Page 3 of Never the Roses

A place as fantastic and unreal as the dreams that made up its fabric, the Dream was wildly confusing to magic-workers not experienced in that ever-changing, undulating landscape. Even naturally talented oneiromancers could become lost in bubbles of dreams that popped or spontaneously sealed themselves off. For Oneira, who’d traveled this mutable land intuitively since she was a small child, then with more skill as she learned from the best, skipping through dreaming minds to find a spindle took only moments.

She located one that looked like a simple version, similar to the book’s illustration, from the dream of a woman surrounded by endless piles of wool and spindles that ever eluded her grasp. Extracting it from the Dream, Oneira pulled herself back to the waking world, the spindle in her hand. As always happened with items from the Dream, it wasn’t exactly right. Though it looked like wood, the substance of the thing was flimsy, too soft for real-world work. There came in the true craft and skill of this sort of oneiromancy.

Using her magic with finely honed precision, Oneira recast the substance into something much more like the wood it was supposed to be. It would never be exactly like the real-world version, but it would more than suffice for her purposes. Especially with no one but herself to see and hold it. Other people tended to be unsettled by the vaguely foreign aspects of items built from the Dream, something of no concern in her exile. Another bonus.

Amused at herself that her self-imposed rules allowed her toobtain a spindle from the Dream, but not cheat any more than that, Oneira bent herself to the new task.

Within an hour, she wished she’d simply thrown the whole pile of fur on the fire.Thiswas why she’d become a sorceress and not a weaver or spinner or maker of things.

Well, this and that she’d never had a choice. As a child of power, the recipient of magic that flew to her like birds to seed in winter, Oneira had begun to study sorcery so young that she had barely understood that people led any other kind of life. It had never once occurred to her to stop and chat with those women she’d observed, to ask to be shown how the tools they used worked to transform one thing into another.

Faced with a mountain of fluff, sore fingers that bumbled every movement, and ascáthcúwho watched her as if he suspected she’d lost her mind, Oneira regretted that she hadn’t ever taken the time to linger by those chattering groups, to observe, or possibly even ask. The book could only give her words; she lacked the translation that would make her handsdothe thing.

Still, giving up had never been in her nature. She possessed an innate stubbornness that had frustrated her teachers and handlers alike, but her obdurate nature had also seen her through knottier problems than fur that flew up her nose and made her sneeze or fingers that reddened and ached in every tiny bone. Out of pride, and honestly a lack of much else to do, she persevered, working the strands of soft fur into, if not actual thread or yarn, then at least a lumpy tube with aspirations.

Hours later, the windows open to the warm summer evening and the languid chorus of crickets singing in counterpoint to the bass beats of the surf below, Oneira dubiously confronted the coil of dirty white ropelike stuff. Nothing remained of the prodigious pile of fur but for a few wisps tumbling idly over the stonefloor, dancing with the night breezes. Beside her, Bunny gave her creation much the same look that she did. In retrospect, she should have spent time removing the various inclusions, all the thorns, bits of rubble, and other unidentifiable detritus Bunny had collected in his fur like an avaricious minor lord wearing his wealth on his costume.

At that point, she very nearly did pitch the ugly product of her work into the fire. Probably she should have—it served no useful purpose—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. She’d made it, however useless and unlovely, and that meant something. Probably not much, but something. Even if she didn’t know what that was. For someone who’d never created anything without a purpose, that she’d made this useless, artlessthingfelt like a step toward an unknown destination.

So, she coiled it carefully, though the uneven lumps and occasional extrusions meant it would never look neat—neatness counts, her teacher Zoltan had endlessly exhorted—and she set it on the mantel, which had been otherwise bare. She couldn’t have said why she had one to begin with, except that mantels went with fireplaces in the visions of most dreamers, and so it had emerged from the Dream that way. She hadn’t cared enough either way to pare it off.

She paused, studying the soiled, brownish, and lopsided column precisely centered on the pristine white shelf, surrounded by equally pristine white walls, then went to bed. Bunny followed along, so he could lay himself in his accustomed spot across the threshold, where he’d remain until she awoke. As was her habit, she rested a hand between his shoulders as they walked, the newly combed fur soft as down. That was an accomplishment: not the making of the object she turned her back on, but the creation of the absence of filth.

As the sorceress and wolf walked away, the coiled rope remained on the mantel, a dubious occupant of the lone place of honor in an otherwise empty house.

The next creature to find Oneira arrived like a literal bolt from the blue. She was out in the garden picking the last of the tomatoes, the as-yet unripe green ones, as the cold wind blasting off the ocean shouted of a hard frost to come that night. She’d learned to listen for those sounds, too: the land, water, and sky speaking of their immediate plans, of the weather traveling from far beyond her fastness, bringing with it the imagined scents of exotic lands she’d once visited, occupied, or overthrown. The lash of the wind against her bare neck—for she’d braided her long, crimson hair and coiled it around the back of her head, so it wouldn’t snarl—felt like a well-deserved punishment from those faraway places.

You abandoned me.

You laid waste to me.

You made me bow to your might and left me broken.

You made me into a nightmare landscape of nothing, nothing, nothing…

Pressing her lips together, she didn’t reply, even in her mind. She didn’t have anything to say back to them. The voices on the wind told her nothing she didn’t already know, nothing she didn’t already regret to the depths of her pitiless soul, nothing she hadn’t already considered how to redress, except that nothing could.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

So she accepted their castigation as her due, plucking each hard, round, brightly green fruit with care—neatness counts—as if each tomato saved from the frost might compensate for some small portion of the land she’d destroyed.

The sound hit her barely before her aerial wards blazed the warning through her mind, then shredded in the wake of the creature that plummeted from above, shrieking a bloodcurdling cry as it fell. Oneira leapt to her feet, dirt-encrusted hands stretched to the sky in a gesture that had nothing to do with defense, and everything to do with strike-first violence. Without thinking about it, she’d opened a portal to the Dream, iridescence tracing the outline of a doorway, the Dream seething beyond, the night terrors summoned by her instinctive fear throbbing with the need to be released. Struggling against her darker instincts, she caged the restless, potent magic, restraining the terrors, prepared to call something else from the Dream instead. Something less lethally nightmarish.

She wouldnotkill rather than die.

At least, not until she knew what hurled itself toward her.

Acutely cognizant of that irony—that all her noble aspirations fell apart depending on context, and her emotions of the moment, marking her indelibly as a monster, forever and always—she sent a seeking eye upward. Aiming her far-vision at the rent in her wards, she was rather astonished to discover the culprit: a tiny kestrel, brilliantly colored in ruby rust and sapphire gray, diving straight for her. She turned her raised hands in time for the creature to land on her forearm, small, black-tipped talons easily piercing her sleeve to dig into her skin, drawing blood.

Oneira winced, but held steady, regarding the bird—no taller than her hand was long—with considerable bemusement. This small raptor had been able to slice through her wards as if they were nothing. Was that the fault of her less-than-sterling wardmaking or its own ability? Would it be able to similarly shatter the wards of a powerful wardmaking sorcerer like Stearanos Stormbreaker? It would be interesting to try, though she’d never meet her nemesis in battle now that she’d retired. Not that they’dever been likely to collide, always positioned against the other as a threat between the warring nations that held their leashes, a promise of mutually assured destruction.

Apparently uninterested in her musings, the kestrel stared her down, glistening obsidian eyes knowing, hooked beak sharp for killing prey. Another meat eater. She considered asking why it had sought her out, knowing there would be no more answer than to whether she could have defeated Stearanos in battle—she was certain she could have—or to the endlessly cycling, far more pertinent question of how to atone for her past.

She could, however, answer the question of the tiny raptor’s identity. Stilling herself, she queried the Dream, seeking similar images. The vivid coloring, the metallic gold sparkle of the ring around its eyes, its ability to penetrate her wards. The answer bubbled up from countless numinous dreams.

This was Adsila, hunting companion to She Who Eats Bears, goddess of old.

Oneira had not asked for Adsila, nor did she want the attention of She Who Eats Bears. Attracting the notice of a deity always led to trouble, and Oneira’s entire plan at the moment hinged on being so thoroughly forgotten that she’d be left alone. “You should go,” she whispered to Adsila, who cocked her head, an obdurate glint in her bright eyes, a mirror to Oneira’s own stubborn nature. The wind tugged at the knot of Oneira’s hair, pulling it free of the coil and sending it whipping about them, stinging her face bloodless from the cold.

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