Chapter 18 #2
Thorn lifted her gaze from their identical joined hands to meet Rose’s eyes, so like and unlike her own. “You’re going to help me?” she asked, hearing the incredulity in her own voice.
“You’re my sister,” Rose said matter-of-factly, squeezing Thorn’s hand one more time before letting go and retrieving her half-eaten cookie. “I don’t know why we were lied to—though I aim to find out—but you clearly are the twin I was told was dead. Of course I’m going to help you.”
“But you were so furious when you arrived.”
“Understandably so, I’d think.” Rose waggled her expressive brows. “After all, some sorcerous bitch had stolen my boyfriend, wore my face around, sent his dog into the Dream, potentially damaged my—”
“You already went through the list of my crimes,” Thorn interrupted. “There’s no need to go over it again.”
To her surprise, Rose laughed. “We’re not so different, you and I. At first I thought you were my opposite in personality, but I think this Jada person just had you beaten down. I’m impressed that you were wicked enough to help yourself to those books and learn what she wouldn’t teach you.”
Thorn’s face heated, in embarrassment, but she was also terribly pleased to have the intimidating Rose’s approval. “I think I was just desperate,” she muttered. It was so strange and wonderful to talk to someone about this. “I felt as though I might break apart if I didn’t do something.”
Rose tilted her head. “Desperation can be motivating, sure, but you chose to channel that, to learn, to break out. Other people in despair might have turned self-destructive. Tell me,” she said, leaning forward abruptly enough to startle Thorn, “how did you teach yourself to physically walk through the Dream?”
“I know it was dangerous, but I was trapped in the root cellar. I was afraid and…”
“Desperate,” Rose finished for her, drumming her pretty nails on the table.
“Oh, don’t look like that. I’m not annoyed with you.
Well, I am, but not for the reasons you think.
” She gave a humorless laugh. “When I consider how much time and dedication I’ve put into learning how to do that—years, with masters of the art! —and you figure it out for yourself.”
“I did look at the books,” Thorn offered weakly.
Rose rolled her gorgeous eyes dramatically. “Oh, she read a book. Did you happen to read the parts where they explain what could have happened to you?”
“I may have skimmed those parts,” Thorn admitted. “But it worked.”
“No denying that.”
“Except it was pretty horrible,” Thorn told her. “I nearly didn’t make it out and I only had to go from here to past the gate. I only made it because Moriah helped me.”
“So interesting that Moriah helped you,” Rose mused, nibbling the edge of a cookie, her gaze straying to the window framing Adsila perched on a branch outside, watching them calmly. “And Adsila came to me through the Dream. What is going on here?”
“Is that how you came here, through the Dream?”
“Yes. I looked for you in the Dream and came here. This is something I’ve only just learned to do and it was far from easy.”
“Looked for me in the Dream—what does that mean?”
Rose eyed her for several long moments. “You’re like an infant with the powers of a full-grown oneiromancer. I wonder if it’s true that this Jada was truly keeping you safe or the rest of us safe from you,” she mused.
Thorn thought that perhaps she ought to be offended, but she wasn’t, oddly enough. After all, she’d wondered the same thing.
“And the inn,” Rose asked suddenly, as if reading Thorn’s mind, “why did you open the Dream in the first place?”
“I didn’t mean to. I just dreamed when I fell asleep there,” Thorn confided.
Rose waited. Cocked her head. “And…? Wait. You don’t know how to control your own dreams?”
Thorn shook her head. “Jada told me that no one has dreams after they grow up, so this was the first time I dreamed since I was very little. I didn’t know they’d come true.”
“You are an oneiromancer,” Rose said slowly, enunciating each word.
Thorn wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to that.
“You make what’s in the Dream reality,” she explained.
“So do I. That’s our magic. When you dream, your magic operates without your conscious control unless you’ve learned to discipline your own mind and sorcery.
Jada didn’t teach you?” She held up a hand.
“Never mind. Of course not. Whatever sorcery Jada has been using to keep you from being detected and to keep you from leaving the house, it also functioned to suppress your dreams. That’s why, as soon as you left the cottage, circumventing whatever magic she’s used on you, you immediately dreamed and made them real.
I haven’t lost control of my dreams since I was six years old,” she added.
How nice for her, but Thorn could hardly defend her lapse. “Sebastien was very surprised by that.”
“No doubt,” Rose said, so drily that Thorn knew Rose was thinking again of all Thorn had done.
“I’m sorry,” Thorn told her impulsively.
“I never meant to damage your reputation or do … any of it, really. I made it out of that terrible dreamscape and was outside the fence for the first time in my life, and then Sebastien rode up and he was so handsome and charming and sweet. And I recognized him from the belt buckle I told you about. I’d somehow imagined we were connected and that someday he’d rescue me and we’d live happily ever after, you know, like in the stories?
So when he seemed to recognize me, too, I thought it was because of that, our destiny. He was kind to me and his kisses were—”
She broke off as Rose raised a sardonic brow at her, suddenly realizing she shouldn’t be saying these things. Picking up one of the cookies Rose had divvied out to her, she stuffed it in her mouth so she’d stop talking.
“Sebastien is all of those things,” Rose acknowledged, looking past Thorn now. “It’s hard to blame you for being charmed by him. Seduced. It certainly worked on me. Tell me, did you have sex with him?”
Thorn choked on her cookie. Rose watched her closely again, her expression shuttered. “No, I didn’t,” Thorn hastily assured her, thinking she should have said so right off. “We slept in separate rooms.”
Rose let out a breath, relaxing. “Well, that helps.”
“Helps?”
“It helps me,” she answered simply, and for the first time, through that minute crack in Rose’s near-perfect poise, Thorn glimpsed something of a vulnerable person within.
Rose tapped a fingertip on her lower lip again, expression thoughtful, her long glossy nail an exact match for her lips.
Thorn wondered how she did that. Magic? “Did you dream last night?” Rose asked abruptly.
“No, thank goodness,” Thorn answered fervently. “But I also didn’t sleep well.”
“Given the potential consequences, that is good,” Rose told her, “but the implications are the salient detail here. There’s probably something embedded in the cottage walls that keeps you from dreaming.”
Thorn felt like an idiot. “I didn’t think of that.”
“I know more about sorcery than you do, which isn’t your fault. This Jada person and whoever gave you into her care—and I’ll be seeking answers there—kept you deliberately ignorant. She didn’t teach you any sorcery at all?”
“At a sophisticated level, just psychometry. I am, at least, good at that. And elementary stuff like lights and fire.”
Rose looked thoughtful. “The psychometry is interesting. I’ve learned only what I need to get by there.
I wonder if I could get good at it, too?
” She shook her head, dismissing the thought.
“The real question is the why of Jada’s reasoning.
You’re an oneiromancer as powerful as I am, most likely.
We’re valuable. I’ve gone to school my entire life, which is expensive.
They’ve invested in me so they can sell my contract and—” She broke off, eyes widening, dark pools in her pale face.
“Thorn,” she said, sinking a weight into the single word.
“Have you been bound by the blood geas?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Thorn answered, a frisson going down her spine at Rose’s intensity.
Rose pressed her lips together in frustration. “Of course you wouldn’t know. And I don’t know how to check you for it.” She pushed a breath through her lips, staring fiercely at Thorn. “I bet you’re not bound and that’s what all this is for.”
“I really don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Thorn said helplessly. “Would you please explain?”
“Yes, yes, sorry. I’m just still reeling. If you are an unbound sorceress then … Wow.”
“Rose!”
Rose waved her hands. “Sorry, sorry. See, all children are tested for magic, up until they’re past the age of manifesting it.
If they have magic, their blood is used in an enchantment that binds them to whoever holds their contract.
At this time the headmistress of HASP holds my contract—the Hendricks Academy for Sorcerous Pursuits where I go to school—and they, what? ”
Thorn had clapped her hands to her cheeks. “I thought HASP was a city,” she said, her voice muffled, her face aflame. “Or a castle. Sebastien must have thought I was an idiot.”
“I doubt that.” Rose reached over and pulled her hands from her face.
Thorn looked back at the glamorous, incisive, and decisive Rose. “I don’t know how he confused us at all,” she confessed.
“People see what they expect to see,” Rose said with that wry twist of her lips. “Thinking you were me made more sense than that he ran into my identical twin hidden away in a remote cottage in the Aswad Woods.”
Rose was talking on, explaining the blood geas and contracts and sorcerous careers, and it all made Thorn’s head spin. She almost couldn’t absorb any more.
“Apologies,” Rose said, reaching over to touch Thorn’s hand lightly. “This is probably a lot for you to think about.”
“Can you read my mind?” Thorn asked, wondering if she could learn that trick, too, if so. Or would she want to?