She tried harder to wake, then, to force her eyes open, to pry apart the wall of sleep and step through. But when she did, she was back in the room, and the red light was stronger, the door swung wider, and the shadow stepped in. Her skin felt a thousand stings, as if she lay in a bath of scorpions, and she woke, and it all started again . . .
She sat up and heard a voice screaming, which she took a moment to understand was her own. Her chest heaved as she clutched at strange bedclothes and prayed this was finally an end to sleep, and not another trick of the Mary. Then she felt the pain in her leg where the arrow had pierced her, and looked around in a fresh panic. She’d awakened before, not knowing where she was, not recognizing anything, and then gradually realizing she was in a familiar place made strange by the linger of dream. But as she stared about the room, it did not become familiar.
The lapping of her dream turned out to be the fire in the hearth a few yards away. Heavy tapestry drapes covered the windows, so she couldn’t tell if it was day or night. A wolf pelt lay flat on the floor, and near the fire there was a loom and a stool to sit at it. Other than that, there was only a door, wooden and solid with iron bands.
She threw back the bedclothes. She wore an amber dressing gown worked with golden roses on the hem. She pulled it up until she could see her leg, and found it bandaged. She felt clean, as if she had been scrubbed, and a lilac scent seemed attached to her.
Anne lay there another moment, trying to remember what had happened. She remembered Tarry falling, and after that very little that could be separated from phantasm.
Whoever had found her, it couldn’t be the Hansan knights. They had never shown any interest in taking her captive, much less in bathing her and bandaging her wounds.
Experimentally, she swung her legs over the bed and eased down to the rug upon the flagstone floor. When she put weight on the damaged leg it ached, but not so much that she couldn’t bear to limp upon it, so she limped to the window and pushed the tapestry aside.
It was twilight outside. The sun was gone, but clouds of royal purple trimmed in gold and verdigris lay across the eastern sky. A light rain was falling, misting the thick glass of the window, which was cold to the touch. Plains or pasture stretched out and away to a dark green haze in the distance that might be forest, all resembling a painting that had been dipped in water while still wet.
She let the tapestry drop and hobbled to the door. As she had more than half expected, it was locked. Sighing, she turned back to examine the rest of the room—only to recoil at a sudden movement at the edge of her vision.
She fixed her eyes in that direction and saw a woman staring at her. She had almost opened her mouth to demand who she was when Anne understood that she was looking into a full-length mirror.
Her reflection was gaunt and hollow-cheeked, and the area around her eyes seemed bruised. The thin frizz of red hair was weird and shocking. Her freckles had darkened and enlarged from long days in the sun—but more than that, her face had actually changed. Grown older, not merely metaphorically, but in fact. The very shape of the bone was different—her nose seemed smaller, and for the first time ever she caught a glimpse of her mother in her.
How long since she had seen herself in a mirror? How much could a woman change between sixteen and seventeen?
And she was seventeen now, though she had missed her birthday. She had been born in Novmen, on the eighth. It had come and gone without her ever knowing or thinking about it until now.
There should have been a party, and dancing, and cakes. Instead she couldn’t even remember where she had been, because she didn’t know the date now, except that it was well past the month of Novmen. Indeed, the Yule solstice had to be approaching—if that, too, hadn’t passed her in the night.
Unable to gaze long on what she had become, she searched the room for anything that might be useful as a weapon, but the only thing she found was a spindle. She took it in her hand and limped back to the bed, just as somewhere near the vespers bell began to toll.
Before the next bell, the creak of the door opening disturbed her. A stooped little woman in a gray dress and black shawl entered. “Highness,” she murmured, bowing. “I see you are awake.”
“Who are you?” Anne asked. “Where am I?”
“My name is Vespresern, if it please you, Princess Anne.”
“How do you know me?” Anne demanded.
“I have seen you at court, Highness. Even with your hair shorn so, I would know you. Is there anything I can get for you?”
“Tell me where I am and how I came to be here.”
“My master asked that he be allowed to explain that himself, Your Highness. He asked me to fetch him when you woke. I’ll find him now.”
She turned and closed the door behind her, and Anne heard a key turn the lock into place.
Anne went back to the window and unlatched it. The air outside was wet and chill, but it wasn’t the weather she was concerned with, but rather what sort of building she was in and how great the distance to the ground. What she found wasn’t encouraging. Gray stone walls winged away in both directions. She could make out battlements above her and a few more windows below. The drop was perhaps twenty yards, and that to a moat of ugly-looking water. There weren’t any ledges she could see other than the narrow casements of the windows. If she tied her bedclothes together, she thought she might decrease the jump by half, and the water might break her fall, if it was deep enough.
She closed the window and sat on the bed to think. Her leg was really bothering her, and she wondered how long such a wound would take to heal. Would it mend entirely, or would she limp for the rest of her life?
About a bell later, she heard the key scraping in the door again, and, clutching the spindle, she waited to see who it was.
A man stepped into the room, and immediately she knew him. Deep down she’d known she would.
“Well,” he said. “I mistook you for a boy once before, and did so again when I saw that hair.”
“Roderick.”
“Well, I’m glad you remember me now,” he said. “After meeting you on the road, I wasn’t so sure you hadn’t quite forgotten me.”
“Roderick,” she repeated, searching for something plausible to say.
His tone sobered a bit. “You terrified me, you know. I thought you were dead.”
“I’m in your father’s castle, then?” she asked.
“Yes, welcome to Dunmrogh.”
“I had friends back in the forest. We were attacked.”
“Yes, I know—I’m sorry, they were all slain. Brigands, I suppose. We’ve had our troubles with them, lately. But look, Anne—it’s impossible that you could be here. How in the name of Saint Tarn is it that you are?”
She studied his face, the face she had dreamed about for so long.
While hers had seemed older, his seemed younger, and not as familiar as it ought to. It came to her that she had really known him for only a few days, not even a month. She’d been in love with him, hadn’t she? It had felt like that. Yet now, looking at him, she didn’t feel the overflow of joy she’d been expecting.
And it wasn’t just because she knew he was lying.
“Stop it, Roderick,” she said wearily. “Please. If I ever meant anything to you at all, just stop it.”
He frowned. “Anne, I can’t say I know what you mean.”
“I mean my letter,” she said. “The one I sent from the coven. Cazio did have it delivered after all.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I doubted him.”