I drifted into sleep before I felt wholly prepared for it.
When I woke hours later, the sheets were crumpled around me, the night pitched dark and cold. The hour before sunrise. It was not a nightmare that had startled me awake. It was the emptiness. The howling quiet. A terrible sense of unease crept over me.
I hadn’t dreamt at all.
I sat forward in bed with a gasp.
I was chilled to the bone; I trembled, full of aches I had never felt before. It was as if I had slept in a snowdrift on midwinter, and I struggled to rise. My fingers and toes were like ice.
My sleep was dreamless, although it shouldn’t have been. My mind was hollow, but I told myself it was nothing to worry over. Nothing to worry over as I left my room and crossed the hallway, to where Phelan’s door sat open with invitation.
I took two steps into his chamber and then halted, as if I was truly losing my mind. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t seek him out for comfort.
“Anna?”
He was awake, as if he had been waiting for me. I listened as he shifted in bed, sitting forward. “Anna, are you all right?”
“Yes,” I replied, and the lie sat in my mouth like glass. Something that would tear me up as soon as I swallowed it. And I said, “No. No, I’m not.”
“Do you want to join me? There’s room for both of us.”
I already knew there was room in his bed. I had slept at his side once, and it had been one of the best nights of sleep I had experienced since leaving Hereswith.
I couldn’t see in the dark, but I surrendered and felt my way to his bed. I listened as he moved the blankets, as he fluffed a pillow, as he made space for me.
I eased into the warmth of his bed. The sheets were like silk, steeped with pine, meadow grass, rain, and spices. The smell of his skin and his soap. And the ice I had felt upon waking dreamless began to melt. The bed was generous enough that we could both lie side by side without a chance of touching, and I relaxed, sinking into the feather mattress. But I could sense him, how slim the distance was between our bodies. If I reached my hand out to the gentle darkness, my fingertips would brush his shoulder. His hair. The line of his jaw.
I felt safe lying beside him. As the tingling left my limbs, I asked myself why I didn’t dream. A voice echoed in my memory, as if in reply. Tell me, Clementine . . . have you read one of my nightmares recorded in your father’s book?
Mazarine’s words, haunting me weeks after she spoke them. And then it was like she was speaking to me, because I heard her whisper, “Have you read one of your own nightmares in your father’s book?”
“Anna?”
“Mm?”
I was thankful he spoke, breaking me from my reveries. I listened to him breathe, wondering if he was about to tell me what nightmare he had dreamt. If I would need to write it down for him. And when the silence deepened like a canyon between us, I thought he had drifted asleep until he spoke again, and his confession echoed through me. . . .
“I dreamt of nothing.”
26
“It must have been the cards,” I said later that morning, watching Phelan pace the library. “Perhaps the enchantment has worn away in them, from being passed through so many hands.”
“No,” he said. “Those cards will never lose their enchantment. Not while the curse still lives on the mountain.”
“Do you think the curse will ever end?”
“I don’t know, Anna.”
I fell silent. I hadn’t told him that I was also dreamless. As far as he knew, I had suffered a nightmare while he had suffered nothing. And if I was honest, there was a piece of me that wanted to tell him the truth. To confess and watch the furrow in his brow ease. But I feared it would make me too vulnerable.
“How does your mother create the cards?” I asked. How does she enchant her illustrations with nightmares was what I truly wanted to know.
Phelan stopped pacing. His back was angled to me; his attention was fixed on the frost-laced window. One would never think he had experienced a bad night; he was impeccably dressed, and his raven-dark hair was held by his customary ribbon. But his eyes were bloodshot and distant. Even when he looked at me, I sensed he was far away.
“I’m not sure. I know very little of deviah magic.” He sighed. The sound could have come from my own lips, as if our worry was the same. “I need to go tend to a few things. You can have the rest of the day off, Anna.”
He left in a rush, grabbing his top hat and coat from the rack on his way out.
For a moment, I didn’t know what to do with myself and this unexpected day of freedom. And then I smelled the aroma of Mrs. Stirling’s cooking drift down the hall, browned butter and golden crust and strawberry preserves, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go.
I went to see Imonie.
She had the town house to herself again. Mama was at the theater, Papa at the mines. I sat on a kitchen stool with Dwindle purring on my lap—even in a different shape, my cat knew me. Bright October sunlight flowed in from the windows as I watched Imonie bake. It almost felt like the Vespers had never happened to us and we were back in Hereswith.
Almost.
“It looks like they’ve been feeding you well,” she said as she kneaded dough on the counter.
“The food is good,” I replied. “But I do miss your galettes.”
She tried to hide how much my comment pleased her; only a hint of blush warmed her cheeks. “If I had known you were coming, I would have a whole tray ready for you.”
I smiled, but I said nothing else for a while, the words suddenly feeling too heavy to speak. I would have been content to simply sit silently in Imonie’s presence until she looked at me with her keen eyes.
“What’s troubling you, Clementine?”
It was a relief to have someone I trusted, someone who knew me in all my shades, ask me a direct question.
“What does it feel like when you dream, Imonie? Do you dream every single night if you don’t take a remedy?”
“It’s been a long while since I dreamt,” she replied, returning her gaze to her dough. But her attention remained fixated on me. “Once, when I was younger, I dreamt vividly every single night. The good dreams were like sustenance, feeding me all throughout the following day. And the bad ones? Well, I think you know what nightmares are like, Clementine.”
I mulled over her reply, and then asked, “Is it common to wake up and forget what you dreamt the night before?”
That brought her eyes back to mine. Sharp and probing. “Why do you ask, child?”
“I’m merely curious.”
“Then yes. Sometimes.”
The stiffness in my shoulders eased. I stroked Dwindle’s calico fur and thought perhaps that had been the case for me last night. But the longer I tried to convince myself, the weaker it felt. Because both Phelan and I should have been battered by nightmares. And nightmares were not the type of dream to be forgotten come sunrise.
“There’s something I want to tell you, Clem,” Imonie said, wiping her hands on her apron. “The other week, when you came for Monday night dinner. You asked if November seventeenth held any significance.”
“And does it?” I prompted, my interest catching.
“It doesn’t in Bardyllis, but once, long ago, that date meant something in Seren. It was a night of feasting, when the people of the mountains lit fires and ate their favorite foods and danced beneath the stars. It was the last feast of autumn, because the snow comes early in the mountains.”