Horns sounded, and as though choreographed, the crowds moved in a single direction. Kane and Dean moved with them. Ahead rose the pearly castle adorned in its crenellations and spires. The crowds pushed through a yawning gate, into a corridor, and up another flight of stairs, then out into the harsh brightness of the gardens Kane remembered. They were very much ripped right out of the Helena’s reverie, though their original richness had been amplified into outright obscenity. Now, the garden existed as the floor of an immense arena, and flung up from each edge were rows and rows of lacy, wicker benches. Dean and Kane, along with every other character, crammed into the seats, sitting just as the light of the garden darkened. Something was starting.
“Have you found Sophia? What about the Others?” Kane asked.
Dean’s eyes shimmered with green as he tried to peer through his powers.
“I can’t see anything clearly, yet,” he said. “But…wait. Do you feel that?”
A rumbling worked up through the arena, and the crowd cheered. Then, from the garden floor, there was a commotion.
“It’s…” Kane squinted.
He saw the pink outfit before he saw anything else, and his relief at seeing Ursula alive was immediately cut off by the blade of her predicament.
Ursula and Elliot stood at the garden’s center. Ursula wore her tattered wedding dress, and Elliot his shredded tuxedo. Their costumes from the original reverie. They stood back to back as two creatures circled them: the rose-gold spider and the diamond serpent.
Kane’s world narrowed into the shrinking space between his friends and those precious predators.
“They’re being forced to fight the hatchlings from Helena’s reverie,” Kane cried. Dean clamped a hand on his leg, holding him still.
“Wait. Look. Are they winning?” Dean asked.
Kane made himself watch. Even in the absurd outfit, Ursula’s was uninhibited power on the battlefield. In the span of a few seconds, she’d somehow climbed atop the spider and detached a bladed leg, tossing it to Elliot. He caught it, maneuvering a sweeping slice as the serpent struck at him. It twisted away, its severed fang rolling into a bed of magnolias.
“Yes.”
“Then we leave them.”
“What?”
“It’s a trap. Something to lure you out. We need to get into the castle and find Sophia. Those two can take care of themselves.”
“Ursula maybe, but what about Elliot?”
“Ursula will protect him,” Dean said.
At the head of the arena, a gate was rising to admit a new threat: the lapis-lazuli beetle.
Kane only knew he was moving because he felt Dean trailing behind him. Then, right at the railing, Kane was yanked back and pinned to the stairs.
“Kane. You cannot intervene.”
Kane got a hand free. “We have to help them!”
Dean caught his wrist and smashed it into the steps. “We can’t. You can’t.”
The white eyes of onlookers began to watch them. The clashes from the arena drove Kane halfway up before Dean pinned him again. Then, in the depths of Dean’s stare, jade magic flickered. The skin where they touched prickled as black armor spread over Dean’s skin.
“No!” Kane begged. “Don’t send me away! I want to fight. I have to—”
“Your sister needs you, Kane,” Dean said as the Dreadmare’s helmet closed over his head, and with that Kane was gone.
• Thirty-Seven •
HOMECOMING
Kane rocketed through the seasick nothing until the blankness ejected him into blinding sunlight. He flailed, reaching for anything to stop himself, and crashed over a low bench. When he sat up, he saw he was in the castle now, high in a tower and overlooking a city of grays, blues, and golds. Far below he could see the arena, just a gash of green in the castle’s creases, like a smear of moss. Through the glass came garbled cheers, and he imagined he could see the Dreadmare joining Elliot and Ursula in battle. Fighting with them.
Without him. Again.
Kane clenched his fists to keep from punching through the glass. He had been forced to flee. Again.
Your sister needs you, Dean had said. Kane’s fists unclenched, and he saw Dean’s reasoning. Intervening would only unspool the reverie’s rage, twisting it around the coming battle and drawing Sophia out. But Dean had ejected Kane from the action—from the plot itself—and now Kane was free to maneuver while the Others held the focus. He could find his sister without being the focal point of her aggression. Maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to wake her up.
“Sophia needs me,” he told himself, tightening his backpack in determination. “I am not an egg.”
Focused now, he made out the distant sound of viola music and grimly put himself to the task of pursuing it. The deeper he descended through the castle, the more physical the reverie’s pressure became, until he could feel this section of Sophia’s world plucking curiously at his strange resort clothes.
Kane trudged through the prickling discomfort. He must be getting close. The music was everywhere now, and people dressed in fancy attire drifted through the corridors. They all wore masquerade masks, and Kane was conspicuously out of place. He took his time, knowing it would only take one mistake to give him away, and finally he reached the music’s source: the ballroom.
A crowd of girls served as cover as he snuck in behind them. His fingers wrapping around the black whistle. When the time came, would he know what to do? What would happen to Sophia if he just pulled her from here into Poesy’s sanctuary? Would she blink away her dreamt identity and be herself, or would her eyes go dull and dark, the black doors severing her connection to this place where her mind now lived?
The group of girls paused to discuss something, and Kane slid from their ranks. The ballroom was immense, its edges thickly clotted in shadows. Good. He snuck behind pillars as wide as redwoods and surveyed the masquerade from afar. Hundreds of guests congregated around something at the room’s center, a circular platform floating in the air. A gossamer curtain concealed what lay behind it. The material rippled as the guests plucked at it playfully.
Kane edged around the pillar until he could see the front of the room, where wide steps led up to a throne of twisted iron and filigree. Atop it sat an unlikely figure. Kane’s mind lurched, barely able to hold on to the image of his sister. As though smeared there by an artist’s brush, Sophia was slumped over the throne in a gown of endless, crimson fabric. It pooled at her feet and slid down the stairs, thick like syrup.
Kane’s mind lurched again. There was something among the folds. Gold skin. The dome of a bald head. A badly bent leg. The stump of an arm, now blackened.