“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.”