Chapter 7
Thorn bent herself to studying her newly acquired texts with vengeance—as much as being surreptitious about it allowed.
She ended up with plenty of time to do it, however.
In the weeks following Oneira’s nocturnal visit, Jada had spent most of her time closeted in the library, taking inventory over and over, attempting to make sense of the theft.
Thorn tried to feel bad about that part.
By covering up her own illicit borrowing, she’d muddied the evidence of this Oneira’s purpose.
Jada couldn’t make sense of it because it made no sense.
But the confusion worked in Thorn’s favor: as long as she kept the meals coming, their clothes washed and mended, the animals cared for, and the cottage clean, Jada left her entirely to her own devices.
With no gardening to do, as winter had not quite yet yielded her grip to gentler spring, Thorn ended up with a fair amount of free time to study, easily able to hear Jada’s approach in time to stow whichever text she was reading in a preprepared hiding place.
She no longer felt any sense of guilt or obligation toward Jada, especially when she verified that she should be dreaming, that everyone did. No one grew out of it.
That salient and startling bit of information confirmed what the cat Moriah had told her.
Not that she’d doubted Moriah, but given that Thorn had lived her life thus far in a tangled nest of half-truths and outright deception, she’d come to value the importance of verifying information from multiple sources for herself.
It helped her feel like she could put a steady finger on what was real and what wasn’t.
Discovering that Jada had lied about the reason Thorn no longer dreamed like she remembered doing as a child, on top of learning that oneiromancy was a magic based on dreams—and that Oneira was the greatest oneiromancer of all—had made Thorn realize that the most reasonable conclusion was that Jada had somehow stopped Thorn from dreaming.
More, Jada clearly didn’t want Thorn to know about the existence of oneiromancy. But why?
The answer mattered, so Thorn focused on books related to oneiromancy, regretting only that she hadn’t stolen more of them. She had learned a great deal from the couple she’d taken, but not enough.
Fortunately, Jada’s turmoil over the visit and theft distracted her from her immediate plans to take another midwinter journey, giving Thorn a margin of time to prepare for the next imposed sleep.
Once she exhausted the books on oneiromancy, she let that avalanche of information settle into the back of her mind, and turned back to analyzing the Sleep of Ages enchantment.
The oneiromancy books indicated that a sorcerer skilled in that arena could both put people to sleep and affect their dreams.
That explained Jada’s more-than-anticipated sleepiness during Oneira’s visit.
Through sheer coincidence, Oneira had cast a sleepiness spell over Jada on the exact evening Thorn had attempted her clumsier, far weaker attempt via herbs.
Jada knew about Oneira’s abilities and thus ascribed that sleep event entirely to the thief.
However, Thorn had not been affected and, according to what she’d read, she should have been.
But Oneira also hadn’t fully detected Thorn’s presence in the very same room, and she should have.
So, Thorn had concluded two things about Jada.
She must be an oneiromancer herself, the way she could prevent Thorn from dreaming.
Thorn didn’t know why, when Jada induced the Sleep of Ages on Thorn, she remained aware.
All the books indicated the sleeper shouldn’t know.
One of the puzzles Thorn had yet to solve.
The other conclusion was that Thorn herself was warded in some fashion that prevented Oneira—possibly anyone—from detecting her presence.
Thorn had been hidden away in this cottage in the deep woods, buried under multiple layers of wards, including the ones woven into the climbing roses along the fence, for Thorn’s safety.
But safety from what?
Possibly from threats like the sorceress who had so easily invaded their home, but in that case, the wards had failed. The sorceress had bypassed them and come and gone as she pleased. No wonder the event had rattled Jada so.
Thorn suspected she would never know what danger the world posed to her until she had freed herself.
But she had come to one more inescapable conclusion: that she herself must also be capable of oneiromancy.
Else, Jada wouldn’t care so very much about keeping her ignorant of that particular magic—along with anything that might help her break the wards.
Thorn must learn to employ this forbidden magic.
Finally, and most exciting, she’d gleaned from the books that the sorceress Oneira had been able to bypass the wards via that exact art. A powerful oneiromancer could walk through something called the Dream and skip right over wards. That’s what Thorn had seen through that portal: the Dream.
She didn’t really understand what that meant.
Oh, she’d read the description of the Dream in the texts, though it seemed the authors of those books mostly paraphrased what oneiromancers had told them about it.
There didn’t seem to be a book authored by the great Oneira, though she was occasionally referenced in other texts as the reigning power in her field, like the sorcerer Stearanos was for wardmaking.
It could be that Oneira had indeed written one and it remained in the library, or in someone else’s.
Or that had been the book the sorceress had taken, for whatever obscure reason of her own.
Thorn didn’t have a good reason why the apparently famous and powerful Oneira would steal her own book.
Truly, Thorn ruefully acknowledged to herself, she had so little understanding of the wider world that she had no idea why anyone did anything at all.
The glimpses the artifacts gave her were frustratingly insufficient to give her a complete picture.
Thorn, accustomed to entertaining herself with the stories she made up, liked to imagine some epic tale in which Oneira scoured the libraries of the world for this book she’d authored.
Perhaps she’d come to regret revealing some great secret, possibly because some young sorceress—like Thorn!
—had read it and done something alarming.
Night after night, Oneira walked the Dream to remove this dangerous text from the world, sacrificing her sleep and magical resources for the good of humanity.
Thorn liked this version, because she wanted to believe the beautiful, crimson-haired sorceress, shimmering with power, was a good person.
Jada was not a good person and so Thorn wanted the only other person she’d ever met, using the term loosely, to be better.
Most likely, however, she acknowledged in her glum moments, Oneira was the thief Jada named her, with the power to take anything she liked, which she used without hesitation or qualm.
In Thorn’s limited experience, that’s what people did.
Certainly many of the treasures she’d touched had been stolen at least once, if not multiple times, and always tinged with emotions from avarice to desperation, but never anything generous or noble.
Finally, spring began to hint at her imminent arrival in the trickles of water down the icicles hanging from the eaves before they fell in chunks and crashes, and in the thrust of pink-veined, purple crocus through the thinning snow. And Jada announced she would be going on a short excursion.
Oneira had not reappeared, but neither had she returned what she’d stolen, so Jada had continued to be irascible and paranoid by turns.
She didn’t like to leave Thorn, she said, but she also felt confident Oneira, should she return, wouldn’t detect Thorn’s existence any more the second time than the first. Especially if Thorn was put in the Sleep of Ages and particularly if she was hidden in the root cellar, for good measure.
Though Thorn had been resigned to the waking sleep—for once the horror of remaining aware would work in her favor, as she had plans to test the enchantment from within—Thorn didn’t have to pretend to be upset about the root cellar.
The prospect of sleeping like the dead, buried underground, filled her with a dread like no other.
If her plan, her carefully practiced skills, didn’t work, she would be trapped in what could become her grave.
More than ever she feared that Jada had reached the end of whatever plan she’d followed all of Thorn’s life thus far, and that she would disappear forever, leaving Thorn to rot along with last season’s apples and potatoes, blindly aware as her mind turned to soup and the worms crawled out of the earthen walls to eat her.
But, though Thorn shed real tears, pleaded, and promised, Jada wouldn’t be swayed.
She waited, remorselessly watching from the top of the ladder, guarding the sole exit with the oppressive weight of her invisible wings of power, while Thorn made herself a pallet of blankets on the cot.
Trying to clear her mind, desperately afraid that her emotional state might affect her magic work—the books all warned about that—Thorn lay down and prepared to fight her way free of the Sleep of Ages.