It took me a second to realize her last comment had been aimed at me. I started opening cupboards, finally finding the one that held the dishes. As befitted the setting, they were made of carnival glass, brightly colored and sturdier than they looked. Thank Maeve. If they had been as fragile as they should have been, I would have broken them just by opening the cupboard.
The Luidaeg took the bowl I offered her without comment, beginning to open jars and dump their contents into it. The smell of rosemary and honey tickled my nostrils.
That reminded me. “How come I can name smells I’ve never smelled before?”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that, weirdo,” said the Luidaeg, adding a sharp-smelling lichen to the bowl.
“Patrick Lorden. His magic smells like cranberry blossoms and mayflower. I’ve never smelled either of those things before, but I knew what they were as soon as I smelled them clearly. Why?”
“Because magic lives in blood, and that means your magic is abnormally sensitive to the magic of others,” said the Luidaeg. “If you’ve ever heard the name of a smell or a sensation, your magic will dig it out of the wet mess you call a brain and serve the word up to you on a silver platter. If you haven’t, you’ll keep getting details until someone tells you what to call it. I have no idea what Dad was thinking when he made you people. We didn’t need bloodhounds with an attitude, we already had the Cu Sidhe.” She waved her hand over the bowl. The smell of sea foam filled the air, accompanied with a biting overlay of salt that made the back of my throat ache.
The liquid in the bowl turned black, and then red, and finally a clear gold, like the finest honey in the world. The Luidaeg held it out to me.
“Drink this,” she said.
I took the bowl and brought it to my lips. Whether or not it was wise to drink a potion prepared by the sea witch didn’t matter: she and I had passed that point a long time ago.
The potion tasted like apple cider, with just a hint of rosehip tea.
I was asleep before I hit the floor.
THIRTEEN
I SAT UP WITH A GASP, looking frantically around me. I was in my room in Amandine’s tower, lying atop the covers on my narrow bed, the ridges of the blankets digging into my butt and thighs as I put more weight on them than I’d possessed when I slept here on a regular basis. My clothes were gone, replaced not by finery or court gear, but by my favorite pair of jeans from when I was a teenager, the denim worn so soft that it was like wearing air, and a T-shirt advertising a 1994 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Tempest.
“Hi, Auntie Birdie.”
I turned. Karen was sitting in the reading nook, wearing her white dress. I didn’t know whether that was her choice, as the oneiromancer, or mine, as the one who’d presumably started this dream; I decided it was better not to ask. “Hi, pumpkin,” I said. “Are we asleep?”
“The Luidaeg made me help her carry you to the bed,” she said, and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know why she couldn’t have knocked you out there instead of in the kitchen, but she thought it was funny when you fell on the floor.”
“That, right there, is your answer.” I slid off the bed. As always when I was dreaming in concert with Karen, the motion felt real. Even when I knew I was asleep, even when the ceiling melted or the floor turned into butterflies, it felt absolutely right, like this was the way the world was always supposed to work. “When you’ve been alive as long as she has, you take your humor where you can get it. Do you need to do anything before you can take us to Dianda?”
“Yes. No. It’s . . . complicated right now.” Karen stood, and was suddenly standing in front of me, without visibly crossing the space between us. Lowering her voice, she said, “You can’t mention any of her things, or even think about her too hard, or she might find us. She’s always asleep. She’s always watching.”
I frowned, bemused. “Who are you—”
Karen’s eyes widened in panic. I stopped talking. Everything was suddenly clear.
Evening. Karen was attending the conclave as Evening’s representative; Evening, who had been elf-shot, Evening, who could access Karen through her dreams. Evening, who might be listening to us even now.
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t think about her, or any of her things.”
“You will,” said Karen, sounding resigned. “You would have even if I hadn’t said anything. But at least now you were warned, I guess. Take my hands and hold your breath.”
This time, there was no need for me to ask why. We were going into the dreams of a mermaid, and there was no reason to assume Dianda would be dreaming of dry land. She was born to the sea. Everything else was inconsequential. I slid my hands into Karen’s and breathed in deep.
No sooner had I filled my lungs with as much dream-air as they could hold than the water appeared around our feet, quickly rising to mid-calf. I shuddered, swallowing the urge to panic. Panic would do me no good. This wasn’t real. This was a dream—a terrible, cruel, necessary dream—and all the wetness in the world couldn’t send me back into the dark at the bottom of the pond. The water kept getting higher, cold and smelling of salt, cupping my thighs and then my hips like the hands of a lover.
Karen smiled encouragingly. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay. It’s just a dream.”
She didn’t say it couldn’t hurt me. If anyone would know that for a lie, it was her. Dreams can do damage even when they’re not dreamt in the company of an oneiromancer. And then the water closed over my head and the light slipped away, leaving us floating in the dark. The current pulled Karen’s hands from mine. I flailed, grasping wildly for her, only to realize that my arms were withering, becoming fins, stubby and useless for anything but moving through the watery deep. The salt stung the gills that opened in my neck. Koi were freshwater fish. I had been condemned to the pond; never to the sea. Never to the sea.
As with all dreams that Karen walked through, this one felt absolutely, inalienably real. I was a fish again, scaled and sleek and helpless, trapped beneath the crushing weight of the water. I swam, panicked, looking for the surface, for the air, for anything that would keep the next step of Simon’s spell from taking hold and changing me completely. When he’d originally transformed me into a koi and abandoned me to my prisoning pond, the spell had changed my mind along with my body. I don’t really remember anything about the fourteen years he stole from me. I spent those years as a fish. Fish don’t want, or wonder, or dream about going back to their families. Fish just exist, trapped in a moment that never ends.
Someone grabbed me. I thrashed harder, trying to pull away. The hands tightened, lifting me until one of my frantically searching eyes was level with Dianda Lorden’s face. She looked different, viewed underwater through a fish’s eyes. She was always beautiful, but here, like this, she was transcendent. There were glittering specks on her skin, places where microscopic scales caught and threw back the light. Her hair floated around her head like a corona, each strand seeking and finding its perfect place. She peered at me, dubiousness and confusion written plainly on her face.
“Toby?” she said. The fact that we were underwater didn’t seem to be interfering with her ability to speak. That was a good thing, I supposed, although I wasn’t sure how I could hear her. Did fish even have ears? “Stop messing around and turn yourself into something useful already.” She let me go.