Epilogue
Rose stepped through the portal she’d made and into the Dream, becoming herself again.
For whatever reason—perhaps because Thorn’s magic still guided the enchantment, not her own—Rose retained the same body she’d had all her life when inside the Dream.
She didn’t mind. It added to the sense of being home.
Though, for a moment, the Dream felt so much more crisp and vivid than usual that she wondered if she’d made a mistake, even following Moriah’s precise directions, and had somehow inadvertently stepped back through into the waking world.
This section of the Dream seemed remarkably stable, following the usual physical laws of the waking world.
There seemed to be a consistent up and down and very few fantastical elements.
Except for the roses.
Before her stretched an enormous field of roses of the most extraordinary shades of lavender and violet purple. A mass scent rose from them unlike anything she’d smelled before, redolent of the low notes of honey and the bright ones of those fancy chocolate cookies, and yet undeniably floral.
In the distance to one side of the undulating bed of roses, a turbulent sea hurled itself loudly below high cliffs.
On the other, snow-capped mountains reared in silent regal splendor.
As Rose looked, she might have seen a pack of scáthcú scudding across a pristine slope.
Or it might have been a distant wind stirring up snow.
In the middle of the concentric rings of living, seething amethyst blooms, a house of white towers stood, serene and still as the peaks above.
With a cry, Adsila winged off her shoulder and to the side.
Rose followed, noting as she drew near that the outermost rosebushes had woven together to create a wall of brambles as high as her head.
The small hairs on the back of her neck rose, prickling with unease, it was so like the cottage and the rose barrier that had confined Thorn for so long.
Farther down, a man attacked the wall of roses.
Tall and dark, with broad shoulders and long braids threaded with silver, the man hurled fireballs and other spells at the briar barrier.
They fizzled into nothing. Rose could have told him that sorcery doesn’t work in the Dream, but he wouldn’t understand, not knowing he was dreaming.
Or … was he? The man, too, had a peculiar vividness, a realness to him that dreamers didn’t, that only people who’d entered the Dream possessed.
Adsila lit on his shoulder and he whirled, desperate hope lighting his face. “Oneira?”
This had to be Stearanos.
He spied Rose and his face fell. “You’re not Oneira,” he said accusingly.
“No, I’m not.”
“How came you by Adsila then?”
“Adsila came to me. To guide me here,” she added on inspiration. “To you, and Oneira.”
Hope returned to his scarred and craggy face. “Can you get us in? I can’t break the wards.” He frowned at the wall. “I’ve been trying for hours and I can’t do it. I should be able to.”
Rose didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d likely been trying for months, trapped in the timelessness of the Dream. “You should rest,” she told him gently.
He shook his head violently. “I cannot. I will not. She’s locked herself in here and I must save her.”
“Must you?” Rose asked, feeling her way. She swept a hand at the house and the roses. “Or should she release herself from the prison she’s made?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “This is her house. Her roses. What if she doesn’t know it isn’t real? What if she’s lost herself here?”
“What if she chooses it?” Rose countered, wondering what had driven Oneira to this strange exile. By all accounts, she’d already retired from the world to an isolated fastness, and then she’d removed herself even farther, re-creating that stronghold in the Dream.
“I drove her to do it,” Stearanos answered, regret in the lines of his scarred face.
“I asked her to do the unthinkable when I knew, I knew it could destroy her.” He stared at the house in the distance.
“I must save her.” With renewed vigor, he resumed his physical and magical attack on the bramble of blithe roses, apparently forgetting her and their conversation.
Adsila launched from his shoulder and returned to circle above her.
Rose left him there. Stearanos was caught in a loop of the Dream; without the oneiromancy to control it, he’d continue in the same vein, returning again and again to his singular thought: to save Oneira.
Rose could perhaps break him free, but not if he fought her.
First, she needed to find Oneira, for surely that was why Moriah had sent her to the sorceress’s corner of the Dream.
She walked on in the direction of the sea, Adsila making small cheeps of encouragement, until she came to where the black-caned brambles met the cliff’s edge.
A series of steps led down to a pink-pebbled beach.
Following dream intuition, Rose stepped onto them, as if to descend, then turned around.
Steps that hadn’t been there a moment ago led up to a gate opening into a surreal, informal garden.
Opening the gate, she entered the garden, marveling at the giant vegetables and the flowers from every season all in simultaneous, riotous bloom.
A table for two set with tea perched in a small, shady clearing, looking oddly expectant and lonely at once.
Prepared, perhaps, for the guest who never arrived.
Rose hesitated to enter the house uninvited, but the glass-paned doors to the kitchen stood open and Adsila flew through them. So she followed her guide.
Soup simmered on the stove, smelling magically delicious, along with the yeasty fragrance of bread dough rising, which Rose recognized from her sister’s kitchen.
Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, emitting shades of rosemary and pepper and others Rose didn’t recognize.
She wandered into the next room, passing the official front door and vestibule and entering a space devoid of anything but a featureless white plinth.
A skylight far above shone rays of sunlight on the surface, pristine as the snowy peaks.
It looked for all the world like a bier, except no body occupied it.
Instinctively, Rose knew that in the waking world, this was where Oneira’s physical body lay.
She followed Adsila up a flight of curving stairs, up and into a crystal dome of dazzling purity.
Was the waking-world version this incredible, or was that the Dream making it seem so?
Rose wondered only a moment, for a crimson-haired woman turned to face her, brows arching in interest, a book in her hands.
She shimmered with potent magic, her oneiromancy palpable as the scent of roses and old parchment in the air.
“You’re the girl from that library, in the cottage in the woods,” Oneira observed. With a striking face, refined by years, and eyes both haunted and acutely intelligent, the sorceress drew nearer. “Or not quite.”
“My twin sister,” Rose offered, not sure why she so immediately spilled that secret. Except that this was the Dream and secrets didn’t survive dreams. “She thought you didn’t see her.”
“A quiet little oneiromancer mouse,” Oneira mused. “So frightened. I let her be. She wasn’t who I sought.”
“What or who were you seeking?” Like a ghost, leaving the Dream and entering the waking world without her body.
Oneira considered that, a line forming and fleeing from between her brows.
“I can’t quite recall. I was seeking a question.
I once had an answer, but I lost it, so I thought to look for the question again.
” She looked around the dome, then at the book in her hands, which vanished under her gaze.
“I can’t seem to read anymore,” she complained. “The words all run away from me.”
“You’re in the Dream,” Rose told her, surprised that Oneira didn’t seem to know. “No one can read in the Dream.”
“Nonsense, young sorceress.” Oneira smiled indulgently.
“If I know nothing else, I know the Dream. I’m in the waking world in my house.
This is where I live now. Alone.” She looked ineffably sad.
Rose realized Adsila, too, had vanished.
She had better look to herself, lest Oneira decide to eliminate her also.
“What about the roses?” Rose gestured to the sea of purple roses surrounding the island of the house.
“I grew those myself,” Oneira told her. “Veredian roses. So very rare they were nearly extinct. Now I cultivate them. I can do that much. I keep thinking…” She trailed off, frowning again.
“You keep thinking what?”
“I don’t know.” Oneira smiled wistfully. “That I’ll find the question perhaps, that if I grow enough of them, I’ll be able to do … something.” She shook her head. “But then I think it was never about the roses. Who are you again?”
“My name is Rose.”
Oneira gave her a long and canny look. “Of course it is. And why are you made of the Dream and yet still a living person?”
Naturally Oneira had recognized that about her. “It’s a long story. Shall I tell it to you over tea in the garden?”
“Yes. It’s been a long time since I had a visitor. I was waiting for someone, I think. Was it you?”
“No. But I can keep you company for a while. Then perhaps we can go looking.”
“That would be lovely. You can tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine. Though mine is very long.”
Rose smiled and extended a hand. Oneira clasped it, and the touch felt exactly right. “We have lots of time.”