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Poison and danger and worry, such worry. My aunt was there, I was sure of it. I smelled her smell, lavender and rose. But the rose was sickly sweet. Like funerals, like death. “Will she survive?” someone said, someone with my mother’s voice, but very far away.
Poison. Poison. Poison. The word kept dancing around me, taking real shape. First made of lead. Then made of glass. Then drawn in molten gold on the ceiling. In the place of the dancing fever, I was in a room filled with feathers, wallpapered with lizard scales. Filled with terrors.
I felt myself thrashing against my sheets. Trying to escape. Trying to flee. Something. Anything. Everything.
“I’m here,” a voice said. A deep voice. A musky scent. It smelled like passion, like screams of pleasure. The pain of ecstasy. Vasile. It was Vasile again; Vasile was back in my dreams. His words were softer than the doctor’s. Warmer. Steadier. A voice asked him to leave. He said, “Never. Never fucking ever.” His rough hand on my forehead and cheek. The sound of him sobbing, a long kiss made wet with his tears.
Then the feeling that he had fallen asleep. His head was resting beside me on the mattress, the close-cropped hair at the base of his neck tickling the soft flesh of my inner forearm. Wake up, wake up, I whispered, but the delirium ate my words before I could move my mouth to say them right.
Then, a moment later—or was it a year?—he was holding my hand, actually holding it; I was not slipping from his grasp. But now I was getting wiser—I had seen this dream before. I knew what was about to happen.
The loss. The death. The absence. The plunge over the cliff.
The dream place would wrench me away, as always. I couldn’t bear for my heart to die like that, once more. And so from deep down in the quicksilver depths of my soul, I found the strength to let go first. Rolling away, I tucked myself into a ball, and slipped once more into the saltwater pool of my sweat on the sheets.
CHAPTER 31
Valeria
When next I opened my eyes, warm, lazy afternoon light filled my bedroom. The sound of geese migrating made me look outside, and I saw their V-shaped formation pass over the bare trees of the forest. Somehow, I could feel that quite a bit of time had passed; the hard frosts of winter seemed to have lightened, ever so slightly. So I had been in bed long enough for winter to give way ever-so-slightly to the Praquean spring.
I inhaled deeply for the first time in what felt like ages. My mother’s old nurse, Vanke, startled herself awake with a snort.
“Good heavens,” she said, beaming at me as she roused herself from her nap. “There you are, my dear. And thank God for that. You scared us all half to death!”
I tried to sit up in bed, but found I was so weak that all I could do was lift my head. My head was throbbing, my throat was dry, and I felt desperate for a long soak in the bath.
“What was wrong with me?”
“Some dreadful attempt on your life. Petre admitted to it, some sort of backup plan if you wouldn’t go through with the wedding. There was a man planted among the guests with strict instructions to prick you with a poison laced pin if anything went wrong,” she said, huffing to herself. “What a piece of work that man is. If he couldn’t have you, he would make sure no one would. Especially his brother.”
Guests? Wedding? What… All at once, it came rushing back to me. The stabbing. My father. My heart plummeted in my chest; he had been so unwell, I felt certain there was no way that he had survived.
“How is my dad?”
Much to my absolute surprise, Vanke perked up happily. “Quite well! I won’t let him leave his bed, but he’s very much on the mend.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. Thank goodness. But in my relief, all manner of other things came rushing into my mind. Especially the feverish, terrible dreams. And Vasile, all those endless thoughts and dreams of Vasile that were so real that I could have sworn he was actually there.
Ridiculous. I groaned and battled with myself to find the strength to actually sit up. However long I’d been laying there, it was much too long.
My mother’s nurse tried to help me, but I shook my head.
“I can manage,” I said, and wriggled upward to sitting. I was surprised to see that my arms looked thinner than I expected. I felt much weaker in my own skin.
Vanke helped me drink a glass of water, and then sat by me patiently as I ate a few slices of an apple. Even though it was hardly a feast, it made me feel so much better that I could hardly believe it. I greedily gulped down another glass of water, then wiped my dripping chin with the back of my arm.
