Page 87 of A Theory of Dreaming
Preston tightened his hold on Effy. Her body felt heavier now, more pliant. Her breathing was low and labored.
He turned back toward Master Gosse.
“I suggest you wake up, professor,” he said. “This dream is coming to an end.”
Preston drew his gaze upward, and Master Gosse’s eyes followed. The glass ceiling was cracking like a sheet of ice. And, beyond it, the floor of the Sleeper Museum was cracking, too. There was a rumbling sound, loud and close, and as the marble walls of the palace began to break and shatter, so did the walls of the museum. Pieces of plaster rained down on Master Gosse’s sleeping body.
His adviser stammered out a noise of alarm. “Héloury—”
“Wake up, professor,” Preston repeated. “Unless you want your sleep to be eternal.”
He did not wait to hear Master Gosse’s reply. Preston only closed his eyes. The bells were too broken to keep ringing. But in the moment before he was thrust back into the waking world, he felt the water begin to pour in all around him.
He woke with his cheek still pressed to the sheets, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Slowly—slowly—he raised his head.
The white room was bewilderingly fuzzy. Preston blinked and blinked, as if he could clear the glaze from his vision, but it all remained a blur of colors and shapes. He could not make out the numbers on the beeping machines, or the words on the cover of the book Angharad had left on the bedside table. He could not even see the details of Effy’s face.
Effy.
Preston rose and shifted to the head of the bed, leaning over, his own breath close enough to feather Effy’s cheek. Close enough that he had the privilege to see this: her eyes, fluttering open.
A sob choked from his throat. “Effy.”
Her green gaze was still muddled with sleep. But her pale lips parted and she whispered back, “Preston.”
Had she seen it all? Did she know? There was no recognition in her filmy stare, no unspoken question. Had she already forgotten everything: the emerald-hued torches, the statue in her likeness, the glass coffin, the confrontation with Master Gosse?
The bells?
Preston couldn’t hear them. Not even the faintest, most distant ringing. And so he knew it was over. He knew, too, because he couldn’t see anymore. He needed his glasses again. He almost laughed. What a mundane thing to happen, in the end.
He bowed his head and clasped Effy’s hands in his. Her skin was warmer now. The pale blue color had receded from the tips of her fingers.
“My love,” he murmured. “Please don’t go.”
Effy’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. In a scratchy, almost inaudible voice, she replied, “All right. I’ll stay.”
A single tear ran a path down Preston’s cheek. They were not safe. Perhaps they never would be. But the walls had crumbled and they were free.
Twenty-Nine
He had raised me up high and put a crown on my head, and thus when he crumbled, so did I. My fall from heaven hurt more than all my days of living hell. But lying there, my ribs cracked, the ashen remains of the Fairy King scattered around me like blown wheat, I drew my first true breath in decades. Every inhale ached. And yet that was how I knew I was alive. How I knew I was free.
—fromAngharadby Angharad Myrddin, 191 AD
The white light burned her eyes when she opened them, as if she were an infant, new to the world and just as fragile. There was no peacefulness in her waking, not as there had been when she slept. The silent, velvet dark released her, and reality took hold again, with all its banal little pains and indignities.
The bite of the IV needle in her arm. The hoarseness in her throat. The stiffness of her disused muscles. The faint throbbing behind her temples. Effy breathed in, then out again, the air itself prickling. The antiseptic smell of the hospital made her feel vaguely ill.
Sleep had been simple. Sleep had been easy. She had not even been vexed by dreams.
She woke to Preston holding her hand, to the gentle pressure of his fingers around hers. He had pulled her—somehow—from that oblivious, ageless darkness. And there was his face, beautiful, familiar, streaked with the sheen of tears. She remembered that, and only a little bit more: the words that had fallen from his lips, soft but urging.
My love. Please don’t go.
And then her own reply, in a voice hoarse from disuse:
All right. I’ll stay.
