Page 7 of Never the Roses

Though her handlers had occasionally discussed—or, more aptly, fantasized—about sending Oneira to assassinate Stearanos, they’d always talked themselves out of it, to her vast relief. The odds were too great that he’d outmatch her and Oneira would end up dead instead. They never quite worked themselves up to run the risk.

These days, of course, she no longer cared if she lived or died. Nevertheless, it gave her a long-withheld sense of satisfaction to know that shecouldhave succeeded. So much for the vaunted wardmaker.

Stearanos Stormbreaker’s library lived up to its reputation, Oneira decided, surveying the large room. In those wee, small hours of the morning, when sleep was deepest and dreams dominated and lasted longest, no lamps were lit, only moonlight showing her the way. Tall windows glowed with light scattered from the moon shining on a sea far gentler than her own. She had no idea which of the seas abutting the Northern Lands it might be. That was one disorienting aspect of physically traveling like this. The Dream didn’t come with labels or dotted lines showing borders. One ended up where the dreamer was, with no other information about the place.

Casting her senses over the castle to be certain of her safety—attention to detail had saved her skin more than once—she verified that her enchantment had put all living things within the walls into deep sleep. Suppressed by her magic, their dreams burbled quietly in the background, with occasional stabs of disturbance from Stearanos, like garish heat lighting in an otherwise calm sky. With a thought, Oneira found the lamps distributed around the room and lit them with a touch of flame, a relatively simple sorcery, common to most magic-workers. She winced atthe sudden blaze of light. The man sure did like to have a lot of lamps.

But then, the librarywascavernous, going on through several connected rooms, shadowed alcoves eating the light. Not knowing quite where to start—how did one search for a thing without knowing what it was to begin with?—Oneira browsed the shelves, running light fingers over the spines, enjoying the sheer variety and unfamiliarity of it all.

Titles and authors flowed into her mind from a myriad of languages. The Dream contained all the minds in the world and thus all living languages, plus quite a few dead ones that lingered still in the dreams of scholars and the ghostly remnants of civilizations long gone but immortalized in the Dream. Many of the books she’d read already, or was familiar with and had chosen not to read, but many more were new to her.

Stearanos had clearly read—or was familiar with and had chosen not to read—all of these books. Oneira supposed the sorcerer could have hired a librarian or archivist to do the work of shelving them, but she had a feeling it was all him.

Also, Stearanos had left a trail of himself on these books. Analyzing remanence wasn’t the greatest of her skills, but Oneira could do so adequately, given time and quiet. A powerful psychometrist could delve through the layers of all who’d touched an object, peeling back to the origin of the item, potentially able to discern even the preceding influences on the constituent materials of the object. Oneira couldn’t do that, but she could usually tell who’d last touched a thing, especially in this case, where book after book whispered of the powerfully magical touch of the same person. If she hadn’t recognized Stearanos by his dreaming mind, she’d have built a picture of him from the years and decades he’d spent holding these books.

Without exception, he’d been the last person to touch eachand every one. Belatedly it occurred to her that he’d likely detect her own remanence left behind on the leather spines and gold-leaf lettering. He was not a highly skilled psychometrist, though—according to his dossier—and not an oneiromancer at all, so he wouldn’t have any way to know who had appeared in the night to peruse his precious books that no one else touched, all while he slept oh-so-vulnerably. The thought of his ire made her smile for no good reason—and the stiffness of the skin around her mouth made her wonder just how long it had been since she’d last done so.

She set those musings aside. How Stearanos reacted to her nocturnal visit mattered nothing to her. Finding her question did matter, so she set herself to discern the organization system, in order to conduct a more organized survey of his collection. From what she’d been told of him over numerous, fairly detailed briefings intended to arm her with knowledge should the Northern Lands decide to throw all caution to the winds and pit Stearanos against her, he was meticulous to the point of being obsessive. Therefore, there must be a system. She need only bend her own intellect to the puzzle.

The problem was, the books were not categorized by language, author, subject matter, or title, but rather by an arcane system that seemed impenetrable initially. Gradually, however, as she made her way through shelf after shelf, climbing the ladders that slid on silent rails, she began to fathom something of the labyrinthine mind that had put these tomes into such a bizarre order.

He’d organized them according to meaning, possibly theme. Here were books on water of all types—oceanography, hydromancy, sailing, precipitation, even poetry on aquatic themes—and within that set of shelves, he’d arranged them grouped by salt water versus fresh, then application of the water. An excellent method to keep anyone but him from finding the book they wanted, she thought with irritation.

Well, she amended, anyone but him and Oneira, who had cracked his code. Had she known the theme of the question she wished to pose, she could have found it quickly. But, of course, she didn’t know, instead letting intuition guide her. Soon it became apparent from the intensity of his lingering presence on those tomes what Stearanos’s most recent area of concentration had been.

Oneira slowed, then lingered over those shelves, sensing the bright passage of recent days in the vivid remanence glittering against her fingertips. And…there. Ah, there was the book that Stearanos had been reading that very evening—in truth, late into the night, as it had been replaced on the shelf only hours before. The sense of the sorcerer came to her vividly, his intense interest and eventual fatigue. The reluctance of relinquishing a quest. Intrigued, she pulled the book from its neat slot on the shelf—neither too compressed by its neighbors nor rattling in a too-big space—and perused the title.

It was written in ancient Veredian, which she could read, though with difficulty, and seemed to be about flower cultivation, which struck her as an oddly frivolous topic to keep an iron skull like Stearanos awake past midnight. He’d marked a page midway through with a scrap of paper with nothing on it, probably intending to continue the read.

Feeling that same mischievous spark as before, the one that had brought the unaccustomed smile to her mouth—and aware that she didn’t have all the time in the world to settle on her choice—Oneira decided to take that book. It wasn’t as if she had a clearer option and it pleased something in her that hadn’t experienced pleasure in a long time to mess with her old enemy, even if he was an enemy only in an academic sense. Besides, shewanted to know what it could be about flower cultivation that consumed the dread Stearanos Stormbreaker.

Now, to leave the obvious gap, shuffle the books together to create temporary confusion, or replace the tome with something else? She decided upon creating symmetry of a sort and, reaching through the Dream, plucked a book from her own library, one she’d kept out of habit more than anything, as you never knew when you’d want some tidbit from the classic reference books. She could easily replace it from any bookseller, should she want to, which made the book innocuous and ubiquitous enough to puzzle Stearanos exceedingly. He was an overthinker, following every clue relentlessly down a rabbit warren of logic. In the past, when she’d planned strategies to counter the Stormbreaker, should they ever clash, she’d had to account for his remorseless attention to detail. In this instance, she would use that to confuse and annoy him.

Inevitably, the book would bear the imprint of her touch, but not much more so than any of her other books, and less than ones she’d read more recently. Not that it would do him any good to detect her presence without context.

She rather enjoyed the prospect of Stearanos trying to discover who she was. He wouldn’t be able to, which also deeply satisfied her in the same way she’d once taken pride in her work. Deep down, she’d always nursed the certainty that, should she ever be pitted against Stearanos, she would’ve won. In her more pitiless days, she’d been almost sorry their kingdoms had shied from the prospect of the destruction they’d cause.

Thatwould have been a battle for the ages.

Instead—in her old age, she thought mirthlessly to herself—she settled for a bit of harmless mischief. Perhaps a part of her missed strategizing against her nemesis, and this would give her a bit of that old stimulation, the thrill of outwitting her enemy.

She inserted her book on the shelf, aligning it perfectly, just as its predecessor had been. In an excess of caution, she ran a finger along the spine, removing as much imprint of her house or companions from the book as she could. Just in case. It would be insane to compromise their safety over a whim.

Casting a look about the library, she snuffed the flames in the lamps, allowing the filtering moonlight to return to the quiet, breathless room. Wandering over to a window, she observed the single deep armchair placed there with a small table and a reading lamp beside it, all of which fairly radiated the sorcerer’s presence. She didn’t dare actually sit in the chair, but angled herself to take in what view Stearanos would see.

Endless views of that ocean that was far more tranquil than hers. Some part of her approved. Another, wiser and more cautious part of her, observed that the horizon had lightened with approaching dawn. They were facing east then. And it was past time for her to go.

Reaching for the Dream, she drew the portal in the air, poised on the silvery threshold, one foot in each world, and cast her mind back over the sleeping castle. She withdrew the sleep enchantment with such gentle precision that they didn’t awaken yet—and shouldn’t until the rhythms of their own bodies prompted them.

Their minds billowed back into the Dream, from the smallest mice up to the vivid, ghastly tumult of heat and light that was Stearanos.

She stepped into the Dream, neatly avoiding all their minds, and was gone.

6

Stearanos awakened with an unaccustomed start and instinctively lay still as death.

He didn’t know what had startled him awake, but he’d slept on too many battlefields, had caught snatches of sleep in too many war rooms to dismiss the internal alarm that alerted him to… something.

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