I looked back to Patrick. “Can she drown?”
It wasn’t as odd a question as it seemed. Of Patrick and Dianda’s two sons, only the younger had inherited his mother’s ability to breathe water. Dean could drown, despite being a mermaid’s son. To my great relief, Patrick shook his head and said, “Not in her natural form. I think . . . I think if she’d been on legs and been pushed into the water, it might be different, but she was relaxing when I left to get the cake. That’s why she didn’t go with me. She didn’t want to put her feet back on.”
There was a splash, followed by a wet, meaty smacking sound. I turned back to the water. Sylvester had hauled Dianda out, her tail hitting against the bricks as he dragged her to dry ground. I grabbed her flukes, lifting them before too much damage could be done to the delicate scales marking the transition between flesh and fin. Dianda wasn’t going to thank us if she woke to find her tail damaged.
“Is there a bed?” I asked, hoisting my portion of unconscious mermaid. Quentin moved to support her midsection, and between the three of us, we were able to lift her with relative ease, keeping Patrick from needing to get involved. There were a lot of things I was happy to ask him to do. Carrying his elf-shot wife wasn’t on the list.
“Yes,” he said. “This way.” White-faced and shaking, he turned and led us across the room to a latticework door. It was more like a screen than anything else: he pushed it aside to reveal a covered balcony, open to the night air on three sides, with a large canopied bed at the center. The bedposts were carved into blackberry vines rich with fruit, and the bedclothes were the rich purple and fragile lilac of the berries and flowers that normally accompanied the vines.
“Sometimes I really admire Arden’s commitment to her theme,” I commented, as we carried Dianda over to the bed. There was a shrill note to my voice, like part of me knew I was whistling past the graveyard, and still couldn’t stop. Dianda was my friend. Maybe more importantly . . . this really looked like a declaration of war.
We slid her onto the mattress. Patrick leaned over to brush her wet hair away from her face, grimacing. He didn’t say anything, but I knew a small part of what he was thinking. When Merrow transformed from fin to flesh, they magically became dry at the same time. He’d probably never seen her with a pillow under her head and water in her hair. In that moment, she could have been dead.
As if he’d read my mind, he said, “Di loves pillows. She sleeps with me in the bed as often as she can, just because she enjoys having something under her head that isn’t a mossy rock. Linens don’t do so well when you submerge them.”
“Sandbags?” suggested Quentin.
Patrick flashed him a surprised look. Then he smiled, the expression tinged with worry and sorrow. “Those work, too. I . . .” His gaze went to the arrow protruding from Dianda’s shoulder. “Should we be taking this out of her?”
“Not yet,” I said. “She can’t get more elf-shot than she already is, and if we leave it there, we don’t have to worry that she’ll start bleeding. Quentin, I have a job for you.”
My squire straightened. “What is it?”
“Go find Arden. Don’t be seen.”
He nodded, catching my meaning immediately, and turned to head out of the room at a brisk pace. Sylvester and Patrick both looked at me, the one quizzical, the other alarmed.
“How much time has he spent in this knowe?” asked Sylvester.
“Is it safe for him to go off alone?” asked Patrick.
“Quentin was a courtier at Shadowed Hills before becoming my squire,” I said, picking up Dianda’s left wrist and studying her webbed hand. Her fingertips were scraped, ever so slightly. She must have been clinging to the pool’s edge when she was shot, and fallen backward into the water as the elf-shot took effect. “He knows how to navigate servants’ halls. If there’s anyone who can get through this place without attracting any attention to himself, it’s Quentin.”
“Can we wake her up?” asked Patrick.
The longing in his voice was so nakedly pure that I froze, allowing several seconds to tick past before I looked up, met his eyes, and said softly, “You know I can’t answer that.”
“We have a cure. It’s here, in this knowe. No one knows she’s been shot. Please, can’t we just . . . wake her?”
“No,” said Sylvester. We both turned to him. He looked at Patrick as he said, “Someone knows she’s been shot: whoever shot her. There are landlocked kingdoms represented at this conclave, people for whom the threat of the Undersea means nothing, because the Undersea could never touch them. Any one of them could have decided to make their point by targeting someone who couldn’t deliver direct retribution—the Law never forbids elf-shot, just cautions that there will always be consequences. Wake her, and whoever shot her can stand before the conclave and announce that the Mists intends to use the cure, no matter what decision is reached.”
“We’re talking about my wife, dammit,” snapped Patrick. “This isn’t one of your idealistic stories about chivalry and heroes. This is my wife. Do you think I give a damn about politics?”
“You never have before,” said Sylvester. “Simon despaired of you ever making anything of yourself.”
Patrick’s expression turned to ice. “Never say his name to me again,” he said. His voice was, if anything, colder than his eyes. “I was more of a brother to him than you ever attempted to be. Do what you like, but be aware that we’re not—will never be—friends.”
“Believe me, I’ve known that for a very long time,” said Sylvester. He turned to me, and said, “I’m reasonably sure Duke Lorden would be happier if I left. Will you be safe with him? Is there anything I can do for you?”
“If you see Madden, ask him to come here.” Madden worked for the Queen. Assuming he wasn’t involved wasn’t just allowed, it was practically required. But as a Cu Sidhe, he had an unbeatable sense of smell, and might be able to tell me who’d been in this room.
Sylvester nodded. “I will.”
“Great. Don’t get shot.” I turned my back on my liege, effectively dismissing him, and focused on Patrick. “We can take the arrow out when Quentin gets back with Arden. That gives us enough warm bodies that we should be able to stop the bleeding long enough to call for a medic. I don’t want to volunteer to ride Dianda’s blood—I don’t know what the elf-shot would do to me, and I’m sure there are things she doesn’t want me to know—but there may be another way, if we wait a few hours.” Once Karen was asleep, she could enter Dianda’s sleeping mind and ask if she’d seen the shooter. It was a clunky solution, one which relied on a teenage oneiromancer being able to reliably repeat what she learned from a comatose mermaid, but it was better than Dianda kicking my teeth in after she’d decided that I knew too much.
“We have to wake her up,” said Patrick. “If we don’t . . . Peter isn’t ready to be Duke. I can’t be Duke. I’ve only ever been ducal consort because there was never any question of my taking over if something happened to her. The Undersea won’t submit to rule by an air-breather. They have standards. If Dianda sleeps for a hundred years, the entire political shape of Saltmist changes. And by the standards of the culture that shaped her, Dianda is a pacifist.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t help myself. Dianda was a good friend and a better ally, but her solution to almost every problem was blunt-force trauma. “Oh,” I said. “Crap.”