Oh, indeed. If you prefer it, I can give you something; not dreams, but nightmare. Endless fear, endless flight.
She shook her head. “No, you can’t.”
Silence.
In her hands, she held sky. It was a sky that no waking person would ever see. “I don’t know who you are,” Jewel said softly to the three butterflies, “but while you’re here, I will do what I can to protect you.”
You can do nothing.
She ignored the Warden of Dreams, and felt the wind blow cold from her right. It was her first sensation in the gray. She frowned. The gray was so much like the Between—a land where gods and mortals might meet, and where such meetings might have consequences.
Dreams had driven her to the South. Dreams of Diora. Dreams of a massacre. Dreams had given her her brief glimpses of the Cities of Man—those powerful, ancient homes in which even the dead could be trapped, and against which gods might break themselves, rather than walls. Dreams, she thought, had driven her to House Terafin: dreams of gods.
She heard the distant growl of a predator, although the landscape remained gray and lifeless. She heard the buzzing of insects—which she viscerally detested—and the sounds of swords leaving scabbards. Small noises, but significant. She heard a child screaming; that was worse.
But it was the only truly human sound in this place.
Frowning, she reached into the scrap of handheld sky. The small piece of dream in her hand had dimension, if approached from the front. She inserted her hand among the butterflies, and to her surprise, they immediately alighted, attaching themselves to her palm, her inner wrist, and her fingers.
It wasn’t the Warden of Dreams, she thought. That wasn’t what they were seeking in their long sleep.
Build, he told her.
She nodded. “Tell me,” she said to the butterflies. “Tell me where you live.”
* * *
The butterflies had no mouths with which to speak, but mouths weren’t necessary when reality was so profoundly subjective. This was the first lesson the dreamers taught Jewel. They answered her in a rush of tiny voices, and not a single voice was constrained by the need for words. They were so pale, she thought, so perfect in form—they were delicate but at this range she could see they were faintly luminescent.
Dreams were subjective. She’d had so many of them, she’d fled so many. Most of them weren’t real unless she was in them. But when she was, they were the whole of the world. Conscious thought stopped; dream logic ensued instead, with its odd panoply of best friends she’d never seen or met in real life, relatives she’d lost, stations to which she had never aspired, familiar homes that she had never lived in. In dreams, it was not truth that mattered; truth couldn’t be measured.
Yet, conversely, dreams worked because they felt true; there was no defense against them.
What she could dream into being was a product of every dream she had ever had. Every dream and every experience that also walked to one side of the solidity of the real world. That wasn’t what she wanted now.
What she wanted now, oddly enough, was Shadow. Even in her dreams, he was still an annoying, whiny, insulting cat. He was utterly himself; he was proof against her imagination, large and small. No, she thought, she wanted to be Shadow, or like him. Herself, in a place where there was no other anchor.
She did not want the dreams of the butterflies; she wanted them to wake.
There is power in dreaming, the Warden said, his voice colorless and uninflected. You dismiss it at your peril. You do not understand what you might build here.
“No. I understand it. But it wouldn’t be real.”
It would be real.
She shook her head. “Why are you allied with the Shining Court?”
It suits my purpose.
“What do you want?”
I want freedom, he replied. I want an end to cages and walls. I want your sunshine and your fields in which only plants grow. I want their dreams, at my leisure, and not in a hurried rush at the turn of seasons that do not turn.
“You kill them.”
I would not need to kill them, he said, if I were free. There would be enough, could I but touch all dreamers. There will be enough, he added, voice shifting again, if I have yours.
“But then I won’t wake.”
Silence.
“And if I don’t wake, the House descends into war.”
Then take them, take them and make these lands unassailable.