Page 68 of Never the Roses

“Why would I have wanted that?” she asked, breathless, yearning, aching with grief, regret, and—bizarrely, given the moment—desire intermingled.

“Because I’m the only person who can understand the terrible power of what you did, the desperation that drove you to do it, and still offer forgiveness.”

Tears welled up in her eyes for the second time that day and she felt like that child she’d remembered being, wanting to sob in her mother’s arms. Only this time, the arms weren’t thrusting her away; they were holding her close, with something that felt like love. “How can you forgive?” she gasped, words broken through the choking sorrow. “I can’t forgive myself.”

“I forgive,” he answered, kissing her tears away. “It can be easier to forgive others what we cannot forgive ourselves. You committed a great wrong, but so have I.”

She believed that, given his reputation and the tales told of him. “I suppose neither of us has led a blameless life, but have you done anything this terrible?”

“Is there a measure of such things?” he asked, sounding bleak. “Some of what I’ve done weighs on me more than others and I can’t always say why it’s those and not the others. It’s not always themost deaths or the worst devastation. Certain faces, moments—those haunt me, give me nightmares.”

“I saw some of them,” she said, hesitating to confess it but feeling she should tell him. “When I first looked for you in the Dream, I caught a glimpse of your dreams—I didn’t mean to pry, but I can’t quite help seeing. Most people never know that I have.”

“Unless you tell them.”

“Unless I tell them,” she agreed, “which I’ve never done before.”

“Why tell me now?”

“It feels important, because of… this.”

“This?” He stroked his hand over her bottom and down to her thigh, lifting her leg so it draped over his hip, snugging them together, her gown riding up.

“Perhaps,” she answered breathlessly, tipping her head back to see his face.

“Can you banish my nightmares?” he asked abruptly, a tinge of hope in his voice. “I’ve heard of oneiromancers who—”

She laid a finger over his lips, stopping the flow of words. He kissed her fingertip, drawing it gently into his mouth in a way both physically stirring and somehow sweetly intimate. Her heart, always a stone lump in her chest, fractured a little, riddled with longing for more and more and more.

“I can’t do that for you,” she told him with regret, “though another kind of oneiromancer, one trained in mental healing, could. Think of me as a devastating flood when you’re asking for a bit of rain. I’m just not able to work with that kind of precision.”

He curled his stern lip in disdain. “You’re the only one I’d trust inside my head. I’ll pass.”

“That’s a disturbing level of contradiction, that you’d trust me when you know what I’m capable of doing.”

“But will never do again, as you’ve demonstrated by living thislife. You’ve done your best to atone, to take steps to create instead of destroy.”

She shouldn’t accept the comfort he offered. She didn’t deserve any of it, and yet she couldn’t make herself push him away. This rough and powerful sorcerer did understand, astonishingly enough. Still, she had to laugh, the sound bitterly cutting. “Growing a few roses—that we don’t know yet will survive and that were fine where they were—hardly makes a dent in the sheer scale of what I destroyed.”

“It’s not a mathematical equation, Oneira,” he replied softly. “All we can do is try.” His lips, trailing down her wet cheeks, found her mouth, kissing her with salt-tinged sweetness. This time, as his hands traveled over her, the desire lost that keen, desperate edge of before, instead swelling like throbbing music, the softer strains of grief waxing into something greater, deeper, more profound. She caressed his bare chest, not digging her fingers into him like claws of need this time, but savoring his skin with cautious fingertips, then tasting him with lips and tongue as he murmured her name and pulled away enough to draw her gown over her head.

Naked against him, she devoured his skin, that lean, hard body with its myriad scars covering the entirety of him. With lips and hands, with her own skin, she consumed him with a hunger less avid than languid, as if she absorbed him through her pores, a healing balm that penetrated to her darkest, agonized depths. His caresses were a benediction, his kisses a psalm of reverence and joy. She hadn’t expected to find this sort of peace, this swelling joy, in another person. She’d only experienced the like in the clean, thin air of the peaks or the surging of the sea against the sand or in the rustling leaves of the forest, the dense buzzing of honeybees on heavy-headed blossoms, the thick silence of whitesnow piling up against her walls. They were of a piece, all of it, she realized. And this, too, was life.

As Stearanos murmured words of sensual affection, touching her as if needing to explore every hollow and crevice, as he moved against and then inside her, she found the shredded tatters of her heart drawing together, not healing, not whole, not yet, but no longer shedding blood, no longer waving in a storm wind and eroding into less and less and less. In its place, there seemed to be a growing and filling, a sense of more than there had been in a very long time.

She cried out her completion against him, shuddering and dissolving along with him, he chanting her name over and over so that it sounded like a low song, the sort a wolf might howl, or a whale or loon call, one end blending into the beginning of an infinite loop.

Oneironeironeironeiro.

They lay intertwined, shrouded in shifting darkness, their edges blurring into the other, magic blending into new shades. She was unwilling to move or speak, not wanting to shatter the fragile bubble of peace. Not quite an illusion, but a delusion, perhaps. Nothing that could last.

“Oneira,” Stearanos murmured, “look at your dream.”

She opened bleary eyes, muzzy with tears and the dregs of overwhelming desire, and turned her head to look. No longer filled with the barren landscape of Govirinda, the dome billowed and furled with roses, the iridescent indigo of Veredian rose petals made a shifting sea of loveliness, a paean to color. Oddly, of hope. Of blooming in the full dark of midwinter.

“This, too, is part of you,” Stearanos murmured, one hard thigh sliding between hers, his big hand flat against the small of her back. He kissed her, drawing her gaze away from the spectacle. “This is you, Oneira.”

She considered that with some wonder. It had been so long since she’d thought of herself as anything but a destroyer, a generator of nightmares and death and destruction. And here she was, a woman sticky with being made love to, perhaps having made love in return, being held as if she were something precious rather than vile. “The roses were only entrusted to me,” she answered, even knowing it wasn’t a direct answer, even though Stearanos hadn’t asked a question. “I didn’t create them.”

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