and missed the loose, summer sleeping shift. “ . . . And I was afraid. This—this is my nightmare made small: people will die in front of me and there will be nothing I can do to prevent it.
“If I failed to wake, this is how he trapped me. And I,” she added, stiffening, “am how he trapped you.”
Adam shook his head. “I chose to stay, Matriarch.”
“Can you just call me Jay while we’re here?”
“Jay is a—is a bird?”
“It’s better than an expensive rock.”
“Women,” he said, “have very strange ideas about their names. Margret hated hers. Elena hated hers. I don’t understand it.”
She grimaced. “What do you mean, you chose to stay? This is Levec’s worst nightmare.”
Adam smiled. “No. Being drawn to the dreaming by the sleepers was his worst nightmare.”
“But you’ve—”
“I’m here with you. If you wake, Jewel, I will wake. You didn’t stay because you were trapped by the sleepers; you stayed because you wanted to protect them.”
“How do you know that?”
Adam raised a brow. “I’m young, I’m not stupid. Leila is awake now.”
“Adam—”
“She won’t come back. We can wake the two you now hold, if you’re willing.”
She nodded almost absently. Something was bothering her. Winter King.
Jewel. She wasn’t surprised when he answered. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t touch him, was almost certain she couldn’t force him to appear—not yet. But he was here. She was no longer lost in her own elusive dream.
Go back to my den. Go back and tell Celleriant that I’m here.
Silence.
I know he can understand you, even if the others can’t.
I will not leave you here.
Adam is here. Nothing short of decapitation will kill me while Adam is with me. Maybe, she added, feeling distinctly uneasy, not even that, if he acts quickly. It was true.
“Yes,” she told Adam, “we can wake them. But not just them.” She lifted her arm—the arm that didn’t contain butterflies. “Warden,” she said. “Warden of Dreams, come.”
Chapter Eight
INTO THE GRAY of nothing, Adam, and butterflies, the Warden of Dreams emerged. He was winged, his wings the color of the butterflies in this place; luminescent and pale. They were the shape of eagle’s wings, but larger, higher. His face was long, fine, his eyes—the whites of his eyes—were golden. But the irises were not; she couldn’t begin to pinpoint their color, they seemed to shift so much.
He bowed to her. It was shallow, but his expression robbed it of sarcasm. It was meant, felt. “Terafin,” he said.
“Why did you kill the dreamers?” Her free hand slid from sky to hip. The butterflies remained on her arm. She’d been half afraid they would fly to meet the Warden of Dreams—and their own demise.
“There is power in dreams,” he replied.
She watched his face, his eyes. Remembered that someone—Avandar? Celleriant?—had called him the two who are one. “Yes. But the dead don’t dream.”
“You believe that sacrifice leads to power. You believe that sacrifice of life’s blood is potent and useful.”
“I’ve seen both.”
“Yet you fail to believe that the destruction of the dreamers leads to power?”
Jewel forced herself not to look at Adam. “They’re no longer in the dreaming if they’re dead. They go to Mandaros. If you need dreams for the power they provide, their death is the last thing you want.”
“Perhaps, little mortal, I devour the parts of their sleeping minds that dream at all; perhaps it is the ability to dream that grants me the power, not the dreaming itself. You have seen only one such dream—but it is life made visceral, personal; it is strong.”
“Yes. But there is no dream if the dreamer is dead. You killed the dreamers.”
The Warden of Dreams lifted his hands; they were glimmering. “I did.”
“Why?”
He smiled. It was an odd smile, and it changed the whole of his face—literally.
“The two who are one,” she whispered.
He nodded. “There are many ways to travel through dreams. Not all of them grant power to the traveler; in fact, very few do. But if one is content to simply travel and observe, there is much to be learned.”
She thought of the magi as they appeared in Leila’s dreams. “Most of it isn’t accurate.”
“What is accuracy? The dreams are felt, their worlds are known, they are believed. In rare cases, when the dreamer wakes, the world changes.”
“The three dreams.”
“The dreaming wyrd, yes. Have you not felt its imperative?”
She nodded as the conversation began to drift out of her control. She brought it back, watching him. He seemed gaunter, more frail, than he had as he folded his wings