Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Lucie had stepped into a dream, and she had not even had to fall asleep to do it.
That was the first coherent thought she managed, and it was not very coherent at all, because the moment she passed beneath Dreamland’s entrance—an archway of nothing she could name, which shivered apart into a thousand golden butterflies as she walked under it and rained down behind her as harmless sparks—the ceiling simply stopped being a ceiling.
It became a sky. And not the ordinary night sky she had left behind outside.
It was an impossible sky, washed in pinks that melted into lavender and deepened into violet, with clouds that moved like paint stirred slowly through water, and somewhere far up in all of it, stars.
Lucie stood quite still and forgot, for a moment, how to do anything else.
She had heard about Dreamland every Season since it had reopened several years earlier.
She had heard about it the way one hears about the far continent, or the bottom of the sea.
As a place that existed, certainly, but not for her.
Dreamland was for the fae, and for the sort of humans whose wealth was so comfortable it never needed to be considered at all.
It was not for the daughter of a dressmaker and a woodworker, no matter how fine the pieces they crafted.
And yet here she was.
Beside her, Charlotte let out a long, wondering exhale that was not quite a sigh and not quite a word. It expressed exactly what Lucie felt.
Rosavyn stepped between them, slid her arm through Lucie’s, then caught Charlotte’s on her other side, so that the three of them stood linked in a row. “Isn’t it extraordinary? I should have brought you both here years ago. Thank goodness for Kazrian and his occasional excellent ideas.”
“Only occasional?” Lucie murmured, gaze still tracing the watercolor sky.
“I refuse to encourage him. He is insufferable enough as it is.”
Then she laughed, squeezed Lucie’s arm, and drew the three of them forward.
A short distance behind them came Kazrian and Theo. Lucie did not turn to look. She was being very disciplined about not turning to look. Charlotte had whispered just before they’d come in that Theo had worked himself into a quiet anxiety about the whole arrangement.
A fae lord, he’d told her. Worlds away from them. They’d have nothing in common. It would be dreadfully awkward. Charlotte had assured him that Kazrian was nothing like whatever sort of fae lord Theo seemed to be imagining, and Lucie was glad Charlotte had said so. She agreed entirely.
They walked on along a path of pale, luminous tiles that chimed faintly underfoot, each note different, so that their footsteps played a wandering melody.
There was, Lucie discovered, no walking through such a place at any reasonable pace, because every few steps something demanded to be stopped for.
“Oh,” Charlotte kept saying, helplessly. “Oh, look at that. Lucie, look—”
“I am looking. I have not once stopped looking.”
A tree with bark of polished gold and leaves of glass.
A pair of vines that met across the path, twisted themselves into the shapes of two dancers, waltzed slowly around one another, and then unwound.
Above their heads, something small and bright drifted past—a tiny umbrella, spinning lazily. Then another. Then a dozen more.
“Oh!” Charlotte pointed. “There—”
Ahead, the path opened into a wide pavilion, and above it was a great silver umbrella, enormous, suspended in the air and spinning slowly in a long, silent rotation.
As Lucie watched, a small umbrella detached from its edge.
Then another, and another, each one drifting upward, and as they rose, each turned itself upside down and continued floating upward into the impossible sky.
It was raining down from the great spinning umbrella, a gentle drift of small, bright things, and Lucie held out her hand instinctively.
Something landed on her palm. A tiny sweet, fruit-shaped and deep red.
It tumbled over her palm and fell, and the moment it struck the ground beside the path, it became a pebble—chocolate-dark—and then began to melt.
“Oh,” Lucie breathed.
The pebbles that landed between the paths melted and merged, finding each other across the grass and the smooth dark earth, and the merged pools found other merged pools, and what began as scattered droplets became a stream, flowing along the gentle slope that fell away from the pavilion’s edge.
Lucie looked up, following it. The stream gathered and widened as the ground descended, joining other streams, and at the bottom of the slope it became a river. A chocolate river, broad and slow, flowing between smooth dark banks and winding away into the dreamscape.
Along one bank, little boats waited, crafted from something pearly and faintly luminous, their bench seats heaped with cushions. “I need one of those this instant,” Rosavyn said, and that was apparently that.
Lucie seated herself carefully on one of the cushions, and the boat began to move.
She looked back. Kazrian and Theo were stepping into the boat just behind theirs. The two of them appeared to be deep in conversation, hands moving, heads tilted toward one another, and as Lucie watched, Theo laughed at something Kazrian said. Relieved, Lucie turned forward.
“Now, Rosavyn,” said Charlotte leaning forward toward Rosavyn, who sat on the seat across from them. “Tell us about Lord Grayfield.”
“Lord Grayfield?” Lucie clapped her hands together. “Oh, clearly I have missed far too much while working at The Honeycomb! Who is Lord Grayfield?”
“She met him at Elderbloom Park,” Charlotte supplied. “He saved her life.”
“What?” Lucie gasped.
Rosavyn burst into laughter. “You speak such nonsense, Charlotte.” She reached across and pressed her hand to Charlotte’s knee.
“This is why we are friends. No, Lucie, I am sorry to report it was nothing nearly so dramatic or romantic. He caught my ribbon as it was blowing away on the breeze. Heroism of the mildest possible variety.”
“He saved your ribbon’s life,” Charlotte amended. “Details.”
“And then we danced together at the Opening Ball,” Rosavyn continued. “Twice. I had not even wanted to attend. Mother all but dragged me. And then I was rather glad she had.”
“And then yesterday?” Charlotte prompted.
“Yesterday we promenaded through Elderbloom Park, sharing secret theories about every single person who passed us. I have not laughed so much in an age.”
Lucie was leaning forward now too. “You like him, then?”
Rosavyn was quiet a moment, seeming to consider this.
The boat drifted past a little clearing where toadstools grew in a perfect ring, and inside the ring two foxes appeared to be playing a game of chase.
“I think I rather do,” she said. “He is genuinely good company, and we appear to have the same sense of the ridiculous. But …” A small lift of one shoulder. “It will come to nothing.”
“You cannot know that,” said Charlotte.
“I can.” She said it lightly. “I have not told him about my lack of manifestation, but he will have heard of it by now, and if not, soon enough. There is always someone delighted to be the bearer. And I do not have real hope that he will continue his interest once he fully understands.”
Charlotte reached across and took Rosavyn’s hand. “Perhaps he is better than that. Perhaps he will see you for you.”
Rosavyn laughed, leaned over the side of the boat, and flicked a droplet of chocolate at Charlotte.
“Listen to the married woman, grown sentimental. Theo has ruined you entirely.” She sat up straighter, plainly setting the subject down and reaching for a lighter one.
“Never mind all that. How are your mother’s masks coming along for the masquerade?
Mine has been asking after them, which means she has been fretting, which means the rest of us shall hear of nothing else until the evening is over and done with. ”
“Oh!” Charlotte straightened. “I have seen some of them. They are truly spectacular this time. She has outdone herself. She begins work during the quiet season, you know, when commissions are thin. It is her largest single order each year, and she is always so grateful your family has never gone to anyone else.”
“Nor would we,” Rosavyn said. “No one else comes close.”
Lucie smiled at that, and felt beneath the smile the small, familiar ache that surfaced every year around the time of the Rowanwood Masquerade.
She had grown up watching her mother create those masks.
Had sat cross-legged on the workroom floor as a girl, surrounded by scraps of silk and feathers and fragments of lace, watching her mother’s steady hands coax something extraordinary into being.
And later, when she was old enough to help, she had handed her mother pins and held fabric taut and listened to her hum while she worked, and all the while she had imagined what it might be like to wear one, once it was enchanted to change a person’s appearance.
To step into that glittering world for a single evening and be part of it, instead of the hands that helped dress it.
She wondered what it might have been like if she had said yes that night, three years ago, when Kazrian asked her to accompany him—
No. She put that thought very quickly out of her mind.
Here, now, drifting along a river of chocolate beneath a sky that belonged to no world she knew, with her sister on one side and Rosavyn on the other and the whole of Dreamland shimmering around them—the ache shifted. Softened. Rearranged itself into something else.