Rose continued to refine her skills at those practices, too, but the power she could summon meant she outpaced her fellow students to the extent that it would be more damaging to them to work with her than otherwise. Master Zoltan believed very strongly in employing a scaled approach to magic-working of all sorts, but particularly the intertwined arts of inducing sleep and manipulating the Dream. If Rose could not perform the tiniest task with absolute perfection, then adding power to the effort would only magnify her errors.
For example, as much as Rose might wish to follow in Oneira’s footsteps—and Master Zoltan himself had taught Oneira everything she knew, he’d informed Rose on her first day, and without the least drop of arrogance—and be able to put a small city to sleep, if she couldn’t induce a short nap in one person with precision, there was no point in her trying for more.
So, Rose practiced exhaustively and to the point of exhaustion. Learning the limits of her magical reserves was important, too, so she worked beyond those limits, finding out their boundaries, the flexibility with pushing them, what kind of recovery she needed. She also refined her ability to create portals to the Dream, to search within the Dream without losing focus, to extract inanimate objects and then refine them with her sorcery to fit into the waking world.
Nothing in the Dream looked like it did in real life. The fabric of the Dream, the millions or billions of contributing dreaming minds over time, the mutable nature of reality in the Dream—these all contributed to a warping of even the simplest of items. If an oneiromancer extracted, say, a bluebird’s feather from the Dream, it would look very much like a feather from a real live bluebird, except that on closer inspection, the blues wouldn’t match any blue in the natural world. And the spines might be mismatched, curling in odd directions, the barb filledwith something that looked like ink. In addition, no two feathers would ever look the same, each drifting away from waking reality in its own unique fashion.
Thus oneiromancers spent a great deal of time, energy, and magic on refining what they brought out of the Dream, making the objectsfitinto waking reality. The “fitting” was subjective, naturally, and depended on the people viewing or using the object. Obviously, if it was meant to be used for some purpose, whatever it was had to actually work. As far as objects of art, some people preferred a bit of magical resonance to remain. As with the jewelry and gowns Clotaire brought Rose, their unusual, clearly otherworldly origin lent to their cachet.
Most people, however—especially those with no magical ability of their own, which was the majority of the population—became uncomfortable around anything that made them think of the Dream. Even without consciously realizing it, they found themselves subtly repulsed, averting their gaze or skirting around the object. Thus the need for perfect refinement, to remove all sense of the Dream from an object intended for any but other sorcerers. Not that Rose would be much occupied with such a relatively plebeian task, but Master Zoltan insisted she perfect those skills also.
Once she had mastered extracting and refining inanimate objects, Rose moved on to living creatures. They posed far more complex challenges, largely because animals inside the Dream had no need to adhere to laws of anatomy, physiology, or even gravity. Also, people dreamed in symbolism, so the creatures that populated the Dream tended to be surface representations of a real-world creature, amalgams of multiple creatures, or even entirely imaginary ones, resembling nothing in the waking world.
Rose learned early on that the bluebirds whose escape from her dreams had flagged her early manifestation as an oneiromancer would not have survived long, even if her night nanny hadn’t banished them. The nanny had taken even the lonefeather Rose had found on her pillow, all that remained of her dream made flesh. The thought still made her inexplicably sad, as if she’d lost something more that day than retaining a single feather or the opportunity to see her dream birds. Like she’d lost a piece of her own body.
During her early time at the academy she’d bent all her energy to learning how to ward her own dreams so she would not inadvertently summon anything from the Dream while sleeping. That had been a grueling process, the oneiromancers tasked with teaching her young self ruthlessly waking her any time she’d begun to dream “out loud.” She’d had to practice wardmaking and wardbreaking, too, learning various ways to seal her sleeping chamber so nothing could get out or come in, and be able to do that literally in her sleep.
Somehow, she’d come to associate those dream bluebirds with the homesickness, sleep deprivation, and sheer overwhelm of those initial weeks. Then it had taken Rose years—and numerous impatient lectures from Master Zoltan accusing her of not really wanting to be able to do it, which wasn’t wrong—to produce a viable creature from the Dream. A ladybug.
She’d progressed, of course. Between her father’s ambitions and the academy’s, Rose couldn’t fail. It simply wasn’t allowed and, after enough time had passed, she didn’t allow herself to be less than excellent. Yes, she hated her failures, the misshapen, sometimes monstrous creatures that flailed, gasped, then perished on the immaculate floor of the sunny oneiromancy studio. With every one, she still felt that curious sense of kinship, as she’d felt with that first feather and with the dream roses in her jewelry. Their painful demises hurt her heart. All the softness she couldn’t seem to summon when interacting with her peers overflowed for these stranded dream creatures.
Master Zoltan dispatched them back to the Dream, chiding her if her tears escaped. There was no room in sorcery forremorse or compassion. The softer emotions interfered with the clearheaded, incisive thinking necessary for perfect spellwork.
One day when she had mastered all of those foundational skills, Master Zoltan would teach Rose to physically walk the Dream. Very few oneiromancers attained the mental discipline to view and search the Dream and maintain their sanity; even fewer could physically enter the Dream and travel to different parts of the world that way. She need only master physically entering the Dream and she would become one of the greatest oneiromancers in all the world. But, now that she’d entered her final year of school, time was growing short.
So Rose focused all of her considerable determination on becoming one of those rare few. If Oneira could do it, so could she. And the great Oneira, notably, had never married or had any liaisons anyone knew about. If she didn’t need love and romance and sex, well then, neither did Rose.
All truly great people are alone.Her father’s words echoed in her mind, but failed to provide any reassurance. Only ceaseless study made her forget her loneliness, so Rose buried herself in that.
3
After that terrible day when Thorn slipped through the briar wards for such a brief moment of freedom and possibility, she lost reading privileges. She was no longer allowed to enter the library at all. Her time in the garden was limited to weeding, harvesting, and caring for their animals. Her guardian, of course, confiscated the journal Thorn hadn’t had time to hide. She’d had to watch as Jada burned the little journal in the fireplace. Though it was an inanimate object, Thorn imagined the lovely, soft thing squealing in pain as it burned and, when she shed tears over it, she felt that she wept for its death more than her own loss.
Jada also confiscated all the other blank journals, sketch pads, and even loose paper from Thorn’s little bedroom. Clearly she couldn’t be trusted with writing materials of any sort.
And then there was the punishment itself.
In payment for Thorn’s transgression, Thorn spent her nights on a cot in the root cellar for an entire week. She wouldn’t say she slept there for a week, because she tossed and turned, more terrified of the dark dampness than ever. She kept imagining that the pale worms that dangled from the earthen walls had crept out to crawl over her skin, to burrow into her hair and ears. She woke from nightmares that they’d crawled into her nose and mouth, suffocating her.
The endless nighttime torment rendered Thorn so weepy and fragile that, when Jada opened the cellar door and allowed in the golden morning light of the sunny kitchen, Thorn wanted to throw herself into her guardian’s arms with trembling gratitude and affection. It embarrassed her later, that she’d practicallygroveled in thanks to the very person who’d jailed her in the first place.
And no amount of pleading, protesting, or promising in the evening made Jada relent in the slightest. Thorn would spend her nights in the root cellar for a week and that sentence would not be commuted. Even when Thorn utterly panicked and fought back, Jada’s relentless and airless wings enshrouded her and thrust her into the dank room. Locked physically from outside, the door resisting all pounding on it and attempts at thwarting the wards.
At the end of her punishment, Thorn returned to her small bedroom with pitiful gratitude for its clean wholesomeness and airy windows. She was also grateful that, by some sheer stroke of luck, she’d possessed the wit to not mention the prince’s gem in her journal. The lint-covered ball of sealing wax remained in Thorn’s pocket. Her prince became her daily companion, reminding her of a world beyond the briars. If not for the gem and the glimpses it gave her of another life, Thorn might have despaired.
Especially as the worst was yet to come.
Following the week of the root cellar, Jada again prepared to complete the journey Thorn had interrupted with her irresponsible and thoughtlessly rebellious behavior. Despite being thoroughly cowed on any number of fronts, Thorn found her mind returning to the problem of escaping through the warded gate, gnawing at the idea with the irresistible urge that had, when she was a girl, led her to wiggle a loose tooth until it released with a stab of pain and a gush of blood.
She told herself not to think about it.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Indeed, with every bit of sorrow over some lost privilege, with every rush of exhausted anger, Thorn consoled herself with thoughts of—not revenge, exactly, but sweet rebellion and savage hope. That wild and reckless part of her refused to give up. She wouldn’t meekly accept being locked away when a road rightoutside the gate promised her another life. It wasn’t as if Jada could punish her more than she already had.
Even if she makes you stay in the root cellar again, for even longer, forever?a cautionary voice whispered.
Even then,she told herself stubbornly, knowing it was easy to make that resolution in the light of day. Still, she would not be broken.It’s only earth.
