Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(60)
I wasn’t ready to give up my humanity yet. It was thin and frayed, and yes, I’d come to terms with the fact that the life I’d chosen meant that eventually, I was probably going to have to lose it, but it was mine. It was all I had left of my father, who had died lonely and believing that his only daughter was gone forever. Things were never really pretty when Faerie and the human world intersected. We just liked to pretend they were.
“Karen says she’s up, and that her room is near a weird fountain thing,” said Quentin. He squinted at his screen. “There’s a fountain inside the knowe?”
“Apparently.” I didn’t spend enough time in Muir Woods to know where everything was. There was a way around that. I stopped walking, looking up at the ceiling, and said, “Hi. You remember me, right? I was here when we got the prisoners out of you. I was here when Arden reopened you. I’m the one who found her. Can you help us find the fountain? I need to talk to my niece.”
Quentin gave me a sidelong look but didn’t say anything. He’d seen me pull this sort of trick before.
Knowes are flexible in a way human homes could never be, capable of expanding themselves and rearranging their interiors when the urge strikes. Knowes are alive. I’d always suspected that, but I’d confirmed it a few years prior, when the knowe at Tamed Lightning had changed to help me. This was nowhere near as urgent, but a little help would still go a long way.
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.