Forget-me-nots.
She clutched the little flowers to her breast—delicately, so as not to crush them. Sebastien had sent her a message. It was so sweet, so thoughtful. He was telling her not to forget him. She hadn’t imagined the connection between them, the pure understanding between like minds and hearts. He felt it, too, but—being so kind and noble—he’d be uncertain about the rightness of pursuing this feeling.Forget me not.
A new resolve crystallized in that moment. She couldn’t do anything trapped in the cottage of amber. She’d go crazy with not knowing. She would go to Sebastien, just to talk. Maybe seeing him with Rose at HASP would make it all make sense to her. At least she would be doingsomething.
Working quickly, as she’d already whiled away the entire afternoon with studying and mooning after Sebastien when she could have beengoingto him, Thorn read through the warnings on physically walking the Dream in not just one text, but three of them.There.That would show Rose and Moriah that she’d taken precautions.
As she would need to look exactly like Rose to sneak around HASP, instead of Rose’s country-mouse counterpart, she also studied the book on pulling items from the Dream. Rose hadtalked a bit about refining objects from the Dream to make them fit reality, but that sounded like a lot of extra bother to Thorn, and more time wasted. That kind of perfectionism was for Rose, so she could get good grades at her fancy academy, not details that truly mattered in the real world.
Besides, she only had to fool the people she might run into at HASP—a school, not a castle or a city, she reminded her stupid self—long enough to find Sebastien. Following the text and what she recalled of Rose’s instructions, Thorn reached into the Dream and found a fancy-looking gown. The sort of thing a princess would wear to meet her prince.
When she opened her eyes, she clapped her hands and jumped for joy. It was easily the most beautiful gown she’d ever owned. The few little flaws weren’t worth worrying about. Yes, the material had a sleek, unnatural feel and shine, almost like oil made solid, but it looked pretty enough. The lacy stuff, which looked uncannily like spiders’ webs when she peered closely, made her skin crawl, but that was on only one side of the neckline and easily remedied with a pair of scissors. The minor fact that she had nothing to wear beneath the dress hardly mattered.
Thorn even dared breach Jada’s bedchamber. She’d been in there before, of course, assisting Jada when she was ill or simply wished to linger in bed and enjoy her breakfast there, but Thorn had never gone in there alone. The trespass on Jada’s second sanctum gave her an illicit thrill—wicked!—and she tiptoed at first before collecting herself. Sitting at the lovely little vanity, with an actual mirror, Thorn took in her wan, plain face, a faded version of the vivid Rose. A butterfly, leached of color.
Well, she was painting herself anew, wasn’t she?
Taking up a brush, she worked the tangles out of her still-damp hair, trying to coax it into a style resembling Rose’s. Clearly it didn’t have to be perfect, just enough to not stand out as wrong should she run into anyone who knew Rose. Thorn was able toget it close, just not exact. Not without experimenting with Jada’s more exotic styling tools and potions.
She surveyed the brushes and paints, longing to indulge herself. She had never worn makeup—Jada said it wasn’t for girls like her—but Thorn had studied Rose’s face over the course of their extended conversation and thought she could get it close. Opening the little glass pots, she used the brushes to paint the colors on her face, erring on the side of less, which also made it go faster, though she had to stop twice to wipe it all off and start over. Out of long habit, she meticulously replaced everything where it had been, lest Jada return. Thorn still didn’t think she would, but just in case.
Returning to the library, she waffled a moment, then put the oneiromancy books away just as meticulously. Though she liked the idea of creating her own portal in the exact spot Oneira had—especially as Rose’s obvious jealousy that Thorn had seen the famous sorceress with her own eyes had been one bright point of feeling superior to her far more polished twin—Thorn decided to go out to the garden again.
It helped to have watched Rose demonstrate the technique, though her repeated emphasis on making the doorway perfectly square had seemed over-the-top. After all, Thorn had done this on her own without all those rules, and without Rose’s fancy education. She sketched in the silver-blue outline and it looked mostly rectangular. Good enough. Now all she had to do was find Sebastien, who should be asleep by then, she hoped. From what Thorn understood, it should be fairly easy to find someone in the Dream she already knew well. Especially as she felt sure she sensed Rose’s footsteps, leading to Sebastien, out there in the Dream that hovered insubstantially on the other side of reality.
Given that Thorn knew pretty much three people in all the world—four, counting Moriah as a person, since the cat could talk—finding just one of them should be fairly straightforward.
“Making a mistake once can be blamed on ignorance.”
Thorn jumped out of her skin at the sound of Moriah’s voice behind her, as if summoned by her thoughts of the cat. She whirled. “You scared me,” she accused, her heart thundering for more reasons than being startled.
“Making a mistake twice, however,” the black cat continued in her remorseless purring tone, tail curled before her front paws as she sat, still as a statue, “is indicative of willful stupidity.”
“I’mnotstupid,” Thorn retorted hotly, especially stung since it seemed apparent that she was. “And even if I am, is it my fault that I’ve been locked up here, deprived of an education, while my twin sister received everything and I got worse than nothing?”
Moriah regarded her with unblinking emerald eyes. “Do you know the tale of the witch Gornicka?”
“I’m busy.” Thorn tried to sound firm and Rose-like, but the words came out more like a plea. “I need to do just this one thing.” She turned back to the portal, ready to open the Dream within the frame she’d drawn. Before she could, the outline vanished as if it had never been. She nearly wailed in frustration, sagging where she stood.
She whirled back on Moriah, who hadn’t moved. “Did you do that?”
The cat gave her one long, slow blink.
“How did you do that?”
Again, Moriah didn’t answer, but Thorn recalled how Rose had called the black cat the antimage, and how Moriah had made the dream vines disappear at the inn. “I won’t make the mistake of dreaming real again,” she argued, much like having a conversation with a mute statue. “I won’t sleep out there, so I won’t dream uncontrolled. I’ll just go for… a while and come back. I came back before, didn’t I? When you told me to. Like I promised.”
Moriah flicked the tip of an ear in clear disdain.
“I’m not being willfully stupid,” Thorn tossed over her shoulderas she drew her portal again. “I’m leaving to gather information, to learn about the world.” As the cat still had no reply, Thorn went back to creating her portal, setting the image and feel of Sebastien clearly in her mind.
“It wasn’t fair to her either,” Moriah commented in that same bland tone.
“To who—Rose?” Though she didn’t want to, Thorn paused, distracted, and the portal wobbled, then disintegrated of its own accord, falling like the persistent, greeting rain. Vanishing to nothing like all her efforts seemed to.
She turned back to the conversation with Moriah, as the cat seemed inclined to speak again. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you know Rose.”
Moriah said nothing in reply.
