me to go hunting when I was barely three days old. That same night she was killed. I can’t remember her at all, but like her, I’m longing to do more than dreaming and witchcraft. I want to be the one holding the blade, I want to watch Hamish and James dissolving the Surari into Blackwater. Nothing can compare to that moment – the moment Hamish’s face changes as he disappears into that trance, the supreme joy of the Blackwater coming, and the way the bodies dissolve gradually, not at once – so we can see the terror in their eyes as they melt. I’ve hardly ever seen that – I have always been sheltered, ever since my sister died and I became the precious Dreamer – but I was trained anyway, for the day I could finally pass on the gift to the next Dreamer. And that day will come in thirteen years’ time.
I know you don’t carry the dreams. It’s difficult to explain what it’s like. Dreaming is like nothing else. You must be strong. Yes, you must be strong and whatever you do, never complain. Because complaining doesn’t get you anywhere. I live with it. So will Mairead. It has its compensations.
It’s sad that there’s nobody left of my family to meet Mairead. My parents and my sister are long gone. I watch Mairead sleeping, and I smile to myself thinking of what she’ll grow up to be. My blood is pure, that’s why my sons are so powerful, and why my daughter will be too. My sister Elizabeth – Eliza – was always weak, not like my mother and me. And she hated being the Dreamer.
She took to going on long walks wearing silly summer dresses, or even her nightdress, come rain or shine – and being Argyll, it was more often rain – until she got what she wanted. She caught pneumonia, and even when my father and the doctors did their utmost to keep her alive, she defied them. I remember one night sneaking into her room and finding that she’d removed her drip and that it was hanging, drip-drip-dripping onto the floor, little drops of blood on the sheets where she’d yanked it out of her arm. I told my father of course, and they put it back in and employed a nurse to watch she didn’t spit her pills and choke up her food or pull out her drip again.
No use. Two weeks later she died. I heard my father whispering with the doctors – the nurse had fallen asleep and my sister had dragged herself to the window, opened it and stood there, breathing the freezing night air, though she was burning with fever. After that, she burnt up for days, wheezing, her lungs full of fluid, and she died without waking again.
I was relieved for Eliza because I knew that’s what she wanted, but I resented her for being so weak. Who was she to decide she could give up?
I wasn’t frightened to be the Dreamer of the family now, not for a minute. I knew that unlike my sister I could take it. Yes, I tried to make them stop a few times when they were really terrible. I tried to stay awake day after day and ended up falling asleep during dinner, just like that, with my face on the table, or outside on the beach by the house, where I’d go hoping the cold would keep me awake. My father would carry me to bed so that I could fall properly asleep, and the dreams could come the way they’re supposed to. So there was no way out really.
All this built my character and I’m grateful for it. Mairead will go through it the same way, and come out a true fighter like me. I know she will.
I suppose it’s not that bad, really. Dreaming. One mostly gets used to it. It’s only when the demons kill me – I haven’t got used to that yet. To think that in my dreams I’ve died so many times, in so many different ways, and still I’m not used to it. The pain can be a bit much, even for me.
Yes, it’s only when the Surari actually kill me that I see why my sister kept ripping that drip from her arm. But then, she gave up, and I won’t.
In thirteen years’ time I’ll be free, and it’ll be Mairead’s turn. Perhaps it’s just as well she got a