I narrowed my eyes before doing the worst thing I could think of, and turning my back on her. “Honey, can you wake us up?” I asked, focusing on Karen.
“Don’t ignore me,” snapped Evening. “You have no right to ignore me.”
“I told you before that I can’t,” whispered Karen. “Not if she doesn’t want me to. She’s . . . she’s stronger than I am.”
“Not here she’s not,” I said. “This is your dream, Karen, not hers. Maybe she can pull you in, but she can’t make you stay. Believe me, and get us out of here.”
She bit her lip as she looked at my face, searching for some sign that I was wrong. Then she seized my hands. “We’re going to wake up.”
“That’s right.” I looked to Dianda. “You should snap back to your own dream as soon as we’re gone.” I wasn’t sure of that—I wasn’t sure of anything where this magic was concerned—but it seemed likely, and if dream logic held sway here, Dianda would probably do whatever she thought she was supposed to do.
“If I don’t, I’ll just need to find something to hit,” said Dianda mildly. “The lady who locked the wards at Goldengreen and kept me away from my son when he needed me should make a great target.”
The wisdom of punching one of the Firstborn was questionable. But again, this was a dream. “Just don’t get hurt before we can wake you up.”
“I won’t,” said Dianda. Her face twisted into something feral and terrifying. “Make sure that Michel boy is still breathing when I get back. I want to have a talk with him.”
He wasn’t going to enjoy hearing whatever she had to say, but that didn’t matter, because the field of roses was going hazy around the edges, until the only solid thing remaining was Karen’s hand holding fast to mine. Someone played a fiddle tune, far on the edge of my hearing, and the air smelled like ashes. Evening shouted, a wordless cry of fury as she realized we weren’t going to look at her again. And the dreamscape dissolved around us.
FOURTEEN
I OPENED MY EYES.
The bed beneath me was so soft that it was like sprawling on a cloud, and the bedroom was a sea of rainbows, thanks to the stained glass panels covering the walls. I sat up, moving from a beam of green light to a beam of red. The motion dislodged Karen’s arm, which had been slung loosely across my chest like she’d been hoping to keep hold of me in the dream world by keeping hold of me in the real one. Her breathing was smooth and level, and she didn’t look distressed. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Not everyone wears their nightmares on the outside.
“Oh, good; you’re awake,” said the Luidaeg. I turned. She was standing in the doorway, a carnival glass bowl tucked into the crook of her arm. She had a wooden spoon in the opposite hand, and was vigorously stirring the bowl’s contents. “Before you start yelling at me, the spell I hit you with was designed to keep you under until you decided to wake up, not a moment longer. So I didn’t knock you out until afternoon on purpose.”
I stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending. Then I gasped and slid out of the bed, staggering slightly as my legs protested the speed of my getting up. “What time is it?”
“Almost four.”
The whole conclave would be starting to stir. It wasn’t safe. “Where’s Quentin? He was supposed to go talk to Walther. He must be worried sick by now—”
“Nope,” said the Luidaeg. “He found your pet alchemist, the elf-shot is being analyzed, and there was nothing else he could do to help, so he came back here, after finding your kitty-boy and telling him what was going on. Smart kid. I would have hated to kill your betrothed when he busted in here and accused me of attacking you. We made it through the day with no injuries and no nonconsensual enchantments. Quentin’s asleep on the couch in the front room. I guarantee I can have him up in five minutes. Maybe less.”
“Please don’t stab my squire.” I scrubbed at my face with one hand, trying to clear the last of the cobwebs away. Karen was still sleeping. I didn’t know whether or not I should be concerned about that. “He functions best unstabbed. So do I, if you were wondering.”
“I’m not going to stab Quentin without an excellent reason,” said the Luidaeg. “I like Quentin. People I like are at the back of the line for stabbing.”
“All right, if you’re not planning to stab him, how are you going to get him up?”
The Luidaeg hefted her bowl. “I’m making pancakes.” With that, she stepped back out of the room, leaving me alone with Karen. I turned to look at my niece.
Sleep had stripped away her defenses, rendering her small and fragile. Her hair covered half her face like sea foam covering the beach, one inky tip resting across her lips. More than ever, it struck me how little she looked like her parents. That, combined with her unlikely, inexplicable magical gifts, made her seem like a changeling in the mortal sense—a child who shouldn’t have been where she was, who belonged to different parents, in a different world.
None of that mattered. Her parents loved her. Her brothers and sisters loved her. I loved her, and if she’d grown up somewhere else, with people who were better equipped to understand her oddities, she wouldn’t have been my niece.
Leaning over, I brushed her hair away from her face and let my fingers rest against her cheek. She made a small, grumpy noise, stretched, and opened her eyes, blinking blearily before she smiled at me.
“Hey, Auntie Birdie,” she said. “We did it. We got out of Dianda’s dreams.”
“We did,” I agreed solemnly. I paused. “Karen . . . can Evening invade any dream you’re walking through?”
Her face crumpled like a discarded sheet of paper, her eyes going shuttered and shifty. “She found me when I was visiting Anthony. He’s been having trouble with math, so sometimes I go into his dreams and tutor him. Math can be fun, if the world changes to make it easier to understand. We were doing fractions with dinosaurs and continents when this woman was just there, and she said Anthony had to go because the adults were talking now, and she pulled me out of his dream and into hers. I couldn’t get away! I tried and I tried, and she followed me. I know so many tricks, when I’m in dreams. I know so much more than I knew when B . . . when Blind Michael took me. And it didn’t matter.”
“She’s Firstborn,” I said softly. “It’s natural that she’d be stronger than you. There’s no shame in being beaten by someone who’s that much stronger.”
“But no one’s supposed to be stronger than me when I’m dreaming,” she said, with all the petulance and resentment of a teenage girl whose one true stronghold has been invaded. “I want her to stop. She doesn’t want the elf-shot to be fixed, but I do. I want her awake. I want her out of my mind.”
I put my arms around her, and for a moment, I didn’t say anything. I wanted the elf-shot cure to be distributed, despite what Theron and Chrysanthe had said about people getting careless around changelings. They were insulated, living in a community where changelings were the majority, where they were respected and prized and considered valuable. For the rest of us, a cure for elf-shot wasn’t going to make that big of a difference, because people were already careless with changelings. And I wanted the sleepers awake. I wanted Raysel to have the chance to learn what it was like to live with a body that wasn’t ripping itself apart. I wanted Dianda to threaten and laugh and love her family. I wanted a lot of things, and I wanted them as soon as possible. But I’d never wanted to wake Evening Winterrose, the woman I’d once considered my friend—the woman who’d cost me everything.