Page 51 of Never the Roses

He suppressed a surge of excited satisfaction. She’d examined him closely while he slept, to know that.

“Why do you do it?” she asked, silver gaze intent, and he realized it wasn’t a challenge, but genuine interest. Thinking about her own motivations, perhaps.

Studying his hands, still turning them back and forth, he saw how like his father’s hands they were, something he hadn’t noticed until that moment. A working man’s hands, unpretty, callused, hardened, the knuckles bigger than they used to be. None of themetaphorical blood on them showed, only the scars of manual labor. Symbolic of something, though he didn’t know what.

“It’s different, isn’t it?” he mused. “All those years we spent learning to control those childhood accidents.” He glanced up at her, assuming she’d had similar experiences to his, and she nodded minimally, old pain in her eyes. “Then studying magic, improving and amplifying our ability to manipulate these unseen, untouchable forces.” He waved his hands, at a loss for the appropriate words.

“Inhabiting unreality,” she filled in.

“Yes.” He breathed the affirmation. “You understand.”

Her lips quirked. “Perhaps more than most. It doesn’t get more unreal than the Dream, but then, I don’t really know how posotomancy works.”

Interesting, to have the opportunity to explain his craft to someone who was both new to his precise skill set, but knowledgeable enough to understand the explanation. The academies kept the various specializations sequestered from one another, encouraging secrecy and isolation. “You said you pull from the Dream and then use your sorcery to shape it. It’s similar for me in that I reach into the underlying reality of an object by assessing it, I find its dimensions and then alter those to make them be what I want.”

Her expression rapt, she considered. “So very interesting. The underlying magic is, of course, operating in the same way, but you use quantification to alter objects to suit your purpose. I do the same, only for me it’s not at all mathematical. More intuitive.”

“Just our modality for manipulating reality differs,” he agreed. “Which makes sense, since we all have some ability to work magic in all the traditional disciplines, just particular strengths in certain arenas.”

“Or weaknesses.” She grimaced. “I’ve never had much ability with numbers and my rune work is rudimentary.”

“I noticed.” He nearly laughed in the face of her indignation. “Oh, your wards are good enough to keep out the mundane world and probably most magic-workers. Just not a wardbreaker of my caliber.”

She wrinkled her nose at him, looking suddenly young and impudent with it. “When one is an oneiromancer, wards and other boundaries of the world are irrelevant. As you learned firsthand, Lord of Wards,” she reminded him archly, even playfully.

“That’s true until someone breachesyourwards,” he persisted, eliciting a huff of annoyance from her. “I can strengthen your wards for you,” he offered, as if that weren’t a huge breach of etiquette and protocol.

She stilled. “You can’t do that.”

“In point of fact, I can. You had me fix what I broke.”

She waved that off. “That’s entirely different. What you’re proposing smacks of collaboration, ofalliance.” She dropped her voice on the final word, as if fearing they’d be overheard.

“Is it really an alliance if you’re retired?” He refused to drop his voice. His wards were the best in all the world. No one would overhear them.

Oneira was shaking her head slowly back and forth. “You know that’s forbidden.Thisis why they keep us apart, why they sequester us by specialization at academy. Why the most powerful among us are tutored privately. It starts chummily enough, then we start chatting about our work, confiding our methods, then we begin to think we’re friends, that we can be allies.”

“Wearefriends.”

“We do not command our own loyalties,” she retorted, annoying him by refusing to acknowledge his words.

“Because they stack the deck against us when we’re too youngto know better and unable to escape them,” he countered. “They bind us to their blood geas, trap us in debt and isolate us, pit us against one another. Isn’t sharing information a way for us to assert control over our own lives?”

“I already did,” she answered with a smile of satisfaction, though her gaze went shadowed.

“Yes, you did. I’d love to hear how you pulled it off.”

All hint of a smile fled her countenance. “I should go.”

“Please don’t. You haven’t finished your wine. We can speak of something else.”

With a mutinous press of her lips, she took a sip of wine and looked at him. The silence stretched out and she moved in the chair restlessly. “What else do you want to talk about?”

So many things, but he firmly shifted his mind off all of them. “How did you like the novel?” he asked again. “Do you agree with my thoughts on the ending?”

She barely moved, her head nodding a breath of acknowledgment. “Ah, of course you know I picked up that note.”

“And replaced the book, yes. Thank you. Both books, I perceive. I hope you copied the other?” Otherwise he’d find a way to make her take it.

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