Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(68)
I stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending. Then I gasped and slid out of the bed, staggering slightly as my legs protested the speed of my getting up. “What time is it?”
“Almost four.”
The whole conclave would be starting to stir. It wasn’t safe. “Where’s Quentin? He was supposed to go talk to Walther. He must be worried sick by now—”
“Nope,” said the Luidaeg. “He found your pet alchemist, the elf-shot is being analyzed, and there was nothing else he could do to help, so he came back here, after finding your kitty-boy and telling him what was going on. Smart kid. I would have hated to kill your betrothed when he busted in here and accused me of attacking you. We made it through the day with no injuries and no nonconsensual enchantments. Quentin’s asleep on the couch in the front room. I guarantee I can have him up in five minutes. Maybe less.”
“Please don’t stab my squire.” I scrubbed at my face with one hand, trying to clear the last of the cobwebs away. Karen was still sleeping. I didn’t know whether or not I should be concerned about that. “He functions best unstabbed. So do I, if you were wondering.”
“I’m not going to stab Quentin without an excellent reason,” said the Luidaeg. “I like Quentin. People I like are at the back of the line for stabbing.”
“All right, if you’re not planning to stab him, how are you going to get him up?”
The Luidaeg hefted her bowl. “I’m making pancakes.” With that, she stepped back out of the room, leaving me alone with Karen. I turned to look at my niece.
Sleep had stripped away her defenses, rendering her small and fragile. Her hair covered half her face like sea foam covering the beach, one inky tip resting across her lips. More than ever, it struck me how little she looked like her parents. That, combined with her unlikely, inexplicable magical gifts, made her seem like a changeling in the mortal sense—a child who shouldn’t have been where she was, who belonged to different parents, in a different world.
None of that mattered. Her parents loved her. Her brothers and sisters loved her. I loved her, and if she’d grown up somewhere else, with people who were better equipped to understand her oddities, she wouldn’t have been my niece.
Leaning over, I brushed her hair away from her face and let my fingers rest against her cheek. She made a small, grumpy noise, stretched, and opened her eyes, blinking blearily before she smiled at me.
“Hey, Auntie Birdie,” she said. “We did it. We got out of Dianda’s dreams.”
“We did,” I agreed solemnly. I paused. “Karen . . . can Evening invade any dream you’re walking through?”
Her face crumpled like a discarded sheet of paper, her eyes going shuttered and shifty. “She found me when I was visiting Anthony. He’s been having trouble with math, so sometimes I go into his dreams and tutor him. Math can be fun, if the world changes to make it easier to understand. We were doing fractions with dinosaurs and continents when this woman was just there, and she said Anthony had to go because the adults were talking now, and she pulled me out of his dream and into hers. I couldn’t get away! I tried and I tried, and she followed me. I know so many tricks, when I’m in dreams. I know so much more than I knew when B . . . when Blind Michael took me. And it didn’t matter.”
“She’s Firstborn,” I said softly. “It’s natural that she’d be stronger than you. There’s no shame in being beaten by someone who’s that much stronger.”
“But no one’s supposed to be stronger than me when I’m dreaming,” she said, with all the petulance and resentment of a teenage girl whose one true stronghold has been invaded. “I want her to stop. She doesn’t want the elf-shot to be fixed, but I do. I want her awake. I want her out of my mind.”
I put my arms around her, and for a moment, I didn’t say anything. I wanted the elf-shot cure to be distributed, despite what Theron and Chrysanthe had said about people getting careless around changelings. They were insulated, living in a community where changelings were the majority, where they were respected and prized and considered valuable. For the rest of us, a cure for elf-shot wasn’t going to make that big of a difference, because people were already careless with changelings. And I wanted the sleepers awake. I wanted Raysel to have the chance to learn what it was like to live with a body that wasn’t ripping itself apart. I wanted Dianda to threaten and laugh and love her family. I wanted a lot of things, and I wanted them as soon as possible. But I’d never wanted to wake Evening Winterrose, the woman I’d once considered my friend—the woman who’d cost me everything.
Karen must have heard the conflict in my silence, because she tilted her head back, meeting my eyes, and said, “No matter what we do, we can’t all win. This isn’t the kind of game that works like that.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But we can sure as hell try. Come on, sweetie. The Luidaeg’s making pancakes. Not everyone can say that the sea witch made them breakfast.”
That actually earned me a giggle—oh, small mercies—as Karen slid out of the bed and followed me from the bedroom to the front of the suite. Quentin was on the couch as promised, his head pillowed on one arm and his knees drawn up against his chest. He looked like a discarded marionette, and I had never felt the weight of my duty to him more. He was my responsibility, and I was going to take care of him if it killed me.