Page 79 of Never the Roses

She smiled ruefully, amazed at how full her heart could feel, even in the face of this ending. “I’m doing this to hopefully save a bit more than that. I created this problem, with my selfishness and weakness. Now I’ll solve it my way. I’m just sorry that your hands will be full, dealing with the chaos that will ensue. At least I can ensure that you will be able to choose of your own free will who to aid. I know you’ll choose wisely.”

“What are you talking about, Oneira? Don’t do this. I’m begging you not to do this. Sit and talk with me. Surely there’s another way.”

She shook her head and stood. “I’ve thought and thought—and I know you have, too. This is the only way, and even this isn’t perfect. You’ll have your work cut out for you.” She smiled at him, letting the warmth, the love she felt, shine through, imbuing his dreams so he’d remember, just as she’d made this place for them with love. “I know you’re up to it. I’ve done what I can. I’ve arranged for the queen to pay your debts. That’s my price for stopping the war before it comes to her shores.”

He was shaking his head, fighting the dream to reach her. “No. I don’t want that. It’s not worth losing you.”

“You lose me regardless,” she told him as gently as she could, aware of tears coursing down her cheeks. “I can’t survive causing another death. I can only choose which murder will be my last and then deal myself the consequences for doing what I’d vowed not to.”

“Oneira, you can’t—”

“I can and I must,” she interrupted firmly, then tried on a smile. “At least I’ve answered Moriah’s riddle. I’ve learned how the heart heals. Take care of my roses, Em.” She released her hold on the dream and let it begin to unravel.

“Oneira!” Stearanos shouted as the dream dissolved. His voice echoed through the Dream, a forever shout of love and longing that would weave itself into the very fabric of the Dream.

A fitting epitaph, she supposed. And far more than she deserved or expected.

38

Oneira stepped out of the Dream and into the vast palace of the King of the Northern Lands. She’d used power with profligate abandon, putting everyone to sleep within a league—including and especially Stearanos, who now slept dreamlessly.

She could give him that much, a deep slumber, out of reach of the nightmares that plagued him. She owed him that, given the chaos he’d assuredly wake to. Gazing down at his sleeping face, Oneira allowed herself one last look at him, this severe man who shouldn’t be so beautiful to her. He’d been the easiest point of travel, so she’d used him for this penultimate journey through the Dream, stepping into his grand rooms in the imperial palace. It wasn’t because she wanted to see Stearanos in the flesh a final time, to take in his scent to carry with her into eternal sleep, she told herself. Oneira had always been very good at lying to herself.

Stearanos had been thrashing in his sleep, legs tangled in the blanket that barely covered the lower half of his body. His chest bare in the guttering light of the fire, he lay twisted, one arm outflung, his mouth still open on that last dreaming shout, braids caught around his neck. Unable to resist, Oneira straightened him, letting her fingertips glide along his skin, marred by those thousands of scars, savoring the feel of him, and the magic beneath. Lifting his arm, she tucked him under the blanket, feeling oddly tender.

Arranging his braids on the pillow, Oneira bent and placed a soft, lingering kiss on his lips, beyond tempted to allow him towake. “I love you, Stearanos,” she whispered. “Against all reason and sense, it seems I do. Too late, but there it is.” She kissed him once more, wondering if he’d wake to taste her on his lips. “Sweet dreams. My hope for you, though I cannot deliver.”

Feeling the weight of all she couldn’t do, wishing more than anything that she could crawl into the circle of his arms and stay there forever, letting the world go on with its vicious spinning without them, she acknowledged the dream for what it was—irrational and insubstantial—and left him there, peacefully sleeping.

She moved through the winding corridors, dimly lit with torches for guards and servants to perform their nocturnal duties, passing them occasionally in sleep where they’d lain down. Over time—and via horrific mistakes—Oneira had learned to make her victims sleepy first, so they’d succumb gradually, rather than falling face-first into whatever was in front of them.

It was quiet, but not silent, snores and occasional guttural cries of dreamers ringing out, barely louder than the crackle of low-level torches. The Dream billowed around her, burgeoning with dreamers, ready to pour into the waking world.

She found the prince through his dreams, easy enough to locate even amid other dreams of glory and bloodlust. To her surprise, Mirza was in the king’s bedchamber, not his own. He slept draped over the bed, holding his father’s empty, barely living body, the distinctive miasma of decaying meat filling the air. Several attendants, possibly a physician, slumbered in chairs around the room, or curled on the floor.

Going to the other side of the bed, Oneira laid a hand on the old king’s brow, his skin cool, crisply thin as dried onion skin. He’d been sent into the Dream. Somehow his traitorous son had found an oneiromancer capable and willing to commit that crime, depriving the man of ever moving on, trapped forever onthis side of death. From what Oneira knew of the king, he hardly deserved her sympathy or pity, but neither did she. Because she could, and it seemed right, she did what the other oneiromancer had not or could not: she severed the final tie to the decomposing body, allowing the spirit of the man to fully enter the Dream, or perhaps even find the realm of death as his old form became fully a corpse. He’d been declared dead and now truly dead he would be. All things must complete the cycle of life and death. That was inescapable.

Then she turned to Mirza. Until that moment, Oneira had been planning a straightforward murder. She’d killed so many people, in so many ways. It should have been a simple dispatching.

And yet, somehow, in the stuttering steps toward healing her heart, she’d gained the ability to feel again. She hadn’t killed anything in all this time, and now she’d kill this sleeping man, hardly more than a boy.

Strangely, he reminded her of Leskai, whom she should despise, but couldn’t.

She couldn’t hate this self-absorbed princeling either, no matter how horrible. Leaning over the bed, she touched a fingertip to the prince’s temple, finding him in the Dream, where he frolicked through battles, crowned with glory, chased by seeping regret. He turned, a man lost in a surreal landscape, surprised to see her there, wondering at the vividness of her walking into his mind. As she severed his connection to his body, he held up a hand, calling to her.

She didn’t listen to whatever it was he said.

From there it was simple to go home.

She did not return to see Stearanos again. Instead, she stepped fully into the Dream, withdrawing the sleep enchantment behind her like a curtain, allowing them all to wake in their own time. All but the prince, who would sleep forever.

She stepped out of the dream and into her garden, lit by early morning sunshine, the flowers seeming to shiver as they opened their petals to the light and warmth. Bunny and Moriah sat there patiently, waiting, as if anticipating her arrival, and Adsila flew out of the Dream behind her.

Realizing she was weeping, silently and copiously, Oneira embraced them in turn, then went to see her roses, Adsila on her shoulder, Bunny and Moriah on either side of her, her hands buried in their fur. The four of them gazed on the rosebushes, which had survived her neglect, but were far from lush. She would never see them bloom now. She could only hope that they’d survive without her to tend them, because she couldn’t allow herself to live any longer.

So many things she regretted, none that she could change. Not now. Not any longer.

Making her way laboriously inside, feeling as old as her true age, as if her body had finally given up on trying, she wrote one last note, giving it to Bunny and Moriah, in case they decided to stay.

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