Page 63 of Never the Roses

“So that I wouldn’t become whatyouare,” she spat, aiming to wound and noting her success as he flinched and paled, as surely as if she had flung a night terror at him. “You can find your way out.”

She turned her back on him, and fled.

32

Stearanos sat there by himself for a long while, only Oneira’s animals keeping him quiet company. The garden was so lovely and peaceful, so full of riotous color, soft sounds of nature and sweet redolence, that he hated he’d been the one to bring the horrors of war and the brutality of the outside world into it. But those creeping wounds from violence would find their own way in to permanently destroy not only this pocket of paradise, but everything good and lovely in all the world.

For the sake of the world, he couldn’t leave Oneira to her well-earned peace.

Thus, eventually, he went to find her. He wouldn’t leave things between them so unresolved, not with her so upset. She’d exhibited wilder behavior than he’d ever expected to witness from the preternaturally calm sorceress. Passion boiled beneath that ice she’d layered over her heart to keep from feeling all she felt. He should have known, because he was the same.

He found her in a large room at the center of the house, the white walls devoid of decoration. All that kept it from being entirely empty—besides her—was a rectangular block shaped like an altar that seemed to merge seamlessly with the floor. Fresh flowers from the garden adorned it, draping over the pristine surface with verdant and colorful glory.

Oneira sat on the floor with her back braced against it, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around them, head bent and turned so one cheek rested against her knees, her hair a brilliant, crimson cloak falling all around her, calling out notes from the flowerssurrounding her. A sunbeam sifted in from a skylight overhead, illuminating the tableau with warmth that only highlighted her crumpled posture. Stearanos briefly wished to be a painter with the skill to capture it all.Oneira in Despair, he’d call it.

“I thought I told you to leave,” she said tonelessly, without raising her head or otherwise acknowledging his presence.

“You issued a statement of fact,” he corrected. “I can, indeed, find my way out. You did not tell me to leave.”

She lifted her head then, silver eyes fulminous. “You really want to quibble semantics?”

“When it lets me stay a bit longer to talk this through, yes.”

“Stearanos,” she sighed his name wearily, “go a—”

“Don’t,” he interrupted. “Please. Let me stay a little longer.”

“I don’t see the point,” she replied, but didn’t tell him to go.

“About what I’m asking,” he began, “you would only—”

“You know what war is, Stearanos?” she asked, her gaze as keen as Moriah’s. “It’s all dick-swinging. All men wanting to be the herd bull.”

He couldn’t really argue that. “What about your queen?”

“She’s not mine,” she answered immediately. “Besides, she’s the same, lacking an actual dick or not. Just glorified monkeys, the lot of them, flinging poo and trying to hog all the bananas.”

He choked on his laugh, though she remained bitterly serious. “Where does that put us—which animal metaphor are we?”

“We’re monkeys, too, ones with more power than a monkey should ever have. And do we use it to make sure there are bananas for everyone? No.”

“Maybe we still could.”

She smiled, briefly, slightly, wistfully. “That would be something.”

Heartened, he stepped closer, running light fingers over theprecise edge of the altar. No, not an altar at all, he realized. “Is this a bier?” he asked, almost to himself.

She gazed up at him, a vulnerability in her expression he hadn’t anticipated. “Dramatic, isn’t it?” she asked, though it wasn’t really a question. Uncoiling gracefully to her feet, she rearranged a spray of what he’d call baby’s breath. “This was one of the first things I installed when I built this house. The centerpiece, as it were.”

“You came here to die,” he realized with a frisson of cold horror, the possibility that she’d have passed from the world without him ever having met her like an arrow to the gut.

She slid him a sideways look, tucking a long lock of hair behind her ear, shrugging one shoulder. “In a vague way, yes. I was… in a state, I suppose the court ladies would say. I was too numb to decide anything, but I made this bier, yes, and the hall to hold it. See how the skylight lets the light fall just so? I had this image of laying myself upon it, and decaying gracefully in the white-walled silence of this space.” She shrugged again, huffing a nonlaugh. “As I said, dramatic. But I find I like putting the flowers on it every day, a kind of ritual acknowledgment of why I came here and how I may eventually still go.”

“How would you do it?” he asked, both to ascertain how close she’d come and to match it with his ideas of how he might make his own escape.

“I’m not entirely sure. At first I was so exhausted, so… empty, that I thought I could simply lie down and drift away. If that didn’t work, I thought I’d simply step into the Dream and not return.”

His scalp prickled at the idea of being lost in the Dream for all eternity. “Don’t you take your body into the Dream?”

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