“All right,” I said, waving my hand. “If your friends are so persistent, I’ll join you.”
“Excellent,” he said, rising from the desk. “I have a few deliveries to make, but I’ll return soon.”
I watched him quit the library, the stained-glass doors latching behind him with a quiet click.
I waited a full ten minutes before I began to search through the drawers. I hoped to uncover correspondence—letters between him and Lennox, or perhaps him and his mother—and sifted through reams of blank paper, corked inkwells, bundles of quills, sticks of wax, candle tapers, a bronze stamp, an amethyst cluster, a sack of lemon drops. And then my fingers caught on a sharp edge of parchment. A square calling card. I drew it into the light.
By the seventeenth of November, it read in elegant handwriting. I held the card against a page in the book of nightmares, to compare it with Phelan’s handwriting. The script was similar in slant and embellishment, but there were a few differences. I didn’t believe Phelan had written this mysterious date down, but perhaps his mother had?
I returned the card to its place in the drawer. But my mind hummed with questions and thoughts. After a while, I decided to return to work. The next new moon was only eight days away, and I still had volumes to cover, new spells to forge in preparation.
I turned a crinkled page in Phelan’s recordings, skimming until my attention was hooked by a particular nightmare. Stunned, I leaned closer until I could taste the dust of the pages, and I read Phelan’s account:
Knox Birch is standing in a great hall of shadows. At first, he does not know where he is, but by the creeping cold on his skin, he feels like he has been here before. When the sunlight begins to flood through the windows, he sees the banners dressing the stone walls—blue banners emblazoned with stars and moons—and he realizes where he stands: the fortress in the clouds. He can feel the great depth of the mountain beneath him, and it is strange how at home he feels in Seren, even though he has never stepped foot in the mountain duchy.
Something evil happened here, he thinks.
But his memory wilts the more he attempts to remember why this place is cursed. And soon, he forgets those feelings altogether when the duke’s throne catches the sunlight. Knox is alone in the hall, and suddenly, he desires to claim the empty chair. He takes the first step, believing that he will restore whatever has broken by making himself duke. He takes the second step, and then the third. And that is when a shadow emerges, hissing like wind through cracks in the mortar. The shadow fights him, impedes him.
Knox has no choice but to take the rapier that blooms in his hand and cut the shadow down. It lies limp at his feet, and he steps over it, his eyes on the throne. But another shadow interferes, wailing with such intensity that he cannot bear to hear it, and he pierces its heart. The second shadow crumples, and he steps over it, nearly to the dais steps, where the throne waits.
And yet a third shadow rises. It screams and fights him. He cleaves it in two, and it lies at his feet. At last, he thinks. He has defeated the challenges and he alone has earned the throne.
He claims the chair.
As soon as he is seated, the rapier in his hand vanishes, and the shadows who are crumpled on the floor are exposed for what they truly are: his wife and his two daughters. They lie dead in pools of blood, destroyed by his hand, and Knox lets out a wail that never seems to end.
He wants to claw out his own eyes. He wants to cut out his own heart. If only he had seen them, he cries. If only he had seen their faces, and not their shadows. . . .
The nightmare captured me, and I was shaken, desperate to escape its icy hold. Of all the dream records I had read in Hereswith, no one had dreamt of the fortress in the clouds. And yet I could still taste the brisk air of the mountain castle, feel the cold flagstones beneath my feet as if I had walked Knox Birch’s nightmare. I closed my eyes and I saw a glimmer of blue on the walls, and I could hear the distant echoes of lives long lost. I wondered what it had been like before the curse. Why had the seven members of the duke’s court killed him? Had one of them desired to take the throne from the Duke of Seren? Was the duke cruel as some of the legends spun him to be?
I couldn’t bear to read another word.
And I shut Phelan’s book.
Later that afternoon, I walked beside Phelan, learning the winding bends of the streets he guarded. The town houses were well maintained—some were extravagant with their ornate window casements and gates with finials dipped in bronze and lush gardens in the front yard. I wondered about the inhabitants who lived behind each door. The mere notion of trying to learn a horde of new names and faces was overwhelming, and I eventually looked upward, to the reassurance of the sky. It was overcast, threatening rain, and there was a slight chill on the breeze. I imagined Hereswith would have felt her first frost by now, and the leaves would soon change.
“Do you ever dream, Mr. Vesper?” The question slipped from me, soft and genuine.
“Do I ever dream?” he repeated, amused. He walked with his hands in his jacket pockets, and the wind stirred his hair. “You mean if I’ve experienced my own nightmare, Miss Neven?”
“Yes, I suppose that is the better question.”
He was quiet, and when he slowed his strides, I slowed mine, to keep in pace with him.
“I’ve never dreamt,” he replied, meeting my gaze. “But then again . . . I’ve never given myself the chance to.”
I hated how his words resonated within me. I hated how his words could have been my own. I hated how they made me want to ask him more questions.
“You’ve taken remedies all your life, then? Even before you were a warden?”
He nodded, and a line creased his brow. “I know that must sound strange to you. But my mother, the countess, never wanted my brother and me to dream at night.”
I drew in a deep breath. A vain attempt to quench my interest. “And why would she desire that? If I may ask, of course.”
“You may ask, Miss Neven,” said Phelan. “And I will answer only if I may ask a question of you, which you must likewise answer.”
I grimaced, loathing myself for letting him play me into a corner. “Very well, Mr. Vesper. You can ask two questions, and I will choose which one I want to respond to.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and guided me around a street corner. “My mother didn’t want Lennox and me to dream because it meant we would need a warden to record our nightmares down in their book.”
“And that’s terrible, in her eyes?”
“Not terrible, but a vulnerability. A weakness,” Phelan replied. “We would be dependent upon another, who would then know our dreams. And sometimes dreams are ridiculous, but most of the time . . . they reveal our innermost pieces. Our desires, our fears, our ambitions, our plans. Our past, even.”
I mulled on that, thinking his mother must be very shrewd. If there were no dream records of their family, then I might have a harder time uncovering their secrets.
“Now,” Phelan said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “You must answer a question of mine.”
“Go on,” I said, bracing myself.
“Do you have any family in the city, or have you ever dreamt, Miss Neven?”
“I’ve never dreamt, either, Mr. Vesper.”
That surprised him, and he glanced at me. “Really? Why is that?”