“All truly great people are alone. It’s a sign that you’ve risen above the rest of humanity. Connections to other people will only get in the way of your path to ultimate power, understand?”
When she nodded, though she didn’t truly understand, he smiled with great pride and affection. “Besides, you always have me, and your daddy loves you more than anyone else in the universe. Look what I brought you.” Presenting her with a jewelry box, he nodded for her to open it.
Inside she discovered a jeweled barrette for her long and heavy black hair, a sturdy one that could hold the whole fall of it, one decorated with the jewellike roses he loved to gift her.
She’d received the first on the day her magic manifested, after she’d been bound with the blood geas, uneasy with the still-prickly enchantment seething under her skin. All the adults assured her the sensation would quickly fade, that she wouldn’t even notice the blood geas after another day or so. As long as she obeyed the implicit will of her contract holder, they would never have to command her and she’d never feel any pressure from the enchantment, which would bind her until the day she died or paid off her debt.
Though they’d also said she wouldn’t remember the torturous process of the blood-binding and she did. She remembered always, with creeping loathing.
But her parents had been proud, and her father had withdrawn a small, velvet-covered box from his pocket. “A special gift for my special girl on her very special day.”
With careful fingers, she’d opened the box. Inside, a rose pendant sparkled on a black ribbon. It looked almost real, except that unlike the honey-gold and peach roses in the garden behind the kitchen at Northbrooke, it shimmered with that jewellike rainbow of colors. The petals seemed almost to breathe, shifting through shades of iridescent pink, blue, and fiery orange. When she poked it with a tentative finger, she found the curved petal edges nearly sharp instead of soft. It shimmered with magic, with a bit of sideways unreality, and she felt a kinship with it unlike anything she’d known before.
“It’s a rose crystallized from the Dream,” her father said, taking the box from her and extracting the necklace. “Turn around so I can put it on you. I got it not long after you were born. A minor oneiromancer makes them. She can pull very small pieces from the Dream and stabilize them. Mostly for jewelry and other ornaments. She needed a favor and I’ve saved it eversince, in hopes I’d be able to put it on you in celebration of this day. There, let’s see.”
She turned around again, touching the jewel where it nestled exactly in the hollow of her throat, the black ribbon soft and snug around her neck. “Perfect,” he breathed. “Just like you. You’ll need longer chokers for it as you grow up, but you can wear this always.”
“Thank you,” she said, holding the pendant. It felt warm and almost pulsing with magic. “I’ll never take it off.”
“That’s my girl.”
By Rose’s twentieth natal day—in celebration of which, her father gave her a spectacular ring with a multicolored dream rose set in platinum and dusted with tiny diamonds—Rose had taught herself to channel all the sexual and romantic longing that ran hot in her bloodstream into her magic. She thought of it like chemical sublimation, like the solid weight of wanting and needing vaporized directly into skillful sorcery. Why worry about the cute boys who ignored her when her teachers praised her so extravagantly?
Not since the sorceress Oneira had they witnessed such finesse, such a levelheaded ability to navigate the Dream, the landscape created by the collective dreamers of all the world, including animals. As with dreams that everyone experienced during sleep, the Dream itself followed none of the rules of the waking world. Time didn’t exist in the Dream, nor did any kind of physical laws. With no up or down, no conservation of mass, nothing that prevented one thing from morphing into another, the inexperienced and unskilled could become easily lost in that landscape. Oneiromancers trained extensively before being allowed to access the Dream on their own. The textbooks cited any number of cautionary tales of unlucky or reckless magic-workers becoming lost in the Dream.
Those lost oneiromancers—or, rather, the irretrievably warped remnants of the people they had once been—were occasionallyglimpsed, sometimes wandering aimlessly, other times trapped in loops and bubbles they couldn’t escape. Very likely, Rose’s teachers said, those lost to the Dream had no ability to understand that they inhabited a different reality, thinking themselves still alive, not an excommunicated dream self locked forever away from a body long since left empty.
“What happens to the empty bodies?” Rose asked Master Zoltan, the academy’s leading authority on oneiromancy.
A small, meticulously neat man with a silvering beard and a balding head, Master Zoltan spoke with a thick accent and alternated between excited glee and despairing gloom, with no apparent emotional states between. Rose had drawn glee that morning, which was why she’d dared ask the question. When she was younger, she’d been told she didn’t need to know about such unpleasantness yet. She’d hazarded that she might finally get the answer to this question that had plagued her and it was her lucky day.
“It depends on the physical age of the sorcerer in question,” Master Zoltan answered crisply, tucking his hands behind his back, “and on their level of power. As you should be aware by now, the majority of sorcerers either die young or live a very long time. The longer a sorcerer lives, the more the magic coursing through their body extends their longevity. After a certain point, in fact, mathematical models indicate that a very powerful sorcerer could become so saturated with magic that they could become functionally immortal. Certainly their bodies can be, occupied or otherwise.”
“So, a powerful oneiromancer who’s lived a long time could leave their body behind and it will just… live?” Rose asked, utterly fascinated.
“Theoretically,” he replied with a cautionary and slightly reproving note in his voice. “This theory has never been definitively tested. Magic-workers at that level of ability are highly sought after, and not usually for peaceable reasons. Most will die in battle, killed by superior sorcerers employed by the enemy, before theygain enough experience to survive those conflicts. Don’t count on living a long time until you’ve earned the ability to preserve your own skin, young Rose.”
“Yes, Master Zoltan.”
“You say that so meekly, but none of you truly are. This is why sorcerers of high ability are either quite young or very old, with very few in between. You are an arrogant lot, by nature and nurture. Being born with extraordinary talents sets you apart from a young age. You gain an inflated notion of your value, are coddled, praised, fussed over, and treated like special treasures for all of your schooling.”
Rose knew her value in absolute monetary terms—having witnessed with her own eyes the chest of coin Madame Hendricks had handed Rose’s parents when the academy head bought her contract—but she wisely held her tongue so as not to interrupt Master Zoltan’s unusually forthcoming mood.
“That arrogance,” he continued, “leads your sort to overestimate your abilities, both in solo efforts and against those superior wizards. Overconfidence ends in disaster more often than in happy results. If you wish to live a long life, remember that.” He finished with an owlish glare, waiting until Rose nodded.
“You don’t find many middle-aged sorcerers,” he observed more lightly, “except in the hallowed halls of academies where they impart their working knowledge of a particular skill to the next generations.” His mustache twitched with his self-deprecation. “The position comes with the added benefit of being unlikely to result in death by duel or battle, unless the faculty meetings become especially contentious.”
His deadpan delivery had Rose uncertain of whether he meant that seriously, so she simply smiled politely. She had never been sure of his age. The longevity imparted by magic saturation came with the side benefit of infusing an extended youthful appearance and likewise health. Beyond a certain point, no one couldtell a magic-worker’s age just by looking. “Middle age” became a relative concept in those cases.
Rose knew many sorcerers took on jobs beyond their abilities, in hopes that a fantastic reward would help to liberate them from the blood geas that kept them trapped as spoiled and pampered, yes, but thoroughly indentured employees. As to be expected, decisions made out of desperation, on top of the attempt to do something so ill-advised that it came with such a tempting reward, rarely turned out well either, that is: never.
She also discovered that no one had examples of the theoretical immortality of aged sorcerers who managed to survive the power conflicts of youth and middle age because those wise, frugal, or exceptionally lucky souls who did manage to pay off their debts immediately withdrew from society. They effectively disappeared, usually never to be seen again. Of course, the only examples of those sorcerers came from very old tales. Rose’s classmates sniped that royals had it so rigged now that no sorcerer could liberate themselves from debt. Certainly no one in Rose’s family had managed to do it, not even with the coin infusion from the sale of their only living child.
Those in power liked to keep their power; they didn’t want unleashed magic-workers wandering the world, doing as they liked. Who knew what trouble they’d cause.
But Rose, at the shining beginning of her career, sheltered by the protection of her ivory tower and a father who wanted a glorious future for her, her life and sorcery full of endless possibilities, didn’t worry about any of these things. Yet.
She spent most of her time in the studio dedicated to the study of oneiromancy, a small space with a wall of windows where she studied with Master Zoltan during certain hours and that she otherwise had almost exclusively to herself. A few other students possessed minor talents in accessing and manipulating the Dream, but they lacked the power necessary to do muchbeyond extracting small objects—like the jeweler Clotaire patronized—or working with sleep enhancements.
