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When the bells strike seven, I turn away anyone still waiting and go upstairs and fall back onto my bed.
People exhaust me.
I shut my eyes—just for a rest. All the threads I traced today meld together into blurry snatches of the Sun Capital and masked revelers. Visions of the past imprint into my memory easily, but trying to remember threads of the future can be like cupping water with open hands.
I hear the clock tower again—eleven tolls this time. Night falls into further darkness and stars light up the sky, spinning and spinning, fluttering and twirling….
No, not stars.
Fairies. A sky full of fairies.
I’m dreaming.
I open my eyes—and the fairies don’t go away. They hover like golden ornaments, silent save for the hum of their wingbeats.
I am on my feet, standing on nothing. No matter how often it happens, this slipping between waking and dreaming never gets easier to distinguish. As I reach out, a trio of fairies land on my knuckles. Their tiny limbs tickle. At least with dreamed fairies, I don’t sneeze.
It is time,voices in the wind rasp.They will rise—beast and briar—at last, at last.
A shiver runs through my body. The wind dies down.
One fairy crawls to the tip of my finger and tugs. It’stoo small and bright for me to see what it’s gesturing at, but it keeps pulling, hard as a pinch, like it wants to show me something.
I walk forward.
Another step, and the darkness seems to part. Craggy edges of underbrush take shape where nothing existed before. Under my toes, moss springs to life. When I breathe, a chill fills my lungs.
The rest of the fairies surge into the underbrush. I follow the path they light, elbowing through boughs and vines. Thorns tear tiny cuts into my skin. My grip is slippery as I clamber in deeper, but I maneuver with the grace of memory: I’m a little thief again, weaving among the clotheslined rooftops.
This place doesn’t feel like a forest. There are no tree trunks, no ferns or stone, only ropes of leaves, twisting and twining, stretching toward some center. When I halt long enough for the rustling to fall silent, I hear a steady pounding, and the vines around me pulse to the same beat. Like a heart.
I shouldn’t be in real danger, but I’m unsettled just the same. I quiet my breathing and check every footstep. The fairies get scarcer. A sliver of moon breaks through the growth to light a gap in the greenery. In the knot of bramble ahead, something is caught—
A body.
A boy.
Lashed upright, eyes shut, lips as red as fruit. So beautiful, even I want to kiss him once.
The prince.
His chest rises and falls, the only movement there is. He’s sleeping, not dead, though he’s pale as death. I’m shaking as I near. The shadows around his eyes are bruises; his mouth is split with a gash. It’s easy to hate Cyrus during my waking hours, but here in my dreams, he’s just a pawn of prophecy. He might die before the summer, if everything those voices told me is true.
A budding tendril threads through his hair and curls near his cheek. I canseeit growing before my eyes, and it unnerves me enough that I lift a thumb to brush it away.
His eyes fly open. I recoil.
Thorny vines snake around his body, drawing pinpricks of blood that bloom into roses. As the leaves shift away, his ragged shirt comes into view, stained rust brown across his front.
The wind fills with whispers. I hear none of it. I can only focus on Cyrus’s piercing stare, green as the tangle surrounding him.
“My curse,” he utters like an accusation. “My ruin.”
The growth swallows him.
The king tasked me with building out Cyrus’s future.
My dreams tell me that Cyrus might nothavea future.
