A voice scattered the music, sending the color dancing away and out of reach. At a little distance from the fire a door appeared, hanging in midair. It was not like any door she had ever seen before—it glowed with translucent color. If stained glass were alive, it might look this way with a light behind it. Getting up from her place by the fire she paced toward it, solemnly and in rhythm with the steady beat that permeated the air. As she drew closer, she slipped off her shoes. Her feet sank into a maelstrom of light, currents of color that swirled and eddied with every step.
Holy ground.
In front of the door she paused, awestruck. She could see the atoms moving, electrons circling and shifting, changing allegiance from one partner to another. The dance expanded—planets circling stars, constellations revolving around constellations, one universe flowing into another. Cosmic wind blew against her, pushing her back and away, even as she stretched her hands out trying to touch the wonder. Farther and farther she blew, growing ever smaller until the door was the size of the universe and she was the size of an atom, tiny, flung adrift in the winds of empty space.
At first she thought she heard her own voice sobbing with loss, but light flickered around her, thousands of tiny fireflies, and as the light grew brighter she could see that each light was a human soul surrounded by multihued auras, their weeping creating a great choral flare of a dull greenish black, like a bruise on the surface of the universe.
Above, in a velvet-black sky, one bright spot shaped like a keyhole glowed with promise.
Vivian sprouted wings and flew toward it. There was a squeeze, and then she was through and flying over a land where the rivers were made of molten gold and precious stones the size of boulders were as common as granite.
Dragons everywhere—sleeping in the sunlight, swimming in the golden river, flying free and wild. And then they turned on each other and began to fight and kill. Fire swept across fields and forests and a great smoke rose up into the sky. Dragon blood, black and corrosive, fouled the golden river.
From out of the earth a thick black substance rose up like smoke, drifting and coiling above the scarred earth. It frightened her more than the clash of the dragons, although she couldn’t say why.
A dark cloud boiled up out of the hills, growing bigger and bigger until it filled the sky like a wall. Lightning bolts shot through it; thunder rumbled and crashed. As a mighty wind came up that drove her back through the keyhole, helpless as an autumn leaf, she heard a baby crying, a lost, abandoned sound. She struggled against the wind to get to the child, but it was too strong, tearing at her body, dashing her about without mercy. Still, she could hear the wailing of the child, and she too was crying with helplessness and loss.
The darkness gathered and coalesced, took on shape and substance. Wings. A long body, a graceful serpentine neck, a horned head with eyes that shone like molten gold. Wherever the black dragon went, darkness went with her and she left a trail of darkness behind her. Stars were blotted out of the sky. Grass and flower and stone were sucked up into her shadow.
Let there be nothing, a voice said, and it was so.
After that it was a long time before Vivian came to herself. It took her a moment to remember the name of the man sitting across from her, silent and watchful, to remember the word for the thing around her shoulders—blanket—and the warm glowing light in front of her—fire. Despite both fire and blanket she shivered, her teeth chattering, and Weston walked over and pressed a tin cup into her hands.
She shook her head, no, no more, but when he pressed it to her lips it was not bitter but hot and sweet. Her hands shook too much to hold the cup. Even with his help it chattered against her teeth and hot liquid dribbled and slopped down the front of her, but Weston was persistent and for every mouthful that she swallowed she felt a little better.
“Now you will sleep,” he said. Words sounded strange spoken aloud, twining with the smoke and the flame and drifting up into the night sky. She obeyed his guiding hands, though, climbing into a sleeping bag laid out for her by the fire. A gentle hand touched her hair, then brushed her eyes closed and she slid into a deep dark slumber.
Twenty-five
Surmise. Zee’s instincts had been right, after all. Not far past the place where the dragon and the giant had died, he’d found an open door that led right into the grassy field in front of the castle. Prince Landon had come out to personally greet the new arrivals, and within moments Jared was whisked off to the healers. Landon had tried to get Zee to go too, but he had refused.
“No time,” he’d said. “Vivian’s in danger. I need your help.”
He’d been conducted to the private garden where he now sat beside a fountain on the stone bench that had once been stained by the Chancellor’s blood. No penguin lying dead now in the grass, no Vivian bruised and frightened, but these images lodged in his memory like stones in a shoe.
He was safe here, for the moment, but this did nothing to ease his sense of urgency and impending disaster. Safety meant nothing as long as Vivian was in danger.
He was hoping that Landon and Isobel could help him think of what to do next.
“Vivian will be a little lost without the pendant, I’d think,” Isobel said, one slender hand dabbling in the clear water of the pool where the fountain endlessly played. She wore a white dress and her hair fell loose over her shoulders. It made her look young, Vivian’s sister more than her mother, and not possibly a woman of over a hundred years.
Zee watched her hand dip in and out of the water, the forearm marked by a network of thin white scars. The fountain and the garden around it was a Dreamworld of its own, somehow sewn onto the fabric of Surmise. Time did not exist here; as long as Isobel and Landon stayed in this small space they would not grow old, no matter how many years passed in the world outside.
A sense of unreality set his teeth on edge. His journey through the maze of the Between, dragging Jared behind him on a makeshift wooden stretcher, seemed a story from a distant past; perhaps something that had happened to another man. The sense of the surreal felt too much like enchantment, made him want to leap to his feet and run.
Which would accomplish absolutely nothing, of course, and so he held himself together and sat, his mind hammering his body into submission.
“What benefit would someone find in stealing the pendant?” Landon asked. The Prince had changed since Zee and Vivian walked out of Surmise, hand in hand, only a few short weeks ago. His shoulders were square, no longer rounded in defeat. His face held a restless energy, the eyes quick with intelligence. Already he had men out mapping the roads of the Between that led directly into the kingdom so he could better understand the risks and resources that were out there.
Isobel’s hands fluttered, then stilled. “That depends. It would give the carrier some power over Vivian, perhaps.”
“The old woman who stole it was crafty and stronger than she looked—overpowered Vivian and then opened a door and vanished.” Shame kept him from telling them about his encounters with either the dragon or the temptress, although he knew he should.
“Sorceress,” Landon guessed.
“A plague of sorcerers, a pestilence of usurpers, a contagion of evil. There must be no communion between them and the Dreamshifters, lest evil befall,” Isobel chanted, in a voice that did not sound solely her own. A silence hung in the air, punctuated by the continual flow of falling water from the fountain. Isobel traced a line of scars with a finger still dripping from the pool.