Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(67)

“Wait—that’s Evening Winterrose?” Dianda shook her head. “It can’t be. Evening’s dead, and she never looked that much like a waterlogged corpse. She was pale. She wasn’t bloodless.”

“I may have played down a few aspects of my appearance when I walked among my inferiors,” said Evening. “Hello, Dianda. Still the little Merrow slut who thought mixing her bloodline with my own would somehow make her worthy of a throne. How is dear Patrick? Is he tired of you yet? I expected better of him than I got. Marrying a mermaid and running off to sea . . . such a disappointment.”

“I take it back,” said Dianda. “That’s Evening.”

“Unfortunately,” I said. “Why are you harassing my niece, Evening? Why don’t you want this cure getting out?”

“There you go, assuming she’s yours again,” said Evening. She looked at me tolerantly, like a mother facing a recalcitrant child. “What’s a hundred years to me? It’s inconvenient, and I would rather be awake, but not if that wakefulness comes with the unmaking of my greatest creation. A hundred years is nothing. Long enough for your alchemist to find another calling, and for you to get yourself killed when one of your ‘adventures’ goes awry. I’ll wake to a world that still respects my strength, and I’ll carry on like nothing had ever changed. You can’t win. I already have.”

“If a hundred years is nothing to you, if you can just wait me out, why did you come back in the first place?” It was something I’d been wondering since the moment I’d first seen her again, back from the dead and never really on my side. Maybe now, in this dreamscape, she would actually tell me.

Evening cocked her head to the side. “You don’t know, do you?” This time her smile was slow and poisonous. “Oh, this is going to be beautiful. You’re stumbling from goalpost to goalpost, triggering all manner of dangerous things, and you have no idea. I came back because you opened certain doors and put certain pieces back on the board, and I wanted them. Maybe I can’t have everything I want right now, but I’m not sorry I tried. I’m only sorry you survived.”

“Leave my niece alone.”

“Or you’ll do what? Have me elf-shot and abandoned on one of Maeve’s ancient Roads? Please. Unless you’re willing to kill me, and have all my descendants know that you, October Daye, daughter of Amandine the Liar, murdered the mother of the Daoine Sidhe, there’s nothing else you can do. Go pick yourself a rose, little girl. That’s always worked out so well for your family.”

I narrowed my eyes before doing the worst thing I could think of, and turning my back on her. “Honey, can you wake us up?” I asked, focusing on Karen.

“Don’t ignore me,” snapped Evening. “You have no right to ignore me.”

“I told you before that I can’t,” whispered Karen. “Not if she doesn’t want me to. She’s . . . she’s stronger than I am.”

“Not here she’s not,” I said. “This is your dream, Karen, not hers. Maybe she can pull you in, but she can’t make you stay. Believe me, and get us out of here.”

She bit her lip as she looked at my face, searching for some sign that I was wrong. Then she seized my hands. “We’re going to wake up.”

“That’s right.” I looked to Dianda. “You should snap back to your own dream as soon as we’re gone.” I wasn’t sure of that—I wasn’t sure of anything where this magic was concerned—but it seemed likely, and if dream logic held sway here, Dianda would probably do whatever she thought she was supposed to do.

“If I don’t, I’ll just need to find something to hit,” said Dianda mildly. “The lady who locked the wards at Goldengreen and kept me away from my son when he needed me should make a great target.”

The wisdom of punching one of the Firstborn was questionable. But again, this was a dream. “Just don’t get hurt before we can wake you up.”

“I won’t,” said Dianda. Her face twisted into something feral and terrifying. “Make sure that Michel boy is still breathing when I get back. I want to have a talk with him.”

He wasn’t going to enjoy hearing whatever she had to say, but that didn’t matter, because the field of roses was going hazy around the edges, until the only solid thing remaining was Karen’s hand holding fast to mine. Someone played a fiddle tune, far on the edge of my hearing, and the air smelled like ashes. Evening shouted, a wordless cry of fury as she realized we weren’t going to look at her again. And the dreamscape dissolved around us.





FOURTEEN


I OPENED MY EYES.

The bed beneath me was so soft that it was like sprawling on a cloud, and the bedroom was a sea of rainbows, thanks to the stained glass panels covering the walls. I sat up, moving from a beam of green light to a beam of red. The motion dislodged Karen’s arm, which had been slung loosely across my chest like she’d been hoping to keep hold of me in the dream world by keeping hold of me in the real one. Her breathing was smooth and level, and she didn’t look distressed. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Not everyone wears their nightmares on the outside.

“Oh, good; you’re awake,” said the Luidaeg. I turned. She was standing in the doorway, a carnival glass bowl tucked into the crook of her arm. She had a wooden spoon in the opposite hand, and was vigorously stirring the bowl’s contents. “Before you start yelling at me, the spell I hit you with was designed to keep you under until you decided to wake up, not a moment longer. So I didn’t knock you out until afternoon on purpose.”