Once Broken Faith

by Seanan McGuire

  He blinked. “What?”

  “I’m trying to figure out whether Dianda’s attacker used magic to get into the room. I’ve found a signature I don’t recognize, but it’s too faded for me to pick out the elements. If you could gather your magic so I can eliminate it as belonging to our suspect, that would be a huge help.” I crossed my arms and looked at him expectantly.

  “Ah,” said Patrick. He raised a hand, palm turned toward the ceiling, cleared his throat, and recited calmly, “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight.” The smell of wood and flowers rose around him, briefly unfamiliar, before the part of my mind that was an inexplicable encyclopedia of magical scents kicked in and identified them.

  “Cranberry blossoms and . . . some sort of flower, some sort of small white flower with five petals that grows close to the ground,” I said. “It’s your magic near the door.”

  “Yes, and the white flower is ‘mayflower,’” he said, dropping his hand and letting the magic dispel. “Dianda was having trouble with the stairs. I cast an illusion over both of us, to keep anyone from seeing and judging her based on her difficulty walking—she’s a mermaid, she’s allowed to have trouble staying on her feet for long—and let it go once we got inside.”

  I paused. “Before she was shot, you mean. You released your spell before she was shot.”

  “I certainly didn’t stand around waiting for my wife to be elf-shot before I dropped a simple don’t-look-here spell, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, a dangerously irritated note creeping into his voice.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said, shaking my head. “The person who shot her didn’t leave any magical traces in the room. They could have been under a don’t-look-here, but it would have broken when they opened the door. They can’t have teleported in, or they’d have filled the room with their magic. But if I can still pick up your magic, from before she was shot, I should have been able to pick up theirs. Dianda saw the person who shot her.”

  “Which means all we need to do is wake her up and she can tell us,” said Patrick, turning back to Arden.

  “We can’t do that,” she said. “You know we can’t do that. My own brother is still asleep, because until the High King judges this cure acceptable, we can’t use it.”

  “She’s asleep,” I said. “Honestly, until we know who did this and why, maybe that’s for the best.” Patrick turned a stunned, furious look on me. I raised my hands, palms out, as if to ward him off. “Hey, I like Dianda, and I don’t want her to spend the next hundred years napping, okay? But she’s not calm, and she could start hitting people who don’t deserve it. This way, we can find out what happened, and why, and wake her up when we have the right people all gift-wrapped for her punching pleasure.”

  Arden was staring at me. “That’s . . . that’s not how the fae judicial system works,” she said.

  “Oh, please,” I replied. “We don’t have a judicial system. We have one law, which we break constantly, and everything else is arbitrary punishments handed down by whoever’s higher-ranked in the nobility than the person who did something wrong. If High King Aethlin says someone’s punishment is getting punched in the face over and over by an angry mermaid, that’s as valid as anything else he might want to hand down. Now. If you two are done shouting at each other, we need to move her. This room is completely indefensible.”

  “I can have her taken to the room where my brother is sleeping, if that would be acceptable to Duke Lorden,” said Arden.

  “It would be,” said Patrick. “Will you let me help you find the people who harmed my wife?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “If I need you. First, though, I’m going to need that arrow.” I gestured toward the shaft that protruded from Dianda’s shoulder. It was fletched in undyed brown feathers that looked like they’d come from some sort of bird of prey. That might help me track down where the shooter had come from, assuming they’d gathered feathers from a native bird. Of course, with my luck, they’d be red-tailed hawk feathers, and I’d learn nothing.

  The elf-shot itself, on the other hand . . . thanks to the timing of the lockdown, Walther was in here with us. And I knew he had his kit. We could figure out who’d brewed the tincture, and go from there.

  “I thought we needed to leave the arrow where it was,” said Patrick.

  “Only until we had help,” I said. “If there’s too much blood or anything like that, Arden can open a portal and get her straight to the doctor. You do have a doctor, right, Arden?”

  “I haven’t needed one yet,” she said uncomfortably.

  I resisted the urge to groan. “Okay,” I said. “Sylvester Torquill is here. He has an Ellyllon on his staff—Jin—who’s one of the best healers I’ve ever worked with. If we can get permission from the High King to open the conclave long enough to invite someone else in, either Sir Etienne can gate her over, or Arden can open a portal to Shadowed Hills and bring her through.”

  “I’ll speak to the High King, and to Duke Torquill, as soon as we have Duchess Lorden appropriately settled,” said Arden.

  “Good. Sylvester will want to be asked. He’d do it if I asked, but it would be a favor to me, not a service to the crown. I think the latter is more important right now.” I glanced at Dianda. She looked so peaceful, sleeping like that. It was really too bad she was going to wake up furious. “Nolan’s still in that awful tower room?”

  “One way in, one way out,” said Arden. “There’s nowhere safer.”

  “I’ll get Tybalt to bring me up to get the arrow,” I said. “For right now, I’m going to trust the two of you to take care of things.”

  Patrick’s eyes widened. “Where are you going?”

  “Remember I mentioned that there might be a way for me to find out what Dianda had seen without riding her blood? I need to go find out if it’s available to me.” Assuming Karen was still awake. Assuming she was willing.

  Assuming a lot of things.

  “We’ll be in the tower room,” said Arden. “As before, all the resources of my knowe are open to you.”

  “Which is a good thing, because I think I’m going to need them.” I offered the pair—technically, the trio—a quick, shallow bow. “Open roads.”

  “Kind tides,” said Patrick reflexively. Arden didn’t say anything, only nodded. I turned quickly, before the shouting could start again, and walked back out to the main room, where Quentin was waiting.

  “Come on,” I said, waving for him to follow me. He was well-trained, and had been with me a long time: he followed without question or complaint.

  Better yet, he waited until we were in the hallway before he asked, “Where are we going?”

  “You have Karen’s phone number, right? You two text.”

  “Not as much as I text with some other people, but sure,” he said, frowning at my non-answer. “What about it?”

  “Text her and ask where in the knowe her room is. I need to ask her for a favor, and I’d rather do it face-to-face.”

  Quentin gave me a sidelong look. “Are you going to ask her to take you into Dianda’s dreams so you can find out who shot her?”

  “Either it’s a really obvious plan, or you’ve been with me for too long,” I said.

  “Or both.” Quentin produced his phone from inside his shirt, swiping words across the screen as we walked toward the stairs. “It’s a good plan. Why didn’t you just, you know, do the blood thing?”

  “Dianda will still have elf-shot in her system, and I’ve never tried riding the blood of someone who’s been poisoned so recently,” I said. “So apart from the concern I’d see things she didn’t want me to see, since I’d be going in without consent, we might have issues with secondary exposure. I’d rather not spend another week having seizures.” I was still mortal enough for elf-shot to be deadly. My body, however, didn’t like the idea of dying, and would fight anyt
hing that tried to kill me. When I was elf-shot and unconscious, that meant the balance of my blood started shifting without my conscious command, pushing me farther and farther away from human.

  I wasn’t ready to give up my humanity yet. It was thin and frayed, and yes, I’d come to terms with the fact that the life I’d chosen meant that eventually, I was probably going to have to lose it, but it was mine. It was all I had left of my father, who had died lonely and believing that his only daughter was gone forever. Things were never really pretty when Faerie and the human world intersected. We just liked to pretend they were.

  “Karen says she’s up, and that her room is near a weird fountain thing,” said Quentin. He squinted at his screen. “There’s a fountain inside the knowe?”

  “Apparently.” I didn’t spend enough time in Muir Woods to know where everything was. There was a way around that. I stopped walking, looking up at the ceiling, and said, “Hi. You remember me, right? I was here when we got the prisoners out of you. I was here when Arden reopened you. I’m the one who found her. Can you help us find the fountain? I need to talk to my niece.”

  Quentin gave me a sidelong look but didn’t say anything. He’d seen me pull this sort of trick before.

  Knowes are flexible in a way human homes could never be, capable of expanding themselves and rearranging their interiors when the urge strikes. Knowes are alive. I’d always suspected that, but I’d confirmed it a few years prior, when the knowe at Tamed Lightning had changed to help me. This was nowhere near as urgent, but a little help would still go a long way.

  A section of the wall in front of us—redwood, carved in flowers and dragonflies and even a few fat banana slugs, down near the floor—swung open like a door, welcoming us into the hidden stairwell on the other side. Quentin stared at it.

  “I am never, ever going to be comfortable with the way you do that,” he said.

  “You don’t need to be comfortable, you just need to come with me,” I said, and stepped through the impromptu door, into the gloom on the other side. Quentin followed, and the door swung shut behind us.

  Fae eyes are better suited to seeing in the dark than human ones, which makes sense, since fae are largely nocturnal. Even so, we need a little light to be able to see where we’re going, and with the door shut, the darkness on the stairs was absolute. I was opening my mouth to ask Quentin to call a ball of witch-light when something glimmered to life near the top of the wall. Lights. Tiny pinprick lights, coming on one at a time, until the carved redwood sky was bright with stars. I could even recognize constellations, although none of them were mortal. This was a reproduction of a Summerlands sky. Half a dozen moons were represented, their lights filtered through thinly sliced gemstones, so that they glowed cherry, or orange, or creamy gold.

  “Wow,” said Quentin. “Do you think . . . did the knowe make this for you?” He sounded almost awed, and more than a little unnerved. He had been born to the nobility, and the idea that the knowes would listen to a changeling when they might not listen to a King was probably disconcerting.

  I wanted to tell him the knowes would listen to him, too, when he needed them to, because he treated them with respect; because he’d been with me for so long that he had started believing that they were living things, which was all they seemed to want, at least so far as I could see. This wasn’t the time. “I think this stairwell was always here, but might have gone somewhere else in the knowe,” I said. “It’s easier with a place like this, where no one really remembers how things are supposed to fit together. It makes it easier for the knowe to decide what it wants to be without attracting attention to the fact that it’s been changing.”

  “These are really beautiful carvings,” said Quentin. “I hope the stairs stay where they are, so people can see them.”

  Was it my imagination, or did the stars in the wall glitter marginally brighter? “That would be cool,” I agreed, and kept walking.

  The stairs ended at a door which, when opened, led us out into a cobblestone courtyard. I glanced upward. The sky was hemmed by the towering trunks of the great redwoods surrounding and growing throughout the knowe. It was twilight—it was always twilight in the Summerlands—but the sky was light around the edges, signaling the coming of morning in the human world. The trees were impossibly, gloriously large. Bridges and tower rooms circled their trunks like strange mushrooms. “It’s like the damn Ewok village,” I muttered.

  “What?” said Quentin.

  I gave him a sidelong look. “Okay, add the original Star Wars trilogy to the long list of things you still need to experience. How do you spend so much time on the Internet without knowing about Star Wars?”

  “Raj likes romantic comedies, and April likes movies where everything explodes. Dean is still catching up.”

  “Chelsea had spaceships all over the walls in her old room. Ask her what an Ewok is.” Aside from the door we’d come through, there were five others, radiating off the central courtyard like the petals of a flower. That shape was mirrored by the fountain, which had a carved blackberry flower supported by stylized figures at its center. “Text Karen. Have her open the door.”

  Quentin blinked at me. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to go banging on doors and waking up nobles who have good reason not to want to talk to me right now,” I said. “I’m going to have to make them talk to me sooner or later, so it’s better not to burn what little good will I have.”

  “Oh.” Quentin bent his head back over his phone.

  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.”