Page 5 of Never the Roses

It had taken time with some of the books she’d collected to purge them of their violent pasts. When she could, during rare breaks in her schedule, she tended to her newest acquisitions, assuming responsibility for their rehabilitation.

With some tomes, the simplest and fastest way to cleanse them had been to pry the jewels from their covers. Usually with men, it was the jewels they wanted, not the books themselves. Or the information inside that would lead them to wealth or power,or both, as the two often went together, or one led to the other. She threw the jewels into the ocean, with apologies to the abyssal deities, and after cleansing the gems to the best of her ability. Sometimes she stripped off the binding, too, if the gold leaf had been too deeply embedded for her to remove it.

With the truly damaged books, she’d had to go to greater lengths, glad of the time in her exile to take on the extended process. To purify them, she returned to the ancient practices, the foundational magics, alternating bathing the books in the light of the full moon and burying them in trunks filled with the tiny, round, pink pebbles from the beach below. With some of the bloodiest books, the process took months or years. But she was patient, considering the labor one of love. It wasn’t the books’ fault that people had used them to commit horrors.

She put each one through the purifying and purging cycle, digging it out of the shining pink grave and carefully assessing the pages with her sorcery, continuing until nothing remained but the characters committed to substrate—and perhaps the intent of the long-ago author, though such things couldn’t be relied upon. What the author intended and what the reader took away could be as distant from each other as the icy mountain peaks from the wave-lashed beach. She recommitted the contaminated pink pebbles to the sea, who was ever infinite in her forgiveness, replacing them with fresh sand deposited there by the everlasting surf, pinking with Oneira’s magic. Why she’d made her beach pink, she couldn’t say, except that it pleased her. She’d seen it once in a dream and never forgot.

One book she couldn’t redeem. It had been written on human skin flayed from a victim of torture. The unfortunate person’s identity had been forever lost, but not the pain they’d suffered, nor their even more acute longing for the loved ones who would miss them and never see them again. If Oneira’s heart hadn’t withered todust long before, she would have wept over that tome. There were others similarly made, written on the skin of humans, or animals, or—in one salient case—a creature she couldn’t identify, not even in the Dream. Those she was able to purge of their suffering, with patient attention and what passed for love. She’d learned early in her schooling that scrupulous, careful attention to a thing could be substituted for the love many spells of creation or redemption required.Neatness counts.

Of course, for the destructive sorcery almost universally requested of her, none of those kinder feelings had been required.

She began with meticulous care and eventually learned to love her books, even the ones written or published in pain. Except for the one. Concerned that fire would only concentrate its malevolence into indestructible ash, she debated for some time what to do with it. Even the sea, in her vastness and eternity, wouldn’t forgive the introduction of such an evil thing.

Finally, Oneira carried the cursed book to the tops of the mountains. It took a long time, but one cannot travel via the Dream to a place where there are no dreamers, and she needed a place where nothing could live. Not even thescáthcú. She hiked three days and two nights to the remote glaciers that never melted in the thin air of the blue-black sky.

Pulling precise flame from the Dream, she carved a hole in the deepest glacier, displacing the upper layers of dirt and exposing the ice-blue heart, sending the benighted tome to rest deep inside. She didn’t know what knowledge it had contained, as she hadn’t dared touch it, much less crack its pages, and so she was at a loss as to how to memorialize the moment she sent it to its icy grave. Still, it felt wrong to say nothing. She stood there a while, idly smoothing over the wound she’d made in the glacier, swirling the lighter snow and soil together in small whirlwinds, like stirring honey into her tea in the mornings. In thedistance, far below, thescáthcúhowled, white ghosts racing the alpine winds.

In the end, she offered a song of benediction, a nonsense lullaby she was surprised to recall from her long-forgotten childhood. Nonsense words were always best, lest one manifest something into reality unintentionally.

She’d left it there, sealed in ice until time itself ended. Or until the mountains melted.

Whichever came first.

4

In time it became evident that Oneira had read every book she’d brought with her at least once. Many, possibly most of them, she’d read multiple times. And in this feeling of waking from a long sleep, all those words she’d consumed she’d also digested. Combined with the new sense of restlessness, the words spilled atop each other and recombined to form a nebulous inkling that prodded at her. Somewhere in mulling this odd sensation, she realized she’d been seeking an answer.

An answer to what, she didn’t know, which presented a problem. How could she know the answer if she’d not yet identified the question? That must be why all those words hadn’t yet formed a pattern. She had no architecture to offer them, no scaffolding upon which they could hang themselves and be assembled to form an image.

Or an idea.

She looked up from the slightly withered carrots she’d been chopping, meeting the inscrutable gaze of Moriah, who had draped herself over the counter beneath the windows, where she could keep an eye on the birds harvesting the remnants of the winter garden as the early morning sun melted the frost from the thawing soil.

“I need more books,” Oneira said aloud.

Moriah flicked an ear, though the cat’s feigned disinterest didn’t fool Oneira in the least. The cat possessed the knowledge of all things and could send Oneira to the book that held thequestion she sought. Well, she could if Oneira could articulate the question that would lead to it—and how did one form a question to solicit a question? The mirror loop was endless. She could only hope she’d know it when she saw it.

“Any advice?” she asked Moriah. In the old tales, the cat could speak, though she’d never given any indication to Oneira that she possessed the ability. Like all cats, Moriah did exactly as she pleased and would no doubt speak only when it suited her purposes. Which it did not in this case. Moriah lowered her chin to her great, fluffy paws, giving Oneira a gleaming, knowing look, and flicked the tip of her tail. “I don’t know why you even came here,” Oneira grumbled. “You’re not at all useful.”

Bunny ambled into the kitchen, wagging tail high and ears perked. “You either,” Oneira said, pointing her finger. “Uninvited guests who never leave are the bane of a peaceful mind.”

Wagging his tail harder, Bunny grinned, tongue lolling to the side. Outside, Adsila called, a circling silhouette against a bluing sky. Shaking her head at herself and this menagerie that had foisted itself upon her, Oneira set the soup to simmer over a low flame and ascended to her tower.

Up in her crystal bubble, she felt like part of the sky. Did Adsila feel this way, soaring with spread and steady wings through the variations in blue and mist? It seemed so clean and restful, just the self and the air, nothing between. Oneira had never tried to fly in the waking world, only in the Dream, though it was theoretically possible for her to do so. The ability hadn’t been anything useful to her clients in winning their wars and required extensive time and study—not something the magic academy that had acquired her had wanted to invest resources in.

She had the time now to learn, but still no need to fly, beyond the idle temptation to join Adsila, who zoomed past in a blur of russet and indigo, circling the dome playfully. Besides,she could travel more swiftly to anywhere she wished via the Dream.

She settled herself in the center of the floor. In this room alone, she’d layered carpets and color over the bare stone. Thick, handwoven rugs, soft as Moriah’s fur and brilliantly colored, depicted exotic flowers, birds, and insects from a distant arid and sunny land. She’d plucked them from the rooms maintained for her at one of the fortresses she’d used to frequent, after discovering that meditating for hours on a stone floor left her too stiff and creaky for comfort. The rugs were priceless in the world of men, but valuable in their own way to her. She supplemented them with pillows she extracted from the Dream, jewel toned and swirling with fantastical images from dreamers.

Crossing her legs, setting her hands palms up on her thighs, closing her eyes, Oneira cleared her mind and prepared to physically enter the Dream.

The Dream is different from dreaming and yet the same. Every oneiromancer first learns to differentiate their own dreams from the dreams of those around them. Later, they learn about the Dream itself, a conglomeration of millennia of dreams that has taken on a life and landscape of its own.

Oneira’s sorcery first manifested when she walked through the dreams of her family, bending them according to her toddler whims. She’d quickly discovered she could pull what she found in those dreams into the waking world, doing so with the gleeful abandon of a child discovering a new box of toys. She barely remembered a few snippets of people crying, shouting, and, as a result of their chaos, feeling afraid for the first time in her young life. Most of her “memory” was a construct of what others, mostly her teachers, had explained to her about it later. Nevertheless, the sequence of the ensuing events came easily to mind, though mostly through the lens of other eyes.

The maestro from the Hendricks Academy for Sorcerous Pursuits had arrived, a brilliant smear of fur-trimmed teal, green, and golden robes, standing out amid even her noble family like a peacock amongst drab sparrows. In the ruin of her family home, littered with twisted creatures never meant to escape the Dream, he’d kindly explained that their young daughter, still unsteady on her physical legs, was a powerful oneiromancer. That she had danced through their dreams without barrier and was capable of laying open their psyches and plucking what she wished from them. In that moment, she’d stopped being their beloved child and became a terrifying predator.

One image Oneira could clearly recall was the revulsion on her mother’s face as she held her daughter out at the full length of her shaking arms, handing her weeping, begging child over to the maestro, scrubbing her hands against her skirts as soon as she let go. Her father hadn’t looked, averting his eyes, his jaw tight and flexing, as he accepted the coin for Oneira’s purchase.

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