Chapter 13 #2
In another moment, the house stood gleaming black, studded with purple roses, as if the edifice had grown from the thorns and then been splashed with ink.
Thorn held out her hands, trying to peel the consuming bramble away from the once lovely and peaceful house, but she had no magic.
She called to Moriah to help, but the big cat sat still and unblinking.
Trying to yell louder—if only someone could hear her!
—she ran for the walls grappling the rose canes, her shouting muffled and distorted.
“Rose!” The unfamiliar name and a sharp sting of pain penetrated her panic and she opened her eyes, confused to find a beautiful, golden-blond man hovering over her, his eyes an extraordinary spectrum of greens, not unlike Moriah’s, and filled with stark fear. He’d slapped her? She whimpered.
“Rose,” he said again. “Wake up! Get control.”
“I am awake,” she protested reflexively. Was she? She must be. This felt real. Not like a dream or the Dream. She was at the inn and this was the charming prince who’d rescued her when she’d escaped the cottage. Sebastien. But he’d sent her to sleep alone. “How did you get in here?”
“Broke the door down,” he answered, distractedly raking back the golden tumble of his hair.
“You’re dreaming. You have to—” He winced as glass shattered.
A huge black vine, glossy hard and bristling with thorns as long as Moriah’s claws, thrust into the room.
A group of people near the door screamed and ran out, calling to others to run.
Above them, the wooden roof creaked ominously.
Sebastien vised his hands on her arms, squeezing hard. “Stop it now, Rose.”
“I don’t know how,” she whimpered, only in part because his grip hurt.
“But you … You’re the best oneiromancer there is.
How…” He sounded hurt and bewildered, as if she’d somehow deliberately injured him.
Betrayed him. The blank shock on his face melted into a terrible realization.
“Who are—” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter right now.
Breathe with me. Banish this dream. You made it; you can dissolve it. You must. People are getting hurt.”
He was right. She needed to handle this, to stop being such a victim at every turn.
“Let me go. Let me concentrate.” She sat up when he immediately released her.
His face filled with relief and hope, but her skills in oneiromancy still felt so clumsy, so raw and new—plus her magic had for the first time ebbed very low. Her skull pounded. She couldn’t think.
The screams were escalating, new ones rising, like nothing she’d ever heard before. Someone shouted about the stables. The horses, she realized. That was that unearthly screaming. Oh no, the poor horses.
Sebastien jerked up his head. “Kismet!”
She hadn’t been confined to the cottage for her own safety. She’d been confined for everyone else’s.
Despite the grinding shame and fear, no one else could stop this.
What had the books said? Somewhere in those warnings she’d carelessly skimmed, the books mentioned that the untrained—or unwarded—oneiromancer could accidentally create a portal from their own dreams into the waking world.
She’d been using her sorcery as she slept, fueling her dream elements, extracting them unknowingly from the Dream and unleashing them on the waking world.
In desperation she tried simply cutting off the flow of her magic.
That made her feel less likely to collapse, but had no effect on the vine flailing about the room that Sebastien was fighting with his sword, chopping off pieces as they whipped into reach.
Flanking him, Nina and Nonna, his faithful hounds, worked in perfect concert, feinting and biting in the spaces between the arcs of the sweeping sword.
Fresh blood spattered the floor with crimson.
As if hearing her notice, Sebastien cast her a desperate glance. “Please fix this!” he pleaded.
Think think think, she commanded herself. The books had said something about sending things back, so with thought, Thorn tore open a portal to the Dream, thinking to push the vines back through.
“Nonna, to me!” Sebastien yelled. A hound cried out a pitiful howl of pain and another snarled in rage. “Nina, careful—no, Nina. Stay back!”
Sebastien shouted a denial, the despair in his voice even worse than that of the terrified horses. The portal slipped from her grip, crashing closed again.
A black shape leapt through the window, sinuous and glossy black.
Thorn braced for another attack, but the black cat Moriah landed on the bed, thrusting her face into Thorn’s, long tail lashing like a whip behind her.
“Is this how my help is rewarded?” she hissed.
“If you’d listened to me, this wouldn’t be happening. ”
“It was an accident,” Thorn answered, knowing it was no answer at all. Stupid girl. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
“What is that creature?” Sebastien’s voice was panicked and strained.
“A friend,” Thorn managed to call back.
Moriah growled at that in such a way that Thorn knew immediately how tenuous that description was. Perhaps entirely wrong.
“Please Moriah,” Thorn said in a hurried whisper. “Help me, please. I don’t know how to fix this.”
“Becaussse you’re not ready,” Moriah said, insistently. “You ssshould have ssstudied more.”
“I’m not ready,” Thorn agreed. “I didn’t know this would happen.”
“You’re an ignorant child,” Moriah acknowledged on a hiss, which became a sigh, “which issss not entirely your fault. I will help if you agree to go back to the cottage; you’re not ready to do what I need.”
“Please at least help the prince,” Thorn pleaded.
“It’s only a flesh wound,” the black cat replied without looking. “Promise you’ll return to the cottage or I will not help and Sebastien will be hurt far worse.”
Thorn had no time to wonder how Moriah knew Sebastien’s name. “I can’t go back there. Please, anything else.” Sebastien yelped in new pain, and she flinched. Outside, the screaming intensified, billowing like a fire out of control.
“You must go back. You are a danger to this world. You must see that.”
She did, all too well. Closing her eyes against overwhelming despair, she nodded. “I promise to go back.”
Everything stopped. As if the world took a breath in stunned silence. In the wake of that cessation of all things, as if the sudden absence of what Thorn had brought into the waking world via the Dream created a vacuum that the world rushed to fill, sound abruptly returned.
“H-how?” Thorn stammered.
Moriah gave her a long, inscrutable look. “I am the antimage.”
“What does—”
Moriah had already vanished, melting away like a puff of black smoke.
Sebastien limped over to her, his sword low, the point nearly dragging on the floor—and his thigh a mass of blood. Crimson stained his snowy breeches, darkening to ominous black at the edges. All her fault. Stupid girl.
“Sebastien, you’re wounded,” she exclaimed, wrestling away the bedcovers still entangling her and lurching across the bed toward him.
Somehow, in all her endless scrutiny of his happiest, most golden memories, she hadn’t thought of him as someone who could suffer and bleed.
But this was no dream, good or bad; it was bitter reality.
He reached the bed and collapsed onto it with a grunt of pain. “Only a flesh wound.”
Exactly as Moriah had said, whatever that meant.
Weren’t all wounds of the flesh? Unless they were in the heart, she supposed.
And he looked heartbroken. He was half dressed, his snowy velvet breeches dragged on but not fully tied, showing golden skin in a muscled vee.
His shirt also hung open, hairs gold as jewelry dusting his chest, all marred by smears of blood.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, her idea half formed, but she’d tended Nessie’s injuries, and the sores the chickens sometimes got. She needed to do something for him. “I should—”
“No. It doesn’t matter.” He sounded crushed. “I just need to rest a moment.” Nonna pushed her head under his hand, leaning her chin on his good knee, and he rubbed her ears, face creased with grief.
“Where is Nina?” she asked after a long, fraught silence. She was horribly afraid of the answer. “Did she … go into the Dream?”
He lifted his head, staring bleakly into her eyes. “I can’t hear her anymore. I’ve been calling and calling, but…” His voice broke.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling the emptiness of the words, tears spilling hot down her chilled cheeks. A bit of spring snow blew through the ragged hole in the wall.
“I know.” Sebastien nodded, as if trying to convince himself. “I should have been able to stop her, with my magic. If only I’d studied harder…” A low sound dragged out of him, his breath catching.
She didn’t understand what he meant, but she grieved with him. She took his hand and he clutched at it, his face averted.
“And … Kismet?” she asked hesitantly. And all those other poor horses. “Maybe you should check on him.”
“I already reached out to him and he’s fine, though frightened,” Sebastien answered cryptically. He laughed a little, a watery sound. “He’s convinced it was a dragon. Breathing fire, you know.”
Oh. She had no idea how he knew that. “I’m just so very sorry that I … that things got out of control.”
He studied her, a terrible change in his beautiful eyes. “How could that happen?” he asked with a gentleness that broke her heart. “Rose never loses control.”
She couldn’t think of what to say, tears hot in the edges of her eyes. It came to her then. Hints she’d ignored, things he’d said, the way he’d come to care for her so easily and fast. There was a Rose, a real Rose, and Thorn was not her. She’d found her prince, only to lose him in the same day.
“Except you’re not Rose. Are you?” Sebastien asked with that same, horrible gentleness, not really a question.
No. If only she were. But she was only Thorn.