Chapter 23
Rose stepped through the Dream and into Sebastien’s darkened bedchamber, Adsila shooting through and past her like an arrow in the night.
She ached in every part of her, including her strained and weary heart.
Which she didn’t actually possess. Ironic, as she’d always understood herself to be not all that emotional, more of a thinker than a feeler.
All coolheaded, rational ambition, not one to be swayed by sentimentality.
That made sense now, in light of her fundamental inhumanity.
But then why did she suddenly feel like a skinned and bleeding heart, abandoned by logic, adrift in a turbulent sea?
And all of that without being actually human.
Standing there, shrouded in shadows, she gazed down at Sebastien’s sleeping form. She’d taken the precaution of enchanting him into a deep and dreamless sleep before she stepped into the room, ensuring that he would be—
No, that wasn’t being honest. The measure had been for her.
If he’d been awake and insane with a Dream-disturbed mind, she didn’t know what she’d have done.
As it was, she still didn’t know what to do.
She’d needed to give herself a moment of grace, a quiet space between her father’s astounding revelations followed by the nightmare of dealing with Thorn, so pitiable and so bloody dangerous—and before she tackled the next in this very long line of extraordinarily daunting challenges.
Thorn. The image of her mirror self, her dress reeking of the unreality of the Dream, the black monstrosity of nightmare fashion swallowing her and making her look unaccountably frail.
The silver lace had been all distorted, different at every point, looking like goggling eyes here and thorny vines there.
Her hair had tumbled out of the style she’d put it in, with distorted roses of an eye-searing color, another set in a straining choker around her slender throat, makeup applied in uneven, too-bright lines, with the shadows of smeared color she’d clearly tried to wipe away, like a child playing dress-up, all of it a clear attempt to imitate Rose.
Where do we go from here?
Rose just didn’t know. And that frightened her more than anything, including her own deep insecurity over whether she was up to coping with any of it.
So, for a brief spell, she allowed herself the luxury of doing nothing yet.
She simply gazed at Sebastien, wondering how she truly felt about him.
He looked so alluring with his golden hair strewn across the pillow in face-down abandon, his splayed limbs in similar gilded disarray, bare skin gleaming where he’d kicked the covers away in restless dreams. She found it almost meditative, contemplating his beauty.
She had liked sex with him and had enjoyed his companionship.
But even when he’d proposed marriage, she’d known that he, too, understood they were simply friends.
He didn’t love her and she … No, she’d never loved him.
I worried that you might not be capable of feeling—or at least feigning—the kind of emotion required for a love affair, but you’ve managed quite well so far.
Had she been pretending affection for Sebastien all that time?
She felt something for him, a warmth in the vicinity of her chest, but how to know what emotion felt like?
All this time she’d believed her body was real flesh, not a simulacrum constructed from the Dream.
Maybe everything she felt wasn’t honest but somehow … contrived.
Maybe everything she’d ever thought or felt belonged to a long-deceased infant and she only reflected them as a Dream construct.
She was simply a mirror of a dead person, with nothing original to herself.
And now she was back to where she’d started: corralled into marrying the prince and becoming Soren’s court sorceress, only this time with the freedom she craved.
All she had to do was consign Thorn to a life of captivity, Sebastien to a loveless marriage, and herself to methodically destroying everyone around her in some quest for power.
Shaking herself free of the paralysis of existential angst, she made herself take the first, small step toward action.
She crawled onto the bed and curled up gently beside Sebastien, fitting her own limbs into the angles and spaces of his.
Briefly, foolishly, she wished he would stir in that way of his, swimming up from deeper sleep into something shallower, but less than fully waking, as he had on all those nights they’d shared a bed.
He’d lift off his belly, smile sleepily at her, murmur a soft hi, then turn on his side and open his body to her, nestling her against him, an arm slung around her to hold her close.
With Sebastien, she had been a human girl.
How and why she didn’t know. And Clotaire had offered the prince to her like another piece of jewelry.
In lieu of seeking Sebastien’s embrace, she set a hand on his bare shoulder.
His skin was hot, velvety soft, resonant with his bright spirit.
She could stay there forever, bathing in his scent, listening to the gentle susurrus of his deep, even breathing, soothing as the sound of surf on a distant shore.
Human. And she the inhuman monster, leeching him of the light and love she couldn’t generate on her own.
Regardless, the time for indulging her fear and weakness had come and gone.
With resolve cobbled together from desperation and a few remaining shreds of will, she sent her thoughts into the Dream and simultaneously thinned the deep-sleep enchantment, mentally balancing the two like bowls of water in each hand, both full to the brim.
Through her skin on his skin, she sent a small bit of oneiromancy—she was honestly running very low on magic, but this couldn’t wait—to encourage him to dream.
He billowed into the Dream, entering that surreal realm fully formed, like a bubble popping and producing a human.
The Dream immediately began to react to his presence, altering as his dreaming mind influenced its fabric.
Like a bucketful of blood dropped into a clear pond, the density of his living presence as a dreamer in the Dream and the vivid intensity of his personality colored and warped the Dream.
Its former landscape of nonspecific shapes and undulating shades crystallized around him, taking on the form of a rambling house that he walked through, holding aloft a lantern that seemed to be made of a spider.
Portraits hung on the walls of a hallway that narrowed and widened with dizzying effect, no apparent ceiling overhead. The people in the paintings spoke, but in mumbles or no language known to Rose. Sebastien stopped at one, bending close to listen.
Well aware that she had inserted herself into Sebastien’s dreaming mind, just as she’d condemned Thorn for doing, Rose did her best not to influence anything with her own consciousness.
Instead, she concentrated on what little she knew of mind-healing via oneiromancy.
She’d learned only the basics of those techniques, mostly in her survey course on oneiromancy, one of the rare classes that she’d attended with other students.
A core requirement for any would-be sorcerer at HASP with a glimmer of oneiromancy, the survey had covered all applications of that magic specialization.
Most of her fellow students had gone on to learn the techniques of mind-healing via dreams along the most basic levels intended to encourage sound sleep and healthy dreaming up to interventions for those plagued with nightmares and night terrors.
Rose would have been interested to study those skills, but she’d been shuffled into private tutoring in tools and techniques considered far more valuable for her anticipated career in wielding oneiromancy to wage wars.
The less lucrative careers in healing could be left to those without her power.
She’d regretted the loss then, because she’d been academically interested, but nothing compared to her current grinding frustration that she might know only enough to be a danger rather than a help.
One of the cautions she vividly recalled, however, was the importance of working quickly, preferably within the same sleep cycle.
If she’d had time she would have called in one of the faculty who specialized in this work—because maybe with time she could have thought up a reasonable explanation for why Sebastien needed this emergency intervention.
Something besides the fact there was a rogue, untrained, uncontrolled oneiromancer out in the wild who just happened to be Rose’s evil twin.
Probably no amount of time would have allowed her to rationalize that.
No matter how she sliced it, it was up to her to rescue Sebastien from Thorn’s reckless, self-involved tinkering. And she’d accomplish nothing by dithering.
Sebastien leaned close in to a portrait, his ear against the painting’s muttering mouth.
The dream surface gave way under the pressure, the paint looping out in glossy strands like candy, weaving into his hair.
The strands became beringed fingers and the figure stepped out of the painting, taking shape as an overblown woman in rich courtier’s clothing.
Wearing heavy makeup and a décolletage of monstrous proportions, she pulled Sebastien in, pressing his face to her bosom.
He struggled, clearly suffocating, and she spoke to him as one would to a small child.
“Just do as I say, boy, and all will be well. Please me and I’ll take care of you.
You know you want it.” Before Rose could act, the crevice of her cleavage yawned wide and she sucked him in.
With a pop, the painting returned to its previous state, the hallway steadying, Sebastien nowhere in sight.