One Last Dream #3
She nods. “More than once. Apparently, a lot. It made your mother think that perhaps there was a reason you were calling out to a woman who lived halfway across the country. So, she came and found me and proposed a marriage.”
Dagfinn has more questions after that, and Euphemia answers all of them. How she met his mother. Why Euphemia agreed to a strange offer in the dead of night. What Kelda told her about him. What Euphemia’s family knows about their union.
And with every answer, his expression shifts between disbelief, amusement, and something that looks suspiciously like pride.
When he’s finally all caught up, Dagfinn leans back against the balustrade beside her.
His hand barely grazes hers, but neither of them move.
“I wasn’t sure how you’d feel,” Euphemia says through a throat constricted.
Turning toward her, he looks at her with something like offense.
Then, returning his gaze forward, they settle into a quiet calm, with only the sound of the distant waves to keep them company. Periodically, she catches him glancing at her as though he’s still trying to reconcile that the woman standing beside him is his wife.
They should be focused on getting her back to the waking world, but now she just hopes she stays asleep a little longer. She does not want to leave him after this.
But that’s just her being selfish.
She needs to get back to his study. Before Kelda can awaken and either pour out the draught or agree to Percival’s terms before anyone can stop her.
Euphemia glances at Dagfinn with something like regret in her voice. “I really should be getting back there.”
Dagfinn looks at her for a long moment.
“Of course.” He clears his throat and whatever emotion was in it. “What do you have in mind?”
“Nothing good.” Euphemia sighs deeply, already regretting what she’s about to say. She shoves off the balustrade and starts pacing. “But I imagine if this is like most dreams, then we just need to give my body a jolt and I’ll awaken.”
“A jolt? Like what?”
The hopeful part of Euphemia thinks that a kiss could do the trick. But she doesn’t dare suggest it.
“I don’t know yet. But I’m sure between the two of us, we’ll figure it out.”
They settle into the quietness of thoughtful minds at work.
And she can see it so easily, the two of them spending their days in the study, discussing various herbs and their effects and how they might brew the next elixir they’re working on.
Perhaps one to cure St. Anthony’s Fire. Perhaps one to allow them to talk more directly to ghosts.
Anything they can set their minds and skills to.
Jostling her from her thoughts, Dagfinn rises from his perch as well.
“What is it?” she asks, following his gaze, but it only leads her off the cliff.
Dagfinn grabs her hand and starts to run. “Come on. I have an idea.”
They bound across the plateau, Euphemia barely keeping up with his larger strides.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” he says, dragging her toward the ledge.
The last time she was here, it had been so dark that everything beyond the cliff was obscured.
Now as Euphemia glances over the edge, her stomach twists impossibly tight.
Dagfinn grabs her shoulders and steadies her there. “What if this is the answer? What if this is how we wake you?”
Euphemia glares at him. “By what? Throwing me over the edge?”
“Yes!”
“You’ve gone mad!”
“Think about it,” he says, losing himself to the idea, and damn her twirling heart for not loving the excitement in his voice. “Any time you’ve died in a dream, what’s happened?”
Defiantly, Euphemia’s shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“You wake up!” he answers for her. “Every single time. No matter the death. The moment before it can happen, it’s like the mind refuses it or something and you wake up back in bed.”
Euphemia hates that he’s sounding more logical by the second.
But only because it is her they’re talking about tossing into the rocks below..
“Sure, that’s how most dreams work,” she says. “But these dreams are different.”
“Are they?” His hands release her, arms spreading wide as he looks behind them.
All around them. “I lost my father so I drank an elixir that I believe would send me to Helheim. For nearly a year, that’s where I thought I’ve been.
But then you arrive and tell me I’m safe and sound in Thorfell instead. This place is just a dream.”
Her resolve weakens, but she still has her reservations. “But there are things about this dream that cannot be explained like normal ones.”
“Name one.”
She scoffs and says the most obvious, most glaring of them all. “Like why we’ve found each other here. How two people can have the same dream. That is quite unusual, don’t you think?”
“I disagree.” Dagfinn’s voice softens. “I made this place from my own grief. Then you came to Thorfell, and you were grieving too. You wanted to find your father. And I had made this place for doing just that.”
Something cracks in her chest.
A cold fist squeezes her lungs.
Because if what he’s saying is true, if this is just some regular dream, then…
“Are you saying none of it is real?”
Tenderness seeps into his expression, dousing the mania.
Dagfinn reaches for her, tenderly cupping the side of her face.
“No. This is very real. But it is just a dream. The spirit does not have to stay attached to the body—like the hugr who took over mine. Spirits can wander, especially in dreams. Especially those searching for something. I think that’s how you got here. I think you wandered into my dream.”
Euphemia doesn’t know what she believes anymore.
Once, she would have dismissed talk of wandering souls and spirits as heresy.
But she has walked among the dead. She has seen things no living woman should see.
Perhaps anything is possible.
Besides, she likes this possibility he’s conjured. The one where they are drawn together like the moon to the night sky. The one where they faced a giant serpent together, where they fought through creatures made of water and death, and survived. Together.
Slowly, Dagfinn’s thumb begins to trace her cheekbone.
Euphemia glances at his lips, and then back to the sea.
“Are you sure that will work?”
Staring at her with the utmost sincerity, Dagfinn takes her hands into his own. His thumb passes slowly over the backs of her fingers, and this time there is no mistaking the way his attention catches on the scars.
Euphemia instinctively tries to pull away.
Dagfinn does not clutch them tighter, nor does he outright release them. Instead, he keeps his hold as tender as it had been, something gentle gathering in his eyes. If she wants to hide them, he will let her. But he does not want her too.
Ultimately, Euphemia stops trying to hide.
She lets her hands settle into his own.
“May I ask what happened?”
The question is so gentle it somehow hurts more than any of the other times anyone has stared in disgust or flinched away from her as if she was infested.
She looks down at their joined hands. “The nightmare. The night my…”
His bobbing head tells her she doesn’t have to finish that sentence.
“I suspected, but I wasn’t sure,” he says.
Then he presses them to his chest, and Euphemia can feel the rhythmic beating of his heart.
She can feel her own as well. “I fear what existence would be like without you, Euphemia. So no. I would not even suggest this unless I was certain.”
Her heart skips over itself. Fractures. Repairs.
Euphemia has never felt like this before.
Like someone who lose the breath in their air if she was no longer near them.
Like someone would do anything for her the way she would do anything for them.
If Dagfinn is certain this plan will work, then so is she.
Now she’s the one to take his face into her hand. A small amount of stubble is already making his jawline rough.
“I promise I will get you home,” she says.
Dagfinn tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “It is not my home that I am desperate to return to, True North.”
Euphemia feels a tug between them like something is hooked around her spine, pulling her nearer. Deeper. Into his depths. But if he is a moor, then she would be glad to drown in him.
Before she can lose herself too completely, Euphemia twists out of his grasp and faces the ocean.
“Wait,” he says, grabbing her again.
She whimpers at the yearning his touch provokes in her. “If I don’t leave now, I will never go.”
His answering smirk is devilish. “I promise, I won’t keep you much longer. There is just one slight flaw with the way you are executing our plan.”
Haughtily, she scoffs. “And what’s that?”
He lowers his voice, forcing her to lean in close so she can hear him over the wind and waves. He presses his mouth against her ear, his breath warm.
“For your plan to work—” he says, breathless, tormenting. “—it needs to be a jolt to your system. Remember?”
She hardly hears what he’s saying though. Dagfinn lingers there, close enough that she can feel his smile against her skin. She hears him licks his lips. Feels the feather-soft graze of his mouth upon her jaw.
It is almost her undoing.
“I’ll see you on the other side of waking, wife of mine,” he says—
Before Dagfinn shoves her over the cliff.