20
The already silent and isolated cottage felt even more abandoned and lonely without Rose’s vibrant presence. Thorn studied the place where the portal had been, fighting the temptation tooth and nail to chase after. She could almost feel it, a pathway already laid for her to follow her sister’s sorcerous footsteps, to silently step into the prints she left in the Dream, and go through to the other side of the mirror, to where she might have grown up,shouldhave, had her life taken a different path.
To meet the people who were and were not her parents.
Back when she was a little girl and Jada brought her toys to play with, Thorn had received a set of paper dolls with a tiny enchantment on them. They would look like one thing at first. Then, if you stroked a finger across them in the right way, they’d change. The princess riding a white horse with a golden mane became the crone atop a black gelding with a white mane. In another, a unicorn became a rhinoceros. A scheming villain transformed into a noble prince.
The paper dolls had long since disintegrated into tatters, but the sensation of delight and surprise lingered on—and Thorn could see Rose and herself as one of those enchanted images, flip and flip, back and forth. How had they decided which infant girl to keep and which to discard? Was Thorn the princess or the crone, unicorn or rhinoceros, hero or villain?
One thing was certain: Thorn had been waiting for someone else’s finger to define her. A great hand from the skies reaching down to paint her into being and give her a real life. And that would never happen. She needed to define herself.
Torn, imagining she might be able to see the outline of Rose’s portal, she peered at the space until her eyes dried. She stood there until she realized a gentle, chilly rain had begun to fall, soaking her, cold seeping into her bones and making them ache. Finally, she shook herself into motion, albeit creaky. Going back inside, she changed into fresh clothes and unbound her braid so her hair would dry. Then she numbly and methodically cleaned up the impromptu meal they’d shared, realizing that it had been the sort of thing naughty little girls might have indulged in—cookies, sweets, and sugary tea. Not just little girls, but sisters.
She wasn’t at all sure what to make of Rose. The sympathetic, fun-loving Rose, gleefully eating Jada’s special cookies and asking for the story of Thorn’s life, seemed too much of a wish-fulfillment, the kind of sister Thorn had always wanted, the kind who seemed so unlikely. It reminded her too uncomfortably of how exactly perfect Sebastien’s arrival in her life had felt. And that had turned out to be a lie. She hated feeling like she still loved him, that he was meant for her, when he was apparently meant for Rose. As everything else had gone to Rose.
With the kitchen clean, which she did to make herself happy and no one else, Thorn marched herself into the library and pulled every text she could find on oneiromancy that wasn’t locked and warded away. There weren’t many more. In frustration, she went to the warded shelves, the titles fuzzy as always, the wards like thick, milky glass.
Rose had been kind, softening the worst of her clearly appalled reaction at Thorn’s dilettantish efforts at using her sorcery, but her pity and worry had come through clearly regardless. Besides which, Thorn would never forget Moriah’s scathing words. She very much worried that the cat hadn’t been back because of Thorn’s careless actions at the inn—and she didn’t blame her.
But she could learn and she could do better. She knew how to break wards now and if Jada felt it and returned, well, then Thorn would face her.There is a place for wickedness in this world,especially if the alternative is being a doormat.Digging her magic into the wards on one of the shelves, feeling very similar to sinking her psychometric fingers into something, she noticed right away that these wards were all Jada and none of the same sorcerer who made the wards on the fence. These felt softer, in a way, looser, like a cake mixed badly that crumbled as it came out of the pan. It didn’t take much squeezing for these wards to fall apart in her sorcerous grip; it took so little effort, in fact, that Thorn wanted to kick herself for never trying this before.
Stupid girl.
As the wards fell away like curtains from a window, like the blindfold of lies falling from her eyes, Thorn saw the shelves clearly for the first time in her life. They contained things besides books—boxes of coin and stacks of paper. But the books, oh, they were lovely. Marveling, she plucked them up, one by one.
Warding for Advanced Sorcerers.This one by Stearanos Stormbreaker again. The other authors she didn’t recognize, all new to her.
Vicissitudes of the Dream: Three Cautionary Tales.
Walking the Dream with Soft Feet: An Advanced Analysis of Trans-Geographic Travel.
The Dream and Relativistic Time: New Theories in Looping.
From Artifact to Art: Working with Objects from the Dream.
A Political History of the Northern and Southern Realms.
Govirinda: Sorcerous Case Study or Natural Disaster?
Ward Your Own Dreams! A Young Oneiromancer’s Guide to Self-Control.
Thorn would study them all. That way, if Rose or Sebastien—for whatever reason—didn’t return for her, Thorn could find her own way out again.
Sebastien.He’d been so kind and funny. He’d liked her laugh and thought she was smart and brave. He told her she wasn’tstupid and with him she felt fully realized and alive, not a ghost at all.
“But he doesn’t loveyou,” she reminded herself out loud. She had been like the trickster in the fairy stories, the changeling monster left in the place of the true beloved. Did those changelings ever truly love the human parents who took them to their breast, all unwitting, raising them in place of their own stolen or murdered child? If monsters were even capable of love…
Suddenly weary, she flopped onto the couch. If she lowered herself into its velvet softness, she could imagine herself back in the lovely, luxuriously comfortable bed at the inn. The one they’d given to her thinking her to be anonymous nobility, companion to a prince, and not a deliberately orphaned waif raised to be a servant, then abandoned.
Was this to be her life? In another year, two years, twenty—would she be still be forever caged in this cottage, her body aging, her sorcery and sexuality atrophying from disuse, the love she wanted to give discarded and despised? She turned her head to the side and her gaze fell on the dead butterfly trapped in the flawless amber globe.
In a fit of unreasoning rage, she flew off the couch and to the shelf, taking up the hated artifact and hurling it at the wall. She couldn’t even do that right, the amber bouncing off with a dull thud and falling to the thick rug, failing to shatter or—when she plucked it up to scowl at it—even show a mark. It just figured, and was just like the metaphor of her cozy prison: pretty and impervious to her pitiful efforts. Had the butterfly struggled against its fate—or had it meekly succumbed?
What becomes of the caterpillar that spins a cocoon and never breaks free? It dies.
A tapping sound at the library window penetrated her fugue. A hummingbird hovered there in the growing dusk and her heart leapt with startled hope. Carefully opening the mullion-panedwindow, she stepped back as the hummingbird zoomed around her head, then came to a disconcerting hover in front of her face. “Did Sebastien send you with a message?” she asked, quite foolishly as, of course, she couldn’t hear the hummingbird’s thoughts. They would be very high and squeaky, she thought, the words running together at speed.
The hummingbird bounced midair, in what Thorn decided was an affirmative. Then she saw it carried something in its beak. She held out her palm, reminded of how she’d offered the gem to Sebastien the same way. The little bird dipped, dropping something into her hand, then zoomed out the window again. Thorn gazed in wonder at the sprig with tiny blue flowers.
