fragments overlapped sky, shadow, grass, bridge rail, as they fell.
She tried to catch them, aware as she did that the rock beneath her feet had been shredded as casually, as completely, as the rest of the known world; she stood—and braced herself to reach—on nothing. But the nothing supported her weight as her open hands caught the edges of one piece of amethyst sky and drew it in toward her chest. It was purple and dark, and within its now small and jagged canvas, three butterflies struggled. This wasn’t a window; they didn’t simply flutter out of view. But they tried; she could see them hit the boundary of the small scrap in her hand, and wondered if they were aware it was there at all, or if they perceived wind pushing them back in its stead.
She spun on her heels; the Winter King was nowhere.
She herself was nowhere; there was no landscape, no sky, no ground; there was no sound. The world was not dark, but it wasn’t bright; it wasn’t even gray, although gray was the color she would have used to describe the total absence of everything, if she’d had to pick one. She couldn’t hear the cats; she couldn’t hear the Warden of Dreams.
But she could see three butterflies, and these butterflies couldn’t reach the Warden; they couldn’t be found and crushed in the palms of his hands. Somewhere in the city of Averalaan—either in the holdings or on the Isle, three people slept; they had not yet died. She wanted to catch all of the butterflies then, and cup them somehow in the curved palms of her hand, as if her hands could be the wall that protected them from his.
No, no, that will not do. This is not a dream; this is the absence of dream. Come, if you will claim these lands. Dream them. Dream them into being. Create something vast and huge and impressive; make it, hold it. Nothing else will stand against me.
What, exactly, was vast, huge, and impressive to the scion of gods?
Certainly not the butterflies whose lives he had so deliberately cultivated and then extinguished.
Yes, he said. Yes, and perhaps butterflies are the wrong seeming for them; they are like stalks of your wheat or corn; they grow, and they ripen, and in time, they are felled. They will fall anyway. I merely accept the gift of their harvest; it is that, or leave it to go to seed.
Her hands stiffened; she couldn’t curl them into fists without partially crushing the small, small bit of sky within which these butterflies flew. Vast? Huge? Impressive?
She thought of the palace of the Winter King—not hers, but the man who had reigned for centuries in the heart of his forest, with cats, stone cats, for companions during the long, long wait for his release. Had his storybook dwelling been impressive enough? It had impressed her—but it had impressed her the way the forests had: they were gold and silver and diamond, those trees, and the palace was all of glass. Or ice; it had been cold, she thought. She couldn’t feel the cold now; it didn’t touch her.
But no, no that would not impress the Warden of Dreams; such a castle had stood for centuries, and if it changed at all, it was slight. She thought of the fallen buildings of the undercity—the great, stone bridges now shattered although their pieces were larger than any single member of the den. What had those bridges occupied when they stood? How high off the ground had they reached? And what—or who—had walked across their chiseled, cut splendor?
Yet even that, she dismissed. City of gods, she thought—and knew it, the way one knows any facts in a dream, even a dream in which the only reality is six inches of amethyst sky and three white butterflies.
You have nothing, the Warden said. And if you have nothing, nothing is all you can hold.
“No,” she told the Warden softly. The ground no longer bucked at her weight, because it didn’t exist. Nothing did; there was no fall, no flight, no destination. The only voice she could hear was his, but without form, what threat could he be?
He chuckled. You will see. These lands are mine now. You will have no dreams and no Companions, except those I allow—and I think I will allow you nothing for a very long time. It discomforts mortals, he added.
Nothing, on the other hand, was better than some of the things she’d