Page 66 of Never the Roses

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Oneira didn’t quite credit his stated motivation, but she’d also never had a friend, so she wouldn’t know. Certainly no one had ever offered to listen to what pained her. At the same time, Stearanos truly didn’t know the extent of what she’d done in her desperation to escape the trap she’d found herself in, the damage she’d done as a result. She didn’t think she could bear to see the look in his eyes when he knew the truth.

But telling him—showing him in vivid detail what she was—would also serve to send him away forever, which is what she needed to happen. She only wished he’d taken her up on the offer of sex first. Who knew that the ruthless sorcerer with his rapacious ways and frank invitations would be the one to hold back, to cling to niceties?

He stood there before her, the hard planes of his chest bare to her gaze and still showing the marks of her teeth and nails, his lean face almost ascetic, silver-limned braids snaking over his broad shoulders, asking about her troubled history instead of plowing her as most mindless men would have. She wanted to put her hands on him again, but it seemed she was fated to never have a man inside her as long as she lived. Fitting.

“I won’t make it through the recitation, but if you trust me, I can show you,” she said.

“I trust you,” he replied with a quirk of his stern mouth.

“Then you’re a fool.”

“A fair accusation.”

“A loving insight,” she corrected wryly, “regarding your arguably self-destructive behavior. Come with me.” She led the way to her dome, wondering to herself why she was doing this. Perhaps Stearanos wondered, too, as he followed only after a long moment of hesitation.

“Where are we going?” he finally asked as they climbed the spiraling staircase to the tower. Then, before she could answer, he added, “To my eternal doom, I suppose. This is when I’ll be immolated by Dream fire and catapulted from the cliffs.”

“If I immolated you in Dream fire,” she replied, nearly laughing despite the queasiness of her gut, “I wouldn’t have to pitch you from the cliffs as there’d be nothing left of you.”

“How do you know?” he countered. “There might be a few bone shards and ash.”

“All right,” she agreed, “any ash residue I would sweep off the cliffs, but I’d retain the bone shards for witchcraft.”

“Do you know witchcraft?”

“No,” she admitted readily, “but I’m well educated and thus know that the bones of powerful sorcerers are much in demand.” She banished the final ward and politely gestured Stearanos into the domed room.

He stepped in and whistled, low and long, turning in a slow circle with hands on hips, surveying the expanse of sea, forest, mountains, and sky, all brought startlingly close by the fine and flawless crystal. “This is incredible, Oneira,” he breathed, and she flushed at the sincere praise, surprisingly pleased and terribly flustered by it. “You made it from the Dream?” he asked, glancing at her.

“Yes. If it can be dreamt, I can make it—with the suitable caveats and explanations attached to that statement, of course.”

“I wish you could teach me.” He actually sounded wistful. Enough so that she briefly considered what it would take toground him in a few principles of oneiromancy. Before she could reply, he spoke again, his head tipped all the way back as he scanned the sky. “I feel as if I’m flying above the world.”

“The crystal does that, makes it all feel much closer.”

Sliding her a look, he raised a brow. “Should I mention how flimsily you warded the access?”

She waved that consideration aside. “Enough to dissuade a curious young poet from invading my privacy. I wasn’t trying to keep out someone like you.”

He grinned at her, that wolfish baring of teeth that shattered the granite sternness of his hard-lined face, a smile that shouldn’t be remotely charming—with none of Tristan’s artless sweetness—and yet affected her so much more profoundly. “I’m flattered to be welcomed into the heart of your home, if not into your own heart. Why here?” he asked, sparing her the need to reply to that outrageous remark.

“Lie back and be comfortable. This is the easiest way for me to show you.”

Looking bemused and incongruous, the big man lowered himself to the cushion-strewn floor, picking up a pillow and giving it a long look. “These are a bit… uncanny.”

“From dreams,” she explained. “Bits and snatches of people’s dreams that I left in them. I think they’re pretty.”

With a noncommittal whuff of breath, he bunched up a few of the uncanny pillows to prop up his head and, kicking his feet around, squirmed himself into a relatively comfortable position. Folding his arms, he stared at her expectantly—and like a man who suspected he might soon be the butt of a joke.

Oneira accessed the Dream, opening a small portal that allowed it to infuse the crystal of the dome with its darkness, but confined there through her will. Though dreams weren’t restricted to the night, they flourished there best, and the absenceof light is the fabric of the Dream, like rich soil from which plants grow. The Dream swirled over and around them now, a deep and fantastical fog. Stearanos made a sound, a grunt of wary surprise.

“It’s only a representation of the Dream,” she reassured him. “A projection of my mind to this substrate. It can’t pull you in or disorder your perceptions.”

“Ah,” he breathed. “Is this how you see the Dream? It’s different from how I perceived it, those glimpses through the doorway you opened in my library.”

“The Dream is as different for everyone as our own dreams differ from one another, but yes—this is how the Dream appears to me.”

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