Page 23 of Never the Roses

She would write the letter, but not send it, she decided. That would purge the conversation from her thoughts. She would burn the letter, consign the words to the air itself, the ashes to scatter over the sea. The furious passion she applied to writing the note failed to match the flip tone she wanted. Even with it mentally composed, she went through several drafts before she was satisfied. Not that it mattered, as she fully intended to burn the cursed thing when she was done. She definitely wouldnottake it to his library and leave it.

She surveyed her final missive with satisfaction and carried it out to the cliff’s edge, pulling a lick of flame from the Dream to rest on the tip of her finger, ready to send the ashes on the winds.

Poised there on the precipice, she couldn’t quite seem to set the letter aflame. Marveling at her own recklessness—where was the meticulously methodical sorceress who’d exercised caution above all?—she knew she couldn’t do it.

She had to deliver the note.

She supposed thatwaslike herself in that she’d always had to have the last word.

Oneira stepped out of the Dream and into the library. As she crossed the threshold from the shifting, lurid colors of the Dream landscape, the waking world blinded her.

Lamps blazed, lighting the library. Already tense, she nearly panicked, certain an attack arrowed toward her, and readied a nightmare to fling at Stearanos—

But he was soundly asleep under her enchantment. As waseveryone in the castle. She hadn’t made a mistake. At least, not of that variety.

Because she’d failed to note that the Stormbreaker wasn’t in his bed.

He was right there, slumped over the desk, head on the parchment he’d been inscribing, his quill pen dribbling ink in a wayward line. Arrested, heart slowing from its frantic pace, Oneira stared at the slumbering sorcerer, feeling as caught out as if she were a child discovered filching cookies from the academy kitchen. Even though she knew her spell held him fast—she checked yet again to be extra certain—she still somehow expected him to rear up and accuse her, perhaps hit her with that devastatingly lethal attack she’d been braced for.

Or for the trap he’d surely set. She waited, ready for it to spring. Perhaps in the next moments she would die.

She’d always wondered if she’d know when she faced death. Would her life parade before her eyes in all its terrible glory? More likely that was utter nonsense and death came as a complete surprise. And yet, she’d always taken the absence of that parade of her past as a good omen, that her day to die had not yet arrived.

No past paraded through her mind. The Stormbreaker slept on.

Gradually, sensing no imminent danger, Oneira relaxed, daring to take a few steps closer. She recognized the sorcerer, to her mild astonishment. Naturally, the man sleeping on the desk in the Stormbreaker’s library and radiating magic even while asleep, like the sun burning through a thin overcast, had to be Stearanos. He could be no one else. Even so, had Oneira met him in a different context, she felt sure that she would have recognized him regardless. Perhaps she knew him from his dreaming mind. Perhaps in some other way.

But he was familiar to her. Like an old friend would be, except she obviously had no old friends. Though, she supposed Stearanos came as close as any, as she’d known about his existence out there in the northern part of the world before she even graduated from the Hendricks Academy for Sorcerous Pursuits.

Drawn, confident that he slept deeply under her spell, she moved even closer, fascinated despite her better judgment. She should drop the note she’d written on the floor—her entire and only reason for being there at all—and escape back into the Dream. Instead, she drew close enough to touch him.

The Stormbreaker was a stern-looking man, no surprise there, with the care of years inscribed in lines that didn’t fade from his face even in deep repose. It didn’t help that his visage had little extra flesh beneath the skin, his nose the hawkish protuberance she’d expected, beneath dark and bristling brows. Even his lips were thin, slightly darker than his weathered skin, pressed together in a disapproval she suspected was a permanent expression, his resting frown enhanced by a few white scars that jagged here and there. Another surprise: he wore his hair long, the dark threaded with silver, though not much, woven into a multitude of thin braids he’d bundled together and tied with a cord.

Tall, lean, with broad shoulders and more scars across the backs of his hands, the man looked more like a battle-hardened warrior than a soft-skinned and pampered sorcerer. How interesting, and not at all how she’d imaginedHis Eminence. The man bearing that title should be soft from rich foods and dressed in purple velvets, not scarred and wearing quite plain clothing. Though he did look like the Stormbreaker.

How did he come by those scars? He looked as if he’d walked through a plate of glass, which wasn’t the usual sort of attack a sorcerer faced.

Perhaps this unexpected physical toughness of his contributed to the sorcerer’s uncanny ability to evade defeat. Many times his death had been rumored and then disproven by his continuedexistence. Confident in her power over him, Oneira peered closely at the scars on his hands and face, trying to discern what had caused them. Unaccountably, she wanted to touch them, to determine if they stood out in fine ridges or blended with the texture of the man’s skin. She didn’t dare do any such thing, no more than she’d put her head in a basilisk’s mouth, but she could look all she pleased.

Even close-up, the scars still looked like thin slices to her, all apparently identical in length and depth, as if they’d occurred all at once, except they seemed to be all over him—unlikely in any scenario she could envision. Nevertheless, whatever had caused them, they looked painful, and she winced in sympathy before recalling that he was her enemy and not deserving of care from her.

Dark smears of ink stained his fingertips, sinking into the lines of his calluses, and dirt made crescent moons under his nails. She knew those moons well, having scrubbed them from her own hands in recent days, the inevitable wages of gardening. Stearanos wouldn’t do his own digging, however, she imagined. Perhaps he simply had terrible hygiene. Though the rest of him looked clean enough and he didn’t stink. She’d been around enough warriors, and courtiers too lazy and self-indulgent to bathe, that she recognized the reek of the unwashed. Stearanos smelled clean, an undertone of some spicy soap or oil to him, probably for his hair or from shaving, given the clean line of his jaw.

And what on earth was she doing, standing there inhaling the scent of her sleeping enemy? She’d lost her mind. That had to be it. Moriah’s hints about Oneira being broken surely meant that. Not a broken heart, but a broken brain.

She would leave her note and go. The now-familiar urge to mischief seized her and she decided to tuck the note in his hand,so he would wake knowing just how very vulnerable he’d been to her. As she bent to do so, her gaze snagged on the words he’d been writing, the quill lying at an angle in his lax grip.

Cowardly thief! Wake me from your spell and face me li.…

She blinked at it. He’d written her a note. In the moment, that was, as opposed to composing them in her absence. Sensing the encroachment of the sleep enchantment—which, a normal person wouldn’t have been able to feel, but this was the Stormbreaker, so all bets were off—he’d scrawled that message, not quite able to finish before he succumbed. And called her a coward.

She liked the notion that he’d attempted to fight off her spell and failed, even though he’d clearly stayed awake in a deliberate effort to await, and possibly to thwart, her arrival. A good lesson for him that he couldn’t withstand her power. But she didn’t at all like being called a coward. She’d thought he’d at least have the wit to respect his wily intruder. It stung unexpectedly to be dismissed that way.

Hewas the one broken in the head if he thought his challenge would compel her to wake him. She could lose the upper hand with remarkable speed if she did that. Oneira knew her strengths, and sneaking in via the Dream gave her the greatest advantage in a myriad of situations. Stearanos wasn’t the strategist he imagined himself to be if he thought such childish taunting would draw her into being careless.

You’re already being careless, her inner voice reminded her,just by being here, which you’d resolved never to do again.

And this would absolutely be her last visit. Stearanos already knew too much about her. He’d clearly realized that she’d been casting sleep spells, but most magic-workers worth their contracts could do at least low-level enchantments to encourage slumber. She still retained a smidgeon of hope that he hadn’tconnected his dream image of the bunny to her. And there was still the remote possibility that this research of his into the Southern Lands—well underway by the look of it—had nothing to do with her.

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