Finally, and most exciting, she’d gleaned from the books that the sorceress Oneira had been able to bypass the wards via that exact art. A powerful oneiromancer could walk through something called the Dream and skip right over wards. That’s what Thorn had seen through that portal: the Dream.
She didn’t really understand what that meant. Oh, she’d read the description of the Dream in the texts, though it seemed the authors of those books mostly paraphrased what oneiromancers had told them about it. There didn’t seem to be a book authored by the great Oneira, though she was occasionally referenced in other texts as the reigning power in her field, like the sorcerer Stearanos was for wardmaking. It could be that Oneira had indeed written one and it remained in the library, or in someone else’s. Orthathad been the book the sorceress had taken, for whatever obscure reason of her own.
Thorn didn’t have a good reason why the apparently famousand powerful Oneira would steal her own book. Truly, Thorn ruefully acknowledged to herself, she had so little understanding of the wider world that she had no idea why anyone did anything at all. The glimpses the artifacts gave her were frustratingly insufficient to give her a complete picture.
Thorn, accustomed to entertaining herself with the stories she made up, liked to imagine some epic tale in which Oneira scoured the libraries of the world for this book she’d authored. Perhaps she’d come to regret revealing some great secret, possibly because some young sorceress—like Thorn!—had read it and done something alarming. Night after night, Oneira walked the Dream to remove this dangerous text from the world, sacrificing her sleep and magical resources for the good of humanity. Thorn liked this version, because she wanted to believe the beautiful, crimson-haired sorceress, shimmering with power, was a good person. Jada was not a good person and so Thorn wanted the only other person she’d ever met, using the term loosely, to be better.
Most likely, however, she acknowledged in her glum moments, Oneira was the thief Jada named her, with the power to take anything she liked, which she used without hesitation or qualm. In Thorn’s limited experience, that’s what people did. Certainly many of the treasures she’d touched had been stolen at least once, if not multiple times, and always tinged with emotions from avarice to desperation, but never anything generous or noble.
Finally, spring began to hint at her imminent arrival in the trickles of water down the icicles hanging from the eaves before they fell in chunks and crashes, and in the thrust of pink-veined, purple crocus through the thinning snow. And Jada announced she would be going on a short excursion.
Oneira had not reappeared, but neither had she returned what she’d stolen, so Jada had continued to be irascible and paranoid by turns. She didn’t like to leave Thorn, she said, but she alsofelt confident Oneira, should she return, wouldn’t detect Thorn’s existence any more the second time than the first. Especially if Thorn was put in the Sleep of Ages and particularly if she was hidden in the root cellar, for good measure.
Though Thorn had been resigned to the waking sleep—for once the horror of remaining aware would work in her favor, as she had plans to test the enchantment from within—Thorn didn’t have to pretend to be upset about the root cellar. The prospect of sleeping like the dead, buried underground, filled her with a dread like no other. If her plan, her carefully practiced skills, didn’t work, she would be trapped in what could become her grave. More than ever she feared that Jada had reached the end of whatever plan she’d followed all of Thorn’s life thus far, and that she would disappear forever, leaving Thorn to rot along with last season’s apples and potatoes, blindly aware as her mind turned to soup and the worms crawled out of the earthen walls to eat her.
But, though Thorn shed real tears, pleaded, and promised, Jada wouldn’t be swayed. She waited, remorselessly watching from the top of the ladder, guarding the sole exit with the oppressive weight of her invisible wings of power, while Thorn made herself a pallet of blankets on the cot. Trying to clear her mind, desperately afraid that her emotional state might affect her magic work—the books all warned about that—Thorn lay down and prepared to fight her way free of the Sleep of Ages.
She hadn’t been able to figure out how to make herself dream, though she’d detected the coppery strands of Jada’s magic binding her, holding her dreams embedded in a net woven so tightly it concealed all within. She sometimes detected the presence of her dreams struggling against that net, causing it to bulge and strain, as if fish pressed against the dome of it holding them against the floor of the deepest pond, but she’d had no luck liberating them. But she thought she could break out of the terrible sleep. Then, if worse came to worst, she could spend the time ofJada’s personal vacation studying to empower herself to become an oneiromancer, too.
As Jada’s magic settled over her, the sleep induction now familiar—even textbook, Thorn thought with a trill of hysteria—she only hoped that her ability to wake herself would outpower Jada’s compulsion to keep her asleep. Even with that hope, she reflexively struggled, her newly developed abilities flexing against Jada’s power. Disaster. She felt more than saw Jada’s frown, her guardian’s face in shadow as she stood above in the doorway, a silhouette against the brighter light of the sunny kitchen. Forcing herself to let go, Thorn submitted to the magic, hanging only on to the merest thread of her own ability.
That, and hope, crazy as that might be.
As the magical sleep dragged her under, she clung to that meager shred of insane determination.
Fighting the Sleep of Ages felt like banging her fists, her head, and her entire body against the confines of a glass coffin. Time passed without demarcation in that lightless space while she drew on and measured her untutored magic against the constraints of the spell. It hurt, leaving her bruised and battered, the dank chill of the root cellar settling into her bones.
When she broke free, it came as a shock, the odd half sleep suddenly shattering, falling away like sheeting water that nevertheless left her feeling sodden and disoriented. But the thrill of victory helped. She had done it! All on her own.
She sat up, even colder as she threw off the blankets that had covered her. Listening, stretching out her sorcerous senses, she verified that the cottage sat silent and empty. Thorn couldn’t be sure how long ago Jada had left, because it felt both like it could have been a couple of hours since she broke free and like years. But she would be careful of the wards until she could be sure that Jada was too far away to come back when Thorn broke them.
Elated, Thorn made a small light to dispel the darkness and went to the ladder, ascending as quickly as her stiff joints allowed, inhaling the freedom like the air that sustained her. Even as she climbed the short distance, she mentally assembled her list of what she’d do first. Eat and drink, probably, as she always awoke parched and voracious, and this time felt more so than usual. Then she’d go to the library and check for additional information on several questions that she—
The door was locked.
Shocked, trembling with growing terror, Thorn perched on the top rung of the ladder and lifted the latch again, as if that would make a difference. The door wasn’t just locked; it was barred. Physically sealed from the outside. Possibly warded, too, though Thorn didn’t have the wherewithal to feel for that through her panic.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she cursed herself. She should have anticipated that Jada would lock her in—for her own safety, no doubt—and possibly, she’d even disguised the presence of the door from the outside. Thorn’s unmarked tomb.
“Calm down,” she told herself. “And get down.” Before she let herself fall.
Slowly, she descended the ladder and crawled back under her blankets, willing her trembling to stop. Whether she was shivering from fear or cold, she couldn’t think straight shaking like a leaf whipped by autumn winds, let alone solve this problem. The instructional texts all emphasized a clear, peaceful mind. At least Jada had taught her that much, practical exercises for meditation, to banish uncertainty, to trust in the magic flowing through her.
Also, she had her talisman, the prince’s bright memories to calm her. Lying in the dimly lit earthen cave, Thorn pictured her sunny garden and the weeping willow in full leaf, trailing her branches across the mirror-still surface of the pond. Roses in bloom, their blossoms heavy and nodding in the heat, beesbuzzing a soothing chorus as they drowsily moved from one flower to the next, bluebirds dipping into the fountain to bathe. She added the prince’s happiest memories, imagining him in her garden also, green eyes sparkling with pleasure to see her.
Gradually, she relaxed, able to feel the magic she’d been coaxing into new and different kinds of sorcery. Oneiromancy. The texts indicated that a powerful enough practitioner could step into the Dream and move physically through it to another place in the world. All Thorn needed was to find a dreamer. She didn’t need to go far. Just past the root cellar door. No, while she was at it, she should escape the wards sealing her into the garden. She might as well go entirely past the briar-rose fence. Perhaps leave forever. She’d love to go to her prince, but he might be very far away and his memories were long ago now. What if she traveled back in time? She had no idea how that might work.
No, she’d look for a dreamer just outside the briars. The books said all creatures dreamed—she suppressed a surge of bitterness at that thought, of all the dreams that had been stolen from her—so any forest creature should do. Once she’d succeeded there, she’d consider her next steps.
Thorn hadn’t opened a portal to the Dream before, wary of performing such a powerful magic with Jada nearby to sense it, but the texts had described the process. It should be intuitive for her. Apparently, some young and inexperienced oneiromancers had difficultynotopening portals. There had been a very long chapter with cautions and warnings—stuff about people becoming lost forever in the Dream—but she had skimmed those. Thorn already lived in danger, had sacrificed so much to this supposed safety she’d never asked for, that she recklessly embraced its opposite face. She wanted to walk on the side of risk. And freedom.
Besides, Oneira had done it, walking from one place and into another with unruffled poise. If she could do it, so could Thorn. SowouldThorn.
Concentrating, she let her mind reach into the Dream. It perched like a flighty bluebird, vividly colorful and bursting with life, just on the other side of waking, seething with the immense power of the shared sleeping minds of all the world. A portal opened in the dark, dank cellar, ragged and uneven, fluctuating like a mouth that opened and closed, speaking some foreign, silent language. But it shimmered silver blue, like Oneira’s had, and revealed the realm of the Dream within its oscillating boundaries, where not light, exactly, but a dreamlike version of it poured out.
She stood and took a step toward it.
Hesitated.
