62
~ TWELVE MONTHS AGO: JOSLYN ~
She was in the palace gardens again, picnicking with Tasia. But now Joslyn knew the gardens for what they were – an elaborate illusion constructed by their captor. A q’isson of sorts, not that different from the time Joslyn had been in the Shadowlands with Milo and unintentionally reconstructed her family’s bliva, its every detail correct, down to the lacquered box next to the entrance and her mother sewing beside the fire.
Tasia didn’t know it was an illusion, though, and Joslyn had learned the hard way that trying to wake her from this dream within a dream would only bring the wrath of the shadows upon them both, alerting the king to her ever-stronger wakefulness.
“More wine?” Tasia asked, shaking the half-emptied bottle between them.
The wine. That had something to do with how he kept them trapped here.
Joslyn put on a smirk and took the bottle from Tasia’s hand. “I can think of something better to do with this stolen afternoon than drinking it away.” She placed the bottle in the grass as far away as she could reach, then leaned over Tasia and kissed her.
“We’re lucky to have an afternoon all to ourselves,” Tasia said. But then she hesitated, and the smile faded from her face. “Are we sure they don’t need us?”
Ah. So there was a part of Tasia that suspected something was wrong with this unending scenario of the two of them lazing away a spring afternoon inside the palace gardens.
Careful now. Encourage Tasia to probe a little further, but make it seem like Tasia’s idea, not Joslyn’s.
Joslyn gave what she thought was a convincing frown. “Who needs us, love?”
“I think someone …” Tasia began. Her brow furrowed. “My sister, maybe. Adela needs me. And Linna could need you. And … there was a boy …”
“A boy? Do you mean…” Joslyn scrunched her face in apparent concentration. “Milo?”
“Milo!” Tasia’s eyes brightened. “Yes, Milo may need us. But besides the children, what about …” She trailed off again, eyes growing distant.
Come on my love, wake up,Joslyn pleaded. If Tasia could pull herself free from this web of illusions without Joslyn’s obvious help, perhaps they could both wake, find themselves back within their physical bodies. And from there: escape. Revenge.
“Joslyn? Where is everyone else? Why is the palace so empty?”
Yes, Tasia. Notice those details he got wrong.
“I don’t know, my love. Who else should be here – other than the children?”
“I … I need to think about that …”
Joslyn laid back in the grass, a hand beneath her head while she studied the cloudless blue sky above them. Let the shadows think she was fully immersed in the illusion, not that she was giving Tasia the space to probe at the illusion’s frayed edges.
Come on, my love. Remember. Each name you remember is a crack within the walls of our prison.
Joslyn had hypothesized that the king and the undatai within him didn’t actually know who else inhabited Port Lorsin’s palace, which explained the absence of all but the nameless servants who occasionally appeared in the illusion’s periphery, bustling about with their made-up tasks.
When Joslyn had recreated her family’s bliva, her mother was there by the fire, her father and brothers were on their way inside, because fragments of memories long dormant in Joslyn’s mind remembered them. The fact that the gardens and the palace looming at its far edge contained no faces she recognized suggested that this q’isson hadn’t been from her own memories, or from Tasia’s, but from the king’s.
If her hypothesis was correct, it suggested two important things: First, the deathless king did not have access to their minds and memories, and second, the king himself must have a memory of the palace.
Who was the deathless king?
“Where’d the wine go?” Tasia asked. “I handed you the bottle. Where did you put it?”
“The gardens are so beautiful this time of year,” Joslyn said, hoping she could redirect Tasia to more important topics without being too obvious about it. “Who built the gardens? Have they always been part of the palace?”
“Nearly,” Tasia answered. She rolled onto her side, propping herself up on one elbow. “The palace was nothing but a crude hill fort at first. Then Dorsan’s sons began expanding it. It only became more palace than fort after the First War of Unification – the Grandsons’ War. Ah! There it is!” She reached over Joslyn’s body and snatched up the bottle of wine. “Why’d you put it way over there?”
“I don’t know.” The faint hope that Tasia would finally break free from the illusion faded.
“More wine?” Tasia asked, shaking the half-emptied bottle between them.
They were being watched. They were always being watched, Joslyn knew. And while she wanted to keep a clear head – she still needed to find a way to get to Ku-sai’s sword without them stopping her – she also didn’t want to alert their guardians to the fact that the illusion’s hold on her was weakening all the time.
The wine would strengthen the illusion’s hold, would keep her trapped here longer. But she had her own illusion to maintain now – the illusion that she was still under the deathless king’s thrall.
Joslyn sat up and handed Tasia her wine glass. “Yes, please.”
#
She’d finally done it.
Beside her, Tasia snored lightly, and Joslyn knew that when she woke up, the fantasy would reset itself. For Tasia it would reset; Joslyn had at last managed to merely feign sleep instead of actually drifting off.
The basic elements of their repeating fantasy were always the same – a half-empty bottle of wine, a picnic basket filled with the remnants of a meal, and either she or Tasia musing about the beauty of spring in Port Lorsin. They would both possess fresh memories of having been there for hours, lounging in the sun while they picked at the rest of their meal and drank their rich Capital Lands wine.
The other details changed intermittently. Sometimes they finished the bottle of wine, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they made love, sometimes they grew too sleepy for such activities after all they had eaten and drunk. Sometimes they chatted about silly topics, like Tasia’s latest disagreement with her stoic father or Joslyn’s obsession with training. Painful memories had been erased: Tasia’s father had not been assassinated; she’d never had a brother who’d died in an unfortunate accident. Joslyn had never been a slave, had never murdered a cruel man named Samwin in his sleep.
Yet the touchstone of pain was exactly how Joslyn had trained herself to consistently break free from the illusion. The moment Tasia brushed a hand against the perfectly smooth skin of Joslyn’s breasts, she began to remember. Memories flickered inside her like a tinderbox trying to catch a spark, memories of a man who took his pleasure from burning things – from burning her. Each time the memories began to flicker back to life, Joslyn was tempted to let herself forget again, was tempted to drink more wine and snuff out the flame before it could illuminate the darkest corners of her mind. But gradually, she’d learned to listen to the voice that told her remembering was important. Instead of snuffing out the flame of memory, she nurtured it. The haze within her mind dissipated in its light, and Joslyn remembered. She remembered that Tasia was the Empress, that her brother Nik had been killed in a hunting accident, that her father and his personal guard had been murdered by traitors. She remembered Samwin and Ku-sai; she remembered the months she had been separated from Tasia while she searched for an all-important sword that the small men said was the key to everything.
So this time, as Tasia’s eyelids grew heavy and finally closed, Joslyn thought of Samwin. She thought of his eyes in particular, as predatory as a mountain leopard’s. It was not easy to hold onto a memory she’d spent years trying to forget, but it was the only way to stop herself from being sucked back into the deathless king’s fantasy world.
She needed to stay awake. And she needed to find Ku-sai’s sword.
Several times – at least she thought it was several times, Joslyn had woken herself from the fantasy q’isson entirely, finding herself inside the dark and dusty replica of Tasia’s bedchamber. But when she tried to dreamwalk from the waking world and find her own q’isson, the q’isson where she’d hidden the sword, she was always discovered by a horde of shadows almost immediately and was forced back into the fantasy, where she once again forgot that she was inside an illusion for who only knew how long.
Did her form within the Shadowlands disappear whenever she returned to her body in the physical world? She guessed it must have – that was probably how they knew she had escaped their prison.
The theory had given Joslyn an idea. Instead of waking herself first and then coaxing forth her dreamwalking abilities, she would try dreamwalking from inside the fantasy, creating a kind of dream within a dream. Her body would appear to sleep beside Tasia, and hopefully the shadows guarding them would never know her mind had traveled elsewhere.
Joslyn closed her eyes. It took longer than it usually did, but at last she felt that eerie but familiar sense of stepping outside her body.
There she was, appearing to sleep soundly before Tasia. She needed to be quick, returning to her body before Tasia woke. If she still appeared to sleep once Tasia was awake, her captors would know something was wrong.
Around her, the palace gardens wavered in and out of focus, as though she truly was drunk on wine. For one instant, Joslyn saw not the blooming flowers and butterflies of spring in the palace gardens but the barren, rust-colored wasteland of the Shadowlands. In the next instant, the illusion returned and she was in the gardens.
Time to find out what lay beyond this fantasy q’isson.
She glanced down one last time. Her own body was at her feet, and it gave her a momentary sense of vertigo to feel both the body that lay on the grass below and the dream body that hovered above it. Tasia rolled over in her sleep, draping an arm across sleeping-Joslyn’s chest.
What happens to her if I do not return?Joslyn wondered.