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Dream-her scoffed lightly, turning back to the tree. “I don’t think he knows how to be kind anymore,” she murmured. “Kindness is a human thing.”
The figure shifted on his feet. “Did you give him an answer?”
She sighed, leaned forward so her forehead pressed against the tree as surely as her palm. “I need time.”
“That does seem to be the one thing we have plenty of, now,” the other voice said ruefully. A pause. “And what answer will you give, after all that time?”
The dream-mind fluttered over answers, unsure which was right. Did she love him? Of course she did, she wouldn’t have come here if she didn’t. Wouldn’t have done as he asked, over and over again, even when she wasn’t sure he was making the right decisions. But did that mean she wanted to marry him?
“I don’t know,” she murmured, an answer for the question in her mind and the person at her back.
The atmosphere shifted. She knew he’d raised his hand, could feel the way his fingers flexed as surely as if they were already on her skin. Her breath caught, waiting. Wanting, though she tried to bury that.
“Don’t,” the other voice said, so softly it was barely sound.
Lore didn’t wake up gasping. Her eyes opened calmly, staring up into her canopy, the fabric waving like a ghost in the breeze through the cracked-open window.
Instinctively, she knew that this dream had harmed no one. It wasn’t her own mind turned against her like Anton had done; it was her own.
Though that phrasing didn’t fit quite right. There was something about these dreams, something more than just tired firings of an overworked brain. They felt too real.
Whatever the dreams were, they were clearly being triggered by channeling. And even if these particular dreams weren’t harming anyone, they still made her uneasy.
Something tugged at her hand when she stood, kept it flush to the bed. Frowning, Lore looked down.
Her ring.
A thread from her bedsheet had gotten caught in one of the silver prongs holding the diamond. Lore had nearly forgotten she was wearing it—ludicrous, the thing was huge—but it sat comfortably on her finger, a weight that seemed like it’d always been there.
She stared at it a moment, lips pressed together. Then she gently untangled it from the loose thread.
There hadn’t really been a discussion of sleeping arrangements when she and Bastian returned to his apartments. He’d gone to his room and hadn’t asked her to accompany him. She’d gone to her own. None of it felt real, like it was a play they were putting on for the benefit of everyone else, for all that she wanted him and he wanted her.
Lore didn’t think he would have stopped her, if she’d followed him. Maybe she should have. Made this something familiar.
Sleep wouldn’t come again, not tonight. She knew that like she knew the shape of her scar. So Lore defaulted to what she’d done before, when her mind refused to settle.
She walked.
No candle this time. She didn’t need it. When she left her room, closing the door softly behind her, the moon illuminated the solar, casting dark shadows of palm fronds on the tiles.
Illuminated Bastian, standing at one of the tall, arched windows, his face tipped toward the sky.
Lore stared at him a moment, idly twisting her ring around her finger. The time after Bastian’s proposal was a blur in her mind—the roar and applause, the congratulations. Her memory was narrowed only on two things: Bastian’s eyes, brown-gold and glimmering as he still knelt in front of her, like he thought something might break if he moved.
And Gabe’s face behind him, his expression carefully blank. Gabe, whirling to leave, just like he had before. He was always leaving.
She didn’t realize she was walking toward Bastian until her feet were already moving. Same as it ever was, him holding her tether, pulling her along.
Bastian glanced at her as she approached, no surprise to be found on his face, then turned back to the window. He didn’t touch her as she came to his side. Strange, for two people who would presumably be married. Maybe he would have stopped her if she’d tried to follow him to his room after all. Maybe they needed time for this to settle before they could treat it like something normal.
As much as anything ever was between them.
Lore scrutinized the window, trying to see what he was looking at so intently. All she could see was a wide swath of sky, a scrim of summer storm clouds over stars.
“They won’t stand for it,” Lore murmured. She twisted her ring around her finger, the tic as ingrained as if she’d been doing it for years. “You know that, right? The nobles won’t allow you to…”
To marry me. The words stuck in her throat. Here was the part that had to settle: Lore believing it could ever actually happen. That her life could change that much.
