But what other options did she have? If she refused to go along with Clotaire, he could have Madame Hendricks invoke the blood geas and command her obedience. Or he could reveal her nature as an abomination, a creature made of the Dream, and have Thorn, or any capable oneiromancer, unmake her.
Master Zoltan had also yet to make a reappearance. When Rose inquired, she was informed that he’d received distressing news and gone on a short journey to seek more answers. She was to await his return, with additional admonishments that she was not to attempt to physically walk the Dream again. As if she needed reminding. As if his forbidding her would make any difference. So long as Madame Hendricks didn’t think to issue the command, Rose could continue to act as she saw fit.
She suspected, however, that the “distressing news” had to do with her. Master Zoltan had perhaps discerned that she wasn’t actually human when she physically entered the Dream—or when he’d seen her stabilize her Dream body to survive the waking world. Who knew what he’d do about that information when he returned. She considered disappearing before then, but Madame Hendricks would only use the blood geas to force her to return.
Instead she’d spent the day in her own research in the school library, trying to find any cases like hers, which—of course—there were none of on record. In lieu of that, she pored over the most advanced texts she could find, including ones the librarian grudgingly allowed her supervised access to in the rare-book room, studying stabilization of living creatures pulled from the Dream. She’d accomplished stabilizations of Dream creatures as complex as any of the case studies listed. And no one had ever managed to stabilize a living creature with any level of sentience,let alone a human being. Or rather, a creature imitating a human being, like her.
Rose wasn’t at all sure how much of the magical feat of her existence had been Thorn’s initial miraculous creation of a facsimile of her twin, or Rose’s own sorcery all these years in keeping herself alive and functioning, but between them, they’d truly accomplished something unprecedented. And potentially monstrous.
Rose fully expected Master Zoltan wouldn’t hesitate to banish her back to the Dream where she belonged. Whether she would fight him or accept her fate remained to be seen. She still didn’t know how much of who she was, how she thought and felt, came from a ghost of a child who barely lived.
Her bedroom door opened and Sebastien staggered in.
Rose gaped, shocked out of her dark thoughts, not only by his bedraggled appearance—clothing torn and bloody, scabbed-over scratches covering every fingertip of skin, handsome face drawn and shadowed with exhaustion—but for the enormous, entirely magical canine that accompanied him, Nonna trotting by his side as if nothing was amiss.
“Is that… is that ascáthcú?” she asked, realizing as she got the question out that it was likely not the most important one. She went to Sebastien and lent him a shoulder, guiding him to a chair where he sprawled with a groan.
“You’ve heard ofscáthcú?” he asked, then immediately said, “Never mind, of course you have. You know everything.”
Rose glanced at him, uncertain if he’d meant that to sting. “Have I done something to offend you?” Of course, she had—or would—but he couldn’t know that.
“No, no.” He sat up with another groan, leaned his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head in his hands. “I apologize. I’m exhausted and that was unfair to you. This is Bunny. He was Oneira’sscáthcúand is visiting.” Sebastien lifted his head and paused in that way of his when one of the animals spoke to him.“Correction,” he said wryly. “Bunny is his ownscáthcú, but he was friend and companion to Oneira and is now mine.”
Rose absorbed that in wonder. “I’d have to look in the annals, but I can’t recall another time ascáthcúchose to be companion to anyone but a tremendously powerful mage—and even then it was exceedingly rare.” Belatedly, she realized what she’d said. “Not that you aren’t—”
Sebastien waved away her explanation, stopping her words. “I’m at peace with my mediocrity. It’s fine.”
She let out a long breath and sat in the other chair, arranging her skirts. Bunny wandered over to Adsila’s perch and woofed at the kestrel. Rose, poised to restrain thescáthcú, if necessary, instead witnessed with surprise as Adsila cheeped a greeting in return.Huh.
“What’s wrong?” Sebastien asked gently. “Not that there isn’t a list, but… You’re not wearing the rose pendant.” He tapped the hollow of his throat. “The one you never take off.”
Involuntarily, her hand went to her own throat. She hadn’t thought what a tell that would be. “Apparently I do take it off.”
He studied her. “You found out more from your parents than confirmation that Thorn is your twin, didn’t you? The one you thought was dead. Not that that isn’t enough to knock anyone sideways, but I know you, Rose. Something has rattled you, and you’re never rattled.”
Sebastien did know her. Truly better than anyone. She smiled at him, feeling the sorrow in it. “We’re good friends, aren’t we?”
He smiled back, a close-lipped echo of hers. “The best of friends, but that’s all we are, aren’t we?”
She opened her mouth to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that she wasn’t actually human. He could no more love her than he could love the chair he sat on. “It’s Thorn for you, isn’t it?” she said instead.
“It isn’t what you think.”
“I think you went to the cottage to try to break through thebriar wards and rescue her.” She narrowed her eyes, reading him all too well, as she had from the beginning. “I think you’re drawn to her.”
He gazed at her a moment, green eyes tired before he closed them, nodding his head wearily. “All right, it is what you think.”
“I’m happy for you,” she told him, finding that she meant it. And she began to see her way toward a plan. “For both of you. Thorn needs someone wonderful like you.”
Sebastien opened his eyes and gazed at her in surprise. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
She considered that. “I don’t think you have. There are things I’ve found out recently in all this mess that have hurt, but I don’t think you and Thorn finding each other is one of them.”
“Your father?” he asked cannily. Sebastien might not excel in school, but he could see through the machinations and manipulations of people. Besides which, he’d never liked Clotaire, seeing more clearly than Rose ever had the way her father used gifts to command her loyalty.
“Yes.” Rose rubbed her hands on her skirts, surprised to find her palms sweaty. “Let me tell you the story.” So, she did, telling him all of Clotaire’s plan, omitting the part about her own nature as an inhuman creature of the Dream, instead saying that Lily’s gravestone presided over an empty grave. She didn’t care that Sebastien might betray them all. He didn’t deserve to be an unwitting pawn in this scheme.
“So, your father’s plot is for you to marry and eventually murder me, after you’ve used up my father as your pawn and dispatched the rest of my family,” Sebastien said after a long pause, absently rubbing at a particularly deep scratch on his arm. “It’s kind of brilliant, really. Turning the tables on the nobility, the sorcerers using them instead of vice versa. I kind of object to the part where you use and discard me, though. Though that would be fair, too, since I was sent to use you.”
