Chapter 15 #2
Physical distance didn’t exist in the Dream, of course, but the exercise still posed its challenges.
Rose emerged from her meditative state to find Adsila staring at her with glittering copper eyes from her roost. Following the advice of the keeper of the mews, she’d accepted several of the perches to keep in places she frequented.
Apparently even a padded shoulder appreciated some time off from being a human perch.
“You’re right,” she said to Adsila, who always seemed to have something to communicate, though Rose doubted she interpreted whatever it was correctly.
“That’s enough for today.” Indeed, she’d missed dinner, and it was coming close to final lights-out.
So, Adsila once again on her shoulder, she climbed her tower steps, feeling her magical weariness deep in her bones.
Opening her chamber door, she nearly shrieked in surprise at the sight of Sebastien waiting inside.
“Rose,” he said, speaking her name with a question in his voice, as if he’d expected someone else.
“I need to—Whoa! Who is that?” He spun, watching as Adsila launched from Rose’s shoulder in a blur of blue and copper, emitting a cry as she did.
The kestrel circled Sebastien’s head once before arrowing to her perch and settling herself there with a smug flutter of feathers.
“You got a kestrel?” Sebastien asked in wonder.
He gazed at the bird. “No. No ordinary bird. What is her name?”
“She is Adsila, avatar of She Who Eats Bears. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”
“I can’t hear her at all. I think she’s not really a bird.
Is that what being an avatar means?” Distractedly, his green gaze came back to hers.
He looked tired, careworn as she’d never seen him.
Pained, leaning to the side a bit and not his usual robust self.
Face lined with grief. Nonna looked wilted lying alone before the fire, chin on her paws, not even bothering to open her eyes, much less greet Rose.
Nina was nowhere in sight. Something terrible had happened.
“That’s one way to think of it,” she answered gently.
He nodded absently. “Everything is so strange lately.”
Rose set aside her disappointment that Sebastien couldn’t talk to Adsila.
She’d been hoping he’d be able to ask the not-a-bird some questions, like why she was there.
“Are you all right?” she asked, edging closer, as Sebastien looked apt to fall over where he stood. “Where’s Nina? What has happened?”
He laughed without humor, his manner darker than she’d ever seen. “So much happened. You’ll hardly believe it when I tell you. But you have to believe me, Rose. Promise me you will.”
“Sebastien,” she said unsteadily, “you’re scaring me.”
He nodded, not even giving her his typical smile of reassurance, seeming like a prince from the darker tales, who’d entered the woods and emerged changed forever.
She almost expected his hair to have turned white.
Going the rest of the way to him, she wrapped her arms around his waist and held on.
He hesitated before leaning against her, seeming to take comfort from her, a reversal of their roles.
She began to get a very bad feeling—or, more accurately, the dread whispering over her senses since she laid eyes on Sebastien deepened, its edges sharpening. “Tell me.”
“Nina is gone,” he said bleakly. “Gone into the Dream. I should have been able to stop her, control her, and I failed.”
“Gone into the Dream?” she repeated, confused. Then the strange gossip about the oneiromancer at the inn leaked into her thoughts. Surely not …
He pulled back just enough to gaze into her face.
Lifting a finger, he touched the rose pendant that always rested in the hollow of her throat.
“I have to ask. Can you get Nina back, do you think?” he asked, hope and the fear of losing that hope in his eyes.
“She hasn’t been gone long. She went through a portal just yesterday. Last night, late. Really this morning.”
A crushing weight slowed her heart and Rose didn’t know what to tell him. She wanted to say yes. She knew the answer was probably no. His faithful hound still lived, but she existed only in the Dream now. Her gaze strayed to the despondent Nonna.
“I’ll look,” she promised. And she would. Except that she feared what she would—and wouldn’t—find.
“Thank you.” He closed his eyes wearily, nodding, and she suspected he knew what she hadn’t been able to bring herself to say.
“Sebastien, what happened?” she asked again.
“So much.” He let out a long breath. “I have something to tell you that will be very hard to hear.”
“Of course.” Leashing her impatience, her curiosity, at least postponing the dread of what she would soon learn that had so devastated the irrepressible Sebastien, she led him to her bed. He sank down wearily with a groan of pain and, shocked, she took in the bandage tied around one thigh.