Authors: A.E. Marling
27
Floating Forest
It took so long to reach the island that Hiresha could have sworn it was drifting away. Dawn broke first, and the island shed swarms of birds. Screeching tides passed overhead. Pelicans scooped up fish, stormy petrels danced over the waves, and gulls abounded.
The island was wooded. When Hiresha’s numb legs flailed her close enough, she saw mangroves walled off all sight of shore. A thicket of slender roots dipped into the sea as if the trees were many-legged water striders. Nests cluttered the bank of mangroves, and a red snake slithered from the water, to the squawking disapproval of birds.
Hiresha gripped the roots and cried in relief. She had never striven so long at anything physical. If someone had told her a week ago that she would have to swim for her life for hours, she would have resigned herself to death. The essence tempest must have given her strength for the trial. She had spent it all.
“Exercise will be the death of me,” Tethiel said.
One root snapped as Emesea scrambled from the water. She reached into a nest and popped an egg into her mouth. The warrior crunched with relish.
Hiresha’s stomach gurgled. She had to accept Emesea’s hand for help up. Every good place to step was inhabited by a nest, and Hiresha felt miserable when her leaden feet knocked a blue egg into the water.
She squeezed between tree trunks. The mangroves made more of a bramble than a grove. Hiresha wore only her undergarments, but her sleepiness kept her from caring about the scratches on her arms and knees. The roots were grey from droppings, and the island stung her nose with a sharp reek.
A cacophony of birds roosted in the branches. Seed pods dangled down like fingers poking at Hiresha’s head. Her legs were pecked by egg guardians. She stumbled forward, ever hoping to reach a bit of land to sprawl over, never finding.
“Is this island entirely overgrown?” Hiresha asked.
“Overrun, without a doubt.” Tethiel shielded his eyes from a diving bird.
Hiresha’s leg slipped between the mangroves, and her foot touched water. She could go no further. She collapsed across a slope of roots, shouldering aside two empty nests. Any person of quality would have proclaimed her resting place too uncomfortable for sleep, too loud, and too smelly.
Hiresha dreamed within minutes.
The enchantress gestured for a mirror to drift closer. It displayed the mangrove she had first clung to. She had only squinted at it through salt-swollen eyes while awake, but now the submerged roots drew her notice.
“I have never seen air bladders on roots before.”
Around the woody bulbs, algae flourished in green and orange hues. Yellow sponges grew on the roots. Oysters hung like ornaments. And below the root tips, nothing. Only deeper sea.
“I do believe these trees are floating.” In the dream she could detect the sway of the mangroves in their mesh of connecting roots. Awake, the motion had seemed only too natural after swimming for hours in the sea. “Of all the miserable islands to be stranded on, this one disappoints even on the ‘land’ quotient.”
Intuition crouched in front of the mirror, gazing at the gaudy fish swimming about the mangrove roots. “No, this is wonderful. The forest is our new leafy ship.”
Hiresha wanted to wake as soon as she could, to ask if this drifting grove might carry them within sight of land. By the time the enchantress could rouse herself, it was night.
“My fear,” Hiresha said, “is that this non-island might only circle the center of sea, trapped between currents.”
“Couldn’t say. Only visited this root maze once before.” Emesea huddled close in a crouch.
“I’ve never heard a legend of a floating forest.” Tethiel sat alight in a finery of red, his stitching swaying in flame patterns. “Island-sized fish, yes. Island-less forests, no.”
“Maybe the fish story means this forest comes within sight of land,” Hiresha said.
“Fish stories do have a certain reputation,” Tethiel said.
Emesea lifted an obsidian axe. “I could cut a raft, but I’ve no rope to tie the wood together.”
“How did you attach the axe head to the shaft?” Hiresha peered at it.
“Cut off some of your hair. But you don’t have enough for a raft.”
Hiresha felt the end of the missing locks. Her hand fell to pick at some of the droppings that already splattered her purple dress. She had donned clothes even though her sleeves snared on branches and the skirt inconvenienced her crawling. Better her dress was torn than her knees scraped and her legs pecked. Once, she could not have abided ruining her purple gown. Now she could not make herself care.
“Some few are afraid of birds,” Tethiel said, “and this island would be the perfect nightmare for them.”
So it’s only near-perfect for us,
Hiresha thought.
The next day, the enchantress knew she had slept late when Tethiel woke her.
“You may want to see this yourself,” he said, “but I hope I can describe it to your satisfaction. To see some things from afar is to be too close.”
Hiresha rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. “Is this a sea monster? Where’s Emesea?”
“She’s keeping watch, hidden in the boughs.”
“Whatever it is, you seem to have survived it,” Hiresha said.
“Barely, I climbed a tree for the view. As you can see from the rips in my bandana, two sea birds took issue with my jostling their nests.”
Hiresha said, “Is there no monster, then?”
“Nude maidens are dancing on the waves.”
“That’s a strange name for a species of bird. Or are they a fish?”
“Their toes kick up spray.” Tethiel made flicking motions with his fingers. “Their hair whips about their bare shoulders in bright colors of tide-pool anemones. Tangerine, canary yellow, and cerulean. Their lips open in laughter, but they make no sound.”
“Strange fish, indeed,” Hiresha said.
“They clasp hands, spinning around each other. They balance on waves, and their hips sway in time with the sea.”
“Now I think you dreamed this.”
“I did make up the part about the hair colors,” he said, “but the rest is real. If you climb a tree you could see the nymphs yourself. But you mustn’t.”
Tethiel curled a hand around her arm. Tickling sensations crossed up her skin like marching ladybugs.
“And why not?” Hiresha asked.
“Because, my heart, the dancing women are a masterful lure. They’re but pigmentation on the tentacles of the Murderfish. So nature can imitate man after all.”
Hiresha felt as if she had swallowed a fishhook. Their situation was desperate enough, and she did not want to believe the Murderfish had tracked them to this drifting grove. “I thought you said all but their hair was real?”
“An illusion viewed by a believer is real,” he said. “I have to admire the Murderfish’s technique, even if she can’t mimic sound.”
“No raft will help us now. Maybe not even the greatest ship in the empire.” Hiresha cradled her face, dragging her fingers along her cheeks as she looked up. “If I could enchant while awake, I could Lighten us. We could run across the waves and leap over any monster.”
When Lightened, a person could be stopped by a breeze. Hiresha knew she would need the lucid thinking of her dreams to manage the timing of such spells.
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s ridiculous speculation.”
“I’m no bard, but it sounded like the makings of a ballad. Anything too ridiculous to be said is sung.”
Hiresha looked up into Tethiel’s eyes. His pale irises were tinted jade from the mangrove canopy. She said, “We escaped together on the back of a whale. That must be foolish enough for song.”
“Yes, and you should hear the whales sing it. What virtuosos.”
She shook her head. “Through all this surplus of peril, you’ve never reprimanded me for going to sea.”
“Why would I? My motto is, ‘Live to regret.’”
“I don’t regret going. It was my life to risk. I wish, though, that you needn’t also be in danger.”
“When a woman of elegance and intelligence puts her life at risk, the world stands to lose all.” He touched her wrist. It felt as if a drop of hot tea fell on her hand.
“The Lands of Loam will lose more if the Lord of the Feast ends up eaten by a monster—”
“It would gain an irony,” he said.
“—and all the little Feasters start a war.”
The corners of his chapped and bleeding lips trembled with concern. “We have both been reckless. My heart, it may be that you will escape the sea, and I will not. May I tell you a secret, that it’ll not die with me?”
Hiresha thought him optimistic to believe that one of them might live. Her pulse drummed in her ears as she nodded.
“It concerns Feasting,” he said. “I’ve always told you I cast illusions. But this is not so. A great Feaster knows he creates truth.”
“I suppose it’s reasonable that illusionists lie to themselves as well.”
“No,” Tethiel said, “an imperfect truth might be called an illusion, like the Murderfish’s nymph tentacles. A perfect illusion is a truth. To all who experience it, it is real.”
Hiresha’s patience was shriveled no little degree by the proximity of a kraken. “A thing’s characteristics are intrinsic and not subject to opinion.”
“People build their worlds block by block with opinion,” he said. “Your magic is no different. Believing you can enchant in your dreams grants you that power. Magic is to perceive the world in a new way.”
“How dare you? You can’t cast at day. I can’t enchant awake, and not because I’m lazy or don’t wish for it strongly enough. This is a world of absolute truths, not absolute whims.”
“Truths are only opinions that have taken root.” His irises shifted in hue to amethyst violet, to ruby, to sapphire, then back to jade green.
Hiresha counted it a severe disadvantage that she could not storm away over the web of roots. The best she could do was to swing herself around a wishbone-shaped trunk and stomp on a nest by accident. Twigs gouged her bare foot.
Tethiel’s words had caused a greater pain. It felt as if he had grasped the base of her spine in his fanged fingers and begun to tear upward. Her hands crimped folds of her dress. She did not care to think of a world where anything could be true, where purple might not always be the best of all colors. It sounded too chaotic, too messy.
Worse, an inkling stopped her from ignoring what he had said. The itch of that knowledge bored through the back of her skull. It was the key to a cursed treasure.
She had not gone far in the forest. The crossing branches of the mangroves had slowed her. She shouted to Tethiel over her shoulder.
“If that wasn’t complete dross, why then do your castings so often fail at day?”
He ducked under a curving branch. “This may be difficult for you to see, my heart, but I have my imperfections. Sometimes, I doubt.”
“Well, I doubt very much that—”
The island shook. Or, rather, the drifting mangroves quaked. Hiresha tumbled against a tree. Eggs rained upon her. One cracked open to uncover a chirping beak.
Through shivering leaves she could see trees forced upward. With a thunderous cracking, the forest lurched. A mangrove launched through the sky. Roots trailed flags of algae.
“Tethiel, tell me this is an illusion of yours.”
He shouted something back, but the breaking sounds of wood drowned him out. The mangroves rippled; the roots that connected them snapped. Trees were dragged underwater, and nests floated off their branches.
Emesea scrambled to Hiresha’s side, an obsidian knife and axe in either hand. “Feel how strong she is? She’s ripping this island apart.”
“Merely to find us?” Hiresha asked it, though she knew it was true.
“I’ll prick her again,” Emesea said, “but it might mean the end of us.”
“It won’t,” Hiresha said. Terror and a flicker of hope spun together in her veins in a jagged pleasure. “We can escape.”
Emesea cocked an eyebrow. “What’s your plan?”
“I’m not certain yet.” Water surged onto Hiresha from the nearest chasm where a mangrove had been uprooted. “But it can be no small scheme.”
Tethiel crouched against a tree. Feathers stuck in the droppings strewn over his ripped coat. Yet his face had a ghost of a grin. “What do you need from us?”
“Time.” Hiresha leaned against the swaying tree. “Protect me while I sleep. Hide me.”
Enchantress Hiresha, Provost of Applied Magic, shut her eyes on the splintering forest and turned her back on reality.
She walked her stairwell to dream, and the stone steps trembled with her uncertainty.
I can’t continue to live in the world as I know it.
Hiresha knew that if she woke again, everything would have to change.
28
Dream Warp
A water clock manifested between the enchantress’s hands. It marked the passage of hours with lines circling its bowl. Between the markings, hieroglyphs showed a woman cutting jewels, playing with a fox, and teaching pupils. On the darker side of the bowl, the woman lay abed.
“All these years I wanted to sleep fewer hours in a day.” Hiresha watched water stream out of a pinhole in the bowl, showing the acceleration of time as the rippling surface descended line by line. “My thinking may be in need of a sea-change.”
“Now we’re scared.” Intuition cuddled a wooden doll of a fox, a dab of black paint on the tip of its tail. “And excited. What if we could gain our powers while awake? We could dance on the clouds!”
“Even the Lord of the Feast struggles to overcome the conventions of his magic,” Hiresha said. “I’d be foolish to try to reteach a lifetime of habit while the Murderfish tears the island apart.”
The Jeweled Feaster leaned so far forward in her mirror that condensation from her breath pulsed across the glass in a heart shape. “Learning is slow. Self-deception is fast.”
“Precisely,” Hiresha said. “The least implausible way for me to enchant while awake is to believe that I am in fact sleeping.”
Intuition pressed a palm against her brow. “Uh oh. Now we have a confusion headache.”
“Justified.” Hiresha held the water clock so the hieroglyphs of daytime activities faced her. “The first rule the Academy ingrained in me was never to muddle my dream worlds with reality.”
She turned the bowl to regard the nighttime images of the woman sleeping and levitating in a basalt laboratory.
“That I should always keep them distinct, especially when an enchantress can craft a dream so intricate it seems like reality.”
Hiresha spun the water clock. The hieroglyphs sped into smears, and night and day blurred into timeless grey.
“That way lies madness,” the woman with sapphire claws said. Her skin jewels flickered in waves spreading from her chest down her arms. “And power.”
Intuition glanced at a mirror depicting the tentacles of the Murderfish breaking through the mangroves. “If we make our dream seem real….”
“If I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or waking—”
“If your lucid thinking accompanies your other powers,” the Jeweled Feaster said. “It might not. Or you might delude yourself with two dream worlds, neither of which is true. Locked in endless sleep.”
“‘Endless’ would last only until the Murderfish grasps the real me,” Hiresha said.
She felt a chilling wonder of discovery coursing through her.
I might gain the power to escape. A new branch of magical expertise might be developed in a single stroke.
With a thought, the water clock slowed to a standstill on Hiresha’s palm. Dream jewels filled the bowl then seeped inside. Painted clay transformed into mosaics of gemstone: lapis lazuli, onyx, tiger’s eye, and malachite. Magic scripts flowed into the bauble in helixes of power.
Hiresha said, “Half the day, I will sleep. Half, I will wake. Hiding which is which from myself is the key.”
“So how do we trick ourselves?” Intuition asked.
Jewels in the laboratory whirled in their orbits, their speed matching the enchantress’s excitement at innovation. One orange citrine shot through Intuition’s hair, whisking it to the side in a black puff.
Hiresha created a coin of electrum yellow. One side showed Pharaoh in her striped crown, the other an oasis. The enchantress handed the coin and the water clock to Intuition.
“Flip this coin. If it lands on the baffled face of a clueless monarch, spin the water clock at once. I will waken, hopefully with my powers of enchantment. If the coin lands on the empire’s crest, have me dream of reality for the first twelve hours.”
Intuition turned the coin over in her palm. With a smile wide enough to see her molars, she lowered her hand, readying to hurl the coin overhead.
“Wait! I mustn’t know how it lands.” Hiresha beckoned to a shelf, and a silver pillow floated into her hand. The spell in the dream bauble was designed to send her patients into a deeper sleep. “For the first time, I’ll use this to take away my own consciousness.”
“I’m not good with secrets,” Intuition said. “Trying not to think about something only means we’re thinking it over and over and over.”
“I know. That’s why I have to shackle you.”
Yellow sapphires, silver chains, and a metal band appeared above the enchantress’s hand. They leapt onto Intuition’s face, and jewel stubs punctured her upper and lower lips. The necklace wrapped from the piercings across her cheeks and behind her ears. It looped down to polished shackles that clamped shut around her throat.
Intuition touched the silver links dangling across her face, winced. Her lower lip bulged as her tongue explored a jewel stub. Her eyes tightened in pain. “You stung me.”
“My apologies, but that bauble will prevent your telling me which facet of the dream inversion is true. My life depends on it.”
Her yellow-gloved hands felt around the metal choker. “We can’t wear this forever.”
The enchantress touched the center of her own forehead and pulled out her most precious bauble, the amethyst quill of dream creation. The tip of the faceted feather slipped from her skull. The enchantress rested a hand on Intuition’s shoulder and scrawled on the choker.
The quill left etchings of gold. “May dream part from truth. May the sleeper wake.”
A shoal of pink sapphires floated by the enchantress’s face. “If I am to try this aberration, I must end it as soon as I reach land. To regain a balance of sanity.”
Intuition cupped the coin in her palm as she ran two fingers over the lettering in the choker.
Hiresha said, “Once I speak these keystone words aloud, you’ll be free. Tell me if I’m dreaming or awake, and the inversion will end.”
Hiresha stood back from Intuition, balancing the quill of creation in her hand. She realized that even if this dream inversion allowed her to live, it might change her forever. Her nervousness felt like blue-cold hands pinching all over her body.
“You need me.” The Jeweled Feaster pressed a palm against her mirror, a starburst of gems embedded in her hand.
“Someone must craft my dreams. I would give this quill to Intuition, but her strength lies elsewhere than in execution. Consult her. Tint the world with randomness. Spice it with the bizarre.”
The Jeweled Feaster grinned at the amethyst quill. Her tongue stroked the arching redness of her upper lip. “You’ll place yourself in my power?”
“I already had my suspicions that the world conspired against me. I am unlikely to notice a change.”
The quill sank into the glass. Black points of fingernails gripped it on the other side, drawing it forth. The Jeweled Feaster said, “I could free myself now. You could be the one bound in the mirror.”
“Be my guest, if you’d care to wake on a trembling island alongside an irritable and invisible kraken. No? Then allow me to attempt this dream inversion.”
Hiresha made a circular motion with her hand, Attracting all her dream jewels. Glowing sapphires, rubies, and diamonds sped into her. Each felt like a snowflake dissolving on her skin, an invigorating tickle. The dream jewels embodied her power. Gems of all colors cascaded from the laboratory skylight.
“Above all,” Hiresha said to the lady in the mirror, “I must believe the dream real. If survival isn’t a sufficient motivator, then know that if I escape the sea I’ll adopt some of your aesthetics. You stole those ideas from me anyway.”
“Fooling you will be a pleasure.” The Jeweled Feaster winked. Her iris twinkled with purple garnets.
The enchantress floated in the room, arms outstretched. A crackling sense of destiny filled her, and she could not help but wonder.
Am I to be the first woman alive with the power of a dreamer?
Or does today mark the end of my life’s thread?
Jewels swirled around her, winking out of existence as she brightened toward radiance. Anticipation stormed within her in a searing bliss. She had never expected it, never dreamed that her somnolence might provide the key to its own cure.
No other enchantress can sleep twelve hours a day, every day. None else could attempt this dream inversion.
And if it succeeded—if her enchantress power of lucid dreaming flowed into her waking moments—then she would never feel sleepy again.
“May the curse of my birth be broken.” Hiresha pressed the silver pillow against her chest.
The Jeweled Feaster flourished the pen, and stars of more natural tints popped into existence overhead. “And may the curse of your own design begin.”
Across the laboratory, Intuition balanced the water clock in one hand. The other lifted the coin to press it against her lips.
The magic in the silver pillow sank into Hiresha. As she spun into unconsciousness the last thing she saw was the moon. The blood moon, the gemstone moon. She kept it in the dream world as a trophy, from the night she had woken before dawn to watch the near eclipse. That morning she had overcome her sleepiness. Now she hoped to turn her somnolence into a victory.
Through the laboratory’s skylight, the amber ruddiness of the moon faded to white.