The Sash saw me and didn’t even slow down. I saw a smile form on his face, and suddenly realized this Sash was a woman.
“Degan!” I said again, “Sash!” This time it came out louder.
I heard a yell behind me and the sound of feet scrambling for purchase in the mud.
The Sash was practically on top of me. Her smile was wide and genuine and cruel, and it made her beautiful in the beaded amber of my night vision. I found myself wanting to say something to the woman who was about to kill me: to tell her how lovely she was, how graceful, how much she reminded me of my sister, but reality was working faster than my mind by that point. I was still figuring out the words when she raised her sword and swatted me aside with its guard.
The blow spun me as I fell. I caught a glimpse of Degan drawing his own blade even as his back foot slid out from under him and he began to fall down the ramp. Larrios was behind, yelling something I could no longer hear, a dripping leather sack clutched to his chest. And the Sash-she was in midleap, her sword held high, her teeth flashing in the night.
Then I was facing the ground, watching it come up toward me. I thought I heard myself say, “Ana,” but it might have been my mind playing with me again. I hit the mud, and the world became a dark and quiet place.
Chapter Eighteen
I was running through the forest. Trees flashed by on either side, and I leapt over roots and rotting logs with ease. Through the leaves overhead, the sky shone the brilliant blue I remembered from my youth, and I suddenly knew where I was-home, in the Balsturan Forest.
But I was me-Drothe the Nose, older, jaded, with a rapier slapping at my side. The youth I should have been was absent, leaving me in his place. I didn’t know why, but I felt that this was a good thing-that I could do something the teen could not.
Then I heard the screams and the sound of steel on steel, and I remembered. This was the day it all ended. This was the day my life became a twisted, broken thing. This was the day they killed my stepfather, Sebastian, and the day any hope I had ever had of family died.
I pushed myself harder, tried to move faster, but my left leg was suddenly filled with pain. I looked down to see blood running from it, leaving a trail of red in the forest behind me. I howled and kept going.
I limped and stumbled, ran and ducked as best I could. The cottage was too far and I was too slow. The boy I had been could run faster, but he’d be helpless once he got there. It had to be me-I could stop this. I had to stop this!
I burst from the trees, half running, half falling, and stumbled over my mother’s grave, long overgrown with grass. My rapier fell from my hand. I pushed myself up.
I expected to see Sebastian, my stepfather, just finishing off one assassin as a second took careful aim with a crossbow and shot him down. I expected to see Christiana, thirteen years old, lying unconscious in the doorway, blood running from her head. I expected to see the agony that had seared itself into my mind all those years ago.
Instead, I saw a marble-paved courtyard, its walls covered with flowering vines. A fountain, carved from rose-colored stone and resembling a collection of those same flowers, stood in the center of the place. Water gurgled gently from each stone rose, spilling across the petals and collecting in the sunken pool at the fountain’s base. Sunlight spilled in from windows cut in one of the walls, turning the puddles on the paving stones to molten fire.
The place smelled green and fresh and alive; I didn’t trust it.
Toward the garden’s back corner stood a woman dressed in loose golden pants and a fitted brown jerkin. She was looking out the window, her back to me. Her hair was an unremarkable shade of brown, tied back in a short tail with a piece of white ribbon. Tiny silver bells hung from the end of the ribbon.
The woman didn’t turn as I stood up. I scanned the ground for my sword, didn’t see it. Must have left it in the other dream.
I took a step-my leg felt fine again-and another before the woman spoke.
“Why do you want the book?” she said as she reached out and plucked a white rose from a vine running up the wall.
Degan no doubt would have come back with a witty reply of some sort; Jelem would have replied with something caustic enough to get himself kicked back into consciousness; me, I simply blurted out, “What the hell is it to you?”
The hand holding the rose made a dismissive gesture. “It would take too long to explain, and we don’t have the time.” She brought the flower to her face, then turned toward me. Suddenly, we were less than a foot apart. I almost fell over as I took a hasty step backward.
She breathed in over the rose, her eyes closed, and she smiled. “Memory always makes them sweeter,” she said wistfully. Then she tossed the flower aside and looked at me.
Up to that point, I would have called her unremarkable-plain mouth, thin nose, small forehead, with dark brown hair tousled carelessly on top. But when she lifted her lids and displayed the gold-touched jade that resided beneath them, I knew I wouldn’t be forgetting her.
“Frankly,” she said, ignoring-or perhaps, counting on-the effect her eyes had on me, “I’m impressed you’re still alive. It speaks well for you. But if you keep stumbling around as you have been, even that degan you have in tow won’t be able to save you.”
“How-” I began, but my words came out slow and muffled. The woman waved her hand impatiently, twice as fast as I knew I could move my own.
“Don’t worry about the ‘how,’ Drothe. Focus on the ‘who.’ Who else knows? Who is after you? You’re a popular boy lately, and I’m the least of the players in this game.”
I almost laughed at that last bit. You don’t step into another person’s dream without being someone-but I knew better than to argue. If she wanted me to know who she was, she’d tell me; and if not… Well, there was nothing I could do to make her.
“All right,” I said, each word sitting like softened lead in my mouth, “who wants the book? And why?”
Now it was her turn to stare, but only for a moment. Then she tilted her head back and laughed. The bells in her hair chimed in counterpoint to her mirth.
“You mean you don’t know?” she said. “You have Ioclaudia’s book, and you don’t even know what this is all about?” She met my gaze, a wide smile on her face. The smile was almost as captivating as her eyes. “Oh, this is too good.”
Ioclaudia’s book? Athel had given me the name of the author? No wonder I hadn’t been able to track her down-if the book was as old as I was starting to think, Ioclaudia had been dead for centuries.
I looked at the woman before me. Bells. And books. And then it hit me.
“Princess,” I said, sketching a deep, ironic bow.
She’d been the one outside Fedim’s shop, the one who had jingled as she walked away while I crouched in the sewer. Iron Degan was hers. Which meant I was talking with a Gray Prince. Princess. The Gray Princess.
“It’s ‘Prince,’ ” she said, sounding almost embarrassed. “And it’s nice to know you can at least figure something out.”
“What I’ve figured out,” I said, my temper rising, “is that I have Cutters, White Sashes, a couple of Blades-not to mention your pet degan-after me. But I haven’t figured out why. Now, if you think that’s amusing, you can shut this garden down and find someone else to play dream games with, because I have better things to do.”
I turned to walk out of the garden and suddenly found myself seated on a bench beside the fountain. There hadn’t been any benches in the courtyard before. The woman was sitting next to me.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. Coming from her, the words didn’t sound so much like an apology as a simple statement of fact. “I had just figured that anyone involved this deeply would know the stakes.”