I began to sink into it, trying not to cry out in fright as I realized that I was no longer one Aurelia but two. One was lying on the silver plane of the melted thread, and the other was . . . here.
The same but not the same. I was a different version of myself. Looking down, I could see that my hair here was not my own ashy blond but a deep mahogany brown.
The Cradle melted away into an indiscernible fog of muddy color. I was adrift within it, weightless because there was no force pulling me to earth. There was no earth. No sky. No here or now.
This was the Nothing Dream. I’d willingly walked into the Nothing Dream.
I tried to remember what Zan had told me when we were hiding in the Canary’s cellar. Find something solid to hold on to. Tether yourself to something real.
Zan.
I held his face in my mind and took a step forward into the awful emptiness.
But of course, it wasn’t empty. It wasn’t nothing. It was the exact opposite of that. It was, as Galantha said, the all-at-once. And my self—my real self—was lying in the middle of a quiet meadow. Real. Just not awake.
I took a step forward into the amorphous smoke of the Nothing Dream and was surprised to f
eel something solid form beneath my feet. I took another step and saw that it was a wooden floor I was walking upon, with thin planks laid tightly together in a crosshatch pattern.
I was in Rosetta’s parlor. Recognizing it caused the fog to roll back further. There were four people in the room, three girls and a boy, all sprawled out on the braided rug. One was Rosetta. Another was a tall girl with a bright, happy face and light waves of hair. The third girl was much younger, maybe nine years old, and was busily rocking a baby doll in the corner cradle, back facing me. The boy was dressed in an old-fashioned Renaltan uniform that had been stripped of all identifying insignia. He had a chunk of wood in one hand that had a rosy tone to it, and a knife in his other hand that was slowly whittling away the sharp corners as Rosetta laughed and posed. I tiptoed around to get a better look at his face, and gasped.
“Kellan?” I asked.
Kellan’s name had a destabilizing effect on the Gray, swirling across the scene and dispersing it into the atmosphere as a new Kellan emerged. This was the one I knew, but he was slightly older here, wearing his black hair longer and plaited into thin braids that were gathered into a high knot on the crown of his head. He was approaching someone who appeared to be shrinking back into the shadows.
“Wait!” he said, holding out his hand. “Don’t go! I just want to talk.” The extended hand was sheathed in some kind of armored glove or gauntlet that shone the same liquid silver as the portal into the Gray.
Gloves. It seemed as if my thoughts—even stray ones—affected what I saw. Now it was Isobel Arceneaux, twisting her hands in her beetle-wing gloves. Her acolyte Lyall bowed to her and spoke. “I’m very pleased with these last results,” he said, motioning to the shriveled corpse of a man, his skin mottled a greenish gray, stretched out across a lab table. “The soul we used was one of our preserved Celestines from the thirteenth century, and it lasted a full five hours before disintegration and body rejection, our best trial yet. But I’m afraid to say that I’m running out of subjects—”
“And we’re running out of time,” she said, pacing by a filmy window. I recognized the building; they had set up some kind of base in the old mill from which they’d hauled the spindles. “The lunar eclipse happens on the Day of Shades—mere weeks away. We can’t risk a repeat of last time. This vessel must be fully prepared. The seal must be perfect. We’ll not get another chance. We have to get into the Stella. We need Urso’s writings to make this work.”
“Well, I think it’s safe to say that Father Edgar won’t be of any help to us now. It was a sound idea, letting one of our souls into his body so that we could use him to get into Greythorne, but we couldn’t have known that the time the souls spent in the luneocite would have such a negative effect on their consciousnesses. The Celestine we used was one of the oldest, and he couldn’t talk. He could barely stand.”
No. No. Father Edgar—I hadn’t recognized him at first. Not like this. Not without his gentle smile and his thick glasses. But there he was. And there were his glasses, too, folded up on the table beside him.
Empyrea keep you, Father. I sent the thought out into the Gray, hoping that if Edgar was still in the spectral plane somewhere, he might hear it.
“We need more subjects—live subjects. That’s all there is to it. And the refugees have all but abandoned their camp; our pickings are growing slim.”
Arceneaux glared. “I’ll take care of it. And the princess? Any news of her and her consort?”
“No,” Lyall answered reluctantly, “but several of my emissaries have not returned from their scouting trips; they must be dead. The only people capable of killing them are mages. And as we both know, true mages are hard to come by these days. We’ll find her. I’ll go myself. While suitable human bodies have grown scarce, the most recent spectral harvest has proved to be fruitful, and we still have many canine subjects with which to make new emissaries.”
“Do what you have to do,” Arceneaux said. “We’re running out of time.”
Time. The Stella Regina’s bells were tolling. I was standing in front of Urso’s statue, where blood was trickling from his outstretched hand and into the fountain. At Urso’s feet, a man was on his knees, a bloody sword bearing the hawthorn seal of the Greythorne family lying on the ground beside him.
This was the Bleeding Dream.
“No.”
I lashed out with both hands and felt the Gray recoil from the force of my rejection, sending my consciousness skidding back into the Nothing.
I tried to conjure Zan’s face again, and the Gray parted in response, but it did not take me to solidity or safety. I went from the red-lit Bleeding Dream directly into the icy Drowning Dream. Only this time, I wasn’t watching Zan sink into the depths; I was leaning over him on the shore while, nearby, a cloaked rider mounted a spectral silver horse.
And just as the scene was about to change again, I saw it: the red-violet metal flower and white stone droplet clapper of the Ilithiya’s Bell, hanging from a chain around the horseman’s neck.
Si vivis, tu pugnas. The voice was little more than a whisper, but the words were unmistakable.