“But why?” Eneas would not let her go. He was strong. He would be masterful for anyone, she sensed—especially any woman—who wanted to be mastered. “Why can’t you let your heart lead you?”
She had planned just such a moment—imagined it almost gleefully, as a hunter might dream of the moment the stag stood exposed and unaware on a hillside, breast vulnerable to the killing shaft. Now that it had come, though, it filled her with unease. How could she take advantage of a good man this way, even to save her family’s throne? How could she pretend to love him just to gain his help?
Even worse, what if she was not pretending?
“I… I must think,” she said. “I had not expected anything like this. I had hoped to find allies here in your father’s court against my family’s enemies, the usurping Tollys. I had not expected to f ind… someone I could care for. I must think.” She looked off across the ordered rows of the garden. Distant figures acted out their own dramas, too far away to be recognized—each of them, herself included, as helpless in their actions as characters created out of air and smoke by Nevin Hewney or Finn Teodoros, ideas committed to paper and performed for the price of a night’s food and lodging. How had she come to such a strange pass? Was she the player or the thing being played?
“Of course,” Eneas said at last. The prince could not disguise the heaviness of his words. “ ’Of course I will give you time, my lady. You must be true to yourself.”
She should have slept like the dead that night, but instead she rolled and tossed through more nightmares of tunnels collapsing and dirt always beneath her fingers. This time there was no silvery shape to lead her, and the longer the dreams went on the farther down into choking darkness she went.
At last she found herself in a deep place, so deep that she understood somehow she had dug out on the other side of the world, that what lay beyond the small patch of ground on which she stood was the empty blackness of a sky with no stars, a blackness into which a single misstep could send her tumbling forever. And there, at the center of that dark otherness, she found her brother.
He was pale, senseless, as he had been before. He lay stretched before her as Kendrick had lain while the servants prepared him for burial, but Barrick was not dead. She did not know how she knew it, but she did.
The three shapes that crouched over him were no servants or funerary priests but something else entirely—dark, eyeless shadows singing wordless songs as they moved their hands above him. Then one of them lifted Barrick’s crippled arm up to the emptiness of its face and her brother began to fade.
Tears, one of the shapes whispered, and the echo was swallowed by the damp, dark earth all around.
Spittle, said another.
Blood, said a third.
She tried to call to her twin, to wake him and warn him about what these terrible specters were doing, but she could not. She felt the change spreading through Barrick like flame, a train of fire from his arm to his head and heart that was also a spreading, burning agony through her own body. She tried to throw herself forward, but some invisible hand held her back.
Barrick! Her cries seemed all but silent. Barrick! Come back! Don’t let them take you!
And at the last, just before the thing of cobweb shadows that had been her brother grew too dim to see, Barrick opened his eyes and looked at her. His stare was empty, utterly dead and empty.
She woke up choking on her own tears, feeling as though the most important part of her had been cut out with a dull knife. For long moments she could only lie on her bed sobbing helplessly. Barrick… Would she truly never see him again? The dream had felt so terrible, so final. Had something happened to him—something bad? Was he… ?
“Oh, gods, no… !” she moaned.
Briony dragged herself up. She could not even bear to think of the possibility. These dreams—the nightmares—they were stalking her as though she were their prey. Would she never sleep again without seeing some parade of horror? So tired that she could barely set one foot in front of the other, she stumbled to the chest she had brought with her from her time with the players, the locked box with the clothes she had worn and the few small objects she had picked up on her journey south.
Briony opened the lid and began digging through it, scattering the boy’s breeches she had worn and the pamphlets that had been handed to her, not even knowing what she sought until her fingers closed on it and she felt the fragile bird’s skull and the tiny dry flowers.
Lisiya’s charm in her hands, she crawled back across her dark chamber and into bed. She held the charm tightly to her breast and tried not to think of the dream-Barrick’s dead eyes. One of the maids whimpered a little in her sleep, and that was the last thing she remembered before the dark took her again.
She was in the forest once more, but this time she could see the thing she had been chasing so long. It was a fox, black on the underside but tipped all over its back with silver, and silver on its tail and sharp face as well. As it sped away it looked back at her, teeth bared in a grin that might have been fatigue but seemed more like mockery. Except for a thin ring of orange, the creature’s eyes were as black as its belly.
The fox leaped over the roots effortlessly, but even in her dream Briony could not move with such liquid ease. She must have stumbled, for she found herself falling forward, the trees suddenly turned into whirling torrents of black. For a moment she thought she was back in the terrible, crumbling earth, but then she passed through that spinning darkness into a forest glade. The silvery fox had stopped running and now crouched with its back to her in front of an ancient tumbled altar of stone.
Briony staggered up and fell to her knees. Things seemed curiously painful for a dream: she could feel twigs and rocks digging into her skin.
“Who… who are you?” she gasped.
The beast turned. This time there was no question: its grin was one of mockery and disgust. The fox shook its head. “I said it before and I’ll say it again—I fear for the breed.”
The little animal hopped lightly up onto the ruined altar and lowered its muzzle to sniff. Thunder rumbled distantly. “Look at this,” the fox said, and there was something familiar in the creature’s voice that cut through the fog of Briony’s dreaming thoughts. “Is this what people think of me, that my sacred places are left untended even here? Even in the dreamlands?”
“Lisiya?” Briony whispered. “Is that you?” But as soon as she said the name she knew it was true.
The fox turned; a moment later the black and silver beast had vanished and the old woman sat upon the altar, her gnarled bare feet dangling as if she were a child. “Lisiya Melana of the Silver Glade, do you mean?” she said with more than a trace of irritation. “Bad enough you summon a goddess and then fail to meet her, but to forget her name as well… !”
“But… but I did not summon you.”
“You most certainly did, child. Three nights running, although I could barely hear you the first few times. Weak as a newborn kitling’s, your voice was, but finally tonight I could hear you well enough to find you.” Thunder boomed again above the forest, as though mirroring Lisiya’s irritation.
Briony could not shake off the feeling that she was misunderstanding something. “I… I dreamed of you—or at least of chasing you. Through the forest. And through tunnels in the earth. But I did not see you before, only your… tail.”