Page 34 of Never the Roses

Oneira Dreamthief faced him without flinching. Far from the ancient sorceress he’d expected, she was young, possibly younger than he. That only added to the galling fact that she’d paid off her debts when he hadn’t even come close. He’d fully expected to be justified in all of his assumptions about her, including that she deserved his hatred. It pissed him off to discover otherwise.

He also hadn’t expected her to be beautiful. And he found himself unreasonably angry about that, too. Her exterior should be as corrupt as the charnel house of her soul. But then, his own internal monstrosity didn’t show on the outside either, for the most part. Her hair—an extraordinary shade of crimson that should have made it into the tales about her, instead of being called “red”—hung long and loose like a cloak about her tall willowy form, stirring in the ocean breeze. She had the fawn-colored, lightly freckled skin of that hair type, her eyes a gray so light they looked almost silver. With her strong cheekbones, firm jaw, and high-bridged nose, she wouldn’t have been pretty as a girl, but as a mature woman, her unusual features catapulted her beyond striking into breathtakingly gorgeous.

The luster of magic only added to her imposing presence. She stood there, in a plain gown, wearing her animal companions as a court lady might accessorize with jewels. Stearanos narrowed his eyes, studying the creatures, all appearing as relaxed as the Dreamthief herself, none of them fooling him. The huge cat, a glossy obsidian with scintillating emerald eyes, gazed at himunblinking, a hint of unsheathed claws peeking from the fringe of her great paws, no doubt poised to eviscerate him, given half the chance. Though he’d only ever read about her, he recognized the cat immediately.

“Moriah, Lady of Night,” he said, bowing courteously, ratcheting back the fireball spell a notch. “I have no quarrel with you.”

If Oneira was surprised that he knew the cat, she didn’t reveal it. In truth, the sorceress’s coldly composed face showed nothing of her thoughts. With a queasy sense of uncertainty, he considered that this could be part of the trap she’d devised, that—instead of him taking her by surprise with his sudden attack—she’d deliberately lured him here, to her home territory, to somehow sabotage his ability to fight the coming war, or to do away with him entirely. He readied himself to throw the fireballs, just in case, running the calculations in his mind on velocity, trajectory, and heat yield to soothe his building anxiety.

It had been a risk, coming after her. Perhaps a fatal one.

“Eminence Stearanos,” Moriah replied in a smooth, purring voice, astonishing him so much that he might’ve missed Oneira’s quick, startled glance at the cat, if he hadn’t been watching her so closely. “If you quarrel with my friend, you quarrel with me.”

Stearanos covered his own surprise. Legend said Moriah could speak, but legends made many outrageous and untrue claims. “Even if your ‘friend’ crossed the line with me first, casting spells upon me and mine, stealing from me?” he demanded.

“Even so,” she replied placidly, a hint of a hiss on the final word.

“Enviable loyalty,” he commented to Oneira, who watched him again, as coolly as the cat. His gaze went to the kestrel on her shoulder, taking in the rust-and-sapphire plumage, the hint of the numinous showing in the bright-gold ring in its otherwise black eyes. This was the avatar he’d sensed in his library, thewhiff light as a night-blooming flower wafting on the sea breeze from far away. His sense of unease grew. Who was Oneira that a goddess had gifted her with this avatar? Was She Who Eats Bears on the side of the Southern Lands in this ill-advised conquest? This began to look worse and worse.

“Adsila,” he said, identifying the bird with a sense of satisfaction. Not being able to previously had gnawed at him the way trying to recall a once-familiar name did. “Avatar of She Who Eats Bears. I have no quarrel with your goddess either.”

The kestrel did not acknowledge him beyond fixing him with the keen gaze of a predator.

Not caring for the feeling of being nothing more than a mouse, Stearanos put his attention on the giant, white wolf, apparently fabricated whole cloth from magic. He couldn’t place the creature in any particular tale or mythology, except that it had to be one of thescáthcú, rumored to run wild in the high mountains of this realm. “I apologize that I don’t know your name,scáthcú,” he said, “but I have no quarrel with your kind either.” The wolf bared daunting fangs at him, flicking out a forked, black tongue, and growled.

Oneira soothed the beast, her hand on its shoulders where it stood at her side, as high as her hip, even with her height. Her long, golden-pale fingers combed through the creature’s fur, a casual display of affection. “He came to me without a name,” she said, her words nearly as much of a surprise as Moriah’s at this point. Stearanos had rather thought she’d determined not to speak another word to him, quiversful of silent and accusing arrows in her arsenal. “I call him Bunny,” she said, raising one brow at him, clearly expecting him to make the connection.

He stared at her, more than a little flabbergasted. Was that a hint of humor? She was toying with him, if so, not behaving at all as if he’d just toppled her wards like a child’s building blocks.

“Bunny,” he repeated, thinking of the epic tale of the beastly little bunny in the children’s book and the fanged, ravenous rabbit she’d inserted into his dreams. If this was another trick to twist up his mind, she was master-level genius in her subtlety. He should have expected that of the Dreamthief.

She was bold, he’d give her that, rather admirably so, since he should have her more or less at his mercy. He’d timed the attack carefully, aiming for midday when the Dream should have less power. Not that he expected her to be without resources, just with her most powerful weapon weakened. The fact that she showed no fear at all had him wondering if he’d been overconfident, if she knew something he didn’t, something like the potential trap that worried him.

In truth, he’d expected to find her gone into the Dream when he arrived on her doorstep, and added grudging respect for her courage and tenacity to the list of things he didn’t want to like about her. To make up for both his attraction and his concern, he advanced on her, amping up the fire in his fists, willing her to flinch, to give evidence that she knew he had the upper hand here. “Surrender to my demands.”

She only raised her chin defiantly.

“Cat got your tongue?” he chided.

Bizarrely, a slight smile bent her lips, a trace of nostalgia in it. “Is that a common turn of phrase in your realm?” she inquired, as if they were having tea instead of squaring off for a duel of epic proportions, the sort the bards would sing of for centuries, if only there were witnesses. “Someone else from your general part of the world recently asked me the same question,” she explained.

“Clearly you have a habit of silence,” he retorted.

“Clearly,” she allowed, and said nothing more.

The sound of the sea filled the quiet that fell between them, thick and fraught with the potential for disaster.

“I want my books back,” he told her, regretting the words the moment he spoke them. Bad strategy to repeat a demand—it made it clear to both parties that the terms had been implicitly denied once already, casting him as the weaker of the two.

She waited a beat, punctuating that she recognized his misstep. “So you already mentioned.”

He waited the same beat, then put his threat on the table. “I broke your wards. I can break you.”

“Over a novel I promised to return?” She posed the question so lightly that she made him sound absurd.

He clenched his fists, magic boiling in his frustration. “Don’t play stupid, Dreamthief. You took more than a novel. Besides, you and I both know that your theft is merely emblematic. You wanted this confrontation or you’d never have violated the sanctity of my home. You picked this fight; now you have it.”

Oddly, she smiled at that, still seeming bizarrely amused by the whole exchange. “In truth, Stormbreaker, I didn’t.”

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