If she survived, she would know where to look.
Not if,
she told herself. She must survive. She was the last of the Dreamshifters; there was work to be done. Calmer now, she scrutinized the doors opening out of the arena. Counting the one behind her, there were six small ones, three on each long side of the oval. Two larger doors at each end of the stadium. Each could be a possible escape route.
But each could also allow something to enter the arena.
One of the doors on the end was big enough to drive a semi through. This one worried her the most; it was also large enough for a dragon.
A fanfare played.
The crowd screamed.
Whatever was coming, it was coming now.
Run for one of the small doors,
she told herself.
Only one guard each. Half a chance to get past. Run for it now, while you can.
Her muscles buzzed with adrenaline, but she lingered, the huge door holding her gaze with a sick fascination, certain that the age-old story of the dragon and the maiden was about to be played out for all eyes to see.
She was wrong.
Two small doors opened, instead. From each emerged a man, costumed in a white kilt, chest bared. One was old, his hair rough and gray, a thick beard cascading down over
his breast. The other couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, muscular and tanned with long blond hair.
The young man stopped at the center of the arena, looked directly toward her, and raised his sword in a salute. His face was too broken to grin, but he made an attempt, the muscles on one side contracting into a grimace.
Duncan.
One of the large doors—not the largest one, not yet—opened, and the priest trailed out in his scarlet robe. From here she could see the dragons embroidered on it in gold. As before, he raised his arms for silence, and the crowd hushed.
“A death for a death,” he said. “The dragon gods must be appeased.” No long speech for the occasion. He turned and stalked back through the door. It clanged behind him, steel on steel.
A trumpet sounded a single tone.
Duncan turned to face the gnarled old man at the center of the oval. The two saluted each other, then advanced into combat range and began circling, swords at the ready. The old man held his sword awkwardly in both hands. He slashed. Duncan parried. The blows were halfhearted even to her untrained eyes, slow, easily blocked. For what seemed like hours, although she knew it couldn’t really have been more than minutes, they circled each other.
Above in the stands, feet stomped, hands clapped. The roar of the crowd took on an ugly tone. “Kill, kill, kill!”
As if on signal, the two men stopped their sparring. They stood about five paces apart, breathing hard. Duncan inclined his head in a gesture of respect, and the old man followed suit. Then, simultaneously, they brought their sword points out straight and level ahead of them, holding the hilts steady with both hands. Their eyes locked. Duncan made a small gesture with his head. A signal.
Vivian felt herself screaming, soundless beneath the roar of the crowd, as the two men flung themselves toward each other, using the momentum to thrust their bodies onto the
blades. One freeze-frame moment they stood motionless, mouths open in shock and agony. And then they released their grip on the swords, flung their arms around each other’s shoulders and clung, pulling closer and closer together until they were locked in a death embrace with the bloody blades thrusting through and through. They sank to the ground joined like lovers, blood staining the whiteness of their clothing, pooling on the grass. Duncan cradled the old man’s head with his hand, keeping it from the sod.
A murmur of disappointment ran through the crowd.
This was Vivian’s last chance to run, to get away through a door, but her legs carried her the wrong way, across the grass toward the bloody tangle of limbs and bodies.
Duncan was still breathing, although his face had taken on the pallor of death and blood gushed from his mouth. The old man was already dead.
Vivian’s brain took her through the drill she knew so well. His airway was obstructed by blood; every shallow breath gurgled in his throat. He was bleeding externally and internally, pulse shallow, fluttering, far too rapid. Already he was white with shock.
“Hang on,” she said. “We need to stop the bleeding…” Even as she said it she knew this was stupid. Too much blood, too much damage; even with immediate access to an operating room, with IV fluids and blood transfusions and a team of skilled responders, she could never save him.
Still, she rested her hand on his brow, smoothed back the hair. She was grabbed from behind and pulled away, not roughly. Two men in red tunics leaned over the bodies, pulled them off the swords and apart. A wet sucking sound, a gush of blood and fluid. Duncan’s eyes widened; he gasped. It was his last breath. His head lolled to the side. More men appeared, gripping the bodies by the feet and dragging them across the grass, heads on limp necks rolling and bouncing.
“That was singularly unsatisfying,” Gareth’s voice said in her ear. “They’ll be cursed for that.”
“They are beyond cursing.” Vivian’s lips felt like stone.
She was surprised that her voice still worked, still sounded like her own.
“Cursed in the world to come,” Gareth said. “If they had followed the commandments of the High Priest, they would receive expiation and pass into a better place. As it stands—they are condemned to a series of hells.”
“It’s barbaric,” Vivian said. “As was making me watch from here. Bastard.”
Gareth grinned, white teeth gleaming. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” She sensed his heightened excitement, knew that the bloodshed had roused him in every possible way. She wanted to claw the grin from his face with her fingernails.
“Come,” he said. “I have something to show you.”
“Fuck you. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
He lifted her bodily to her feet, grabbed her arm, and towed her along, following the grisly procession ahead of them. Vivian’s bare feet squished in grass wet with blood. She twisted and struggled but Gareth didn’t deign to slow, to turn to look at her, or even to slap her. Just kept walking, her arm pinioned by his hand.
Recognizing futility, half in shock, she went with him. Up the stairs, his arm tight around her shoulders, forcing her against his side. An enormous swollen moon hung over the castle, dull red, brooding. The crowd flowed left toward castle and moon, a turgid river of humanity. The men dragging the dead turned right, and Gareth and Vivian followed behind.
A few more steps and they came upon a small black-and-white figure, waiting. The penguin lengthened his neck, hissing. It must have been the moonlight that made his eyes flare red.
Gareth’s hand moved to his sword hilt. “That creature is an abomination.”
Poe hissed again, then waddled off to the side and into shadow. Vivian followed him with her eyes, trying to pick him out of the darkness, but nothing moved. As far as she could see, the grass, the bushes, the castle, all were lit by that unearthly reddish light.
Ahead of them, at the center of a small space of flowers, towered an oak tree with wide and spreading branches. A tire swing twirled gently from a wide bough, a swing that a child might sit in to commune with sky and grass and tree for a long afternoon of dream. A wail of grief and loss rose in Vivian’s throat, half-choking her as she held it back.
The men they had followed stopped beneath the tree. Sick and dizzy, Vivian could only watch as they wrapped rope around the dead men’s necks and hoisted their bodies up to hang beside the swing, the wind making their loose limbs dance and sway.
“Why?” Vivian turned to face Gareth. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Her Majesty wishes for you to know what she can do with dreams.”
Vivian closed her eyes to shut out the travesty, but the bodies swung behind her eyelids as though on a screen. “Please,” she said. “If you have any decency, take me away from this place.”
“Of course.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle.
He released her arm and took her hand, twining his fingers with hers as though they were lovers and she were not his captive. She went with him willingly when he began to walk, not caring where they went, so long as it took her elsewhere. Only when the fragrance of roses reached her did she realize her mistake.
The dead were not a threat to her; she should have stayed with them. Should have run, run like hell into the darkness and the hope of an escape. Not this, not a rose garden and a fountain by the light of this red moon. Not in the company of this man.
The scent of roses was overpowering, heavy, too sweet. A breeze blew spray against her face from the fountain in a pool behind her. Weary, heartsick, and afraid, she sank down on a stone bench, cool against her thighs through the fabric of the gown.
Gareth dropped to his knees in the grass and kissed her.
Fighting back a shudder of revulsion she held herself quiescent, neither responding nor resisting. His lips burned, too hot, too much pressure. She did not respond, did not try to pull away. Waited.
Lips still fastened on hers, he circled her throat with both hands, pressing lightly on the arteries with his thumbs. Black spots danced before her eyes. If he applied strong pressure, in seconds she would slip into unconsciousness and it would all be over.
But the hands released her, slid down to cup her breasts.
It was not to be borne. She turned her head to break the kiss, shoved at him with all her strength. He was too heavy, too strong. He squeezed her nipples, hard, in retaliation.
“Gareth, please…”
His voice was husky, caressing. “I knew I could make you beg. Say it again.”
She slapped him. An angry red patch appeared on his cheek. He slapped her back, a blow that jolted her head to one side, turned her cheek to fire.
Still, he had released her breasts; his lips were no longer on hers. Gasping for breath, she asked, “What did she promise you?”
“Who?”
“The Queen—she gave you something, promised you something—”
An instant of hesitation told her the guess was right. Maybe she could move him, turn him. He was a stranger, but not entirely. The worst of Jared, but Jared still; she knew him.
A pulse beat in his throat; the muscle in his jaw clenched and released.
“She doesn’t care about you, Gareth, not really. Not you or anybody. This—place—Surmise. It isn’t real. All built of stolen, twisted dreams. In another place, another world, you are a decent man. You don’t have to do this.”
“You know nothing about what I have to do.”
“I know what she is, what she does. She’s using you—”
Wrong words. His eyes went flat. “You think I am some
stupid pawn. Think again. She has given me more power than you can imagine.”
“Right. She sees that you are valuable, but she—”
“You say this place isn’t real.”
“Well, it is, but it is not—”
“If it’s a dream, why get so upset about a death or two?”
Esme limp and unconscious between the guards. Bodies hanging from a spreading oak tree. Vivian swallowed. “It’s complicated.”
“Explain.”
“Jehenna, she can enter dreams, change them, trap the dreamer—”
She could see by his face that she wouldn’t sway him. Even if he wasn’t under Jehenna’s control, he was already set on a course. In her pocket, she remembered, was a dreamsphere. The one that Poe had picked up off the floor. Surely it would end this, would take her somewhere away, give her time to think, to plan.
Her hand reached into the pocket of the gown even as Gareth’s lips claimed hers again. She let him kiss her while she fumbled for the globe, pulled it out, and then broke away and held it up to the light.
Gareth reached for it. “What—”
A splash turned them both toward the fountain at once.
Poe was swimming in the pool. Diving and surfacing, part fish, part bird, pure essence of sublime joy. A dive beneath the surface and out of view, and then he shot up out of the water onto the rocks, only to dive back in and traverse the pool in a series of leaps like a dolphin.
“Get that creature out, at once!”
Even in the moonlight Vivian could see that Gareth’s face had gone white, a note of fear edging beneath his command.
“You don’t understand. The fountain is off-limits. If she finds out—”
“I guess you shouldn’t have brought us here then.” Her own voice surprised her, level and calm. The crystal hadn’t taken her away, but it had changed something. She had
felt the shift, and then Poe had been in the fountain. In her mind the voices kept a waiting silence, as though they were holding their collective breath.
“Get him out.”
Vivian spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “You’re talking about a bird, not a dog. He doesn’t understand commands.” In reality, she was pretty sure Poe understood a lot more than she’d given him credit for, but she wasn’t about to admit it.
Gareth ran the few steps to the fountain, making shooing gestures with his hands, but never quite touching the water. “Get out of there, you stupid bird!”
Poe did come out, to Vivian’s surprise, although he never seemed to notice Gareth’s flapping hands, or his shouts. In his beak he carried something that wriggled and flopped and sparkled in the moonlight. Waddling across the grass, he dropped it carefully at Vivian’s feet.
A fish, only not like any fish she had ever seen. Luminous and shining, rainbow colors shifting over its body in waves. Its fins were winglike, diaphanous, emerald green and cobalt blue.
A shout went up from the voices in her head and they all began talking loudly and at once, a babble of excitement with overtones of awe and wonder.
Gareth stood silent beside her, staring.
The wondrous creature was dying. It flopped in the grass, gasping, gills distended. The brilliant colors were beginning to fade. Vivian bent to pick it up. She must return it to the pool at once; surely in the water it would revive and go on swimming. But the instant her fingers made contact there was a chiming sound and a flash of light. The fish vanished. In the grass lay a gleaming black object.