As if hearing her notice, Sebastien cast her a desperate glance. “Please fix this!” he pleaded.
Think think think,she commanded herself. The books had said something about sending things back, so with thought, Thorn tore open a portal to the Dream, thinking to push the vines back through.
“Nonna, to me!” Sebastien yelled. A hound cried out a pitiful howl of pain and another snarled in rage. “Nina, careful—no, Nina. Stay back!”
Sebastien shouted a denial, the despair in his voice even worse than that of the terrified horses. The portal slipped from her grip, crashing closed again.
A black shape leapt through the window, sinuous and glossy black. Thorn braced for another attack, but the black cat Moriah landed on the bed, thrusting her face into Thorn’s, long tail lashing like a whip behind her. “Is this how my help is rewarded?” she hissed. “If you’d listened to me, this wouldn’t be happening.”
“It was an accident,” Thorn answered, knowing it was no answer at all.Stupid girl.“I don’t know how to fix it.”
“Whatisthat creature?” Sebastien’s voice was panicked and strained.
“A friend,” Thorn managed to call back.
Moriah growled at that in such a way that Thorn knew immediately how tenuous that description was. Perhaps entirely wrong.
“Please Moriah,” Thorn said in a hurried whisper. “Help me, please. I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Becaussse you’re not ready,” Moriah said, insistently. “You ssshould have ssstudied more.”
“I’m not ready,” Thorn agreed. “I didn’t know this would happen.”
“You’re an ignorant child,” Moriah acknowledged on a hiss, which became a sigh, “which issss not entirely your fault. I will help if you agree to go back to the cottage; you’re not ready to do what I need.”
“Please at least help the prince,” Thorn pleaded.
“It’s only a flesh wound,” the black cat replied without looking. “Promise you’ll return to the cottage or I will not help and Sebastien will be hurt far worse.”
Thorn had no time to wonder how Moriah knew Sebastien’s name. “I can’t go back there. Please, anything else.” Sebastien yelped in new pain, and she flinched. Outside, the screaming intensified, billowing like a fire out of control.
“You must go back. You are a danger to this world. You must see that.”
She did, all too well. Closing her eyes against overwhelming despair, she nodded. “I promise to go back.”
Everything stopped. As if the world took a breath in stunned silence. In the wake of that cessation of all things, as if the sudden absence of what Thorn had brought into the waking world via the Dream created a vacuum that the world rushed to fill, sound abruptly returned.
“H-how?” Thorn stammered.
Moriah gave her a long, inscrutable look. “I am the antimage.”
“What does—”
Moriah had already vanished, melting away like a puff of black smoke.
Sebastien limped over to her, his sword low, the point nearly dragging on the floor—and his thigh a mass of blood. Crimson stained his snowy breeches, darkening to ominous black at the edges. All her fault.Stupid girl.
“Sebastien, you’re wounded,” she exclaimed, wrestling away the bedcovers still entangling her and lurching across the bed toward him. Somehow, in all her endless scrutiny of his happiest, most golden memories, she hadn’t thought of him as someone who could suffer and bleed. But this was no dream, good or bad; it was bitter reality.
He reached the bed and collapsed onto it with a grunt of pain. “Only a flesh wound.”
Exactly as Moriah had said, whatever that meant. Weren’t all wounds of the flesh? Unless they were in the heart, she supposed. And he looked heartbroken. He was half dressed, his snowy velvet breeches dragged on but not fully tied, showing golden skin in a muscled vee. His shirt also hung open, hairs gold as jewelry dusting his chest, all marred by smears of blood.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, her idea half formed, but she’d tended Nessie’s injuries, and the sores the chickens sometimes got. She needed to dosomethingfor him. “I should—”
“No. It doesn’t matter.” He sounded crushed. “I just need to rest a moment.” Nonna pushed her head under his hand, leaning her chin on his good knee, and he rubbed her ears, face creased with grief.
“Where is Nina?” she asked after a long, fraught silence. She was horribly afraid of the answer. “Did she… go into the Dream?”
