into a cobblestone courtyard. I glanced upward. The sky was hemmed by the towering trunks of the great redwoods surrounding and growing throughout the knowe. It was twilight—it was always twilight in the Summerlands—but the sky was light around the edges, signaling the coming of morning in the human world. The trees were impossibly, gloriously large. Bridges and tower rooms circled their trunks like strange mushrooms. “It's like the damn Ewok village,” I muttered.

“What?” said Quentin.

I gave him a sidelong look. “Okay, add the original
Star Wars
trilogy to the long list of things you still need to experience. How do you spend so much time on the Internet without knowing about
Star Wars
?”

“Raj likes romantic comedies, and April likes movies where everything explodes. Dean is still catching up.”

“Chelsea had spaceships all over the walls in her old room. Ask her what an Ewok is.” Aside from the door we'd come through, there were five others, radiating off the central courtyard like the petals of a flower. That shape was mirrored by the fountain, which had a carved blackberry flower supported by stylized figures at its center. “Text Karen. Have her open the door.”

Quentin blinked at me. “Why?”

“Because I don't want to go banging on doors and waking up nobles who have good reason not to want to talk to me right now,” I said. “I'm going to have to make them talk to me sooner or later, so it's better not to burn what little good will I have.”

“Oh.” Quentin bent his head back over his phone.

A door on the other side of the courtyard opened, and Karen appeared. She'd traded her fancy dress for jeans and a gray sweatshirt, and she looked so young and small that it made my heart hurt. Her oldest sister, Cassandra, was the image of their mother, but Karen was the image of no one but herself, a pale dream of a girl, bleached like bone in the desert. I took a step forward. Her gaze snapped to me, and then she was running, arms already outstretched, eyes wide and bright and terrified. I braced myself for impact. If this was hard on me, an adult who had been in worse situations, what was it like for her? She was just a child, sharing quarters with one of Faerie's greatest monsters, unable to go home.

Guiltily, I realized I hadn't called Stacy to tell her what was going on. I didn't even know if the Luidaeg had bothered to tell Karen's mother before she'd carried her away, off to become part of a story that was bigger than anything a changeling girl from Colma should have been pulled into. Then Karen was throwing herself into my arms, and I didn't have time to worry about what Stacy was thinking right now. All I could do was hold my
honorary niece tight, and let her press her face against my shoulder, and wait for her to stop shaking.

When I raised my head, the Luidaeg was standing in the open doorway to the room the two of them were sharing. She nodded politely. I returned the gesture.

“Quentin said you needed me,” said Karen, finally pulling back far enough that she could tilt her chin up and look at my face. “What's going on?”

“Come here,” I said. I disentangled myself from her arms and led her to the edge of the fountain, where I sat, pulling her down beside me. Quentin followed at a slight distance, and remained standing, almost like he was keeping watch. That was good. It meant I could focus on Karen and not worry about an ambush as I said, “Dianda—you remember Dianda, the Merrow Duchess from Saltmist—has been elf-shot, and I need to find out who did it. The arrow went into the front of her shoulder. I think she saw the shooter before she lost consciousness.”

“You want me to take you into her dreams.” The statement was soft, resigned, and not questioning in the least. “You know dreams aren't like linear reality, right? When I come into yours, you're almost always the one who decides where we are, unless I'm forcing your dreamscape to show us something specific. You'd be going into whatever a mermaid dreams about.”

Which probably meant water. Lots of water, surrounding me, encompassing me, until I was back in the pond where I'd lost fourteen years of my life. I took a shaky breath and nodded. “I know. But riding her blood isn't safe with the elf-shot in her system, and Arden won't let us wake her, since someone knows she's been elf-shot. It sends a bad political message if the allies of the Mists can be woken up when we're refusing to share the cure with anyone else.”

“It's still dangerous,” said Karen. She bit her lip, worrying it between her teeth before she let it go, and said, “But I'll do it for you. You'll just need to go to sleep.”

“Will you be able to sleep?”

She smiled a little. “It's sort of part of the power. I can make myself go to sleep by thinking that I want it to happen. I can't always wake myself up quite so well. I'm still learning, and there's no one to teach me.”

The idea of sleeping in the middle of a crisis wasn't appealing, especially since I wasn't sure that Dianda's condition had anything to do with King Antonio's murder. And yet it was the only thing I could do that would bring me closer to an answer, and keep Patrick from pulling the knowe down around our ears. “All right,” I said. “How will you know when I'm asleep?”

“She'll know because you're going to come and sleep where I can keep an eye on you, dumbass,” said the Luidaeg. I looked up. She had crossed the courtyard, and was now standing on the other side of the fountain. The spray didn't touch her as it fell. Like Karen, she had changed her clothes, trading her tidal gown for a pair of overalls and a white blouse that looked like it had been stolen from the late seventies.

“Um, what?” I said.

“You, Karen, our room, now,” said the Luidaeg. “I can put you under, no problem. Quentin can go do whatever weird-ass errands you're not going to be doing while you're asleep. He's your squire. It's his job.”

“She's right,” said Quentin. “You have to start trusting me sometime.”

“I do trust you,” I said. “I just don't trust anyone else. A man's been murdered, remember? That sort of makes me, the nontrusting one, more correct than you, the overly trusting one.”

“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.