Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(61)
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.