I nodded absently, still half lost in memory. “There wasn’t much more. The priest came to run us off. I think he had promised the view to some of his chief donors.”
“Figures,” Ray said cynically. “Everything’s sacrilegious ‘till it involves moolah. By the way, who won? I got my money on the fishermen.”
“You would lose. The shipwrights won. I had a bet with Luysio. He owed me pistachios and sweetened rice cakes . . .”
“Did he ever pay up?” Ray asked, leaning over the roof for a final view of the fight, which he didn’t get because child-me had turned to look at the priest.
“No.”
“Welcher,” he said, smiling.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t his fault. I had a fit that night, my third in a month. And father decided it was enough.”
“Enough?”
“He separated Dory and I, and after that, she was in control.” I looked around, feeling strangely lost suddenly. “This was my last memory as . . . me.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dorina, Faerie
The sun-drenched scene of old Venice faded, to show me Ray’s face splashed by firelight. He looked confused, as people often did when surfacing from another’s mind, but also troubled. He didn’t look like he knew what to say, which was fair, I supposed.
Neither did I.
“Was it . . . painful?” he finally asked.
I shook my head. “Not the separation, no. But I did not understand what had happened. It felt like being in a prison cell, a dark, echoing space from which I could not escape. I thought I had gone mad for the longest time. And when I finally understood—”
“Wait. It took years?” He sounded appalled, having seen the truth in my mind.
“It . . . came in pieces, over time. I began to see things, slowly, here and there. I was conscious when Dory was not, but I did not know that at first—”
Ray frowned. “How could you not know you were conscious?”
I blinked at him. “Her eyes were closed.”
He swore and took a drink.
He had apparently decided that there were better uses for the wine than the one I had found, and I agreed. He handed me the canteen and I had a small sip. Fey wine smelled like herbs and burned like flame, but I found that I did not mind so much tonight.
“But during the in between times, when the mind is neither asleep nor awake, I began to get glimpses,” I explained. “Enough to understand that I was somehow still moving about, was living in the same house, in the same room. There were sketches on the walls that came and went, which I did not recognize, but that looked like my work. And, eventually, a fine oil painting of a dog chewing up his master’s slipper. I recognized the brushstrokes, yet I had not done them . . .”
“Jesus.”
I nodded, remembering the surreal feeling of being an exile in my own body. “I slowly began to understand that my power grew at night. When the body I no longer controlled slept, I would awaken, although for a long time, I didn’t understand that I could go anywhere. I looked at things from under her lashes for weeks, perhaps months, before I learned that I could move about spiritually.”
“How’d you find out?”
“By accident. Horatiu came to rouse Dory one morning and startled me. I sat up but my body did not. Before I could figure out what had happened, Dory was awake and I lost consciousness. But the next night—”
“Freedom,” Ray guessed, his expression lightening.
“Not . . . quite.”
I gazed out at the water. The fire was sending orange ripples over the dark waves and gilding the rocks. It looked the way the Grand Canal had the next evening, when I’d gone exploring in my spirit form. I had been left shaking and amazed at the sights of handsome people laughing from gondolas, light splashing out of the fronts of palazzos, torches blowing in the wind. It had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and the most confusing.
It was only when I tried to speak to someone that I realized: they couldn’t see me. I didn’t know why that had so surprised me; I had flown over the city like a great black bird, seeing it from a completely new angle. Had I really thought that a creature who could do that would be visible? Or that people would react well to it if it was?
My only excuse was that I didn’t think. I had been