Jehenna’s voice was faint, little more than a breath of wind. “You amuse me. Deny as you will; you will see the truth.” She was still laughing when her body began to disintegrate. Feet first, fraying into particles of dust so that she fell to her knees. And all the while the laughter spewed from her throat until she had no throat to laugh with, and even then her mouth remained open in soundless, evil mirth, her white-filmed eyes bulging in a face coming apart at the seams.
And then it was over, a gust of wind scattering a heap of dust across the stadium floor. A new shock wave, greater than the last, shook the arena, throwing Vivian to the ground. Another section of the wall caved in. Seats dissolved into a cloud of dust. Voices screamed.
As Vivian stared, numb with horror and grief, half of the field simply vanished.
It wasn’t due to something comprehensible like a giant sinkhole or a crater sucking matter down into the earth. Instead, grass, soil, and a huge section of the restraining wall disappeared. No sound, no fury. No wind rushing into the vacuum.
Just Nothing.
Vivian shook her head and blinked, attempting to grasp the concept of matter that did not follow the laws of physics. But dreams were another story, and Surmise had been built Between. All of the people of Surmise would not only die, they would just Not Be.
She bent to kiss the Warlord’s lips, already cold, soulless, and then the lips vanished along with everything else.
One heartbeat.
Then nothing.
no air
no sound
no light
no dark
no body.
A faint memory of arms and legs, hands and feet. An echo of breath and heartbeat, cold and warmth, pleasure and pain.
All that existed now was mind and spirit. Memories. Ideas.
And emotions. A deep and encompassing regret. Grief. Despair. So many dead because of her failures, and now she was beyond hope of putting things right.
Fear came next. An eternity of existence only as consciousness. Memories and thoughts—guilt, loss, regret—and nothing else. No future. No escape. Only the unquiet mind, forever and ever and always, and it was amazing how sharp the pain of this could be.
And then even the pain began to fade, the last thing, slipping away no matter how she tried to hold on.
An odd tug, a little jerk, and…
Vivian lay flat on her back. Something soft was beneath her, and the scent of fresh grass and flowers filled her nostrils. Opening her eyes she saw, high and far away, three dragons dancing on the wind.
She pushed herself up on her elbows and her head throbbed with the change of position, a familiar and oddly comforting thing in a world altered beyond comprehension.
Across a wide field of grass and flowers towered a pure-white castle, as unlike Surmise as a castle could ever be. Slender turrets sprang upward toward the sky, graceful and light.
No fallen Warlord lay at her feet. No dead dragon, no little heap of ashes.
An emptiness of grief and loss took her breath and doubled her over with both arms clasped around her belly. Alone in all the worlds.
Tears would have been a mercy, but her eyes were dry and there was no way to ease the relentless pain at her center. Unless she were to change, to fly with the dragons.
Not now, not yet. She still had work to do. Massive failure on her part didn’t justify sitting around bemoaning her fate. Doors still stood open into Wakeworld, dragons running loose. Her mother and the Prince were still trapped. She needed to find the dreams that Jehenna had stolen. Recover the key.
Something soft brushed against her arm. She jerked away, startled, turning to see the most penguiny-looking penguin she had ever seen. Too big for an Adélie, too small for a King, with a breast a little too white and a beak a little too yellow and obsidian eyes that glittered with unnatural intelligence.
“Poe?”
The penguin squawked and flopped into her lap.
She flung her arms around him, pressed her cheek against his head, even as she murmured, “You’re not real, you can’t be.” Her hand went to the chain at her throat and found the pendant. Not a dream, then. Still somewhere in the vastness of Between.
One tear escaped her and fell on the penguin’s head, a small crystal drop repelled by waterproof feathers, gleaming diamond bright in the sun. Poe was dead, and this couldn’t really be him.
A line of crimson feathers on his white breast caught her attention. She ran her fingers over them, feeling a scar marring the skin beneath. There was another scar, smaller, on his back.
“It can’t be,” she whispered.
Poe
quawrked
, then hopped down and waddled off to explore.
Following him with her eyes, Vivian noticed for the first time the people clustered across the meadow in groups of two and three. Something about their behavior was—not wrong, exactly, but different. Old people and young, disheveled and ragged, some of them bloodstained, all speaking in hushed voices and looking around them as if waiting for something. A woman sobbed softly against the shoulder of
a man whose own shoulders were shaking, his face buried in her matted hair. Children stood or sat in the grass, eyes vivid and taking in everything, but too serious, too quiet.
Refugees, Vivian thought. Unsure what is expected of them, waiting for instruction. One of the faces looked familiar, and then another. Prisoners, faces she had last seen blank and aimless in the dungeons.
As she scanned the scene again, things made more sense. Where there was now this field of grass and flowers, there had once been a stadium. The castle had changed in form but stood in the same relative location. This was still Surmise, only drastically changed.
A guard stood at a cautious distance, trying to maintain his dignity while evading Poe’s investigation of his bootlaces. When her eyes fell on him, he sank to his knees and bowed his forehead to the grass. “My Lady, I meant no insolence by standing in your presence…”
“Get up,” she said.
“Yes, My Lady.” He got to his feet but kept his eyes averted. A muscle bunched and twitched in his jaw. As she searched for words to put him at ease, he removed his belt and sword and laid them in the grass before pulling his tunic off over his head.
Vivian took a step backward, thinking he had lost his sanity. “You need to put your clothes back on.”
His face turned ashen, but his jaw tightened stubbornly. Keeping his eyes on the ground, he held the tunic out toward her in a trembling hand. “My Lady, you are naked.”
A profound act of courage, she realized, as she took the garment from his hands. It was roughly woven and smelled of sweat, but she pulled it on, accepting both gift and giver. As far as she knew, the man had risked his life in concern for her comfort. She could trust him.
“Thank you,” she said. “Can you tell me what happened just now?”
He blinked rapidly, then opened and closed his mouth before answering, “Forgive me, My Lady, but surely you are the one who knows the answer to that question.”
“Humor me.”
Again the rapid blinking. He swallowed hard. “Well—Surmise was here, and then it wasn’t, My Lady. After you destroyed the dragon and the Queen.” If possible, he paled even further, dropping back to his knees. “Of course, she is—was—not the Queen. You are, My Queen, I meant to say. Please forgive me, My Queen, it all happened so suddenly, I lost track of the protocols.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a queen, and I mean to find Prince Landon and put him in charge straightaway. Seriously—get up. No more bowing to me.”
Again he scrambled to his feet. He stood a little straighter, shoulders square, and met her eyes.
Vivian managed a brief smile. “You served the Warlord—I remember. Tell me your name.”
“Tellar, My Lady.”
“All right, Tellar. I owe the Warlord a debt. You have my word that I mean no harm to you. Now—take me to the Chancellor.”
“I—don’t know where to look for him, My Lady. The castle is gone.”
The man had a point. “All right, then. Do a couple of things for me, will you? Find some of the men you trust. Have them hunt for the Chancellor, and find out what has happened to all of the prisoners. Make sure nobody is trapped in the dungeons, all right? And have your men keep their eyes out for an object—this size—carved from black stone.”
His face brightened, hope flaring in his eyes. A quick salute of genuine respect, and he headed off with a steady, measured tread.
Vivian turned her back to him. She drew a deep breath, and then another. Grounded herself, and then thought her way through a tangle of doors and dreams without moving her body at all. When at last she found the door she sought, it opened at her command.
In an empty white room, the Prince sat in the corner, stroking Isobel’s hair. She lay motionless with her head in
his lap, eyes closed, her face smooth and unlined, flushed a little in sleep. Vivian had never seen her look so serene. Landon did not look up, did not stop stroking Isobel’s hair.
“Jehenna is dead. You need to come out here and be the King,” Vivian said. “Do you hear me, Landon? You’re needed.”
His eyes turned toward the door. He saw her but didn’t move, and Vivian remembered that he couldn’t hear her, that there was no sound in that chamber.
Isobel stirred and opened her eyes. For a moment they were confused, far away, and then they cleared and focused. She smiled, then sat up and turned to Landon. Placing a hand on his cheek, she looked long into his eyes, and at last he nodded. He kissed her, very gently, and the two of them got up and walked to the door, hand in hand. Both hesitated, then stepped through the doorway together.
“You’ve killed Jehenna,” Isobel said. It was a calm statement of fact without a hint of question.
Vivian nodded. “And Mellisande.”
“Poor old dragon,” Isobel said. “But you couldn’t have killed Jehenna if you hadn’t.”
“You knew?”
“I remember—bits. The ceremony, when I was a child. She made me watch. Made me drink—” Her face twisted.
Landon put an arm around her shoulder, drew her against him, a protective gesture. As though the two of them were under threat. His eyes were bleak, his face drawn.
Vivian looked at him, bewildered, and then began to understand. Another grief, another loss.
“I didn’t really kill Jehenna,” she said, hearing her own voice speak what she didn’t want to acknowledge. “After the dragon died, she just—disintegrated.”
Isobel nodded. Vivian thought already her mother’s face looked older, that there were lines under her eyes that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Threads of silver in her dark hair.
“I’m over a hundred years old, darling. She bound me
to Mellisande’s life, as well. My age will catch up with me now.”
“We could stay in the room of nothingness,” Landon said. “There is no time there.”
Isobel smiled at him, shook her head. “No, my love. All my life I have been locked up one way or another. I’m free—Mellisande has given me back my sanity. And the people of Surmise need you.”
Vivian couldn’t catch her breath. She would watch these two age and die, just when she had found them. The mother she had never truly known. This man she believed might be her father. They needed time to be together. It was one more wrong that Jehenna had done, another evil.
And one that maybe didn’t need to be.
“Wait,” Vivian said. “I have an idea. There are other places outside time. Like Landon’s room in the dungeon. I know a certain fountain…”
Isobel’s face brightened. “We couldn’t stay there always, but it would slow the process.”
“Are you certain?” Landon asked her.
She smiled. “We need to live, Landon, not just exist. And the kingdom has suffered enough.”
Landon drew her into his arms and buried his face in her hair. “My love.”
“Stay here until it’s set,” Vivian said. “I’ll come back for you.”
Isobel smiled, and the two of them stepped back across a threshold no longer spitting green fire. Vivian left the door open, that they should never be imprisoned again.
For a moment she found herself disoriented and lost, unable to remember how to get back through the maze. But then she felt the faint tug, the tide of dream that always pulled toward Surmise. Even as she followed this, she added it to her list of things she needed to put right. Nobody lost in dream should be drawn into Surmise unless that was where they wanted to be.
Standing again in the field of flowers, she blinked,
grounding herself with her bare feet planted in the grass and one hand on the pendant. Poe presented himself, standing at military attention with his best penguin stare. Time had passed. The sun hung low on the horizon.
Tellar stood waiting. When her gaze turned to him, he stepped forward and saluted sharply. No more bowing and cowering. He spoke with confidence.
“We have searched the castle, My Lady. No sign of the Chancellor. But we found this where his chambers should have been.” He held in his hands a box, big enough for secrets, small enough to carry with you. Carved on the lid, two dragons intertwined.
Vivian took it from his hands, opened it.
It was empty.
“My Lady?”
She realized she had been staring at the empty box for far too long. Well. Time was one thing she had plenty of. She would find Gareth; she would find the dreamspheres.
“You found nothing else in his chambers?” she asked, thinking of the key. Perhaps it had simply vanished with the old Surmise, but she didn’t think it could be that simple. She remembered the glow in Gareth’s eyes and that he had been standing behind Jehenna when she threw the key to the ground.
“Nothing, My Lady.”
“All right. And are there prisoners in the dungeons still?”
“The dungeons are missing, My Lady. We can find no doors, no tunnels, no trace of anything leading below the earth, either here or in the castle.”
Vivian blinked. “And the prisoners?”
His jaw hardened. “They were all standing about in the field. We’ve released them, My Lady. Told them they were free to go wherever they please.”