She shivered and barred her meager door. She built a meager fire and cooked a meager meal. Her ears were tuned to the night outside, but she only heard the rain. There was nothing for her fretting but to get out her book, her treasure, her one thing from home: true home, long lost, the Failed Colony. It had had a real name, once, but all those decades of striving and living and building and planting and loving had been reduced in a single season to that wretched word: failed.
The book had eighteen stories in it, and when she read them—aloud, always—it was with her mother’s cadence, which was imprinted on her heart. She turned to the one that suited this night: a maiden, pursued by an ogre, transforms herself into a doe rather than become his wife. Her eyes were tired from a long day squinting at stitches, so she let them flutter shut. But she knew the story by heart and it kept going, into the woods on fleet deer feet and down a mossy slope.
And all of a sudden she was in Nasty Gully. She knew she was dreaming, because her book had nothing to do with Nasty Gully. The spring beetles were there, all glint and shimmer in the ferny half light, but they weren’t flying at her face. They weren’t flying at all. They were motionless in their hundreds, and when Neve stepped in close, she saw that they were jewels. They were beetles made of jewels, and when she took one up it was a ring for her finger. Another, it was a brooch. The gully was quiet and the light was soft, and she sensed that she was not alone.
“Hello?” she whispered, and woke in her chair, no sound besides rain and the pop of the dying fire, but a whisper seemed to follow her out of sleep. It wasn’t that she heard it so much as felt it.
It felt like a breeze through a forests’ worth of leaves.
“I will free you, and I will lift you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you laugh. Your smiles will be the honey in my mead, your enchantment my delight.”
And in her shed by the dying fire, Neve sensed, as she had in the dream, that she was not alone. But it wasn’t a lurking feeling, as a figure in the night. It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in the world, and that was a very different thing.
She slept. She dreamed. There was music such as she had never heard, and singing in a language as far from her own as the spitting rain was from the roar of the sea. Dancing, too. A hand held hers, and she couldn’t see whose it was but only felt herself spinning spinning spinning, safe in a circle made by strong, dark arms.
But in the morning, the yard held a fresh set of preacher tracks and another gift on the porch—a framed miniature of the man’s own smug face—so Neve knew it had been all and only dreams, all and only her own fool hopes, coaxed up out of hiding and tricked into dancing, dancing all alone.
“Stupid,” she whispered, and gave the portrait a nudge with her toe. She wanted to kick it out into the mud but didn’t dare. Tricked by a dream into hoping, and hoping for what, dancing and a pair of strong arms? “Stupid,” she said again, with more venom. You’d think she was new to despair and just learning its tricks. She stumped into her boots and made for the hen house. The axe was in the chopping block, and she thought maybe today she’d do it. What good is a hen that won’t lay?
About as much good as a girl who won’t marry, said a voice inside her, and she rousted Potpie, who gave a sleepy blink. “What do you say, old girl? Did you make me any breakfast today?”
There would be no egg. Neve knew it. It was pathetic that she still checked—proof that hope had its hooks in her, whatever she might think—
She let out a chuff of surprise. There was an egg. “Well done, you,” she said to Potpie, unreasonably pleased for such a small thing as an egg. She reached for it. Took it. She picked it up and held it and knew that it was not an egg.
It looked like an egg.
But it wasn’t an egg.
An egg feels like nothing but what it is. This was too light. It was air and shell and something, but that something was not yolk and fluid, and Neve should have wanted to drop it—not even wanted to but just done it instantly, instinctively, as a reaction to a wrongness. But she didn’t drop it. She did not, in fact, sense a wrongness. She held the egg, and it was warm and smooth, and it fit her palm like a rightness.
Breakfast forgotten for the second day running, she carried it back across the yard, and once she was inside she looked at it some more and weighed it gently, hand to hand. Something shifted in it when she moved it, and she wondered what to do. She could leave it as it was, intact. But eggs aren’t meant to remain intact, are they? They’re meant to open. To disclose.
So she cracked it, gingerly, and the sound it made knocking at the rim of her old clay bowl was like a note of music. The eggshell split and opened and the something inside it … sparkled. Neve spilled it into the cup of her palm and couldn’t believe her eyes.
It was a beetle.
From her dream of Nasty Gully. Here was one of the jewel beetles, and it had a diamond for a body—as big as her thumbnail, and as dazzling as a star encased in crystal—and two half moons of milky jade for wings. They were set on cunning hinges and opened at her touch, and its head was an emerald with cabochon eyes of some stone she couldn’t name, soft pearl pink and flecked with gold. Like in her dream, it was set on a ring and fit her finger just right, as though faeries had measured her for it in her sleep.
At first there was only wonderment, her staring at it and opening and shutting its jade wings in slow, astonished delight. Then the questions crept in.
How?
And, of course … who?
*
So the world was not dead, but it was so altered as to seem a new place—and not a better one. It was dirtier, paler, tarnished with sadness, and the Dreamer felt himself lost in it. He still didn’t know how much time had passed, but he understood that it was too much.
That the Dreamers had, by their absence … forfeited.
But how had it come to pass? Where were the others, and why had none of his brothers or sisters come to wake him? Did they sleep too, in their own far-flung hills? Had their feathers been stolen as his had, their wits and senses dulled? He would have to find them and draw them out of the earth, but first, something bound him here.
Someone bound him.
She had asked for his protection. No. She had done more than that. She had summoned him, even through the barriers of the colorless, choking sorcery that had held him in its stupor. He owed her for that. When he went to find her, it was to settle a debt.
And then he saw her.
He saw her, and the clamors and stinks of this new world fell away, as murmurs overcome by a bright surge of song. He saw her on her lonesome road, her brightness ill-concealed by the dun disguise of such dull clothes, her grace scarcely hindered by the mud-caked weight of boots, and his panic died away. His was the panic, you understand, of one who has overslept and is late for work … when the work in question is the making and keeping of the world. It would return, and all the world-clamor with it, but for now, it was silenced by the sight of a girl.
She was so alone, so brave and so afraid, and so beautiful. His heart—that had beat with the earth’s slowest pull since it first tested its turning—slipped into a new register, as sweet to his blood as birdsong to his ears, and it liked it there.
She was not his subject. He had conjured green in its every variation and carried it with him out of dreams. He had given storms to the world, and riverbanks, and bees. But the shape of this girl, the fierce gloss of her eyes, and the layers and treasures of soul and mind that were in her to discover, that was none of his doing. The Dreamers were the gods of all things but mankind. All the rest they had made, but not these striving things, that had made themselves.
For better or worse.
He was the god of tide-lap and wingbeat, talon and pearl. She was the goddess of … herself. And he could not look away from her.
*
Neve went through all the paces of an ordinary day: the walk to and through town, the row of girls at their hoops, and tiny stitches on an altar cloth for some far-off cathedral she couldn’t even imagine. Nothing was different, but something was different. She had put Spear’s miniature into a pocket of her apron, and the jewel beetle into another. Into one pocket—can you guess which?—her hand slipped again and again, and, each time, her cheeks flushed with the confirmation that she hadn’t dreamed the first good surprise to ever come her way.
She tried to stop herself from wondering what it meant, to take it like a story from her book, where logic could find no firm footing. It wasn’t easy.
Who?
All day long, that one word lurked behind every other that she spoke, and when she wasn’t speaking—which was most of the time—she was wondering, dreamily, Who?
“Well?” Dame Somnolence wanted to know. “Did you give him the flower?”
Neve nodded. “He ground it in his fist and came again last night.” She took out the miniature and let it dangle from its chain.
Seeing that she was not distraught, the old woman misunderstood the reason. “Well, won’t the coffin maker be pleased,” she sniffed, her big, doleful eyes going narrow with the affront of advice ignored. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Neve didn’t try to explain. What could she say? That she’d called for protection and been answered? When she even dared to think it, she saw how preposterous it sounded, doubted it all anew, and had to slip her hand into her pocket and cup the beetle in her palm.
She was so preoccupied that when, walking home that evening, she passed Reverend Spear on the high street, she unthinkingly did as he had bid her the day before. Half of it anyway.
She smiled.
Oh, the smile wasn’t for him. It was on her face already when she chanced to turn his way—it was slight, and quizzical, and dreamy, but certainly a smile—and with difficulty she kept it from sliding off. She didn’t blush, as requested, but the smile seemed to suffice. He stood in a company of men—leering, knowing looks from all of them—and didn’t stop her but only nodded, gentlemanly, though his eyes burned at her, hot with something that was not anger. That was worse than anger.
Never mind. It was best not to draw his ire.
I’m not for you, Neve thought. She had twenty-three days till the Christmas Eve gather, and the understanding had come to her slowly through her wonder that the beetle in her pocket—worth such a fortune, she didn’t doubt, as had never been seen on this island before—meant her freedom from both Spear and Fog Cup, even if it meant nothing else. She could take ship any time she wanted and set sail toward any life she wished, and that was a reason for smiling, certainly, but it wasn’t the best reason.
Someone had given it to her. Someone was out there. She felt him. I will free you, and I will lift you. Those were his words from her dream. He had freed her already.
What now?