Chapter 30
Master Zoltan sent Rose a message to attend him barely before she was to depart HASP forever.
Everyone believed that she would be traveling to Castle Vega, to marry Sebastien and take up a role as court oneiromancer to King Soren.
It was all going according to plan. And yet she hadn’t accounted for the personal impact of having everyone congratulate her on her supposed impending nuptials and bliss with the charismatic Prince Sebastien and on her professional coup.
She had to contain a flinch every time, faking smiles so often they began to feel fragile as glass, reminding herself that she was lying to everyone for very good reasons.
Never mind that hiding her own monstrous nature had become a vitally important part of her layers of deception, nor that she hadn’t been the one to weave the initial web of lies.
She was complicit now, taking up the tactics of manipulation and evasion to advance her own agenda.
She’d even convinced her mother not to tell Thorn about what she’d done as an infant and Rose’s true nature.
At least Shoshan had agreed that Thorn had enough to learn without grappling with something like that.
Rose still didn’t like the deception, more and more often wondering who she was becoming.
How will I know what good is? Thorn had posed a question for the ages.
It helped steady Rose that Adsila remained steadfastly by her side.
Or, more literally, on her shoulder. Surely She Who Eats Bears wouldn’t leave her avatar with someone on the side of evil.
Or perhaps the goddess would. Deities notoriously operated on a different moral framework from regular mortals.
Rose had completed all of her classes, except for the final certification from Master Zoltan on her abilities as an oneiromancer.
Rose had worried the professor wouldn’t return before Madame Hendricks traveled to Castle Vega for the geas transfer, which could jeopardize the contract terms with Soren.
It had taken Rose considerable finagling to arrange to travel separately from the headmistress.
She’d finally begged off as needing to be there early for wedding preparations, scuttling the madame’s plans to arrive in grand style with the princess-to-be.
But the continued absence of Master Zoltan threatened to compromise all that.
So, along with exhaustively researching everything she could find on her own nature as a creature made of the Dream—which mostly meant finding nothing and experimenting with physically walking the Dream and reconstructing her body upon exit—Rose had been concocting various backup plans, none of which sounded plausible.
So it was with considerable relief that she answered the peremptory summons.
As she approached Master Zoltan’s office, however, nerves struck.
He should have asked her to come to the oneiromancy studio to finish her training.
Unless he’d discovered she’d been physically walking the Dream without his permission and supervision and planned to withhold his final stamp of approval as punishment?
He sat in his office, as gloomily lit as his nature, apparently meditating. He opened his eyes and raised his brows at her knock on the doorframe. “I apologize for disturbing you, Master Zoltan,” she said. “You sent for me?”
“Yes.” He gestured to the chair before his desk. “Sit. Close the door behind you.” He waited for her to comply. “I understand you’ve made the decision to marry the pretty young prince and join Soren’s court and that you’ll be departing very soon.”
“Yes,” she answered, feeling like she should say more, but unwilling to speak the lie.
He sighed. “So few of our graduates stay for the actual graduation ceremony, so eager are the powers in the world to lay claim to them. It’s too bad, really.”
Rose nodded, not having strong feelings about the graduation ceremony, which was good, as she wouldn’t be able to attend regardless. Thorn could, in her place, she supposed. It surprised her a little that Master Zoltan cared about something so relatively meaningless.
“I see that Adsila remains ever by your side,” Zoltan observed.
Rose caressed the kestrel’s breast. “Yes,” she said again, unsure where his apparently idle small talk was headed. She wanted to ask about the certification, but it felt rude to presume.
“Have you determined the significance of the goddess awarding you the companionship of her avatar?” he asked. His tone made the question sound like an exam, not at all curiosity.
Rose had ideas there, but she hardly wished to expose her secrets, and Thorn’s. “Can any of us claim to understand the intention of a deity?”
The oneiromancy professor gave her a disgusted look. “Don’t presume to dissemble with me, young sorceress. Unless you’re more obtuse than I believe and you’ve not yet realized the import of what happened when you first physically walked the Dream, which is also when Adsila attached itself to you.”
Rose froze in place, uncertain what Master Zoltan had discerned.
He narrowed his eyes at her arrested expression.
“So you have realized and thought to hide it from me. Not entirely foolish of you. Should anyone else realize what you are, it would likely not go well for you. It has occurred to me that the responsible action for me to take would be to banish you back into the Dream myself and seal you there forever. It is where you belong, isn’t it?
Creatures of the Dream should not be allowed to exist long in the waking world. It upsets the balance of things.”
Rose, her mouth dry with fear that he might do that very thing—and that she might not be able to fight it—considered her next words carefully. “Why didn’t you do so immediately?”
He dipped his chin as if she’d given a satisfactory answer.
“At least you don’t attempt to prevaricate.
I will answer your question and then you will answer mine.
In the first place, I did not act immediately because I was uncertain of what I’d witnessed.
That you are a creature made entirely of the Dream instead of a human being is unprecedented.
I checked,” he added drily. “It should be impossible.”
That verified her own research.
“Tell me, have you always known?”
She answered honestly. “No. I only recently discovered this. Around the same time you did.”
He rolled his gaze toward the shadowed ceiling.
“I presume you know how this came to be? Don’t tell me,” he cautioned before she could speak.
“I don’t believe I want or need to know.
Should I change my mind, I’ll inform you and you will confide what I wish to know, on pain of exposure and/or banishment to the Dream. ”
Nothing like a little extortion—though it occurred to Rose that he’d have to find her first.
“It also occurred to me that an oneiromancer had to create you and that there is only one oneiromancer in all the world that I know of who possesses the power and skill to make what is an apparently fully realized human being from the Dream. That person is the sorceress Oneira. I didn’t believe that she would commit such a monstrous act, but only that she could.
So, I paid her a visit in the sanctity of her retirement, in the home she built in the middle of nowhere.
Yes, of course I’d heard she disappeared, but I thought I might find her there anyway. ”
“A trick,” Rose said, but then Oneira’s companions wouldn’t have left her.
“Oneira was not there, however. Or rather, her body lies within the home she built, but she no longer occupies it.” He raised his brows at Rose. “I taught you well enough that you must perceive the implications of such a situation.”
“She went into the Dream,” Rose answered as neutrally as possible.
“Indeed. To my vast surprise and interest, the sorcerer Stearanos had also deposited his unoccupied body nearby. Thus I sought out a gentleman named James who served as secretary to the sorcerer Stearanos. He was able to explain that Oneira’s action is less mysterious than anyone thought,” Zoltan continued with real anger and disappointment.
“In some fit of self-castigation, Oneira punished herself with this impetuous exile into the Dream. Stearanos, the fool—his erstwhile secretary and I agree on that point—went into the Dream after her, apparently with some deluded, romantic idea of saving her.”
“Is Stearanos an oneiromancer?” Rose asked in surprise. She’d never heard of him mentioned as one of their rare set.
“No.” Zoltan shook his head. “I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”
It was exactly the sort of noble gesture that occurred in heroic tales, and she found it deeply moving.
She nevertheless envied the kind of devotion embodied in such an act.
She wished there could be someone who cared for her that much.
Not a desire an inhuman Dream creature should have, but …
“Maybe he was thinking that he loved her and would rather die trying to bring her back than live without her.”
Zoltan snorted in disgust. “Love. Guilt. Worthless emotions. He will be utterly lost, but Oneira may yet survive this ridiculous exercise in self-excoriation.” He pointed at her.
“This is why I have chosen to spare you, if only for the time being. You are the only oneiromancer in existence with any hope of retrieving Oneira. I am charging you with her rescue.”
“Me?” Her mind whirled. It rather startled her as she’d been contemplating this exact thing, although with no idea how to do it.
“Yes. You are nearly as powerful as Oneira. Possibly more so because you are of the Dream. She is your maker. She has to be. There is no one else who could have accomplished this feat and so you owe her. I wonder if she didn’t create you with this exact rescue in mind.”
Well, no, she hadn’t because Thorn was Rose’s maker, though Rose certainly wasn’t going to say that aloud. “I don’t know how,” she said instead.
“No one does, but you will find a way. You have Adsila to guide you.”
“Adsila can guide me?” She leapt on that interesting piece of information.
The kestrel trilled an affirmative. Could this be why the avatar had come to her?
Moriah and Bunny had been assisting Thorn and Sebastien.
It could be that She Who Eats Bears had sent Adsila not to assist with vengeance, but with rescuing Oneira.
She didn’t know why the goddess would be invested in the lives of a few mortals, but who understood the minds of deities.
“In this way you can atone for the anathema of your existence,” Master Zoltan informed her, his disdain leaking through his stiff manner. “You will do this for me, for Oneira, or I will see to it that you are returned to the Dream where you rightfully belong.”
“Yes, Master Zoltan,” she replied, hoping a seemingly dutiful answer would appease him.
“You will have difficulty circumventing His Majesty’s will and service, though I’ve no doubt the prince knows nothing of your true nature.
You have been quite clever in your ability to fool everyone into believing you are only a human woman and not an abomination, but I know.
Your cleverness will aid you in this quest, but never forget that the blood geas binds you.
If you fail to act on this, I will see to it that the king shortens your leash. ”
Rose stood, Adsila flexing her talons in more than reflexive balancing.
Also angered, the avatar mantled, her blood running hot at the professor’s threats.
Monster Zoltan, indeed. Sebastien had seen him clearly.
“I’ll need your final certification sent to His Majesty,” Rose said coolly. “If the king is to hold that leash.”
Zoltan frowned at her. “Don’t think to play games with me, phantasm. I am a master of oneiromancy and you are simply a figment of the Dream.”
“Then allow me to vanish from your presence,” she said, and left him behind.
For she had conceived an idea. A way to outwit them all and secure true freedom for herself.
Clotaire had sent a message for her to meet him at Prince Rupert’s hunting lodge the day after the wedding and contract-signing, a location she found hugely ironic, given Sebastien’s tales about Rotten Rupert and the horrible hunting trip there.
Rose wasn’t at all sure what this indicated, except that her father had a closer relationship with Rupert than one would expect for a sorcerer contracted to another kingdom, albeit one much more minor than Soren’s.
Part of Clotaire’s grand scheme, no doubt, which Rose intended to stay very far away from.
Oh, she would meet with her father, but it would not go the way he expected. None of them would ever be part of his schemes again, and now she knew exactly how to shed the last of her chains.