Page 60 of Sleep No More

“I know you won’t believe me now, Toby, but where I come from, she’s just about your least favorite person in the world, and she’s been responsible for a good number of the things that have hurt you and the people you care about. The woman you know is a fantasy of Titania’s, and is probably an idealized version of the real thing. This is the one our world decided was too dangerous to wake up.”

That was a horrible thing to contemplate, as was the idea that the Eira I knew wasn’t real. Was she just a solid illusion? If I pulled on the threads around her, would she unravel and disappear? Being asked to break spells I didn’t fully understand was a dangerous thing. I didn’t want to make anyone vanish.

“We have to keep moving,” said Ginevra. “This isn’t who we’re looking for.”

“I think I’m glad,” I said. “I don’t want to bother any of the Firstborn.”

Ginevra didn’t say anything, and we made our way across the clearing to where the desire path resumed, winding ever deeper into the wood. Again, we went some distance before I had to ask her to scratch me and draw blood, and again, it showed me a spark of pink shining through the dark, giving us a way to go. We were still heading in the right direction.

The fog began to clear, allowing the forest floor to reappear, and we emerged into another clearing.

This one had no bier. Instead, a towering hawthorn tree grew at the center of the clearing, its branches reaching for the sunless sky, the ground around it empty of brush or thorns. It seemed to be living through every season at the same time, green leaves, white flowers, and red berries weighing its boughs down. The trunk was twisted into the outline of a woman’s body, her face pressed up against the bark, her mouth open in a silent scream.

The temperature of the air dropped the moment we entered the clearing, until I was shivering inside my leather jacket, my sweat making me even colder. This place was not very interested in treating visitors well.

“I think this is what we’re looking for,” said Ginevra, voice hushed. “And good.”

“Good?” I asked.

“There was a chance—not a strong chance, but a chance—that Titania would have elf-shot the woman we’re looking for, rather than throwing her into the enchantment. We don’t have any of the elf-shot cure with us, and the person who invented it in our world hasn’t had a reason to do that here.”

“The person who . . . Oh, now I know you’re making stuff up about your version of Faerie to make it sound better than it actually is!” I shot her a quick glare before looking back to the tree. Something about it called the eye, making it difficult to look away for long. “There’s no cure for elf-shot. There never will be. The Rose of Winter didn’t make it to be unmade that easily.”

“In our Faerie, a brave and clever alchemist worked with a very chaotic knight, and they found a way to wake the sleepers,” said Ginevra. “It can even save changelings, if it’s administered quickly enough. Elf-shot doesn’t have to be a death sentence anymore. And I’m not saying that to make our Faerie sound better. I’m saying that because it’s the truth. It’s also academic: she’s not elf-shot, she’s a tree.”

“So now what do we do?” I asked.

“We make her stop being a tree.”

She said that like it was so simple, so straightforward. Don’t like it that someone’s a tree? Make them stop being a tree. Just undo it. Uncast the spell, unwind reality, and move on.

“How do we do that?”

Ginevra turned and looked at me. “It’s a spell like any other,” she said. “You can break it.”

I’d known this was why they wanted me along. So we could find this person, whoever she was, and get access to her stronger blood, which would somehow make it less painful for me to disenchant others when they agreed to be released from the real world and into the fantasy we had apparently replaced. “I am real tired of bleeding,” I muttered, approaching the tree.

It was a tree. Like any other, save for the odd configuration of its trunk, which could have happened naturally. If not for the way it sought to catch and hold the eye, I would have said there was nothing unusual about it. I circled three times counterclockwise, then stopped, putting my right hand on what would have been the figure’s shoulder, had she been anything more than a shape in the bark.

“I don’t have much of a choice here, so let’s do this,” I said. “Ginevra, I need blood.”

Quick as a blink, she was beside me, claws already extended. I pulled my hand away from the tree and shrugged out of my jacket, handing it to her. “Don’t lose this.”

Ginevra blinked, then pulled the jacket close to her chest and held out her hand again, claws at the ready. I shivered in the chill, feeling oddly exposed. How quickly a single piece of clothing had come to feel like a shield against the world.

“Gonna need more blood for this,” I said, and rolled up my sleeve, baring my arm for her. “A lot more. This is going to hurt. Distract me. Tell me something about your Faerie.”

“I was born a changeling,” she said. “Me and both my sisters. And when you came to my father’s Court—he’s a King of Cats up in Silences—you offered to shift the balance of our blood, to make us immortal, if that was what we wanted. All three of us said yes. As soon as the humanity was out of my system, it turned out I had the power to be considered a royal cat, and when Tybalt needed someone to stand regent for his heir so he could get married, I agreed to come here and do the job.” She looked at me coolly. “I would have done anything he asked, because he’s the one who brought me to you.”

She brought her hand down then, raking it across my forearm with lightning speed, claws laying the skin open and biting deep into the muscle. I yelped and jerked away, instinctively bringing my arm to my chest. Then I realized what I was doing and reversed the motion, flinging blood onto the woman in the tree. It stuck in irregular red blotches, then began to dribble downward, a terrible piece of abstract art.

Bringing my already almost-healed arm to my lips, I took a mouthful of the remaining blood, swallowed, and closed my eyes.

It was getting easier and easier to sidestep the memories, letting them slip back down into the deep well of my magic while I grabbed the power the blood offered me and focused it into the seeing that had nothing to do with my eyes.

The magic that led me there immediately blossomed into view, an intricate lattice of pink threads and knots in the shape of a hawthorn tree. There was a denser shape inside the tree, a woman outlined in macrame loops of scintillating pink that almost blocked out the storm-dark oceanic color of her own magic. Two spells, then, one nested inside the other, the first to do . . . something . . . the second to transform the woman inside the first spell into a tree. Well, the second spell was in the way of the first, and so I needed to focus on that before I could do anything else. I bit the inside of my cheek for just that tiny bit more blood, reached out, grabbed the first layer of threads, and pulled as hard as I could.

There was nothing subtle or elegant about the way I approached the spell keeping the woman bound inside the tree. Maybe if I’d been there to see it cast, or if I’d had some understanding of the structure, but no. I was working without any sort of a roadmap, and that meant the only thing I could do was aim to create as much chaos as I possibly could.