An Accident of Stars (24 page)

“But even so, everyone dreams – every sentient soul on every world, all pouring their thoughts into a great subconscious web we call the dreamscape. Well, I say
we
; not everyone believes it. The Shavaktiin, though, we know the truth: that the dreamscape connects all minds across the Many, heedless of time and distance, because the Many doesn't care about clocks and seasons, decay and ageing, relative positions in time and space. There is only one moment in all of existence – one eternal beat in which every universe is born and breathes and dies, the way milliseconds and femtoseconds inhabit what we commonly think of as the smallest unit of time – and that moment is always
now
. And so it is with the dreamscape: the dreams of the past don't die because the past is past. Why should they, when neither past nor future truly exists?

“And when you dream – when anyone in creation dreams – they're connected to the dreamscape; a realm created solely by its visitors, by the very act of visiting. But sentient minds, and particularly human ones, are limited: the dreamscape is far too vast for any one soul to traverse, and there's a kind of topography to it, a sort of enforced proximity, so that the dreams you visit most easily are the dreams of those nearest to you – the dreams of others of your world, whether forwards or backwards in time. Unconscious dreams, where the daylight mind sleeps, everyone has those, and their substance lends deception to the dreamscape, which doesn't distinguish between beauty and nightmare, history and lies. But conscious dreams, like this one? Well, then your daylight mind is alive to that deception; it helps you parse true from false. But unless you remember it on waking, you might as well have dreamed nothing at all.

“And so, to answer your question, Saffron Isla Coulter – is this magic? Only if consciousness is, or if brains are. Wherever magic occurs in the Many, in whatever manifestation, it's always a disturbance: a specific usurpation of the norms of its world, or of similar worlds, whose ultimate origins and logic not even the Shavaktiin know. But everyone dreams, and everyone feeds the dreamscape – which makes it normal, and
that
means it isn't magic. Not really.”

For the longest moment, Saffron simply stared. Part of her had drunk in every word, but the rest of her was dumbstruck, unable to comprehend the scope of Luy's response. Falling into another world was one thing, but the sudden possibility of endless new realms all interconnected even while stretching into infinity… It was too big to believe – and Luymust have known that. He was looking at her with suppressed humour, eyes gleaming as though, by answering her question, he'd also laid a challenge before her. Which, Saffron realised, he had: not just to accept it, but to remember.

Softening slightly, Luy reached out and tapped the side of her cheek with a finger. “You're no oneiromancer, worldwalker girl. But you might learn something yet.”

Around her, the dreamscape began to fade, the field of flowers whitening into mist.“How…” she began, but before she could form the rest of the words, both Luy and his world had fallen away, leaving only muzzy dreamlessness in their wake.

I
n the cold dawn light
, Zech lay still and watched as Safi began to stir – she'd been lying awake for hours, thoughts churning with all the revelations of their shared dream. She'd already thought of a way to tell Yasha what she'd learned about the soldiers without mentioning that they'd seen inside the palace, but first she had to see if Safi remembered too – and if so, how much. The wait was agonising enough that even the pain in her leg couldn't wholly distract her. And what if Jeiden or Yena woke too? Though neither had so much as twitched in the time that Zech had been watching, Jeiden was a light sleeper and Yena was still curled against Safi, making it difficult for one of them to rise without disturbing the other.

Finally, Safi's eyes slid open. Zech held her breath, willing her to look over. For one heart-stopping moment, the older girl almost went straight back to sleep, but at last she met Zech's gaze, blinking slowly.

Speak now, privately
, Zech mimed at her.
Please?

Safi nodded agreement. Gently disentangling herself from Yena (the other girl only sighed and rolled over) she stood away from the others, waiting politely while Zech, still unsure how much strain her leg could bear, came slowly to her feet. Pain shot through her thigh, but it was a marked improvement on yesterday. The realisation made her overconfident – no sooner had she taken a step than she was stumbling, toppling forward. Only Safi kept her upright: the other girl lunged forward and caught her, lending support while Zech, red-faced, looped an arm around her shoulders.

Clearly, walking anywhere was out of the question until she'd seen the healers again. At Safi's tacit suggestion, Zech let herself be lowered back down, the pain easing as soon as she took the weight off her feet. Casting a wary eye at Jeiden, she opted instead for a different sort of secrecy.

“Safi,” she asked in English, “what did you dream last night?”

Beside her, the older girl stiffened. “I think… ugh, I feel like it was something important, but I can't remember. Maybe you were there? I don't know, it's all sort of vague, like the more I try to hang onto it, the more it slips away. Maybe it'll come to me later.” She paused, looking quizzically at Zech. “Why? Did you dream something too?”

The hope in her tone made Zech wince with guilt, but if Safi noticed the expression, she must have attributed it to yet more pain as she said nothing.
Maybe I should tell her. We could work together. Maybe we could be allies.
But the risk was too great, she knew that now; she wanted to trust Safi, but first she had to find out more on her own – had to figure out who knew what, and how badly she'd been lied to.

Instead, she shook her head. “It was nothing,” Zech murmured. “Just a nightmare.”

T
hree hours
north of the riverside camp, when Pix and Viya were due to turn for Avekou, Zech suddenly announced, “I had a true dream of Leoden last night.”

The hairs on Saffron's arms stood up, though she didn't know why. She stared at Zech, trepidation coiling through her stomach as Gwen and Yasha, Pix and Halaya all demanded details of the dream.

“He's called off the search for Iviyat,” Zech said, her gaze lighting on everyone but Saffron. “He ordered his commanders to turn around. He doesn't want to find us anymore.”A whirlwind of discussion followed. Pix alone was sceptical, not of Zech's claim, but of the idea that the dream could be trusted in isolation, while Yasha was almost feral with pride at this newly-manifested talent. All agreed, however, that the news should change the distribution of the Shavaktiin between the two parties – if Leoden was no longer hunting Viya, then there was potentially less need to protect her, and all four women began to haggle the details out in earnest.

“Is that a kind of magic here?” Saffron asked Matu, who was the closest adult not involved in the conversation. “Dreaming true dreams?”

“We call it the ilumet,” he said, and Saffron shivered with déjà vu. “Some people are more gifted with it than others, but everyone dreams, and having another type of magic often makes you more sensitive to the dreamscape.” He paused, then added, “Zechalia wouldn't lie about something like this.”

“I know,” said Saffron – too quickly, because even though she trusted Zech, she had a nagging feeling that she was missing something. But then she'd felt that way about most things since coming to Kena; that was just her being out of her depth, not a sign of something important. The thought sent a pang through her chest, and she hunched in on herself, remembering Kadeja's blade at the fountain, the blood of the Envas road.

“Here now,” said Matu, giving her shoulder a gentle nudge. “You look like you've swallowed the moon.”

“Like I've
what
?”

Matu laughed. “Forgive me, it's a tale we tell children. Once, they say, there was a third moon in the sky, and she knew all the stories in the world, but she was too shy to share them. So her elder sisters wove a spell in moonlight, that if anyone drank the youngest moon's reflection from a pool, one of her stories would pass to their keeping until they died. And people drank, and the younger moon, once fat and round, grew thinner and thinner, only waxing full again when those who knew her stories passed into death.

“But as the legend grew, we began to drink the moon's stories faster than our dying could replenish her, until one night a lonely child saw the moon's reflection and drank until she was gone forever. His belly was full of stories, but he grieved her loss, knowing then that he'd taken her duty on himself, but fearing it was beyond him. And from then on, there were only two moons in Kena's sky, and our stories stayed with us even after death. And that's why, even now, the tales we tell to children are called moon-tales.”

He looked at her, his dark eyes kind. “I say you've swallowed the moon because you look burdened with stories. As if you've taken more weight on yourself than you rightly know how to carry.”

“Oh,” said Saffron quietly. Hot tears pricked her eyes. “Oh.”

Ahead of them, the women had sorted out the dispersal of the Shavaktiin. Pix and Viya broke away from the main party, accompanied by fewer riders than initially planned, but still enough that their absence left Saffron feeling strangely exposed. She raised a hand to wave them off, as did Matu – she'd already said her proper goodbyes to Viya that morning – then watched them ride away, the smaller party taking a curving path through the trees until they were out of sight. When her own mount started moving again, it was almost a shock; she jolted in the saddle, fingers clutching at the reins, and stared at a fixed point in the distance, unfamiliar earth beneath a too-white sun.

“We'll start your lessons in Vekshi tomorrow,” Matu said, into the not-quite-silence of hoofbeats and creaking leather.

“Mm,” said Saffron. She didn't look up.

“I could teach you other things, too, if you wanted.”

There was a pause as the offer sank in. “Like what?”

“How to defend yourself,” said Matu. His voice was calm and even, as though they were discussing the weather, but Saffron felt her cheeks burn, ashamed to be so transparent. “Not how to fight with a Vekshi staff – there's not enough time, and I'm hardly proficient – and Pix is the one to ask for lessons in knives. But there are… tricks, I suppose you'd say, that are helpful for defence. Ways to use your size to your advantage, your speed. Nothing complicated. Just enough to keep yourself safe, disable an opponent or get away clean. If you wanted.”

Saffron thought of how helpless she'd felt when Kadeja had cut her fingers; how frightened she'd been in the battle; how vulnerable she still felt now. It wasn't that she wanted more violence – she just didn't want other people to hurt her again.

“I'd like that,” she said softly. “Please.”

“All right, then,” said Matu. “I'll talk you through the forms as we ride, and this evening, I'll show you in practice. How does that sound?”

Saffron took a deep breath, and for the first time that morning, it didn't feel tight in her chest. “Good. It sounds… good.”

In the days that followed, Matu was better than his word. Though he never probed openly about Saffron's fears, he was quick to intuit their parameters, adapting his conversation to suit her level of comfort. Their second morning out, when talk of self-defence became too much for her, he segued effortlessly into a description of Yeveshasa, a stone-carved city set atop a massive mesa, punching up out of a plateau like the earth god's fist. The sevikmet flowed between them, Vekshi words and Kenan twisting in her head, and when she tried to speak aloud, he never once mocked her accent. Gwen joined in for some of these lessons, muttering about agile young brains whenever she stumbled over a word, but Matu didn't tease her either; just rode between them, reins tied to the saddle as he grazed his fingertips against their skin, the touch both chaste and comforting.

Sometimes, during these moments, Yena would catch Saffron's eye and wink at her, leaving her flushed and smiling. Though Matu undoubtedly noticed, he politely refrained from comment. And whenever they stopped – whenever Saffron could bear it – he taught her his tricks of self-defence in earnest.

On the evening of the third day, as they sat beside the campfire, Matu explained about the nine branches of Kenan magic, each discipline tied and attributed to a particular god, though their limitations were, in his view, a product as much of custom as natural law.

“We use our magics like tools, the way we've been taught,” he said. “The shape of a tool defines its use, but the substance of a tool – the how and why of its making – is a human choice.”

“You're saying all magic is the same?” asked Saffron.

“I'm saying,” said Matu, “that Veksh and Kena are different lands, but where their magic is different to ours, it's not because of blood.”

She dreamed of the Envas road that night, a paralysing melee of blood and screams, the woman she'd killed looking up at her from under the dying horse. Saffron woke with tears on her cheeks, but not alone: she was cuddled between Zech and Yena, with Jeiden's small hand sneaking over Zech's flank to curl around her wrist.

“It's all right,” Yena murmured sleepily, nuzzling into Saffron's shoulder. “We've got you.”

Zech made a sleepy noise of assent, and Jeiden squeezed her wrist, and when she fell asleep again, she didn't dream at all.

Not that night, at least. But in the days that followed, more unsettling than her periodic nightmares were the dreams she didn't remember, their absence niggling at her like a half-completed chore.

Just as she'd done for the last ten days since setting out for Avekou, Viya woke to the ungentle nudging of Pix's boot. She'd protested at first, angry at having her status so thoroughly disregarded, but Pixeva only smiled and said that the dignity of rank while travelling was like a three-legged roa: both mythical and conceptually pointless. Thus far, Viya had endured the indignity of riding through rainsqualls, pissing and shitting behind innumerable bushes, and nightmares of the Envas road that unfailingly woke her from sleep. Though her complaints were only ever about the first two problems, in her secret heart she knew the latter was truly responsible for her upset. Like all women of her class, Viya had been raised to fight and defend herself, taught from childhood that there was no dishonour in taking the lives of others if it were done to save one's own. And yet the battle weighed on her – not the loss of the dead themselves, but the fear and fury of it, and the sharp uncertainty she'd felt as to whether or not she'd live.

Her nightmares were always the same: an endless, looping replay of when she'd fallen. Only seconds had passed between Mara's demise and her hitting the ground, but both at the time and in memory, it felt much longer. Viya had been paralysed, so terrified that she'd wet herself; so dislocated from her living flesh that, for the smallest increment of time, she felt as if she were floating outside her body, leaving her with an incongruous, impossible memory of staring in disbelief at the back of her own head. And then she'd slammed back into the moment, spurred by an overwhelming desire to fight, to win, to
live
. She'd slashed the hocks of the horse above and rolled away, fast enough not to be crushed by its body but too slow to avoid the sword of its rider. Her face burned as the blade came down, and after that there was nothing but blood and darkness, interspersed with flashes of light and the far-off sound of screaming.

That was when she invariably woke, sweat-drenched and trembling in the night air, the whole world silent except for the whir of insects and the breathing of her companions. Sleep never came easily after that, but eventually her body's exhaustion overruled her brain's alarm, and she'd drift back into a shallow, dreamless oblivion. She said nothing of this to Pix, of course – pride forbade her – but sometimes as they rode, she'd caught the courtier watching her with speculative sympathy, as though she were waiting for Viya to admit to it. Had the two of them been alone, it was possible Viya might have given in, but their five Shavaktiin companions – three archers, a dreamseer and Dom the healer – were always nearby, and so Viya held her tongue.

Her scar, though still painful, was healing cleanly. She'd seen so herself on the second day out, when they'd passed a loop of the river where the water was still enough to serve as a mirror. The scar was only slightly thinner than a finger's width, taut and ridged and shiny-sallow, extending diagonally from just inside her left eyebrow to the top right of her forehead, at which point the blade had jagged back again and torn a wedge of scalp away from her hairline. Thanks to Dom, the flesh had been reattached, albeit at the expense of a small hank of hair – the skin there was weird and bald, only now beginning to prickle with new growth.

Magic could only speed up her body's natural healing, not replace it altogether: the scar, though neater and more fully developed than it would otherwise be, was still permanent. Viya had stared at it for a long moment, wondering how she felt. A small part of her was sad, but as for the rest… She was still Cuivexa; still Iviyat ore Leoden ki Hawy; still herself. And besides, bloodfather Iavan had a scarred face too, and everyone loved and respected him. Why should Viya be any different?

Now, though, in the chill dawn air, she probed the scar and winced. It hurt more when the air was cold, and after yet another night spent on hard ground, her whole body was stiff and sore into the bargain. Biting back curses, she blinked angrily up at Pix: in a break from her usual nudge-and-move-on routine, the courtier still stood over her, one hand resting lazily on a hip.

“What now?” Viya grumbled, yawning as she stretched. “More demotions? Do you want me to cook you breakfast? Shine your boots?”

Pix quirked her lips. “Either would be lovely, did you feel so inclined, but no. I've spoken with Oyako–” the dreamseer, robed in white, “–and she says we ought to reach Avekou today. I thought you'd like to know.”

Instantly, Viya sat up. “So soon? I thought we were another day distant at least.”

Pix shrugged. “Even with the rain, we've made good time. I'd thought we might have more of Leoden's honoured swords to contend with, but Zechalia must have dreamed it true, after all. If he's still looking for us, he's doing it in the wrong place.”

“Hmm,” said Viya, coming to her feet. Because of Zech's dream, Halaya had downsized their Shavaktiin escort in accordance with the reduced threat; originally, she'd planned to send swordsmen with them as well as archers, but as the journey to Veksh was deemed to be the more perilous, she'd opted to keep the bulk of her people together. Viya wasn't surprised the girl had dreamed it true – though Zech was Vekshi by birth, Ke and Na had already acted through her once, so why not again? But she'd learned from her earlier mistakes not to antagonise others if she could help it, and so she kept her opinions to herself.

Instead, she asked, “Did Oyako say when we'd arrive? Did she dream inside the rebel camp?”

Pix shook her head. “The place is warded, apparently – Amenet must have someone with the ilumet on her side, or else she's working with Hime's Kin. As for time, the afternoon is most likely. We've still a way to ride.”

At this casual mention of Amenet ore Amenet ki Rahei, Viya shivered. It wasn't until the third day out from the others that Pix had finally admitted that not only was Amenet still alive, but they were on their way to meet her. Up until that point – ever since she'd first heard mention of Avekou – Viya had assumed that the allies Yasha had sent them to find were, in fact, Rixevet, Iavan and Kadu. Certainly, nobody had tried to disabuse her of the notion, and given Yasha's previous refusal to let her leave the group, it had made sense that wanting Rixevet as an ally might have caused her to change her mind. Knowing the truth, she still hadn't given up hope of meeting her parents in Avekou, but it was a small hope, one she'd done her best to keep buried lest reality prove a disappointment. Avekou was a large territory populated almost exclusively by the farms and estates of nobles. Only Pix knew to whose lands they were actually heading, and so far, she was keeping it close to her heart.