Waking beauty, p.26
Waking Beauty, page 26
His tone gentled. “It’s not all the same to me.”
Couldn’t the man have the decency to stay self-righteous?
“You’re just confused because of this horrible Curse Voracity laid on you. In your heart, I know you are good and pure.”
“That’s sweet of you.” She swung her feet over the arms of the stuffed chair and yawned to cover her mistake. “But there are as many versions of good as there are politicians. And as many truths as there are dreams. Speaking of which, all this prancing about gutters has worn me out.”
“Of course. I shouldn’t be here.” Arpien looked down at his uncovered shirt. For the first time he seemed to notice that he was most improperly dressed for an unmarried man in private rooms with unmarried young women. His cloak and doublet still flew like a banner from the walls of Boxleyn. “I can’t be seen leaving your rooms dressed like this.”
“You were seen entering them like this.”
“That was unavoidable.” Arpien whirled on Nissa. “And I’ll not have you begging for your cousins’ clothes or my brothers’ or anyone else who’s tried to murder me lately.”
Nissa chewed her bottom lip. “Arpien, are you expecting Brierly to sew you an outfit here and now?”
Kendra’s eyes widened. “Princess Brierly, have you cut up Prince Arpien’s old doublet and trunk hose yet?”
Spinning wheels. Brierly’s heels banged a soft hollow thwump thwump thwump against the plush upholstery. “They might still be wearable. Now where did I leave them?”
She tried not to let her eyes catch on the scrap basket too quickly. “Ah yes.”
She dumped the basket upside down. Fabric bits went flying like colorful butterflies. The incriminating doublet and trunk hose plopped onto the floor. She displayed the riot of gold and yellow gashes to Arpien.
If she hadn’t been fighting embarrassment, Brierly might have laughed at the parade of expressions that marched across Arpien’s face and finally finished with the same furious indignation he’d shown when she rescued the pickles from Estepel.
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY CLOTHES?”
“I was experimenting with a new fashion technique.”
“You had no right to mutilate my clothes.”
“They were already mutilated, and they aren’t your clothes. You gave them to Kendra and she gave them to me. Don’t fuss when it seems I’ve helped you.”
“I DON’T NEED ANY HELP LOOKING LIKE A FOOL!”
In the background Nissa bit her lip again. Brierly couldn’t tell if she was scandalized or amused.
“Thistles, Brierly, is this what your Gift says about me?” Arpien said. “That I’m weak? Incompetent? Sloppy? Vain? Mawkish?”
“Slashed sleeves could become the new fashion, Herren.”
“My. Name. Is. Arpien.” He kicked a limp sleeve over with his toe, as if to see if it were alive. “What are you trying to say about me?”
That was the last question Brierly could answer. “Art speaks for itself, or not at all.”
“So that’s the verdict? I revere you and you feel nothing for me. I’m a rag doll you can dress up and then discard in a dusty corner until you feel like playing again.”
In his righteous rage he was the very image of Cryndien, not Herren.
She yawned. “Will you leave now, please? I’m tired.”
“You’re not tired. You’re running away.” He snatched up the doublet and trunk hose. “And another thing—if you’re really asleep, how can you be tired?” He slammed the door behind him.
But she’d been tired for years.
She stared at the heavy wooden door and dug a cold knuckle into her lips.
What if you let him kiss you?
Voracity would kill him.
He’s a figment. You could just imagine him back to life later.
Could she? Was Arpien Voracity’s creation or hers?
She’d forgotten Nissa was still there, analyzing every flicker her face revealed. “Do you think I’m running away, too?” Brierly said.
“I didn’t say that,” Nissa said.
“You never say anything.” What was this? She scolded Arpien for taking his anger out on Nissa but it was fine for her to?
“You’re right. I never say what I should be saying.” Nissa shoved aside a green brocade and sat opposite Brierly. “The person keeping you imprisoned isn’t Voracity or the Prince, it’s you. You refuse to see that you’re awake. Listen, Brierly, everything I’ve researched indicates the prophecy is true. Please, please, just try calling the Prince back one more time.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
Nissa toed the floor. “That’s why I never say anything.”
Heat wormed through Brierly’s veins. “I’m going to go lie down. Not because I’m running away. Because—because there are dreams out there more interesting than this one.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“The opportunity for an easy exit hasn’t presented itself.”
“What would you call Eusar chucking you off the roof?”
“Maybe I don’t like taking orders from figments.”
Nissa lowered her eyes again. “You say this dream is just like the others, but you don’t act like it.”
“You shouldn’t say things like that.” What if Voracity was listening? “If you think I’m so attached to this place, why did you and Arpien both accuse me of running away?”
“Because you know what you want, but you don’t want to pay the price to get it.”
“What do you know of what I want?”
Nissa flinched.
Brierly had a brief mental flash of Queen Perturbance’s face overlaid with hers, towering over Nissa. “I’m sorry—I—”
Brierly went to bed without another word. Emaciated rays of sunlight still winked through the window. Her listless young supporters among the Boxleyn nobles would be expecting her to provide mutual entertainment and distraction well into the night. It was far too early to go to sleep. What was she thinking? She was already asleep. She compromised by shutting one eye and leaving the other open to stare at the wall.
She felt guilty for getting angry with Nissa. She felt angry because Nissa made her feel guilty. She shouldn’t be feeling anything. Lying here remembering the texture of Arpien’s hand—calloused and strong and gentle—was dangerous. Envisioning the warmth of that unexpected nervous smile as he dangled five stories above the ground—that was deadly.
She’d had plenty of time to mould dream-Herren into the perfect man. But she’d never been able to finish the job of falling in love with him. It wasn’t just that Voracity periodically destroyed her favorite figment. It was that Herren, like the rag doll, had no choice in his actions. If she told him to capture the moon for her, he got a net and fished it out of the sky. If she wanted him to kiss her, he pressed his lips to hers as gently or urgently as she preferred. But it was a kiss without a spark, as self-referential as kissing a pillow. She could create her figments with any appearance, but she could not give them wills of their own. Without that, love was only the fondness the artist had for her favorite sketch.
So when Arpien didn’t behave how she expected, it made him seem like he might have that spark all the other Herrens lacked. The notion made her veins run with molten ice.
You say this dream is just like the others, but you don’t act like it.
How long could she maintain indifference? A year? A century? Perhaps it was best to let Voracity finish him off before she grew any more attached to him.
She sat up in bed. That was an unexpected solution. Take the small cut now to avoid the gaping wound later. The way to finally escape this recurring dream was not for her to die, but for Arpien to die. He had started this dream, hadn’t he? To end it she need only follow him to a dream where he was in danger, wait until Voracity knew she was watching, and bite her tongue while he perished.
The thought made her head pound with nausea, which only convinced her she was right. If she was silly enough to care about a figment now, how much worse would it be later?
If she was lucky, maybe he’d die without ever knowing she was there. She didn’t want to see the disenchantment in his face as he realized his “good” and “pure” princess was no such thing.
Spinning wheels. She really had been around Arpien too long. What were such words doing in her vocabulary?
How long did it take an efficient surgeon to amputate a limb? Five minutes? Better get it over with all at once. She burrowed back into the scratchy linens in search of a landscape in which to kill her prince.
30
Arpien
That night Arpien played more the ineffectual rescuer than ever in his nightmares. This time the victim was Cuz. He and Arpien fought back-to-back on dream practice fields while warrior after warrior attacked them, deadlier and more massive than they had ever been in real life. Cryndien. Eusar. Bo. Timothy. Emol. Gerret. They attacked in irrepressible waves, until it was more like fighting a thicket of blades than individuals. Arpien thrust and parried with his dull practice blade. His arms weakened and thinned into paper.
A woman watched him from a window above the practice fields, but he could not identify her. Behind him, Cuz gasped for breath, a whimper in each exhalation. “Courage, Cuz,” Arpien said, as much for his own sake as the boy’s. Arpien’s body was completely flat now, and his paper sword flapped. If only he had the vademecum sword.
A blade reached past his guard and took Cuz in the back. Arpien caught the dying boy as he fell. Blood trickled in stairsteps from the corner of Cuz’s mouth. “Why didn’t you save me? You were my hero.” His glassy eyes closed.
Arpien shook Cuz’s shoulders. “Don’t close your eyes, Cuz!”
Cuz obeyed, but the fiery gold eyes that opened were not his own. “You should leave Rosaria, paper prince. No one wants you here. You couldn’t rescue a slice of cheese from a mouse.”
Voracity. Was she controlling Cuz’s body? Arpien leapt to his feet, paper sword in hand, and whirled toward the window where he’d seen the shadowy woman looking on. It was empty.
An incalculable pain took him between his shoulder blades, and he folded to his knees. He looked down at his chest and saw the tip of a dull practice blade. Cuz’s face, distorted into Voracity’s expression, leered at him. “Spare yourself any more pain. Run away.”
Arpien tried to insist that Arpien Trouvel did not run, but he couldn’t pump the words past the pain. Cryndien impaled him with another sword. With ceremonious deliberation, each warrior stepped forward to reach past his weakening guard and skewer him.
Someone jerked a blade from his body and the world went a blinding white. He heard someone cry out, but it was not his own voice. The pain diminished as someone yanked the blades free one by one. He pressed his hand to his chest, wet and sticky with the horror of—
—glue?
He wiped glue from his eyes. Where a vengeful Cuz had been a moment before stood a snowman. Glueman. White sludge began to melt off the figure in a rumble of rage. More glue gushed down on top of it. Underneath he could see spinning flashes of color, something alive and beautiful and inhuman. Was he about to fight a fairy in full form?
Arpien seized his gloopy paper sword in his right hand. Another hand grabbed his left and yanked him away. It was a slender hand, surprisingly strong, and the moment it gripped his he felt himself turn to flesh and blood again.
“Sometimes,” Brierly said, “running away is smart.”
She tossed a long green knitted scarf at the glueman. It entangled the glueman’s neck and arms long enough for them to escape. Brierly dove into the sticky liquid surface of the practice field and pulled Arpien after her.
Drowning in glue reminded him far too much of his nightmares of drowning in Kirren’s river. But this was Brierly’s hand, and he let it pull him down to the very bottom of the opaque white ocean. They hit the ocean floor. Up became down and down up, and Arpien found himself standing in the middle of Sentre Forest, clean and whole.
Free of the glue, he at last got a good look at his companion. It was Brierly, wasn’t it? Not a dream about Brierly, but Brierly herself walking the dream world? The expression on her face was too naked to be feigned. Had it been Brierly or Voracity watching from the window?
Did it matter?
Their hands clung together as though she had not been able to erase all traces of the previous dream. It brought back a similar scene from yesterday’s waking hours. Brierly must have remembered it, too, for she blanched and let go of his hand.
For the first time since they’d met, Brierly babbled. “I couldn’t—you’re not—I didn’t mean—”
“Shh …” Her lips were silk under his calloused fingertips. “It’s all right.”
She didn’t slap him, that was promising. Her lips parted just enough that he could feel the wavering air stream as she exhaled. But she said nothing. She looked at him as though she were drowning, or he was. Arpien held his own breath, as though they were two shipwrecked victims tossed into an uncertain sea, and neither knew the way to the surface.
She backed through the woods and the trees closed in around her.
He ran after her—
—smack into a tree.
He sat up and rubbed his head. The last month had brought more trauma to his skull than the rest of his life combined. Was he so clumsy, or had Brierly, with her control over the dreamscape, shunted the trees into his path?
It was their recurring dream together. He chased his lady in white. She eluded him. Yet how could he give up on her when she kept giving him reason to hope?
He wished again for the vademecum sword. His princess-detector. In the way of dreams, the hilt of the practice sword lengthened and changed shape in his fist. He drew the vademecum sword and closed his eyes. It needled northward. The walls of the forest? his mind? rippled and parted at the touch of the blade.
He stepped through the rift and into the unknown.
Part Four
Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
Jane Austen
I am by no means of opinion that a ball of this kind,
given to respectable people, can have any evil tendency.
Jane Austen
31
Arpien
He wasn’t in the unknown. He was home.
It wasn’t home as Arpien remembered it. This was the Conquisani palace, but the red and gold banners were smaller. The stone bust of Great Great Uncle Nedferin, the very one he’d broken as a boy, had his beaky nose again.
A pair of gentlemen in antiquated parti-colored hose passed by. One gestured grandly, in the throes of a traditional Conquisani boasting story.
Arpien sheathed the vademecum sword and stepped into their path. He tucked his right arm behind his back and extended his left to his side, pointer finger up, and bowed the Half-Bow of Mannerly and Slightly Urgent Interruption. “Three thousand and three pardons, my lords—”
They walked straight through him.
Arpien’s spine tingled. Ghosts? If so, who was the ghost?
No, no, it was a dream. Brierly’s dream, not his, judging by the strains of old-fashioned string ensemble music drifting from the ballroom. He’d cut into the scene enough to see and hear and smell the ball, but not enough to take part in it.
He headed toward the noise—always a good place to look for Brierly. He spotted his princess in the middle of the ballroom floor, where a long line of ladies danced with a long line of gentlemen. Must be a style of dancing popular from Brierly’s memories. Arpien couldn’t remember ever seeing it in his own time. She’d exchanged her white gown for the pink one he’d first found her wearing in the tower, on Kissing Day. Then it had been dingy and sleep-rumpled. Now it was so pink it gave him a toothache.
He had full view of her face, so he saw her yawn so wide as to drink up the sea in one gulp. He’d pity Brierly’s partner if the gentleman were real. Good luck trying to impress her.
The line of men reached across to the line of ladies. Partners spun and crossed in a neat drill of collapsing geometric figures. Only when the row of ladies and gentlemen switched positions did he get a good look at Brierly’s dance partner.
It was he himself.
He squeezed through the crowd to get a better vantage point, and clutched a column.
No, wait. It was Great Grandfather Herren.
No wonder Brierly insisted on calling Arpien Herren. Arpien was only a pale copy of her first love.
But look at her face. Arpien had seen the same expression on the faces of his childhood friends, when he rambled on too long about the comparative merits of hedge clippers versus pruning shears.
She’d had one hundred years to shape Herren into the literal man of her dreams. He still wasn’t enough.
Most of the night was an endless cycle of the same dance to the same music. Midnight trumpeted Brierly’s birthday in with red and gold fireworks. Herren beamed at his betrothed. Brierly yawned. How many times had she turned seventeen?
Brierly brushed through Arpien on her way from the ballroom. He followed. The moment her foot hit the first step of the tower, the whole tenor of the dream sharpened. Arpien squeezed the handle of the vademecum sword.
Arpien compared the Conquisani version of the crime with Brierly’s dream-memory of it. Herren recorded that the Rosarians only agreed to let Brierly travel with them to the Conquisani palace if she were quartered in the highest tower. It would be easier to guard, Brierly’s father said.
