Page 4 of Never the Roses

Bunny nipped a green tomato from the basket and ate it, grinning at her.

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Full winter enclosed the white halls of Oneira’s fastness, layers of drifted snow washing against the high-walled garden like the foaming surf lashing the cliffs below, the blizzarding clouds swirling over the forever-frozen peaks above.

Winter days flowed quietly, with fewer sojourns into the world outside her walls. The heavy snows piled in waves against the gates, sealing them closed, and she didn’t care to free them. Sometimes rows of days passed when she didn’t venture outside, instead reading her books by the fire or in her dome surrounded by snowfall, getting up only to make soup, or turn the bread dough. Bunny and Adsila went in and out, but she’d quickly tired of playing servant to them. She might be embracing humility of circumstance, but she hated to be disturbed while reading. Or disturbed at all. Old habits die hard.

So, she spent a morning creating egress and ingress for her self-invited living companions. For Adsila, she added an aerie to the top of the house, not high enough to interfere with the view from her tower, but enough to satisfy the bird’s desire for a lofty roost. She made it cozy enough for security, then added glass for viewing the landscape. It was simple enough to set a ward on the glass, as the goddess’s bird could come and go freely, as if it didn’t exist.

The solution to Bunny’s independence took a bit more doing. In the summer, it had been simple enough to leave the glass doors open to the warm air, but the winter winds blew less kindly.Though Oneira’s fire burned without wood, and she could warm the house by pulling from dreams of hot summer lands, she discovered she disliked cold drafts nearly as much as being interrupted. And Bunny, accustomed to roaming the high peaks, liked to get out and frolic in the snow until he’d resemble a creature crafted from ice rather than pure magic. Then he’d roar in again, like an ice-ridden alpine wind, scattering snow—and snowmelt—on his hurtling path to the fire, where he’d roll belly-up until he reached roasting temperatures. Then he’d repeat the process.

Thenth time Oneira stepped barefoot into a shockingly cold puddle of melt on her warm stone floors, she shrieked, pulled from deep thoughts, and seriously considered at least singeing an unrepentant Bunny. Instead she made a tunnel. It burrowed beneath the house wall and emerged some distance away in the garden. She would not make a ground-level access to her home from outside the walls, wards or no. That was a nonstarter. Bunny could stay in the garden for the winter before she’d risk that. Oneira trusted her skills in wardmaking only so far.

The tunnel functioned to cut the drafts and to absorb the water shed by Bunny as he raced through it. By the time he emerged into the house proper, he had dry fur again. Pleased with herself, Oneira considered the tasks well-accomplished and she turned back to her studies.

But magic liked to be used and her spell-working had tickled awake old habits and inclinations. Restlessness filled her, her agile mind no longer satisfied with making soup and baking bread. She sometimes walked with Bunny in the garden, donning her fur cloak she’d made from a dream of arctic climes, treading the weaving paths he’d tamped down in his circling. The snow rose on either side of her at hip height, the trees draping heavily laden branches nearly to the ground so it seemed at times that she moved through a tunnel of black, leafless skeletons fleshed insnow dropped again in sifts and clods, the landscape as bizarre and unreal as any she might tread within the Dream.

If she allowed her fancy to take her there, the soft plopping and the visual comparison to flesh melting from bone could remind her of the nightmare aftermath of battlefields. Or of lands destroyed without the opportunity to raise even a word of objection, like at Govirinda, the job that had tempted her with a startling revelation, the alluring possibility of ending the years of growing, restless dread. The one that had paid her enough to allow her to retire, to exile herself and leave it all behind. That guaranteed she’d never again open the Dream to bring in nightmare monsters to reduce a population of hundreds of thousands to sludge dripping from bones.

A quiet whuff from Bunny told her she’d stopped and was staring darkly at a pile of limbs half-buried in snow. They looked nothing like the mortal corpses of the dream that had invaded her mind, dredged up from memories that refused to be purged, and yet… She’d stood there long enough for her feet to grow cold and numb, and for the normally ebullient wolf to tug at the hem of her cloak with gentle teeth. Absently patting him on the head, she resumed walking, resting her hand on Bunny’s shoulders as he paced beside her. He steered them back toward the house, showing a concern that she wasn’t entirely sure how to wrestle.

As they approached the house, white on white against the gray sky, asomethingshifted. Oneira halted, not quite alarmed, Bunny mirroring her stillness, lifting his muzzle to sniff the snowflake-dense air. Adsila burst out of her aerie above, a streak of rust-and-blue smoke, cutting through the mist in skipping bursts. Oneira’s mind did likewise, leaping along the smooth surface of her wards. No breaks, no intrusions or testing.

And yet, asomethingwas somehow inside her wards and walls, arriving without a ripple of the many alerts that should’ve keptit out. “Who are you?” she asked on a whisper, threading it with a command to reveal itself truly. Under Oneira’s hand, Bunny quivered, but didn’t move.

A shape undulated out of the lacy curtain of falling snow, white going to gray and darkening to black as deep as shadowy corners on a moonless night. Graceful as smoke, liquid and dancing on great, soft paws, the cat flowed toward her, emerald eyes penetrating the mist with a sharpness at odds with all of its otherwise fluidity.

Ah.The knowledge came to Oneira on the wings of a dream. “Lady Moriah,” she murmured. The cat’s whiskers twitched up in a half smile, eyes glittering. The antimage, the witch’s familiar, the feline in form but not function, repository of all the spells in the world. Before this moment, Oneira would have called Moriah a myth, a simple metaphor for the techniques ancient witches used to cast enchantments. But then, she’d also have called She Who Eats Bears a construct of human longing for a protective deity and thescáthcúnothing more than a tale told to ambitious young wizards hoping to shortcut indentured servitude.

Third time’s a charm. Why these semimythical creatures had converged upon her aloneness, Oneira had no idea. She was no apantomancer, to work magic through chance encounters with animals. If these truly were chance encounters. She rather thought otherwise, but she also could no more refuse this guest than she had the others. She sighed and swept a hand at the house.

The three of them went in through the door to the kitchen, the side that faced the ocean and thus was regularly swept bare by the offshore winds. Adsila arrowed in over their heads, making one loop before exiting to her aerie. Moriah gave the bird a thoughtful, watchful glance. “Only if you care to anger a goddess,” Oneira advised, figuring Adsila was on her own in thisbattle. Oneira had retired, after all, and was done with assisting anyone in their wars.

Moriah gave the feline equivalent of a shrug and ambled her way through the kitchen and into the rest of the house, looking it over thoroughly before finding Oneira’s bier and leaping onto it. She swiped away a few of the dried garlands, then stretched herself out on the white stone, tail draping lavishly over one side nearly to the floor.

Oneira considered objecting, but she’d already said more words in a row than she had in weeks, possibly months, and found herself wearied. It had been an unusual day, what with Moriah’s arrival and the uncanny visitation of that nightmare of her ultimate crime at Govirinda, and she apparently had lost all resilience for accommodating even the smallest variations in her days. She’d sought the numbing sameness of isolation and the gentle abyss of the blank slate. That had meant forgetting and thinking of nothing at all. Even the words of the books she read had slid into and out of her mind without leaving a trace.

With the advent of Moriah, Lady of Night and holder of all the spells of the world, things changed. Not to discount the disturbances created by Bunny and Adsila, but Moriah had tipped the balance, permanently disturbing the frozen sea of Oneira’s mind. Thoughts trickled in through the cracks, small green shoots thrusting through the desolate frozen soil of her being.

She still submerged her waking hours in reading, sleeping, making soup, and baking bread, but the words she read ran around in her thoughts as they hadn’t before. They marched in columns and reassembled themselves into new formations. When she slept, she dreamed of words. These dreams didn’t come real, of course, as she’d long since mastered disconnecting her sorcery from her dreaming mind. Still, she dreamed vividlyof lines of text, running backward and forward, upside down and sideways, the glyphs breaking up and rearranging.

For the first time since the moment she’d dumped out the chest of coin at Queen Zarja’s feet, Oneira considered what shewasdoing. She’d rained a pile of bloodstained gold to drip down the stairs of the dais and told the queen and that roomful of astonished men to consider her debt paid and beyond, that she was done with them and their wars, to release her from the blood geas, that she was leaving and to disturb her at their peril.

“But what of Stearanos Stormbreaker?” Queen Zarja had demanded, barely suppressing the quaver in her voice. “Without you here, there’s nothing to stop the Northern Lands from wielding him against us. We’ll be conquered.”

“Don’t tell them I’m gone,” Oneira replied. Stearanos and what he might or might not do was no longer her problem. “I’ll go in secrecy and stay in secret, but Iamgoing.”

She went, and she’d gone on to find the place, build the house, ward against intruders, learn to sustain her life until she made the final decision to be done with it, to embrace the death she’d earned as surely as she’d earned those gold coins.

All of it had consumed her. But it had all occupied her as dreams devour a sleeper.

The time had passed in a mist of snowfall and summer leaves and ocean spray. Now, like a dreamer awakening, she wondered what she’d been looking for in all those books she’d read. At first she’d immersed herself in books because she finally had the long stretches of time to read everything she wanted to. All her life, she’d collected books, depositing them in the house she’d never truly lived in, in the suites of rooms in castles, palaces, and citadels that had been hers and not.

Her life had been an itinerant one, moving at the behest of the queen, or those requiring her services enough to pay her exorbitantprices. The time she’d spent in her ostensible home had been limited to visits to a place that felt more unfamiliar than the fortresses, forts, and castles she’d returned to again and again. One thing had become abundantly clear over the course of her career: the same places formed the nexus of the most trouble.

The abodes of those warlords had become more familiar to her than her own titular home. In some cases, they’d maintained a suite of rooms for her, kept solely for her use, furnished grandly and lavishly, always a reflection of what they thought she should like. Never had anyone asked her what she actually liked. To be fair, if they had, she wouldn’t have had an answer for them. The house that had belonged to her hadn’t held anything she particularly liked either. People gave her things. Gifts as payment, as tribute, as hints, to curry favor. Spoils of war that smelled eternally of the blood spilled to take them and echoed with silent screams of agony and injustice. She’d deposited them all in that house.

And when it came time to leave, she’d taken only the books. All those books she never read, all the more valuable because she couldn’t pull them from the Dream. For some reason, people didn’t dream in printed characters. Books from the Dream looked real enough on the surface, but the pages of the books they dreamed came glued together or were always out of focus, the words formed of nonsense shapes.

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