Page 140 of The Sun King's Noon

Richard’s eyes opened onto a wall of cobwebs. It bowed inward, pressing his shoulders, his ribs, his thighs against something hard and ridged at his back—a tree, he realised. The glistening silk had cocooned him standing upright, with his arms pinned to his chest and his lungs struggling to inhale the sweltering air inside.

Small dark shapes skittered across the silk. Hundreds of them. Spiders burrowing their way through the cobweb. The inside of Richard’s collar prickled, tiny legs scuttling up his neck, and the memories slowly returned.

“Father?” he whispered. “Mother?”

Memories upon memories. Running into Haldric’s embrace. Waking to Briony. The almost fight in the courtyard. The Summer Ball. His father’s brilliant grin, his mother’s gentle hands?—

“Look at you. Look at my handsome boy.”

The cry that tore out of him was akin to a flayed animal. It muffled against the silk and reverberated in his ear, a wet, ragged howl of grief. They were dead.Dead.He had lit their pyres himself and collected their ashes to scatter at the lake. His siblings were orphans. His neck bore an elf’s claim, and theprophecies that haunted his knight promised more horrors to come.

Richard bit down on his tongue until he tasted copper.

Real. This was real.

He forced his right hand to his hip. The silk dragged at his knuckles, sticky, clinging, but he managed to reach his sword. The blade was plain to look at but had been designed by the Iron Sisterhood—Ardenia’s finest blacksmith forge run by six friends—and they had ensured the sharpest edge. The silk parted with a single cleave upward, and cold air rushed in.

He fell.

The drop was no more than a foot, but it took him by surprise, and his knees smarted on striking the tree’s roots. He looked up to see the trees’ canopy pressing so thick and close that only the faintest sunlight filtered through.

Richard got to his feet. The tree opposite him was enormous, its gnarled trunk resembling a face. Where it’d been unclear before, daylight now laid the truth bare.

“Oh.” Richard stumbled closer and traced over the grooves that shaped eyes. Heart racing, he scanned the other trees and found the same. A woman with braids ingrained into the bark. A child with a dimpled smile. A man with only one ear.

Not a trick of the light. These had once been people who had become wood. Perhaps they, too, were cocooned, and the trees had absorbed them over time as they dreamt on.

Richard’s stomach lurched. In a manner, their deaths had been kind.

Flashes of the dream world bombarded him again—the laughter as Aralynn put Haldric in his place, his siblings’ antics in the ball, Kaelen—oh, Kaelen, sweet even in a siren’s crafting, who had followed him into the unknown?—

Richard swallowed against the lump in his throat.

There was work to be done.

* * *

He foundFlint several trees down, at the base of a redwood—its vast trunk the size of a horse. His cocoon was a swollen, pale sac, and through the cobwebs Richard could just make out Flint’s face—slack, and peaceful.

Richard brought his sword up. The first cut split the hardened silk in a horizontal slash, and as the blade sank in?—

—green fields, a stone cottage with a thatched roof and clothes on the washing line, a pond of lily pads, and three children racing through tall grass. The boy at the front had long dark hair and a wild laugh. And behind him came a smaller boy with tousled mousy hair, and a girl with auburn pigtails, cackling as she tried to overtake the leader?—

Richard recoiled, the vision seared into his mind. So this was Flint’s dreamworld. No wonder he smiled so serenely.

Gritting his teeth, Richard slashed through the webbing once more?—

—children skidding to a halt at the pond’s verge. Flint flopping onto his stomach to plunge his hands into the water, going ‘I’ve got it! It’s slimy!’, and Edith jostling him, trying to snatch the frog, and Lyell standing back with folded arms—‘Frogs carry disease, you know. No, don’t lick it, Flint!’—

Richard cut again. The hole was large enough now?—

—a woman calling from the cottage door. ‘Children! Bread’s out of the oven!’ She had Flint’s upturned nose and stood in an apron with flour on her hands, smiling, hip cocked against the doorframe. And the children scrambled from the pond and ran across the field, laughing and laughing?—

Richard set his foot against the trunk and hauled the man out. The cocoon split, spiders scattering aside, and Flint sagged forward into Richard’s arms, his head lolling.

“Flint. Flint!” Richard shook him. “Wake.”

A hoarse gasp. Flint’s body convulsed in Richard’s grip. He coughed, retching up strings of webbing from between his lips. He blinked at the ground.