Twenty-two
The priest’s words echoed through the silence in the hall.
No one spoke or moved.
At last Jehenna pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. “Nahl—you who serve as High Priest to the Dragon. Tell us, what shall be done to appease the gods, that no further harm shall come to the kingdom?”
“There must be a death.”
“But my people are at feast—”
“It must happen now, My Queen.”
Jehenna inclined her head, the personification of a deep and heavy sorrow. “The gods have spoken. You will all proceed to the arena at once.”
The words were too rehearsed, too planned.
A tumult of voices arose. Chairs pushed back. Courtiers jostled and pushed in a frenzied rush toward the door, abandoning their plates and the food spread untouched on the tables. Vivian stayed in her chair, Gareth still holding her arm. She was overwhelmed by the chaos, by the prospect of violence and the eagerness of the crowd to embrace it. Landon had disappeared, but she thought she caught a glimpse of fluttering rags vanishing through a doorway. Poe was nowhere to be seen.
Gareth got to his feet, closing one hand around her wrist. “Come.”
Vivian tried to twist away, but the hand clamped tighter. Her head throbbed. Cold sweat trickled down her back while her heart beat a rapid and uncomfortable rhythm. Her feet ached in the stupid shoes as she took a few running steps to catch up and ease the pressure on her wrist.
“Gareth, please. Let me go.”
He didn’t slow, or stop. Didn’t even look at her. “You are the guest of honor. We must not be late.”
Fear shafted into her belly. Being the guest of honor was not a good thing. Images of all of the tapestries and paintings flashed through her mind: maidens sacrificed to dragons, again and again and again.
She dropped to her knees, twisting her arm against the weak spot between Gareth’s fingers and thumb. She managed to break his grip, but before she could get back on her feet and flee through the crowd, his hands were tangled in her hair. A sharp yank brought her staggering up onto her feet.
“Every time you struggle,” he said, leaning close so she could hear him through the noise, “every insult you cast my way, somebody will pay. You. Esme. That abomination of a bird. Understood?”
She nodded, wishing she hadn’t eaten the soup after all as her stomach churned.
“Not far now,” he said, his voice pleasant and ordinary, as though they were taking a stroll in the country, as though he hadn’t just threatened her and those around her with violence.
He picked up the pace until she was forced to cling to him in order to keep her balance. They passed out of the castle through wide-open doors and walked under unfamiliar stars. Ahead lights blazed into the night sky, the mass of moving humanity pouring toward them and vanishing through a gate.
The gate opened into a giant oval, half football stadium, half coliseum. The entire structure was built out of stone. Narrow stairs led down through row upon row of seats, many of them already filled. At the bottom, a twenty-foot sheer wall separated the playing field from the spectators. At one end of the field a red stone thrust up out of the earth. Fragments of chain hung from it, and in a wide circumference no grass grew, the earth burned black.
At sight of the stone, the voices in her head leaped to a crescendo, warning of danger.
As if she’d needed any warning.
She stumbled after Gareth, keeping on her feet with difficulty. The shoes had been difficult before; now they were dangerous. She was going to sprain an ankle, going to fall. People drew back as she passed, as if they feared contamination by a casual touch.
To her right, about halfway down, a banner and pennons waved—scarlet dragons on a purple background. Jehenna sat within an ornate private box, surrounded by courtiers and guards. Gareth led her on past, all the way down to the front row.
Ahead of them gaped the maw of a black pit. One last time Vivian thought about fighting. A swift kick to the groin, then run like hell.
Right. In impossible slippers, directly into a stadium full of loyal subjects who would never let her go. Besides, she had no doubt that Gareth would keep his promise of retaliation. If she was able to get clear, someone else would suffer.
And so she followed him down a dark and narrow staircase. A smoky torch sputtered at the bottom, dimly lighting a small box of a room that held a chair and a battered wooden table. The guard leaned over a nearly empty plate. At sight of Vivian and Gareth he sprang to his feet, wiping his mouth with one hand and saluting with the other.
“Open the gate,” Gareth commanded.
The guard nodded, lifted a wooden latch, and pushed open a panel exposing an expanse of grass bounded by a high stone wall. Above it rose row on row of seats filled with shouting faces. A hard shove against Vivian’s lower back thrust her reeling forward. She fell heavily onto her knees in the damp sod. Heard the gate slam shut behind her.
The noise from the crowd intensified; flags waved, feet stomped.
Kicking off the stupid shoes, Vivian scrambled up onto her feet, dug her toes into the grass, seeking courage in the solidity of the earth beneath her. Only it wasn’t solid, not at all. The voices muttered about a vast network of tunnels beneath her, connecting chambers large and small. She could sense them, as she could sense the doors that closed and opened.
Esme must be down there somewhere. Duncan. Maybe Isobel.
If she survived, she would know where to look.
Not if, she told herself. She must survive. She was the last of the Dreamshifters; there was work to be done. Calmer now, she scrutinized the doors opening out of the arena. Counting the one behind her, there were six small ones, three on each long side of the oval. Two larger doors at each end of the stadium. Each could be a possible escape route.
But each could also allow something to enter the arena.
One of the doors on the end was big enough to drive a semi through. This one worried her the most; it was also large enough for a dragon.
A fanfare played.
The crowd screamed.
Whatever was coming, it was coming now.
Run for one of the small doors, she told herself. Only one guard each. Half a chance to get past. Run for it now, while you can. Her muscles buzzed with adrenaline, but she lingered, the huge door holding her gaze with a sick fascination, certain that the age-old story of the dragon and the maiden was about to be played out for all eyes to see.
She was wrong.
Two small doors opened, instead. From each emerged a man, costumed in a white kilt, chest bared. One was old, his hair rough and gray, a thick beard cascading down over his breast. The other couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, muscular and tanned with long blond hair.
The young man stopped at the center of the arena, looked directly toward her, and raised his sword in a salute. His face was too broken to grin, but he made an attempt, the muscles on one side contracting into a grimace.
Duncan.
One of the large doors—not the largest one, not yet—opened, and the priest trailed out in his scarlet robe. From here she could see the dragons embroidered on it in gold. As before, he raised his arms for silence, and the crowd hushed.
“A death for a death,” he said. “The dragon gods must be appeased.” No long speech for the occasion. He turned and stalked back through the door. It clanged behind him, steel on steel.
A trumpet sounded a single tone.
Duncan turned to face the gnarled old man at the center of the oval. The two saluted each other, then advanced into combat range and began circling, swords at the ready. The old man held his sword awkwardly in both hands. He slashed. Duncan parried. The blows were halfhearted even to her untrained eyes, slow, easily blocked. For what seemed like hours, although she knew it couldn’t really have been more than minutes, they circled each other.
Above in the stands, feet stomped, hands clapped. The roar of the crowd took on an ugly tone. “Kill, kill, kill!”
As if on signal, the two men stopped their sparring. They stood about five paces apart, breathing hard. Duncan inclined his head in a gesture of respect, and the old man followed suit. Then, simultaneously, they brought their sword points out straight and level ahead of them, holding the hilts steady with both hands. Their eyes locked. Duncan made a small gesture with his head. A signal.
Vivian felt herself screaming, soundless beneath the roar of the crowd, as the two men flung themselves toward each other, using the momentum to thrust their bodies onto the blades. One freeze-frame moment they stood motionless, mouths open in shock and agony. And then they released their grip on the swords, flung their arms around each other’s shoulders and clung, pulling closer and closer together until they were locked in a death embrace with the bloody blades thrusting through and through. They sank to the ground joined like lovers, blood staining the whiteness of their clothing, pooling on the grass. Duncan cradled the old man’s head with his hand, keeping it from the sod.
A murmur of disappointment ran through the crowd.
This was Vivian’s last chance to run, to get away through a door, but her legs carried her the wrong way, across the grass toward the bloody tangle of limbs and bodies.
Duncan was still breathing, although his face had taken on the pallor of death and blood gushed from his mouth. The old man was already dead.
Vivian’s brain took her through the drill she knew so well. His airway was obstructed by blood; every shallow breath gurgled in his throat. He was bleeding externally and internally, pulse shallow, fluttering, far too rapid. Already he was white with shock.
“Hang on,” she said. “We need to stop the bleeding…” Even as she said it she knew this was stupid. Too much blood, too much damage; even with immediate access to an operating room, with IV fluids and blood transfusions and a team of skilled responders, she could never save him.
Still, she rested her hand on his brow, smoothed back the hair. She was grabbed from behind and pulled away, not roughly. Two men in red tunics leaned over the bodies, pulled them off the swords and apart. A wet sucking sound, a gush of blood and fluid. Duncan’s eyes widened; he gasped. It was his last breath. His head lolled to the side. More men appeared, gripping the bodies by the feet and dragging them across the grass, heads on limp necks rolling and bouncing.
“That was singularly unsatisfying,” Gareth’s voice said in her ear. “They’ll be cursed for that.”
“They are beyond cursing.” Vivian’s lips felt like stone. She was surprised that her voice still worked, still sounded like her own.
“Cursed in the world to come,” Gareth said. “If they had followed the commandments of the High Priest, they would receive expiation and pass into a better place. As it stands—they are condemned to a series of hells.”
“It’s barbaric,” Vivian said. “As was making me watch from here. Bastard.”
Gareth grinned, white teeth gleaming. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” She sensed his heightened excitement, knew that the bloodshed had roused him in every possible way. She wanted to claw the grin from his face with her fingernails.
“Come,” he said. “I have something to show you.”
“F*ck you. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
He lifted her bodily to her feet, grabbed her arm, and towed her along, following the grisly procession ahead of them. Vivian’s bare feet squished in grass wet with blood. She twisted and struggled but Gareth didn’t deign to slow, to turn to look at her, or even to slap her. Just kept walking, her arm pinioned by his hand.
Recognizing futility, half in shock, she went with him. Up the stairs, his arm tight around her shoulders, forcing her against his side. An enormous swollen moon hung over the castle, dull red, brooding. The crowd flowed left toward castle and moon, a turgid river of humanity. The men dragging the dead turned right, and Gareth and Vivian followed behind.
A few more steps and they came upon a small black-and-white figure, waiting. The penguin lengthened his neck, hissing. It must have been the moonlight that made his eyes flare red.
Gareth’s hand moved to his sword hilt. “That creature is an abomination.”
Poe hissed again, then waddled off to the side and into shadow. Vivian followed him with her eyes, trying to pick him out of the darkness, but nothing moved. As far as she could see, the grass, the bushes, the castle, all were lit by that unearthly reddish light.
Ahead of them, at the center of a small space of flowers, towered an oak tree with wide and spreading branches. A tire swing twirled gently from a wide bough, a swing that a child might sit in to commune with sky and grass and tree for a long afternoon of dream. A wail of grief and loss rose in Vivian’s throat, half-choking her as she held it back.
The men they had followed stopped beneath the tree. Sick and dizzy, Vivian could only watch as they wrapped rope around the dead men’s necks and hoisted their bodies up to hang beside the swing, the wind making their loose limbs dance and sway.
“Why?” Vivian turned to face Gareth. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Her Majesty wishes for you to know what she can do with dreams.”
Vivian closed her eyes to shut out the travesty, but the bodies swung behind her eyelids as though on a screen. “Please,” she said. “If you have any decency, take me away from this place.”
“Of course.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle.
He released her arm and took her hand, twining his fingers with hers as though they were lovers and she were not his captive. She went with him willingly when he began to walk, not caring where they went, so long as it took her elsewhere. Only when the fragrance of roses reached her did she realize her mistake.
The dead were not a threat to her; she should have stayed with them. Should have run, run like hell into the darkness and the hope of an escape. Not this, not a rose garden and a fountain by the light of this red moon. Not in the company of this man.
The scent of roses was overpowering, heavy, too sweet. A breeze blew spray against her face from the fountain in a pool behind her. Weary, heartsick, and afraid, she sank down on a stone bench, cool against her thighs through the fabric of the gown.
Gareth dropped to his knees in the grass and kissed her. Fighting back a shudder of revulsion she held herself quiescent, neither responding nor resisting. His lips burned, too hot, too much pressure. She did not respond, did not try to pull away. Waited.
Lips still fastened on hers, he circled her throat with both hands, pressing lightly on the arteries with his thumbs. Black spots danced before her eyes. If he applied strong pressure, in seconds she would slip into unconsciousness and it would all be over.
But the hands released her, slid down to cup her breasts.
It was not to be borne. She turned her head to break the kiss, shoved at him with all her strength. He was too heavy, too strong. He squeezed her nipples, hard, in retaliation.
“Gareth, please…”
His voice was husky, caressing. “I knew I could make you beg. Say it again.”
She slapped him. An angry red patch appeared on his cheek. He slapped her back, a blow that jolted her head to one side, turned her cheek to fire.
Still, he had released her breasts; his lips were no longer on hers. Gasping for breath, she asked, “What did she promise you?”
“Who?”
“The Queen—she gave you something, promised you something—”
An instant of hesitation told her the guess was right. Maybe she could move him, turn him. He was a stranger, but not entirely. The worst of Jared, but Jared still; she knew him.
A pulse beat in his throat; the muscle in his jaw clenched and released.
“She doesn’t care about you, Gareth, not really. Not you or anybody. This—place—Surmise. It isn’t real. All built of stolen, twisted dreams. In another place, another world, you are a decent man. You don’t have to do this.”
“You know nothing about what I have to do.”
“I know what she is, what she does. She’s using you—”
Wrong words. His eyes went flat. “You think I am some stupid pawn. Think again. She has given me more power than you can imagine.”
“Right. She sees that you are valuable, but she—”
“You say this place isn’t real.”
“Well, it is, but it is not—”
“If it’s a dream, why get so upset about a death or two?”
Esme limp and unconscious between the guards. Bodies hanging from a spreading oak tree. Vivian swallowed. “It’s complicated.”
“Explain.”
“Jehenna, she can enter dreams, change them, trap the dreamer—”
She could see by his face that she wouldn’t sway him. Even if he wasn’t under Jehenna’s control, he was already set on a course. In her pocket, she remembered, was a dreamsphere. The one that Poe had picked up off the floor. Surely it would end this, would take her somewhere away, give her time to think, to plan.
Her hand reached into the pocket of the gown even as Gareth’s lips claimed hers again. She let him kiss her while she fumbled for the globe, pulled it out, and then broke away and held it up to the light.
Gareth reached for it. “What—”
A splash turned them both toward the fountain at once.
Poe was swimming in the pool. Diving and surfacing, part fish, part bird, pure essence of sublime joy. A dive beneath the surface and out of view, and then he shot up out of the water onto the rocks, only to dive back in and traverse the pool in a series of leaps like a dolphin.
“Get that creature out, at once!”
Even in the moonlight Vivian could see that Gareth’s face had gone white, a note of fear edging beneath his command.
“You don’t understand. The fountain is off-limits. If she finds out—”
“I guess you shouldn’t have brought us here then.” Her own voice surprised her, level and calm. The crystal hadn’t taken her away, but it had changed something. She had felt the shift, and then Poe had been in the fountain. In her mind the voices kept a waiting silence, as though they were holding their collective breath.
“Get him out.”
Vivian spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “You’re talking about a bird, not a dog. He doesn’t understand commands.” In reality, she was pretty sure Poe understood a lot more than she’d given him credit for, but she wasn’t about to admit it.
Gareth ran the few steps to the fountain, making shooing gestures with his hands, but never quite touching the water. “Get out of there, you stupid bird!”
Poe did come out, to Vivian’s surprise, although he never seemed to notice Gareth’s flapping hands, or his shouts. In his beak he carried something that wriggled and flopped and sparkled in the moonlight. Waddling across the grass, he dropped it carefully at Vivian’s feet.
A fish, only not like any fish she had ever seen. Luminous and shining, rainbow colors shifting over its body in waves. Its fins were winglike, diaphanous, emerald green and cobalt blue.
A shout went up from the voices in her head and they all began talking loudly and at once, a babble of excitement with overtones of awe and wonder.
Gareth stood silent beside her, staring.
The wondrous creature was dying. It flopped in the grass, gasping, gills distended. The brilliant colors were beginning to fade. Vivian bent to pick it up. She must return it to the pool at once; surely in the water it would revive and go on swimming. But the instant her fingers made contact there was a chiming sound and a flash of light. The fish vanished. In the grass lay a gleaming black object.
Vivian picked it up. A chord of music sounded, all of the voices in complex harmony, and then silence. The object felt and looked like stone but seemed to her more solid, more real, than any substance she had ever touched. It was roughly cylindrical, the length of her palm and middle finger, unexpectedly heavy for its size. One end was thicker and etched with rough dragon symbols. The other end was carved into a complex shape, familiar, but before she had time to sort out what it represented, Gareth’s voice said, “I’ll take that.”
The voices shouted objections with a volume that nearly split her skull.
“No.”
Perhaps her grandfather’s last note had made sense after all: Beyond the living rainbow the dragons guard Forever. Could this be the key? She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this.
Gareth drew his sword. “You will give it to me.”
“I will not.”
Nightmare slow, Vivian backed toward the fountain.
Out of the darkness beside her, a small figure ran toward the Chancellor, wings spread wide, neck stretched long, beak open in a hiss.
Gareth spun on his heel and thrust with the sword.
Before Vivian could release the scream rising in her throat, the sharp blade pierced the penguin’s white breast. In that moment, it seemed that time stood still. She saw Jared’s face, twisted with hate, Poe’s beak gaping open, the red stain growing around the steel that spiked his breast. And then, in all of the agonizing detail of slow motion, Jared lifted both sword and penguin, gave his wrists a contemptuous flick, and the body slid off the sword and hit the ground, limp and unmoving.
Vivian’s legs refused to hold her. She dropped to the cool grass beside Poe’s body, searching for signs of life. “Oh, dear God, what have you done—”
Gareth stood over her. “It’s only a bird. Get up.”
“You killed him—”
“What does it matter, if none of this is real?”
She just stared at him, and under her scrutiny something in his face shifted a little. “You’ll see, when I give her the key.” Bloody sword still in hand, he reached for the black cylinder with the other and wrenched it out of her clutching fingers.
“Come now. It’s a lovely night. Kiss me—”
“Are you insane? You just killed my penguin in cold blood.”
He smiled. “Come—the garden is beautiful by moonlight.”
“Over my dead body.”
His face changed, hardened. “I said get up.”
“No.”
He grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked.
Her feet caught in the hem of the gown as she staggered upright, and she hung for an instant from her hair before she could catch her balance. “Let me go—”
Twisting his hand so that she cried out with the pain, he forced her head back and pressed his mouth over hers, thrusting his tongue between her lips.
She bit down hard, tasting the rush of salt as her teeth pierced soft flesh. He released her, stumbling backward.
“F*cking bitch.” He drew the back of his hand across a trickle of blood on his chin and wiped it on his silken doublet, leaving a rusty smear.
Taking advantage of the moment, she tried to knee him in the groin but was hampered by the gown. He pinioned her by both arms in a grip she couldn’t break, and dragged her back to the bench.
She braced her feet, put all her weight against him.
Releasing his right hand he hit her again, closed fist this time. The world shattered into darkness and fire. He flung her down onto the bench, jolting her bones against the stone, her head striking hard enough to make a flash of stars.
“You are mine—mine—you understand? The Queen herself promised me this. If you fight me, I will hurt you. If you scream, I will hurt you more.”
She struggled, tried to free herself, but he straddled her, pinning her down. Her arms were trapped, her legs tangled in the gown. His weight compressed her ribs. She couldn’t breathe. In her peripheral vision she could still catch a glimpse of black and red.
His breath was hot on her face. As his lips again closed over hers, she remembered for the first time what was in her pocket. One of the voices separated itself from the others, made itself easily heard.
Calm down. There is a way, but not if you panic.
She stopped struggling, focused on trying to catch her breath. If there was a way, she would find it. He had done this to her once. Twice she would not allow.
But he must not have the key. No matter what it costs you.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered aloud. “I’ll be good. I swear. Just don’t hurt me anymore.”
“I’m not stupid. I don’t trust you for a minute.”
But the iron grasp on her wrists eased, just a little. When he kissed her again, she kissed him back. At the dark side of Jared was a man who needed to believe that every woman wanted him. Wanted to believe. All she had to do was help him with that.
She moaned softly, returned his kisses with lips and tongue.
He loosed one of her hands so he could reach down and free himself from the confinement of his breeches, and she slid her freed hand down between his legs in a slow caress, cupping the heavy, hot weight of him, stroking.
In response, he moved his lips down her neck toward her breast, and freed her other hand.
Pleasuring him with one hand, she slid the other down over her own hip, feeling for the pocket. At first all she felt was an expanse of unbroken fabric and her heart constricted in fear. Maybe the pocket was tucked up underneath her hips; maybe she couldn’t reach it. But then her fingers caught the edge of an opening and she managed to work them inside.
Jared knelt over her, preparing to take her by force as he had done once already in dream.
He didn’t hear the click of an extending blade. Vivian cupped his balls and then squeezed and twisted with all her strength. His body jerked and stiffened on a gasp of pain, and in that instant she sank the blade of the knife deep into his buttock.
With a shriek of pain and outrage, Gareth rolled off the edge of the bench and onto the grass, doubled over on his knees, both hands pressed to his wound.
Vivian sprang to unsteady feet and bent to retrieve his sword from where it lay in the grass. It was heavy, but two-handed she was able to lift it.
“Why?” he asked, in the tone of a child who has been beaten for no reason.
“Seriously? You killed Poe. You tried to rape me—”
His eyes looked unfocused, his forehead creased in thought. “Vivian, I would never—”
In that moment he sounded like Jared in one of his softer moments. She steeled herself.
“Look, Gareth. For all anybody else knows, you had your way with me and are leaving here a sated and dominant man, although you might want someone to bandage those wounds.”
“Please,” he said. “I’m bleeding.”
“You won’t bleed to death. No major arteries to worry about. First, you are going to help me.”
“What do you want?”
“Information. Tell me what Jehenna wants with the key.”
He swallowed hard, kept silent.
Vivian moved toward him, holding the sword. “Tell me.”
He crawled backward. “Don’t hurt me.”
His confusion appeared genuine. She tried to think what to do, but the voices had increased again in intensity, were a siren song, pulling her away from the here, promising, always promising. Listen, listen, listen.
Vivian clenched her jaw, drove the energy of her full attention onto the man in front of her. And as she opened her mouth to speak, she felt it all, like a towering wave, like the climax of a symphony, all of the energy of all of those words coalescing into her voice at once. “Tell me.”
As they emerged from her lips, the words felt more solid than anything else in this place, more real than her grief or the blood on the grass.
His eyes widened and focused. “I was to—kill the bird. Give her the key, if I ever found it.”
“In exchange for what?”
“You. She promised me that if I gave her the key, you would love me.”
“And you believed her? Tell me when this happened.”
“I…” He swallowed; his eyes drifted far away. “I—it was a strange place. Many houses, all in a row. The street was hard and black. I do not know this place. A dream, perhaps…” Vivian remembered Jared standing at her doorway with his hands full of roses, Jared who’d arrived only moments after Jehenna left, who had mentioned a key before she knew that there was one to be found.
“What does she want with the key, Gareth?”
“I don’t know. She spoke of the Forever, said she wouldn’t need the dragon anymore. I don’t know what she meant.” His face was slick with a cold sweat; his voice broke on the words.
More gently now, she said, “Give me the key, Gareth.”
“She’ll kill me—”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
“She knows everything.”
His face was so white she thought he might pass out. He wiped one hand across his forehead, leaving a smear of blood. There was no place here for mercy. She used the Voice again. “The key, Gareth.”
Without further hesitation he drew it out from inside his tunic and handed it to her.
“Now, get out of here.”
No need for the Voice with this command; Gareth was more than happy to be gone. He moaned as he got to his feet and hobbled across the grass and away into shadow.
Which left Vivian alone with her dead. Kneeling beside Poe, she laid her hands over his bloodstained breast, tried to summon some magic that would heal this wound, make his heart begin to beat again. If she had the power to make Gareth talk, maybe she could reverse a death.
You couldn’t save one boy poisoned by a dragon, not with a crew and modern technology to help you.
Her breath was a difficulty in her throat, a sharp pain that wouldn’t ease, but her eyes remained dry.
“Good-bye, Poe,” she whispered.
A whisper of sound, steel against leather, drew her eyes upward. Standing before her, the blade of his sword naked in his hand and death in his eyes, stood the Warlord of Surmise.