Empress of Dorsa (The Chronicles of Dorsa)

They fell asleep afterwards, naked and intertwined atop discarded clothes still damp from spilled wine. Tasia fell asleep first, her chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm, lulling Joslyn into her own sleep a few minutes later.

But Joslyn’s sleep didn’t last long. She lay awake beside her slumbering princess, staring up at the clear blue sky above them, letting her thoughts meander along with the gentle spring breeze.

Movement flickered in her peripheral vision, and Joslyn turned her head in time to see something – a figure? – disappear behind a cascade of flowering vines.

Joslyn sat up. The wine had mostly worn off, and now she was keenly aware of both Tasia’s nakedness and her own. Hastily, she pulled on her tunic and threw her brizat over Tasia’s bare torso.

She didn’t remember bringing the brizat to the gardens, yet somehow here it was.

The vines quivered again, and this time Joslyn was almost certain she’d seen a figure – the edge of an arm and a leg.

“Hello?” she called towards the vines. “Who’s there?”

The vines did not answer.

Standing, Joslyn pulled on her breeches and looked for her sword belt, but it was nowhere to be found.

That was strange. Had she left her sword in Tasia’s apartments?

There was one sword in particular she wished she had right now, a large, curved sword with strange letters etched upon the flat of the blade. But Joslyn had never owned such a sword, so she wasn’t sure why she’d thought of it.

Ku-sai’s,a soft voice in the far recesses of her mind said. It was your ku-sai’s sword.

That thought made no sense. Joslyn had longed for a ku-sai once, many years ago when she was still a teenager, but she’d never found one. So she’d joined the Imperial Army instead.

A handful of leaves fell near the place she thought she’d seen a figure, and Joslyn jogged after it. She didn’t remember putting her boots on, but they were on her feet now.

Joslyn peered around the edge of the vines just in time to see someone disappear around the corner of a hedge. A circular courtyard was in front of her, one of many such courtyards in the palace gardens, paved with flagstones worn smooth with time. In the center of the courtyard stood a fountain, babbling happily as clear water poured into its base from a statue of a child holding a jug. The hedge stood behind a bench on the far side of the fountain.

She crossed the courtyard in a few long steps and rounded the corner of the hedge.

Everything changed.

The gardens, the courtyard, the fountain, the blue sky disappeared all at once, like a dream abruptly ending. Where the palace gardens had been was a dusty, barren landscape, stretching out endlessly in every direction. It was like a desert, but not a desert. The sky was a rust color slightly lighter than the dusty ground beneath Joslyn’s boots, as if a sun somewhere shone through the smoky haze left by a fire.

As though she’d been doused in ice-cold water, Joslyn recognized this place immediately: the Shadowlands. And the figure that had disappeared around the hedge a moment earlier? She knew him. His name was.

“Milo!” she called as loudly as she could. “Milo, where are you?”

Her voice did not echo. It was as if the bland landscape swallowed each syllable before it could travel farther than her outstretched arm.

“Milo!”

“Commander? I’m here, Commander.”

Joslyn turned and there he was, the skinny boy she’d rescued from a cage almost a year earlier.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him. Then, hearing her own words, she added, “Why are we in the Shadowlands?”

“I don’t know.” Milo glanced right and left, as though expecting to see someone. “I think this is your dream, not mine. I heard you calling my name, and I saw you sleeping here beside the Empress, and … and then you sat up and called my name.”

“I wasn’t in the Shadowlands, though.” Joslyn frowned, because suddenly she couldn’t remember where she had been. “I was in …”

She hadn’t been in the Shadowlands; she’d been in the palace gardens all afternoon with Tasia. After a leisurely picnic, they’d made love in the grass beside the pond where Tasia and her brother Nik had chased rabbits as children. Then they had fallen asleep. How long had Joslyn slept? Ten minutes? An hour? Why did time suddenly seem so slippery?

Because you’re in the Shadowlands,the voice in the back of her mind answered.

She’d never been in the palace gardens at all, had she? And if Milo was right, if this was her dream and not his, then a part of her had known that all along. A part of her could still –

“Where am I?” she asked Milo suddenly.

He chewed his bottom lip. “They say … they say you died. You and the Empress.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “We escaped. I sent … I wanted the mountain men and the Brotherhood and the Order of Targhan to believe we died, but we didn’t. The pirate showed us a way out of the city as it fell.”

What pirate?Joslyn wondered even as the words left her lips.

The boy looked profoundly relieved. “I knew it couldn’t be true. I knew it.”

Memories flooded Joslyn’s mind – real memories this time, not false ones. They’d all been dreaming – she and Tasia and the pirate. They dreamed of an ancient and withered king, weak but gloating in victory, and inhabited by the powerful undatai. They sailed towards that king instead of away from him, towards him so that they could strike while he was still –

The corkscrewing stems of the wine glass. That was what the city of Persopos looked like: a gleaming white monument spiraling upward as though carved from the mountain itself. Spiraling just like a corkscrew.

“Milo,” Joslyn said urgently, “before the Empress and I left for the East, you told me you were dreaming of an old king possessed by a shadow, a shadow that reminded you of the undatai. You were right. And we – the Empress and I – we’ve been trapped by him somehow. I think…” She glanced around, taking in the empty waste of the Shadowlands. “I think my mind is in the Shadowlands, but my body is trapped somewhere in the Kingdom of Persopos. And the longer we stay here –”

As though triggered by her insight, the ground around them quaked. The barren soil churned.

“They’re coming,” Joslyn said. She needed her sword – Ku-sai’s sword. But it was… gone. She’d hidden it somewhere, but now she couldn’t remember where she’d put it. “You have to wake up, Milo. Tell them where we are. Tell them time is running‌ –”

But they were upon her before she could finish her sentence. Human-sized but only vaguely human-shaped, like the crude drawings of a child, the shadows were suddenly all around them, groping at them, clawing, screeching in words that weren’t quiet language.

Joslyn had no weapon with which to fight them, and even if she had, the semi-translucent grey-black shadows were upon her too fast for her to strike out. “Wake!” she shouted at Milo, who was rapidly disappearing beneath a swarm of shadows. “Wake now!”

“Eh …?” Tasia said, voice groggy.

Joslyn blinked. Hadn’t she been in the Shadowlands a moment earlier, about to be swallowed by a boiling mass of shadows?

This wasn’t the Shadowlands. The sky above her was blue, clear, not a cloud to be seen. A spring breeze tickled over her naked body, touching all the places not covered by Tasia’s own naked body.

“I think I…” I think I was in the Shadowlands. “I think I was dreaming,” Joslyn said at last.

Tasia, who lay on her side with one arm and one leg draped over Joslyn, stretched like a cat waking from an afternoon nap and smiled. “What of? I hope it was me. I hope it was hot.”

“No,” said Joslyn. “It was of … ”

But she couldn’t remember what she’d been dreaming about. It seemed important to remember, but the dream’s images slid from her grasp, slipping through her fingers like grains of sand falling through an hourglass.

An hourglass. Time, falling away from them too fast.

Tasia’s lips found Joslyn’s bare neck, then her collarbone, then the nipple of her left breast. Joslyn shivered.

“I love your breasts,” Tasia said once she took her mouth away. “They’re perfect little apples.” She giggled. “My perfect little apples.”

Then the lips were on Joslyn again. She glanced down, seeing Tasia’s golden-red hair draping over one shoulder and tickling the side of Joslyn’s chest.

Had Joslyn’s breasts always been so smooth? It seemed a ridiculous thing to wonder, but somewhere, far in the back of her mind, a small voice told her that these were not her breasts at all, that her actual breasts were a mass of ugly scars left by a cruel and ugly man.

What an unpleasant thing to be thinking about, especially right now.

“Come here,” Joslyn said, tugging Tasia away from her torso. Tasia’s face hovered above her own, and Joslyn stroked her cheek lightly with the back of one hand. “You’re beautiful,” she said. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Tasia smiled, and their lips met. Joslyn’s princess tasted of sweet wine and smelled like spring flowers and sunlight. She rolled Tasia onto her back and straddled her hips, dropping her mouth to meet Tasia’s. Tasia’s lips smiled against Joslyn’s. Joslyn let her mouth roam across Tasia’s face and neck, and Tasia let out a contented sigh of pleasure.

All troubling thoughts of bad dreams, evil men, and scarred breasts evaporated like morning dew beneath the rising sun.