Keeping the panic from rising up and overwhelming me took everything I had. This is just a dream, I thought fiercely. This is just a dream; you can’t die here. You’re going to wake up. But was that true? There might not be a horror movie monster with knives on his hands waiting to steal my soul, but having Karen in the dream meant it felt just as real as the waking world. Could we die if we died while she was dreaming with us?
The thought had time to form before there was one last, convulsive yank, and we were falling through dry air, suddenly devoid of oxygen. I took a greedy breath, coughing as the last of the water in my gills was knocked loose. Then Dianda screamed, high and shrill and uncharacteristically terrified. I turned toward the sound, and realized we weren’t falling through a void: we were falling toward the ground. A vast meadow filled with rose briars had appeared beneath us, thorns reaching up as if to welcome us home.
“Auntie Birdie!” shouted Karen. I didn’t turn, just flung my hand out in her direction, while I reached for Dianda with the other hand. Mermaids were designed to be aerodynamic, but not to land safely on solid ground. If she fell without us . . .
Her fingers strained toward mine. I leaned, clasping my hand around her wrist just as I felt Karen grab hold of me—and with Karen’s touch, gravity seemed to lose most of its urgency. We drifted, like strange, finny feathers, down to one of the few clear spots in that field of briars. Where we promptly collapsed in a heap, since none of us was exactly equipped to stand up.
“Oh, for Oberon’s sake,” snapped Dianda, squeezing my hand hard enough to hurt. “Focus and shift.” There was no scent of amber and water lilies as she changed forms, her top extending into an elegant, old-fashioned gown when the magic took hold. This was a dream. Normal rules did not apply.
But some things still worked. I reached deep, looking for the tension that would give me back my legs. I knew it was there, however hard it might be to find; all I had to do was remember the feeling of the change. Everything tingled, and then I was standing, pulling Karen to her newly-recovered feet. My jeans and sneakers were dry, unlike my shirt and hair. I felt like I’d been overenthusiastically bobbing for apples.
Karen was back in her white dress, and looked like she was scared out of her mind. “I can’t wake up,” she whispered, clinging to my arms. “You promised, and now she knows we’re here, and she’s not going to let me wake up.”
“Who knows—oh.” I stopped myself, realization sinking in. “Of course.” Karen had cautioned me not to think about Evening if I could avoid it; not to think about the things Evening considered to be her own. Evening was the Firstborn of the Daoine Sidhe. Patrick and Michel were both Daoine Sidhe; by the old rules of Faerie, they both belonged to her. Maybe that wouldn’t have been enough, but Goldengreen had been her demesne once, before she faked her own death and left the knowe standing empty. Invoking it by name had been the last straw.
I should have warned Dianda.
The air around me tasted like roses. I peeled Karen’s hands away from my arms and turned, shielding her with my body as much as I could. As I’d feared and expected, Evening was standing in the field behind me, head cocked to the side, a smile painted on her lips. She was wearing a dress of rose petals in red and pink and sunset orange, arranged into a gradient and stitched together with tiny loops of silver wire. Flashes of snow-white skin showed through the gaps, pale enough that I would have called her a corpse if she hadn’t been moving, and breathing, and looking at me.
“That took you less time than I had expected,” she said. “Well done, October.”
“Leave my niece alone,” I said.
Her smile faded. “I thought I taught you better than that,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “You were meant to know how to respect your betters, not flap your tongue like a bird’s wings and think it would help you fly away.”
I blinked. “Wow. Did you level up in ‘pretentious’ after we shot you, or are you going with the whole ‘dream logic’ bullshit? Karen is mine. Her mother is my best friend, and I’m her honorary aunt. That means hands off. She’s not going to help you wake up.”
Evening actually laughed. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Karen—such a bland name; there’s no majesty in it, no mystery. It means ‘pure,’ you know. Such irony, when you consider where she comes from. But none of that matters, because your little Karen isn’t yours to claim, and she isn’t here to help me wake up. She’s here to make sure you people don’t destroy my greatest creation in the name of ‘playing fair.’”
“Uh, not to be pushy or anything, but who is this lady?” asked Dianda. She stepped up next to me, adding her body to the screen blocking Karen from Evening’s view. I’d never been more grateful to her. “She looks like she could use some sun, and maybe a good kick in the teeth.”
“Dianda Lorden, may I present Evening Winterrose, better known in some circles as Eira Rosynhwyr, the Firstborn of the Daoine Sidhe, and the woman who locked the wards at Goldengreen.” I gestured grandly toward Evening. “I’d call her names, but none of them would be suitable for mixed company.”
“Wait—that’s Evening Winterrose?” Dianda shook her head. “It can’t be. Evening’s dead, and she never looked that much like a waterlogged corpse. She was pale. She wasn’t bloodless.”
“I may have played down a few aspects of my appearance when I walked among my inferiors,” said Evening. “Hello, Dianda. Still the little Merrow slut who thought mixing her bloodline with my own would somehow make her worthy of a throne. How is dear Patrick? Is he tired of you yet? I expected better of him than I got. Marrying a mermaid and running off to sea . . . such a disappointment.”
“I take it back,” said Dianda. “That’s Evening.”
“Unfortunately,” I said. “Why are you harassing my niece, Evening? Why don’t you want this cure getting out?”
“There you go, assuming she’s yours again,” said Evening. She looked at me tolerantly, like a mother facing a recalcitrant child. “What’s a hundred years to me? It’s inconvenient, and I would rather be awake, but not if that wakefulness comes with the unmaking of my greatest creation. A hundred years is nothing. Long enough for your alchemist to find another calling, and for you to get yourself killed when one of your ‘adventures’ goes awry. I’ll wake to a world that still respects my strength, and I’ll carry on like nothing had ever changed. You can’t win. I already have.”
“If a hundred years is nothing to you, if you can just wait me out, why did you come back in the first place?” It was something I’d been wondering since the moment I’d first seen her again, back from the dead and never really on my side. Maybe now, in this dreamscape, she would actually tell me.
Evening cocked her head to the side. “You don’t know, do you?” This time her smile was slow and poisonous. “Oh, this is going to be beautiful. You’re stumbling from goalpost to goalpost, triggering all manner of dangerous things, and you have no idea. I came back because you opened certain doors and put certain pieces back on the board, and I wanted them. Maybe I can’t have everything I want right now, but I’m not sorry I tried. I’m only sorry you survived.”
“Leave my niece alone.”
“Or you’ll do what? Have me elf-shot and abandoned on one of Maeve’s ancient Roads? Please. Unless you’re willing to kill me, and have all my descendants know that you, October Daye, daughter of Amandine the Liar, murdered the mother of the Daoine Sidhe, there’s nothing else you can do. Go pick yourself a rose, little girl. That’s always worked out so well for your family.”