Chapter Two Your Dream Is at an End
CHAPTER TWO
YOUR DREAM IS AT AN END
Six hours earlier
The door between sleep and waking did not open readily, and I made no attempt to shift it.
Slowly, there came the feel of my pulse, its greeting a thud, thud in my ears and throat.
Annoying. I’d made a friend of the dreams I’d already forgotten and didn’t yet care to bid them goodbye.
There was comfort in the subdual of my senses. Peace, in oblivion.
Two seconds later, it shattered.
“What an arduous process it is to wait,” said a strange, jarring voice. “I say, Bartholomew, I am not made to be kept on my fingers like this.”
A woman’s voice sounded, low and choked. “His bleeding has only just stopped.”
Muscles strained throughout my body. I kept my eyes shut, but there was no holding sleep captive. I was waking up. Waking—
To nothing.
My mind was a cavern, its walls made of scratchy wool. I reached into it and touched nothing but an uncomfortable bewilderment. I had no past, no present—not even a name.
The thud, thud of my pulse hastened. Was I injured?
There didn’t seem to be any pain. I lay on my back, and my spine felt straight and unbroken, but then I wondered how I would know if my spine was broken, so I wiggled my toes and felt the confines of boots.
All right, then. My feet were working, and I was fitted in clothes, and those clothes were a burden—whatever I was wearing was wearing me. Heavy, stiff.
Armor, came instinctual knowledge from nowhere. You’re in armor, and you’re lying on grass, and the two voices overhead could very well be the reason you can’t remember your own name. Get away from them. You’re good at running.
Was I?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know anything, except that I was afraid.
Meanwhile the craggy voice carried on, its tone lecturing.
“I don’t expect there’s any particular rules about waking after consuming the tor’s spring water, except perhaps that it makes everyone frightened and dim-witted and open to suggestion.
Not me, mind. When I woke from that forever sleep, I was the model of bravery and intellect and unsuggestion. I don’t remember any of it, but—”
“Bartholomew,” the woman said. “How long? Roughly?”
“Some time yet, I’m afraid.” There was a tutting sound. “I can always smell when a dreamer is going to wake, and this one smells entirely of blood and not sickly sweet at all. He’ll need several more hours.”
I opened my eyes.
A stone monster and a woman loomed over me. When they saw that I was awake, their gazes widened. The monster opened his mouth, let out a bloodcurdling shriek—
I ran.
Stumbling over myself, heavy in armor, I fled into an open place; a windy slope upon a reaching, rocky hill.
A breeze blew, whispering through bromegrass and gowan flowers and over the hard backs of pale stones.
Above, the night sky stretched out, painted an incomparable shade of purple and lit by its denizen, a silver moon.
Voices called behind me.
My breath came in short, juddering gasps. I ran for all I was worth, but breastplate and greaves and pauldrons slowed me, and fear made me clumsy. I tripped between stones. Fell. Looked over my shoulder—
And saw a great stone bat with one vengeful wing spread out behind it.
My chest seized, a mule’s kick of terror hitting me in the sternum. “The fuck?” I scurried to my feet, then slipped on grass.
The woman chased me. She was middle aged, with dark hair and charcoal smeared around her eyes and a lethal-looking axe in her right hand. She ran at me with a strange limping gait, like she was injured. “Wait!” she called. “Rory, it’s all right—”
“I don’t know you.” My voice was the snarl of a cornered animal. “Get away from me.”
They kept coming. The stone bat began to clap. “What a sneaky little worm you are! We thought you were dreaming.”
I was. I had to be. I shut my eyes and crawled through grass on shaking limbs, my blood rushing. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
“Please.” I was curled around myself, clutching my side, the chainmail slick with blood, though I felt no wound, no pain. “Don’t—don’t—”
The stone bat got to me first. Fangs peeked from his lips and claws tipped his fingers.
A dusting of limestone followed him like a hazy cloud, its source the jagged edge on his shoulder that had no doubt once been his left wing.
He crouched, examining me with what might have been scrupulousness were it not for his stone eyes, which were impossible to read.
“Settle yourself, Bartholomew,” he said to me. “Your dream is at an end.”
The woman came beside him. She dropped her axe and fell to both knees at my side, putting one hand on my shoulder and pressing the other upon my breastplate directly over my heart. “Breathe. You’ve had a terrible shock.”
She looked so severe with her heavy brow and sharp nose and fearsome green eyes.
When she pressed her palm harder against my heart, I was overcome by the feeling that she was braver than all the world, and that she would stand between it and me if I needed her to.
“You’re Rodrick Myndacious,” she said, her voice like iron.
“You’re a knight, and so am I. My name is Maude Bauer.
You don’t remember me yet, but you will.
I’m here to keep you safe. I’ve always kept you safe. ”
The wind was cold against my cheeks, my eyes full of tears. “I don’t know who I am.”
The bat’s voice quieted. “Would you like me to tell you the story?”
I looked into his stone gaze.
“You’ve heard it before, I’m afraid. That is how stories are.
They echo to stay fed; the snake, consuming its own tail.
” This close, I could see that it wasn’t just his wing that was broken.
There were cracks, like veins, running down the entire left side of his body.
“It begins where it ended and ends where it began: here, on the tor. And now you are as an Omen, as a Diviner—a holy thing in the Stonewater Kingdom, and a contradiction. Strange, special, new—and yet ever repeating.” He sighed.
“All this is true, I’m sorry to say, for the exact reason you cannot remember who you are. ”
The bat leaned close, the moon a pale eye over us both. “You’re dead, Bartholomew.”