She didn’t ask, figuring she didn’t need the picture in her head until she paid her first visit.
“Thank you, Berent,” she said with heartfelt sincerity, handing him some of Clotaire’s largesse.
He smiled. “Anything for Prince Sebastien. He’s a rare good one. Please pass along my regards.”
“I will.” With Adsila on her arm, she strode out of the salon and out of the lodge. Only to stop at the sight of an enormous black cat with emerald eyes waiting for her. Adsila cheeped a greeting and the cat gave the avatar a long, slow blink.
“Moriah, Lady of Night,” Rose said, inclining her head in respect. “To what do I owe this visitation?”
The cat seemed to smile.
EPILOGUE
Rose stepped through the portal she’d made and into the Dream, becoming herself again. For whatever reason—perhaps because Thorn’s magic still guided the enchantment, not her own—Rose retained the same body she’d had all her life when inside the Dream. She didn’t mind. It added to the sense of being home.
Though, for a moment, the Dream felt so much more crisp and vivid than usual that she wondered if she’d made a mistake, even following Moriah’s precise directions, and had somehow inadvertently stepped back through into the waking world. This section of the Dream seemed remarkably stable, following the usual physical laws of the waking world. There seemed to be a consistent up and down and very few fantastical elements.
Except for the roses.
Before her stretched an enormous field of roses of the most extraordinary shades of lavender and violet purple. A mass scent rose from them unlike anything she’d smelled before, redolent of the low notes of honey and the bright ones of those fancy chocolate cookies, and yet undeniably floral.
In the distance to one side of the undulating bed of roses, a turbulent sea hurled itself loudly below high cliffs. On the other, snow-capped mountains reared in silent regal splendor. As Rose looked, she might have seen a pack ofscáthcúscudding across a pristine slope. Or it might have been a distant wind stirring up snow.
In the middle of the concentric rings of living, seethingamethyst blooms, a house of white towers stood, serene and still as the peaks above.
With a cry, Adsila winged off her shoulder and to the side. Rose followed, noting as she drew near that the outermost rosebushes had woven together to create a wall of brambles as high as her head. The small hairs on the back of her neck rose, prickling with unease, it was so like the cottage and the rose barrier that had confined Thorn for so long. Farther down, a man attacked the wall of roses.
Tall and dark, with broad shoulders and long braids threaded with silver, the man hurled fireballs and other spells at the briar barrier. They fizzled into nothing. Rose could have told him that sorcery doesn’t work in the Dream, but he wouldn’t understand, not knowing he was dreaming. Or… was he? The man, too, had a peculiar vividness, a realness to him that dreamers didn’t, that only people who’d entered the Dream possessed.
Adsila lit on his shoulder and he whirled, desperate hope lighting his face. “Oneira?”
This had to be Stearanos.
He spied Rose and his face fell. “You’re not Oneira,” he said accusingly.
“No, I’m not.”
“How came you by Adsila then?”
“Adsila came to me. To guide me here,” she added on inspiration. “To you, and Oneira.”
Hope returned to his scarred and craggy face. “Can you get us in? I can’t break the wards.” He frowned at the wall. “I’ve been trying for hours and I can’t do it. I should be able to.”
Rose didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d likely been trying for months, trapped in the timelessness of the Dream. “You should rest,” she told him gently.
He shook his head violently. “I cannot. I will not. She’s locked herself in here and I must save her.”
“Must you?” Rose asked, feeling her way. She swept a hand at the house and the roses. “Or should she release herself from the prison she’s made?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “This is her house. Her roses. What if she doesn’t know it isn’t real? What if she’s lost herself here?”
“What if she chooses it?” Rose countered, wondering what had driven Oneira to this strange exile. By all accounts, she’d already retired from the world to an isolated fastness, and then she’d removed herself even farther, re-creating that stronghold in the Dream.
“I drove her to do it,” Stearanos answered, regret in the lines of his scarred face. “I asked her to do the unthinkable when I knew,I knewit could destroy her.” He stared at the house in the distance. “I must save her.” With renewed vigor, he resumed his physical and magical attack on the bramble of blithe roses, apparently forgetting her and their conversation.
Adsila launched from his shoulder and returned to circle above her. Rose left him there. Stearanos was caught in a loop of the Dream; without the oneiromancy to control it, he’d continue in the same vein, returning again and again to his singular thought: to save Oneira. Rose could perhaps break him free, but not if he fought her.
First, she needed to find Oneira, for surely that was why Moriah had sent her to the sorceress’s corner of the Dream.
