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“How can you admire him, when you can do so much more with just a stub of charcoal?”
Tears of frustration distort my vision.
If I can’t even help him, how can I do anything?
Cas draws his dreamy gaze to my face. I hold my breath.
His features pull into the ghost of a familiar scowl, but then something over my shoulder catches his attention. The pool.
In a sudden move, he shoves me behind him. I trip, falling into a bed of flowers.
Casvian stands at the edge of the water, his hands clenched into fists. He’s fallen into a fighting stance. I don’t know if he can win against what the Storm has in store for him, but the look in his eyes says it’s his battle.
The warrior-Casvian touches the water. His hand pushes against the surface, and the water bends like mercury. It holds for a heartbeat.
The reflection’s hand breaks through in a scattering of droplets that catch the light like jewels.
Casvian reaches and grips the red-gloved hand, dragging the rest of his perfected self out of the water.
The dream rises in full armor, Ragno Haveli’s scythe strapped to his back, wearing an inhuman expression of cold confidence. He reaches for Casvian’s throat, his mouth open, speaking in a dozen voices.
I’ll live your perfect life, brother. All the things you can only dream, I will become.
In a motion smooth as silk, with the speed and finesse of an expert sitarist, Casvian digs his fingers into the dirt, draws an ikon, and wrenches free a jagged dagger of crystallized earth. With a flick of his wrist, the dagger flies, piercing his dream’s heart. “Keep the dreams, brother. I have others.”
The slain dream wears a look of fury as he falls, mercury blood spurting in an arc, dousing the water, the flowers, the grass. His head rests on a bed of velvet petals, white becoming silver as they soak up his blood. His body sinks into dark water marbled with pale lines of dream-blood.
The fireflies blink out one by one.
Casvian’s dagger floats upon the water, until ghostly hands wrap their fingers around the crystal hilt and reclaim it for the depths.
A strange new light burns in Casvian’s eyes as he turns to me. “That’s enough dawdling, don’t you think?” He reaches out a hand, palm up, not unlike the hand he extended to his dream. I grab it, letting him pull me to my feet. “We’d better find our dear prince. I have a feeling he’ll need us.”
“Casvian...” I trail off, biting back a dozen too-sincere things.
He gives me the tiniest approximation of a smile. “Go on, I’ll follow you.”
The darkness shrouding the garden gives way before us; an ominous chasm appears. A distant scream sounds from within.
I look back over my shoulder, getting one last glimpse of the garden and its honeyed temptations as the last of the fireflies goes dark. A breeze, soft as a breath, touches the back of my neck.
Do not tarry.
I inhale. I’m about to jump into the chasm when a hand slips into mine. “Thanks,” Cas whispers into the dark.
We jump together.
Casvian’s hand tightens around mine. His cloak spreads wide behind him, slowing his fall. I hold fast, my feet dangling in the air, praying he won’t drop me.
My thoughts go to Dalca, to the last time I flew. He’d better be alive.
I gasp as my toes touch solid earth, blinking into the inky dark. Cas’s fingertips brush mine as he lets go, and I strain to hear him breathing, to reassure myself that the dark hasn’t eaten him up. Light flickers to life beside me from within Cas’s palm, casting his face in shades of blue.
He holds out his ikonlight, and it glows brighter.
We stand in a cathedral of a cave, so large its edges are lost in shadow. But the ikonlight catches on countless dim golden pinpricks, as if the walls are studded with golden gemstones.
“What is this?” Casvian’s voice is pitched low.
