Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(64)
I frowned, bemused. “Who are you—”
Karen’s eyes widened in panic. I stopped talking. Everything was suddenly clear.
Evening. Karen was attending the conclave as Evening’s representative; Evening, who had been elf-shot, Evening, who could access Karen through her dreams. Evening, who might be listening to us even now.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t think about her, or any of her things.”
“You will,” said Karen, sounding resigned. “You would have even if I hadn’t said anything. But at least now you were warned, I guess. Take my hands and hold your breath.”
This time, there was no need for me to ask why. We were going into the dreams of a mermaid, and there was no reason to assume Dianda would be dreaming of dry land. She was born to the sea. Everything else was inconsequential. I slid my hands into Karen’s and breathed in deep.
No sooner had I filled my lungs with as much dream-air as they could hold than the water appeared around our feet, quickly rising to mid-calf. I shuddered, swallowing the urge to panic. Panic would do me no good. This wasn’t real. This was a dream—a terrible, cruel, necessary dream—and all the wetness in the world couldn’t send me back into the dark at the bottom of the pond. The water kept getting higher, cold and smelling of salt, cupping my thighs and then my hips like the hands of a lover.
Karen smiled encouragingly. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay. It’s just a dream.”
She didn’t say it couldn’t hurt me. If anyone would know that for a lie, it was her. Dreams can do damage even when they’re not dreamt in the company of an oneiromancer. And then the water closed over my head and the light slipped away, leaving us floating in the dark. The current pulled Karen’s hands from mine. I flailed, grasping wildly for her, only to realize that my arms were withering, becoming fins, stubby and useless for anything but moving through the watery deep. The salt stung the gills that opened in my neck. Koi were freshwater fish. I had been condemned to the pond; never to the sea. Never to the sea.
As with all dreams that Karen walked through, this one felt absolutely, inalienably real. I was a fish again, scaled and sleek and helpless, trapped beneath the crushing weight of the water. I swam, panicked, looking for the surface, for the air, for anything that would keep the next step of Simon’s spell from taking hold and changing me completely. When he’d originally transformed me into a koi and abandoned me to my prisoning pond, the spell had changed my mind along with my body. I don’t really remember anything about the fourteen years he stole from me. I spent those years as a fish. Fish don’t want, or wonder, or dream about going back to their families. Fish just exist, trapped in a moment that never ends.
Someone grabbed me. I thrashed harder, trying to pull away. The hands tightened, lifting me until one of my frantically searching eyes was level with Dianda Lorden’s face. She looked different, viewed underwater through a fish’s eyes. She was always beautiful, but here, like this, she was transcendent. There were glittering specks on her skin, places where microscopic scales caught and threw back the light. Her hair floated around her head like a corona, each strand seeking and finding its perfect place. She peered at me, dubiousness and confusion written plainly on her face.
“Toby?” she said. The fact that we were underwater didn’t seem to be interfering with her ability to speak. That was a good thing, I supposed, although I wasn’t sure how I could hear her. Did fish even have ears? “Stop messing around and turn yourself into something useful already.” She let me go.
I hung in the water in front of her, not swimming away, trying to figure out how to do what she wanted. This wasn’t my dream anymore. I didn’t dream myself wet and scaled and . . . wait. That wasn’t true. Sometimes I dreamed myself all of those things, because bad dreams could happen to anybody. Sometimes the pond was inescapable. So this was my dream, on some level.
I’d joined Dianda in the ocean in the real world once, courtesy of a transformation spell designed by the Luidaeg. It had turned me into a Merrow in every way that counted, including the ability to go from my natural bipedal shape into something a little more Disney-esque. There had been a particular sideways way of thinking necessary to trigger the transformation, like stretching a muscle that was less a reality than it was an idea. I couldn’t close my eyes—fish didn’t have eyelids—but I let my vision go as unfocused as biology allowed, and reached into myself for that stretching feeling.
There was a pop, like my entire body had been replaced by rapidly bursting bubbles, and I expanded, instantly and painlessly, into the Merrow form the Luidaeg had spun for me. My legs were still missing, replaced by a great sweep of calico scales and ending in a set of powerful flukes, but I had hands, I had arms, I was the next best thing to myself again. Even my tacky Shakespeare shirt was back. I did a somersault in the water, resisting the urge to whoop.
When I stopped flipping, Dianda was looking at me flatly, arms folded over her chest. Her hair was longer than I was used to, I realized, cut to conceal her gills, and her top was an elaborate confection of pearls and watered blue silk that shimmered in the light filtering through the water. She caught me staring, and said, “This is how I looked when I met Patrick. I was dreaming of our first date when the whole place flooded and you showed up. You are Toby, aren’t you? Because I swear, if I’m just dreaming about your pasty face when I could be dreaming of my husband, I’m going to murder you when we both wake up.”