Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(63)
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.”