“Sebastien,” she said unsteadily, “you’re scaring me.”
He nodded, not even giving her his typical smile of reassurance, seeming like a prince from the darker tales, who’d entered the woods and emerged changed forever. She almost expected his hair to have turned white. Going the rest of the way to him, she wrapped her arms around his waist and held on. He hesitated before leaning against her, seeming to take comfort from her, a reversal of their roles.
She began to get a very bad feeling—or, more accurately, the dread whispering over her senses since she laid eyes on Sebastien deepened, its edges sharpening. “Tell me.”
“Nina is gone,” he said bleakly. “Gone into the Dream. I should have been able to stop her, control her, and I failed.”
“Gone into the Dream?” she repeated, confused. Then the strange gossip about the oneiromancer at the inn leaked into her thoughts. Surely not…
He pulled back just enough to gaze into her face. Lifting a finger, he touched the rose pendant that always rested in the hollow of her throat. “I have to ask. Can you get Nina back, do you think?” he asked, hope and the fear of losing that hope in his eyes. “She hasn’t been gone long. She went through a portal just yesterday. Last night, late. Really this morning.”
A crushing weight slowed her heart and Rose didn’t know what to tell him. She wanted to say yes. She knew the answer was probably no. His faithful hound still lived, but she existed only in the Dream now. Her gaze strayed to the despondent Nonna.
“I’ll look,” she promised. And she would. Except that she feared what she would—and wouldn’t—find.
“Thank you.” He closed his eyes wearily, nodding, and she suspected he knew what she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say.
“Sebastien, what happened?” she asked again.
“So much.” He let out a long breath. “I have something to tell you that will be very hard to hear.”
“Of course.” Leashing her impatience, her curiosity, at least postponing the dread of what she would soon learn that had so devastated the irrepressible Sebastien, she led him to her bed. He sank down wearily with a groan of pain and, shocked, she took in the bandage tied around one thigh.
“You’re injured?” she demanded, horrified that she hadn’t noticed earlier. She unwound the clearly hastily applied bandage, the material of his breeches beneath caked on with dried blood. Grabbing a basin of water and her athame, she cut away the material, soaking it out of the wound, and cleansing the ragged flesh. It looked as if a sharp stake had dug into his upper thigh and dragged downward. Bruising radiated from the laceration like a midnight roseburst. She wrapped it in fresh linens, loosely, to let the wound breathe. Sebastien had yet to answer her, or say anything at all, simply watching her ministrations with a numb, blank expression, almost as if he’d never seen her before. “Sebastien?” she asked.
“Are you sure you’re an only child?” he asked abruptly.
She was already kneeling beside the bed, but that set her back on her heels. “Yes,” she answered automatically. Then stopped, alarm ringing through her nerves. “Well, only living child. I had a twin who died at birth. Lily. Why do you ask?” The terrible sense of formless dread sharpened, and she thought she maybe didn’t want to know the answer to this.
He shook his head. “I’ll answer all of your questions, just… give me a moment.” She rose from her crouch, then laid herselfbeside him, gently guiding his golden head against her breast, helpless while he sobbed in hoarse, heaving spasms.
Later, in the early hours of morning, Rose lay with Sebastien in her arms, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. The fire in the fireplace had subsided into mostly glowing embers. Adsila, eyes closed, sat still on her perch, a dim silhouette gilded by firelight in coppers and blues. Sebastien had crashed into a deep, unmoving sleep and Rose had not, stewing in her anxiety. She’d lain there awhile, debating with herself, while Sebastien’s dreams spun around her, alluring and full of the secrets he’d yet to spill.
She hadn’t touched his dreams since the beginning, when she’d skated over the surface, assuring herself of his identity, very real interest in her, and even more focused mission from the king. Rose didn’t want to invade his mental privacy, but she couldn’t stand not knowing any longer. She should wait for him to wake up, but if her twin sister had somehow survived…
At last, she gave in to her darker nature, as she supposed would always be inevitable, and dipped into his dreams, always so temptingly easy to do, his dreams tantalizingly close and requiring only that she open her mind to them. At first glimpse, she thought he dreamed of her, except that she behaved and dressed nothing like her usual self. That was standard for dreams, but very little seemed to make sense beyond the singular logical explanation. The encounter looped and played back, his distress fixating on the experience. Dreams following traumatic experiences tended to focus on nodes: actual or symbolic images related to those events. The analytical, trained sorceress side of Rose helped steady her raging emotions.
In this case, the woman who looked like her was connected to a cottage deep in the woods. Rose brambles formed fences and came alive. Sebastien was fighting them endlessly. Nina and Nonna were leaping through a ragged portal into a seethingDream, over and over. And all through it, the other Rose—her identical twin, alive and well?—weeping, crying, looking pitiful.
Rose withdrew from Sebastien’s dreams, after laying down some soothing magic to calm them and give him restful slumber. It wouldn’t do to stop the replay of the awful loop, as his mind needed to go through it to eventually assimilate the shock and grief, but she could mitigate the impact a little. Then she went to Nonna, still lying listlessly before the fire, and sat herself beside the hound on the rug, rubbing the grieving dog’s ears.
Lily, her twin, was alive. And she was also an oneiromancer.
The dinner table gossip returned in full force, along with her flip and far-too-prescient words.Unless I have an evil twin out there…At the time, she’d said it without consciously recalling that she’d once had a twin. It had been so long ago—twenty years—and barely anyone had ever spoken of Lily, the infant who hadn’t survived her first day of life. For the first time, Rose thought past her childish acceptance of every word from her parents being the truth. Was the grave under Lily’s tombstone empty? It must be, because her sister had lived.
Her parents had lied to her and Rose had to sit with that betrayal for a time, mastering the tumult of emotions. Was this why she’d felt wrong all her life, so fundamentally lonely, because she was missing half of herself?
Adsila, awake now, watched her with a calm, knowing gaze far more penetrating than any mere bird should have. The kestrel didn’t say anything, any more than she ever did, but Rose felt she knew the message in those gold-rimmed eyes.
No matter what had happened at their birth, the first step was clear: Rose would visit this cottage in the woods and meet her long-lost twin. She wasn’t supposed to walk the Dream again without permission or supervision, but she no longer cared. And if there was one dreamer in all the world that she should be able to easily find, it would be the sister who’d shared the womb with her.
16
Returning to the cottage proved to be easier than Thorn had feared. The wards prickled against her face, an implicit warning, and she wasn’t sure if they would allow her back in. Still, animals and weather came through, and she was afraid to attempt walking the Dream, for so many reasons, so she might as well test her options.
The latch gave easily, the gate swinging wide, a doorway back through the thorny arch of rose canes. Extending a hand, she pressed trembling fingertips against the field of the wards. It felt like pushing through a thin layer of ice: relatively easy on the way in, dragging painfully on the way back.
It seemed she could go in, but not come back out. Taking a deep breath, she stepped through. She might have imagined that the rose canes rustled, twisting in her peripheral vision and bringing back with vivid, nightmarish quality that enormous, monster rose cane that could have killed Sebastien, that injured so many horses, though Sebastien had nobly shielded her from seeing anything. She scowled at the roses as if they’d been complicit, and they stilled. Or they’d never moved at all and she’d simply imagined it.
