Neve dismounted. Everyone else just stood and stared. There was Keillegh Baker and her boy, both agog, and Bill Childbreaker, ill at ease in his cheap Sunday suit. There was a gaggle of First Settlement girls in matching crowns of holly berries—their shock held no wonder, only envy—and Dame Somnolence, whose eyes had never looked larger or less doom-struck.
And then there was Reverend Spear, as motionless as all the rest. He stared and stared, Neve’s splendor diminishing his own. He seemed to shrink before her eyes like a shadow at the rising of the sun.
Neve faced them all and smiled, and beheld the deepening ripple of their shock when her dress flushed from blue to flame, and when she walked past them, she felt like she was floating.
Maybe she was. Nothing seemed impossible now.
The corridor was wide, its ceiling vaulted high, and at the end of it, the ballroom glowed with a light too bright for lanterns.
He was already there. She felt it even before she heard the singing—the language of her dreams, wind through a forests’ worth of leaves—and she knew that the isle folk were crowding behind her as she drifted; she felt them, too, but with nothing like the pulse of radiance that drew her onward. They were the past, already receding.
In her spider-silk slippers, she came into the ballroom.
And there he was.
The senses have their limits, and we can never know how short they fall in revealing to us the truth of a vision, a scent, a sound. Gazing on the Dreamer, Neve felt herself careen into the boundary of her human limitations … and push past it. The others were left behind. They saw him too, but only a mirage of him.
Perhaps they saw a man.
He was not a man. Had she really thought he would be?
She had never been able to imagine him, but when she’d pictured this moment, Neve had thought she would go to him, that he would hold out his hand and she would take it. But how could she go to him when he did not stand on the ground?
He drifted above their heads, up amid the glittering bowers of paper snowflakes, precious glass icicles, and lanterns whose copper chains swayed with the draft of his wingbeats. The Dreamer had wings.
Of course he did.
He had found his black feathers, wherever they’d been buried, and they were as glossy now as they had been the day ages past when he shook them off to lay down to his dreaming. His hair was black, and wasn’t hair … not only. In one glimpse it was pelt, the next feathers, the next the bright obsidian of scales, and then again the long luxuriance of new-spun silk. He was dragon and bird and wolf and orchid and lightning bolt—and he was man, too. A thousand facets, he was like a jewel of infinite dimensions.
The facet he turned toward the gathering crowd was human, and so that was how Neve perceived him … mostly. He was darker than any person she had ever seen, his skin a deep umber, so rich with hue that the shadows cut by the planes of his face read as color to her artist’s eyes, too: indigos and violets, shades she associated with rarity and riches, because the dyes were so precious that only the best of embroiderers were allowed near those threads. His eyes weren’t color, though; they were black, in the way the sea is black under starlight, and she beheld the form and limbs of a man—though not clad and hidden as was “decent” and “proper” to human society as she knew it. She saw his body. His chest. The dip where muscles met to form a smooth channel to his navel.
His navel.
Looking up at the Dreamer, her head tilted back and every nerve alive, Neve became aware of her hands. The whole surface of them from palm to fingertips began to tingle, petitioning to discover the texture of those dark contours. This was a new sensation, and her lips were not immune to it.
Nor the tip of her tongue.
I wonder what his skin tastes like.
Neve’s face grew hot. She had woken the Dreamer, and now it was her turn to wake. It was like hatching out of a small, dark life into a great, unfathomable one, and the man before her, the god before her—above her, adrift in a sphere of his own radiance—was waiting to take her hand.
But how could she reach him?
She needn’t have worried. No sooner did she lift her own hand toward him than the rest of her began to rise—
I will lift you …
—and … to change. Her honeysuckle hair came unpinned, transforming, as it tumbled free, to a sheath of pale yellow feathers. For an instant, this concealed her other transformation, but only for an instant, because wings such as these could not be hidden.
A god of the old world took a girl into his arms, and she was no longer a girl. She was still herself, still flesh and blood, and still lovely—eye-bright, slender, smiling—but Neve was no longer human, not quite, and she was no longer bound to the earth. She beheld the sweep of her own new wings—the same pale yellow as her hair—and remembered when wanting had seemed futile. She reached for him.
Her hand, his hand—finally. The Dreamer drew Neve close and whispered his true name in her ear. Mystery flowed into her like music. The paper snowflakes detached themselves from the ceiling of Scarman’s Hall, and by the time they fluttered down to the upheld hands of the isle folk, they weren’t paper anymore.
All evening long, real snow would fall from the ceiling to glitter on the lashes of dancing girls and ardent boys, but Neve and the Dreamer didn’t linger.
They had other things to do: all of them. All the things, dreamed and undreamed, in the depth and breadth of the whole spinning world.
Amen.