Twenty-four

Again, she was up a tree. Again, the shadow-things gathered below her. The dead forest stretched far beyond, and the castle lay at its distant edge, dark and almost as lifeless.

This time was different. The branch hadn’t broken; indeed, the tree’s limbs had all been sturdy, and Sophia thought that there’d actually been less space between them than there had the times before. The shadow-thing that had grabbed for her ankle hadn’t even broken the skin.

She’d considered fighting them. The world, whatever it was, had started responding to her will. She might have been able to make herself a sword or a bow. Possibly here she’d even be able to use either—but Sophia thought not. For one thing, her body seemed still to be hers, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, and she saw the sense in that. The body was one of the first and closest ways that a person knew themselves, and thus logically the hardest to change. For another, she didn’t know enough about weapons to know how to make herself good with them. For a third, the direct exercise of will itself was still new to her, and she used it clumsily. Her efforts before had been shouting or shoving, not delicate manipulation.

Last and most important, the world might not have belonged to Valerius entirely, but Sophia would have wagered that the shadow-things did. Either they were his creatures, dual-natured and thus more at home than she was in the world of the forest, or they were direct projections of his will. Unless she had no choice, she would not set herself against him. She’d never do it and hope to win, nor even to survive.

And so she’d fled. She lay wrapped around a branch near the top of her tree, looked down at the moving mass of shadow, and then peered out across the forest.

She didn’t want to go to the castle. Then again, she didn’t want to be in the dream at all, and there certainly was no more inviting destination in sight. Now too, she wondered whether the forbidding appearance of the place might not be intentional. If so, if Valerius didn’t want her there, it certainly merited further investigation.

Very well, then. Options.

Giant birds—or dragons, in fact—would be difficult. Sophia had yet to try to create anything living, but it didn’t feel like a wonderful idea or even necessarily a possible one. If the shadows were dual-natured and pulled into the dream by Valerius’s magic, then trying to create anything sufficiently dragon-like might even force Cathal into the forest world, another only-in-dire-circumstances plan.

Bracing herself against the branch, Sophia summoned her will, stared at the castle, and tried just to think herself there. Very briefly she felt the fabric of the world respond—a deeply strange sensation—but it was as though she leaned against a very thick door. The frame shifted a bit, then shifted back. There was no real give. She hadn’t really expected any—she’d had to climb the tree herself, after all—but she would have felt foolish not trying.

Given that she didn’t much fancy going back down the tree and facing the shadow-things, there was only one other way forward.

Sophia stared at the open space between her and the castle and thought of bridges. She pictured slabs of stone, wide enough for horses and carts to cross; sturdy arches; high railings. Other images came to mind too—rotted, gapped planks, dangling from a few strands of rope—and she tried to ignore them, but they wouldn’t go.

As she focused on the images, she felt herself push with her mind again, and once more was struck by how odd it was, and how little control she still felt she had. How did one learn to work limbs that had never existed before? How did the mind learn that such a sensation means grasp, and another means hit, and a third, elsewhere, means stand? What did that process feel like? Perhaps children forgot so quickly because the memories were so much work.

Logically, her mind couldn’t ache, and thinking couldn’t make her sweat, but Sophia’s forehead was wet by the time the first side of the bridge appeared, and a low, muscular-feeling pain was starting in her temples. Logic didn’t govern everything, particularly not here.

Slowly the bridge took shape. It was a patchwork beast. Sections were stone, others wood, a few like nothing more than solidified light, and the division was not always neat. Looking out across it, Sophia saw a patch near the start where a thin rope handhold supported an immense stone block. Her eyes practically crossed as she looked at it.

She thought it would hold. She hoped it would hold. She hoped that falling in a dream didn’t make one die upon hitting ground, or if it did, that Alice would wake her before that moment arrived. Her hands were sweating too now, and the stomach she didn’t properly have threatened to disgorge a dinner that she’d never eaten in this world.

The edge of the bridge was a few inches away from her, perhaps a foot below. Sophia wished she’d spent more time in trees when she was a girl and less in her books. Holding on with both hands, she let her body dangle from the branch, swung forward, and dropped.

It was stone, and it hurt. Her skirt rode up, letting her scrape skin off her legs from knee down to shin. The impact shuddered its way through her body. But the bridge held firm.

Keep going. You don’t know how long it’ll last.

Her legs weren’t broken. Sophia pushed herself up to her feet and began to make her way across. She went as quickly as she dared, but it still felt slow, particularly on the mismatched parts, putting one foot gingerly in front of the other like a child walking a rooftree.

She knew not to look down, and of course she wanted to, even more than she would have on a normal bridge. It helped not at all that the view straight ahead of her was itself disconcerting. The sky was like a festering wound, and near the edge, where the outlines of the trees and castle showed up against it, Sophia thought she saw movement or perhaps gaps. Not everything joined as it should have. It was no pleasant sight, but there was nowhere else to look, and she didn’t dare close her eyes.

When she set foot on the first translucent part of the bridge, she truly wanted to. The railing and the bridge itself didn’t quite feel real either. They bore her weight and guided her, but there was a softness about them, a sense that they weren’t entirely solid, and every fiber in Sophia’s being screamed that this was a bad idea. Abandoning her better judgment, she crossed that section with more haste than the others; she hadn’t thought that flimsy planks could be such a relief as she then found them.

As if in response, the bridge swayed beneath her weight.

No, Sophia thought at it, even as she grabbed the guide rope and whimpered. She kept walking, though. Stopping would give her too much time to think. It might also show the bridge—or the world, or Valerius—that she was afraid, and she thought perhaps that was a bad idea, as with dogs and horses. Although she was aware of every movement of every muscle, even though she cringed inwardly every time she put her foot down, expecting it to land on empty air, she kept going.

She began to think of the stone sections as islands, places of safety, although she knew logically that there was no reason for it. They weren’t real stone, nor did they have anything in the way of support keeping them up. Sophia tried not to think about that very much. If the stone bits felt safer, she would take safety from whatever corner it came. They certainly felt solid, and they didn’t move. That was enough to be thankful for.

Gradually the distance shrank, until it was a man’s height, then half that, then only a few more steps, and Sophia finally stepped onto solid ground. She wanted to collapse then, just as she’d wanted to run the last few feet, but she didn’t let herself do either. She could see nothing menacing around her, but that didn’t mean nothing was there.

Also, as good as solid ground was in comparison to the swaying bridge, the ground beneath her feet was even worse than it had been back in the forest: softer, wetter, more redolent of decay. Sophia didn’t want to get any closer to it than necessary, and her first few heaving breaths of relief quickly became much shallower and further apart.

Ugh.

Up close, the castle was huge and dark. Not only did nobody come out to meet Sophia—although she wasn’t certain she would have wanted that—but she couldn’t spy so much as a light in any of the windows. The great doors were closed, and the portcullis was down. If there’d been a drawbridge, she thought it would have been up.

Why wasn’t there a drawbridge? If Sophia had been making a castle in a dream world, she’d have put a moat around it. She’d have gone ahead and put in some sharks too, or mayhap vitriol instead of water. One couldn’t be too careful.

Instead, she could walk right up to the castle walls. That might have come down to arrogance, but it suggested more what Sophia had been starting to think: this was a place where Valerius had less control. The castle most likely mirrored some counterpart in the waking world—at least to a degree. The actual place probably was inhabited and guarded, and she doubted that the walls felt spongy to the touch.

UGH.

Wiping her hands on her skirt did little good. The doors felt just as awful, and they didn’t budge when Sophia tried to push them open. Reluctantly, she knocked on one, but received no response.

Standing back, she contemplated the building, thinking of it now not just as a physical object. Half through what few laws she’d observed of the world, and half through a feeling she couldn’t put into words, Sophia thought that the castle was an anchor—the inalterable center from which all alterations spread, mirror of and clue to the man behind the dream.

From Cathal’s first description, she’d known Valerius for a vain and petty man. Moiread’s information had only confirmed that much, but now Sophia thought of lines of descent and pacts forged in blood, strands of information knotted together into a fishing net. Valerius was not isolated, not even as much as another man might be. He had connections; there would be an opening, or—

—there.

Near the base of one wall, a brick had crumbled. Whether it had always been so and Sophia had only just noticed it or whether she’d worked her will on the castle just then, she didn’t know. Later it would make an interesting theoretical question. Just then, she knew what she needed to do. The brick was not an opening, but it might be what she needed.

Bending, for she still didn’t want to kneel, she plucked the pieces of brick one by one off the bare earth and held them in her cupped hands. Against her skin, they seemed almost to move, or to pulse with a faint and foul heartbeat.

Sophia gritted her teeth, closed her hands tightly around the stones, and woke herself up.

This time there was no disorientation. It was morning. Alice was sitting beside her, watching and frowning. Her face cleared as soon as Sophia opened her eyes, but not entirely. “Your hands are glowing,” she said, “and I don’t like the look of it.”

Indeed, a nimbus of dull light surrounded both Sophia’s hands. Any but a close observer might not have noticed, but it was there, and the same red-gray as the sky in Valerius’s world. It was repulsive; it was satisfying.

“Bring me”—Sophia bit her lip, held her hands away from her that she might not touch anything with that sickly energy, and thought—“the branch I took the holly leaves from. Please. I think it might be helpful.”