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“Perhaps you can hide like you’ve hidden me?” the ox replied.
Brinna stilled, focusing on the words, the images, realizing that dreams rarely spoke straightforward language. They often operated in symbols.
“Hide,” Scarlett said, sounding doubtful.
“In plain sight.”
“Why do you need to hide, Mother?” Brinna asked, but her mother continued humming, unable or unwilling to hear her.
The dream shifted, the clay sliding away until Brinna stared into the depth of nothing, then at her mother’s sleeping form.
Brinna pulled her hand away, wondering what she’d learned, but nothing felt reliable or true. The nebulousheagain. Hiding. It all felt much the same.
She stood and walked back and forth across the cottage, considering what she’d seen. What she knew. What had her mother told them?
The red ribbons were protective spells.
That she wasn’t from Sevens but from somewhere else.
Brinna considered what her family had experienced at the meadow that day. What had Tarley said? There were ravens who’d spoken to their father. She looked at her father, wondering where he’d been in the dream. Her mother had been pregnant. Who was the ox? The crow?
She needed more.
“You’re not hiding from me, Mother,” she said and crouched again at her mother’s side.
With a touch, Brinna was pulled into a new scene, still an observer behind the transparent wall. Now, she stood in a town square—or the hint of one—the colors and people just a chaos of moving swirls, hints of themselves in the dreamscape. But there was Scarlett, her hood pulled up, hidden among them though clear and vibrant to Brinna’s eye.
“Here ye! Here ye!” a herald called, and the crowd stilled. “The king has issued a time of mourning for the queen.”
Everything turned dark, still there and swirling but now in shades of gray. Scarlett was still there, still clear, but now her hood was off, and she walked among them, though no one noticed. Tears ran down her face, eventually becoming chains that bound her body. She floated up into the sky, and the town square was gone, a stone room taking its place.
Scarlett stood in the stone room in chains. The sole window offered light, and she tilted her face toward it, tears shining on her face. She was alone. Alone. Alone.
Brinna pulled back, her heart racing in her chest and her cheeks wet for what she’d seen. That level of loneliness had felt like death, but what did it mean? Brinna wasn’t sure, but she tucked it away inside her mind like clues to buried treasure.
She turned to her father. “Your turn,” she said and reached out to touch him, then blinked into his dream.
Separated from him just like her mother, Brinna stood inside the woods, though where her mother’s landscape had been muddy and shifting, her father’s was clear and radiant with color. He walked through the woods carrying his ax, humming. When he looked up at the sky, Brinna followed his gaze, realizing that the trees were so large, the plants, the flowers. Giant. It would have made him tiny, which seemed such a strange thing considering how large her father was. For some reason, this made her feel sad, as if this smallness was how he saw himself.
He stopped, looked around. “Scarlett?” he called and frowned, turning in a circle. “Scarlett?”
“Father?” Brinna asked, pressing her hand against that transparent wall. “Can you hear me?”
But he clearly couldn’t, continuing to call for Scarlett as he started through the gigantic forest once more.
Brinna disconnected from him, then leaned down to kiss his cheek. “I love you,” she said.
In her dream, his eyes fluttered, as if he’d heard her. It gave her hope. She waited, holding her breath as if it might be gifted to him, but he stilled once more, and remained so.
She stood and sighed, resolved to visit each of her siblings. So she turned away from her dreaming parents, and went to look for Mattias.
15
Luc woke to streaks of sunlight sneaking through the window filter over the floor-to-ceiling windows. He sat up and swiped a hand over his face, the stubble on his cheeks scratching against his palm. Bending forward, he stared at his feet, pressing them against the wooden floor, then wiggling his toes to ground himself in the sensations. He looked at his fingers and wiggled them too, afraid perhaps, that he was losing all sense of what was real and what wasn’t.
He sighed and wondered how he would know. He could see he was in Sol—but he’d been here in his dream with Brinna. He could feel the way his body moved now, but it hadn’t felt so different in the dream. In the dream, he’d held her—he could still hear the sound of her voice, the lapping of the sea against the shore beyond the bedroom he’d conjured. Now that he was without her, he noticed that ever-present hint of discomfort in his chest, and his brow furrowed at the sensation.
He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised by something magical like being connected to Brinna in their dreams, considering he was in a home suspended in the heavens. He thought of Brinna, her fear, but also her resolve. She’d pinched him. Luc could still feel the sting of his nipples and pressed his palm against them. He smiled. Real. He couldn’t think of a single god with that particular power and wondered: even if Brinna carried godblood, why she would possess the power to walk in dreams?
