To her surprise, Rose laughed. “We’re not so different, you and I. At first I thought you were my opposite in personality, but I think this Jada person just had you beaten down. I’m impressed that you werewickedenough to help yourself to those books and learn what she wouldn’t teach you.”
Thorn’s face heated, in embarrassment, but she was also terribly pleased to have the intimidating Rose’s approval. “I think I was just desperate,” she muttered. It was so strange and wonderful to talk to someone about this. “I felt as though I might break apart if I didn’tdosomething.”
Rose tilted her head. “Desperation can be motivating, sure,but you chose to channel that, to learn, to break out. Other people in despair might have turned self-destructive. Tell me,” she said, leaning forward abruptly enough to startle Thorn, “how did you teach yourself to physically walk through the Dream?”
“I know it was dangerous, but I was trapped in the root cellar. I was afraid and…”
“Desperate,” Rose finished for her, drumming her pretty nails on the table. “Oh, don’t look like that. I’m not annoyed withyou. Well, I am, but not for the reasons you think.” She gave a humorless laugh. “When I consider how much time and dedication I’ve put into learning how to do that—years, with masters of the art!—and you figure it out for yourself.”
“I did look at the books,” Thorn offered weakly.
Rose rolled her gorgeous eyes dramatically. “Oh, she read a book. Did you happen to read the parts where they explain what could have happened to you?”
“I may have skimmed those parts,” Thorn admitted. “But it worked.”
“No denying that.”
“Except it was pretty horrible,” Thorn told her. “I nearly didn’t make it out and I only had to go from here to past the gate. I only made it because Moriah helped me.”
“So interesting that Moriah helped you,” Rose mused, nibbling the edge of a cookie, her gaze straying to the window framing Adsila perched on a branch outside, watching them calmly. “And Adsila came to me through the Dream. What is going on here?”
“Is that how you came here, through the Dream?”
“Yes. I looked for you in the Dream and came here. This is something I’ve only just learned to do and it was far from easy.”
“Looked for me in the Dream—what does that mean?”
Rose eyed her for several long moments. “You’re like an infant with the powers of a full-grown oneiromancer. I wonder if it’strue that this Jada was truly keeping you safe or the rest of us safe from you,” she mused.
Thorn thought that perhaps she ought to be offended, but she wasn’t, oddly enough. After all, she’d wondered the same thing.
“And the inn,” Rose asked suddenly, as if reading Thorn’s mind, “why did you open the Dream in the first place?”
“I didn’t mean to. I just dreamed when I fell asleep there,” Thorn confided.
Rose waited. Cocked her head. “And…? Wait. You don’t know how to control your own dreams?”
Thorn shook her head. “Jada told me that no one has dreams after they grow up, so this was the first time I dreamed since I was very little. I didn’t know they’d come true.”
“You are an oneiromancer,” Rose said slowly, enunciating each word. Thorn wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to that. “You make what’s in the Dream reality,” she explained. “So do I. That’s our magic. When you dream, your magic operates without your conscious control unless you’ve learned to discipline your own mind and sorcery. Jada didn’t teach you?” She held up a hand. “Never mind. Of course not. Whatever sorcery Jada has been using to keep you from being detected and to keep you from leaving the house, it also functioned to suppress your dreams. That’s why, as soon as you left the cottage, circumventing whatever magic she’s used on you, you immediately dreamed and made them real. I haven’t lost control ofmydreams since I was six years old,” she added.
How nice for her, but Thorn could hardly defend her lapse. “Sebastien was very surprised by that.”
“No doubt,” Rose said, so drily that Thorn knew Rose was thinking again of all Thorn had done.
“I’m sorry,” Thorn told her impulsively. “I never meant to damage your reputation or do… any of it, really. I made it out of that terrible dreamscape and was outside the fence for the first time in my life, and then Sebastien rode up and he was sohandsome and charming and sweet. And I recognized him from the belt buckle I told you about. I’d somehow imagined we were connected and that someday he’d rescue me and we’d live happily ever after, you know, like in the stories? So when he seemed to recognize me, too, I thought it was because of that, our destiny. He was kind to me and his kisses were—”
She broke off as Rose raised a sardonic brow at her, suddenly realizing she shouldn’t be saying these things. Picking up one of the cookies Rose had divvied out to her, she stuffed it in her mouth so she’d stop talking.
“Sebastien is all of those things,” Rose acknowledged, looking past Thorn now. “It’s hard to blame you for being charmed by him. Seduced. It certainly worked on me. Tell me, did you have sex with him?”
Thorn choked on her cookie. Rose watched her closely again, her expression shuttered. “No, I didn’t,” Thorn hastily assured her, thinking she should have said so right off. “We slept in separate rooms.”
Rose let out a breath, relaxing. “Well, that helps.”
“Helps?”
“It helps me,” she answered simply, and for the first time, through that minute crack in Rose’s near-perfect poise, Thorn glimpsed something of a vulnerable person within. Rose tapped a fingertip on her lower lip again, expression thoughtful, her long glossy nail an exact match for her lips. Thorn wondered how she did that. Magic? “Did you dream last night?” Rose asked abruptly.
