Where do we go from here?
Rose just didn’t know. And that frightened her more than anything, including her own deep insecurity over whether she was up to coping with any of it.
So, for a brief spell, she allowed herself the luxury of doing nothing yet.
She simply gazed at Sebastien, wondering how she truly felt about him. He looked so alluring with his golden hair strewn across the pillow in face-down abandon, his splayed limbs in similar gilded disarray, bare skin gleaming where he’d kicked the covers away in restless dreams. She found it almost meditative, contemplating his beauty. She had liked sex with him and had enjoyed his companionship. But even when he’d proposed marriage, she’d known that he, too, understood they were simply friends. He didn’t love her and she… No, she’d never loved him.
I worried that you might not be capable of feeling—or at least feigning—the kind of emotion required for a love affair, but you’ve managed quite well so far.
Had she been pretending affection for Sebastien all that time? She feltsomethingfor him, a warmth in the vicinity of her chest, but how to know what emotion felt like? All this time she’d believed her body was real flesh, not a simulacrum constructed from the Dream. Maybe everything she felt wasn’t honest but somehow… contrived.
Maybe everything she’d ever thought or felt belonged to a long-deceased infant and she only reflected them as a Dream construct. She was simply a mirror of a dead person, withnothing original to herself. And now she was back to where she’d started: corralled into marrying the prince and becoming Soren’s court sorceress, only this time with the freedom she craved. All she had to do was consign Thorn to a life of captivity, Sebastien to a loveless marriage, and herself to methodically destroying everyone around her in some quest for power.
Shaking herself free of the paralysis of existential angst, she made herself take the first, small step toward action. She crawled onto the bed and curled up gently beside Sebastien, fitting her own limbs into the angles and spaces of his. Briefly, foolishly, she wished he would stir in that way of his, swimming up from deeper sleep into something shallower, but less than fully waking, as he had on all those nights they’d shared a bed. He’d lift off his belly, smile sleepily at her, murmur a soft hi, then turn on his side and open his body to her, nestling her against him, an arm slung around her to hold her close. With Sebastien, she had been a human girl. How and why she didn’t know. And Clotaire had offered the prince to her like another piece of jewelry.
In lieu of seeking Sebastien’s embrace, she set a hand on his bare shoulder. His skin was hot, velvety soft, resonant with his bright spirit. She could stay there forever, bathing in his scent, listening to the gentle susurrus of his deep, even breathing, soothing as the sound of surf on a distant shore.Human.And she the inhuman monster, leeching him of the light and love she couldn’t generate on her own.
Regardless, the time for indulging her fear and weakness had come and gone. With resolve cobbled together from desperation and a few remaining shreds of will, she sent her thoughts into the Dream and simultaneously thinned the deep-sleep enchantment, mentally balancing the two like bowls of water in each hand, both full to the brim. Through her skin on his skin, she sent a small bit of oneiromancy—she was honestly running very low on magic, but this couldn’t wait—to encourage him to dream.
He billowed into the Dream, entering that surreal realm fully formed, like a bubble popping and producing a human. The Dream immediately began to react to his presence, altering as his dreaming mind influenced its fabric. Like a bucketful of blood dropped into a clear pond, the density of his living presence as a dreamer in the Dream and the vivid intensity of his personality colored and warped the Dream. Its former landscape of nonspecific shapes and undulating shades crystallized around him, taking on the form of a rambling house that he walked through, holding aloft a lantern that seemed to be made of a spider.
Portraits hung on the walls of a hallway that narrowed and widened with dizzying effect, no apparent ceiling overhead. The people in the paintings spoke, but in mumbles or no language known to Rose. Sebastien stopped at one, bending close to listen.
Well aware that she had inserted herself into Sebastien’s dreaming mind, just as she’d condemned Thorn for doing, Rose did her best not to influence anything with her own consciousness. Instead, she concentrated on what little she knew of mind-healing via oneiromancy. She’d learned only the basics of those techniques, mostly in her survey course on oneiromancy, one of the rare classes that she’d attended with other students. A core requirement for any would-be sorcerer at HASP with a glimmer of oneiromancy, the survey had covered all applications of that magic specialization. Most of her fellow students had gone on to learn the techniques of mind-healing via dreams along the most basic levels intended to encourage sound sleep and healthy dreaming up to interventions for those plagued with nightmares and night terrors.
Rose would have been interested to study those skills, but she’d been shuffled into private tutoring in tools and techniques considered far more valuable for her anticipated career in wielding oneiromancy to wage wars. The less lucrative careers in healing could be left to those without her power. She’d regretted theloss then, because she’d been academically interested, but nothing compared to her current grinding frustration that she might know only enough to be a danger rather than a help. One of the cautions she vividly recalled, however, was the importance of working quickly, preferably within the same sleep cycle.
If she’d had time she would have called in one of the faculty who specialized in this work—because maybe with time she could have thought up a reasonable explanation for why Sebastien needed this emergency intervention. Something besides the fact there was a rogue, untrained, uncontrolled oneiromancer out in the wild who just happened to be Rose’s evil twin. Probably no amount of time would have allowed her to rationalize that.
No matter how she sliced it, it was up to her to rescue Sebastien from Thorn’s reckless, self-involved tinkering. And she’d accomplish nothing by dithering.
Sebastien leaned close in to a portrait, his ear against the painting’s muttering mouth. The dream surface gave way under the pressure, the paint looping out in glossy strands like candy, weaving into his hair. The strands became beringed fingers and the figure stepped out of the painting, taking shape as an overblown woman in rich courtier’s clothing. Wearing heavy makeup and a décolletage of monstrous proportions, she pulled Sebastien in, pressing his face to her bosom.
He struggled, clearly suffocating, and she spoke to him as one would to a small child. “Just do as I say, boy, and all will be well. Please me and I’ll take care of you. You know you want it.” Before Rose could act, the crevice of her cleavage yawned wide and she sucked him in. With apop, the painting returned to its previous state, the hallway steadying, Sebastien nowhere in sight.
Cursing at herself for forgetting how fast time can shift in the Dream—especially for someone consciously present and therefore not seamlessly part of the Dream’s subjective reality, even if that reality was native to her—Rose banished Sebastien’s hallwayand followed him. Fortunately, that much was within her abilities, especially with their bodies still connected via physical contact. And, she hoped, the synchronicity of their hearts and minds.
She found him again immediately, which was good, but his dream had spiraled to an even darker and more twisted place. Nina and Nonna, baying, raced past. Sebastien chased them with a glad cry. He ran through room after room of increasingly distorted horrors, bodies of people in fancy dress dismembered or turned into furniture, the lush bodies of women with open orifices calling to him. Screaming incoherently, he searched for the hounds, but they’d disappeared again. He turned to the furniture people, grabbing one gowned figure after another, sobbing. Rose, unsure of the best course of action but also certain she shouldn’t waste another opportunity, drew near enough to realize Sebastien was callinghername.
Both reassured and brokenhearted over her role in his emotional storm and fraying mind, no longer stalling, she reached delicately into the fabric of the dream, willing only goodness and joy and love into the strands. The nightmare stubbornly refused her gentle nudges. Sebastien wept over a dark-haired, delicately beautiful woman dressed in fanciful black and silver.
Guilt and shame slammed through her. She wasn’t good for him and he knew that, for this to manifest in his dreams. The terrible regret poured from her in dark threads, reaching for Sebastien with tentacles of longing. She wanted to apologize and have him reassure her that she wasn’t terrible and evil, that she hadn’t destroyed his essential goodness with her darkness, his pure humanity with her wrongness. Her body, that he’d kissed and caressed, brought such pleasure to, wasn’t even real flesh. Surely that had tainted him.
Adsila suddenly winged from the shadows, circling her head and landing on her shoulder. In the next moment, her mind had cleared, the Dream withdrawing. She hadn’t even realized how much she’d lost herself to the twisted miasma ofSebastien’s nightmare. Rose had issues to wrestle, yes, but those were hers to handle. She was here to save Sebastien’s sanity, not her own.
Which was for the best, as it might be too late for her.
With Adsila’s steadying presence, Rose reached for the joy and pleasure Sebastien brought her. Once again, with fervor, she poured that into the fabric of the Dream, countering the instability wrought by Thorn and—to be perfectly honest—by her own inhuman self. The room brightened, the figures melting into furniture not composed of corpses. Sebastien looked around in patent wonder, laughing in pure delight.
She laughed, too, in sheer relief.
Sebastien turned at the sound, his expression a picture of unadulterated pleasure. He opened his arms. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“I’m right here.” She didn’t go to him, not trusting herself to insert her own needs into his dream. In this she must be selfless as possible, not at all her strong suit.
“I was afraid,” he said, looking about the room. The walls began to close in, the shadows gaining sharp edges like knives glistening with blood. Several figures appeared. Court ladies baring their breasts, commanding him to be compliant. In the distance, the hounds howled. “Nina! Nonna!” he called, turning in that direction.
“Sebastien,” Rose said gently. “It’s all right.”
