Dreamer's Daughter (19 page)

“I'm not sure it will be easy.”

He reached out and put his hands very lightly on her shoulders. “What can I do?”

“The magic wants you to come with me and drop your spells over Muinear's while I change what's left of hers to something more permanent.” She looked at him blankly. “How do I do that?”

He put his arm around her shoulders and led her toward the door. “Do you remember what the front looked like, with the stream and the front garden?”

“Aye.”

“And the back, including the stables?”

She nodded.

“Then let's go have a look at the spell outside the back door, round up the ponies, and be ready to fly. I'll tell you how I will weave my spell only to include Muinear's spell and not us, which is what you would normally need to do with yours, but I'm not sure that will work for you here. I suggest you try not to catch us up in your spell, but you'll have to negotiate that with your magic, I suppose.”

“I feel faint.”

He tightened his arm around her shoulders. “I can't blame you, love. Let me buy you a bit of time, shall I? I'll put something distracting over the top of Muinear's spell first. Elvish glamour, or some such rot.”

She smiled briefly. “You're trying to distract
me
.”

“Is it working?”

“Not very well.”

“I would pour more effort into my efforts, but I want something left of you to do your work.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I think you're far too aware of the fairness of your face.”

“Nay,” he said easily, “far too bemused by the fairness of yours. Let's argue about it later at length.”

Later
was, as it happened, quite a bit later than he would have wished for. His magic was, his earlier successes in the library aside, thoroughly unwieldy. It was a bit like trying to drag a spoon through solid rock. Frozen honey would have been a simple thing by comparison.

His grandfather would have been appalled by the condition of the glamour Rùnach managed to spread over Bristeadh's property, but Rùnach was just grateful something had worked at all. Muinear's spell at least seemed to find his efforts acceptable. Aisling had woven her spell of essence changing well if not a little untidily. He'd memorized it, of course, because that was just what he did, but he had the feeling he would never dare use it. Bruadair would likely turn him into a toad for his trouble if he did.

He had no idea what would be left of Bristeadh's house when—if—they returned, though Aisling's spell seemed to be, from all appearances, impervious to assault. His own spell of un-noticing that he'd drawn over them—fashioned from Fadaire in deference to Bruadair's delicate sensibilities—had seemed to be working as intended. There had been nothing else to do but be relieved to be away on a horse with magic of his own, accompanied by a very lovely golden filly whose parentage he fully intended to discover sooner rather than later.

Sooner
, he supposed, would also be quite a bit later than he would have liked. At the moment, he was simply flying into the sunrise, Aisling sitting behind him so he blocked the wind for her, with her father riding Orail and looking rather green. Flying was obviously not the man's favorite activity. Like father, like daughter, he supposed.

Aisling wasn't entirely sure where they were going and Bristeadh looked so perplexed that Rùnach half suspected that if he left their direction up to the two of them, they would all land in Beul where they would find themselves joining Aisling's cousin Euan in Sglaimir's dungeon. He had posed a silent but very deferential question to Bruadair's sentient self, then decided perhaps he would simply leave it up to Iteach to sniff out a nest of dreamspinners. His pony seemed to know where he was going—either that or he was simply doing his damndest to make certain Rùnach had nothing but sun in his eyes. At the moment, Rùnach wouldn't have been surprised by either.

Aisling's finger was quite suddenly alongside his face.

“There,” she said, pointing to the right.

Rùnach couldn't see anything at all for the sun, but Iteach at least seemed to agree with her. His horse began a slow, downward spiral. Rùnach would have accused him of showing off for that lovely filly, but the reality was, he and Orail were no doubt simply sparing Aisling's father any undue distress.

Rùnach looked over his shoulder yet again—he'd lost count of how many times he'd done so during the night—but saw nothing. He was still turning over the possibility that Sglaimir
couldn't
hide himself thanks to Bruadair's magic not being willing to allow it. He didn't want to count on that, but even just the thought of it was almost enough to allow him to take a deep breath instead of endless shallow ones. To have such an advantage might mean the difference between success and failure.

Assuming Bruadair didn't decide that he deserved the same treatment.

He realized Iteach had landed and exactly what that meant only as he found himself dismounting and staring in astonishment at the sight in front of him. He collected himself enough to give Aisling a hand down from their horse, but that was the extent of the courtesy he found himself capable of at the moment. Her father could no doubt see to himself.

“Oh,” Aisling said quietly.

He couldn't have agreed more. He supposed he should have taken a bit more time over the past few fortnights to at least come up with expectations about what a dreamspinner's palace might look like, but he doubted that even his wildest imaginings would have prepared him for what he was facing.

Admittedly, he was used to a fairly limited range of buildings. Buidseachd was surely a seat of power and only a fool would have approached it without a great amount of either deference or power. But while it was definitely immense and intimidating, it was not precisely beautiful.

Seanagarra was another vision entirely, immense but giving the impression that it was nothing more than a handful of beautiful gardens surrounding an admittedly fine collection of lovely chambers, halls, and kitchens.

The keep at Ceangail was a wreck, but he seriously doubted anyone expected anything else when they made a visit there. Tor Neroche, Léige, even his favorite place of Chagailt . . . they were each beautiful in their own way, but all were, in the end, simply buildings.

He wasn't quite sure what to call the thing in front of him.

It was enormous. He craned his neck to try to demarcate where the roof ended and the sky began, but that was more difficult than he would have expected. The glade they stood in was less a glade than an enormous expanse surrounded by mountains and forests set at the perfect distance to provide a stunning backdrop yet not interfere with the perfection of the creation in front of him.

A place that looked as if it were made solely of glass that only existed because his poor mind demanded that dreams take some sort of solid form.

He felt Aisling grope for his hand, but since he was groping for hers at the same time, he supposed he couldn't be accused of any unmanly weakness.

He looked at her father, who had come to stand on her other side. “Are we at the right place?” Rùnach managed.

Bristeadh nodded, looking perhaps less overwhelmed than he might have if he'd had a modicum of compassion. He clapped Rùnach on the shoulder briefly, then turned a gentle look on Aisling. “Here we are, daughter. I hope you'll find it to your liking.”

Aisling looked as though what she would have found to her liking was to bolt. Rùnach recognized the expression. It wasn't, of course, that he shared the thought fully. He was just having sympathy for her, no more.

She looked at him uneasily. “What do I do now?”

“Well, our horses seem to think you should press on.”

“Alone?” she asked in horror.

“I'll come along behind you with the horses,” Rùnach said promptly. “At least a dozen paces behind, perhaps a score. Not to worry.”

She looked at him in surprise, then her eyes narrowed. “Coward.”

“I'll take the horses,” Bristeadh said with a smile, removing Iteach's reins from Rùnach's hand. “You two go ahead.”

Rùnach looked at Aisling's father seriously. “I wonder when might be the appropriate time to discuss my intentions with you—if Aisling will permit it, of course.”

“I would accuse you of stalling, but I imagine you've more courage than that.”

So he hoped. He took a deep breath. “I thought I might run the idea by you before I attempted to approach any potentially less corporeal entities with my plan.”

Bristeadh smiled. “I'll consent to the match, though I daresay Aisling doesn't need my permission. Bruadair, however, is another story entirely and Sìorraidh will have its own opinions beyond that.” He shrugged. “The dreamspinner's magic will slay you if you cross the threshold unworthily. Or it doesn't like you. Or you're catching it on an off day.”

Rùnach pursed his lips. “I wish I thought you were having me on.”

“Try it and see, I suppose,” Bristeadh said.

“How is it you're so comfortable?”

“I'm not the one thinking to marry the First,” Bristeadh said with a shrug. “Not this time. I'm just bringing in the horses. You two go ahead. I'll wander off to the stables and leave you to your comfortable breathing. Or not, depending on the hall's preference, I suppose.”

“Is
everything
sentient here?” Rùnach asked in surprise.

“Everything,” Bristeadh confirmed. “But considering where your mother was from, that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.”

Rùnach supposed there was no point in listing all the things he found surprising, mostly because in the end, none of their present business was about him. He watched Aisling's father walk off with the horses, then looked at her.

“How are you?”

She took a deep breath. “I'm not sure.” She paused. “I suppose this is it, isn't it? I'll either walk through the doors and continue to breathe or I'll walk through the doors and I'll die on the spot.”

“Somehow, my love, I don't think you'll find yourself slain.”

She didn't move. She simply held his hand and looked at the palace in front of them. He supposed he could understand that very well. Everything she had learned about herself, everything she might become in the future, indeed the future of her country rested on what happened to her when she walked across that threshold.

She looked up at him. “The moment before battle is the hardest?”

He brought her hand up and kissed the back of it, then continued to hold her very chilly fingers with his. “It is.”

“Does it get any better?”

“After a few paces, aye.”

“You won't really walk twenty paces behind me, will you?”

“I'll walk wherever you want me to,” he said quietly, “but I have the feeling, my love, that you'll eventually need to walk ahead.”

“Briefly.”

“If that suits you.”

She took a deep breath, then nodded. He watched her put her shoulders back and steel herself for the short journey. He would have had more sympathy, but he was worried enough for his own damned self. He could think of many unpleasant ways to meet his end, but he suspected that perishing on the threshold of his betrothed's . . . well, whatever it was—

He took his own deep breath. He didn't want to die. He wanted to wed the woman next to him, have a handful of children who had her eyes, and spend the rest of his extraordinarily long life not walking twenty paces behind her. If that suited her.

Aisling looked at him once more and smiled faintly. She looked more confident than she had before, which was reassuring.

He only wished he could find that same reassurance for himself, because he had no idea whether or not he would manage to cross the threshold of those massive glass doors and continue to breathe.

And he'd thought facing Acair would be the true test of his courage.

A
isling walked up the handful of smooth, wide steps and paused before she put her hand on the enormous doors to what had to have been the largest building she had ever seen. It looked less like a palace than it did a cathedral. She had seen a building very like to what was before her within the walls of the university at Lismòr, though that had been a fraction of the size of the hall she faced at present. Beul had a cathedral, though she'd never been inside it. It had been shuttered for as long as she could remember.

Perhaps there was a good reason why.

The structure before her was so large, she wondered how human hands could possibly have constructed it. She looked up but couldn't see the spot where the roof terminated. She supposed even the doors were three times her height. She considered the heavy golden doorhandles, each perhaps two feet long, attached vertically but somehow looking as if they simply floated in front of the glass that was not cloudy but rather infused with something that was impossible to see through.

Magic, she supposed.

She looked for Rùnach and realized he was standing on the step below her, his hands clasped behind his back, simply watching her. What she wanted to do was turn, fling herself into his arms, and whisper in his ear that
away
would be a good direction to take at present. He lifted his eyebrows briefly as if he understood exactly what she was thinking. Then, damn him, he stepped backward onto a lower step. She shot him a warning look because she didn't dare tell him aloud not to go any farther.

He only inclined his head as elegantly as he would have to his grandmother the queen of the elves. Then he simply looked at her, beautiful elven prince that he was, and waited.

She wondered if he would catch her and hold her once more if she soon found herself breathing her last.

She turned back to the doors because there was no time like the present, she supposed, to find out if your life was going to end or not. She reached out to touch the golden doorhandles, wishing her entire arm wasn't trembling so badly, but before she could touch anything, the great doors swung inward all on their own.

Something rushed through her she couldn't identify: terror, dread, or perhaps even relief. Doors opening was a good thing. Then again, perhaps even wells of evil extended their welcoming embraces to those they wished to smother. She dropped her arm to her side and forced herself not to clench her fists. She knew she should have been looking up, as Weger had shouted at her so often to do, but she thought that might be slightly beyond her courage. It was one thing to step across a threshold; it was another thing entirely to look up as one did so while fearing that death might be lying in wait there.

She kept her eyes on her boots as she stepped forward, then continued to look down as she ventured another pair of paces. Then she stopped, but it wasn't from feeling her life being taken from her.

It was because of where she stood.

She supposed that she might look back on that moment at some point and be able to relive it without having so much invested in not finding herself slain or offending whomever might have been there watching her walk into a hall that wasn't hers. At the moment, though, all she could do was look at the floor.

It wasn't glass, but it was like no polished stone she had ever seen. It was very dark, giving the impression of being solid while at the same time reflecting the depths from whence the stone had been hewn. There was also somehow a faint layer of something that seemed to contain each footprint that had passed over it, particular to the souls making those footprints. She was part of history, yet standing to the side observing it.

Then she blinked, and it was simply a floor. It was, however, a floor she suspected Uachdaran of Léige would have salivated over.

Bruadair was a strange place.

She realized there was a pathway there, a part of the floor that was a less blackish blue than the rest of the floor, as if it knew she had come and wanted her to reach the other end of the grand hall without undue trouble. Or anyone blocking her path, apparently.

She looked up and realized that such might be more of an issue than she would have expected.

The hall was full of people, people who were all looking at her. She who had done her best over the course of her life to simply disappear and escape scrutiny was apparently the focus of their attention.

She flinched a little, then stepped backward, though fortunately not over the threshold. She glanced over her shoulder to find Rùnach standing where she'd left him, outside the hall, his hands still clasped behind his back, an expression of utter seriousness on his face. She was tempted to go hide behind him, which she supposed he knew. He simply watched her, silent and grave, as if he wanted to give her the support of his presence but leave the rest to her.

Which she knew was his intention, damn him anyway.

She took a deep breath, nodded just the slightest bit, then turned back to the path. She put one foot to it and it began to glow above and beyond what it had done before. She was tempted to look around herself and see who else the floor might be welcoming, but she didn't have to. Everyone in the hall was looking only at her.

She took a deep breath, then walked a dozen steps forward. She counted, because that seemed to help. There was a dais at the end of the path, so she supposed that was as good a place to make for as any. There were people standing on that raised bit of the hall as well, but she didn't dare look at them too closely lest they think poorly of her. She would know soon enough who they were.

She looked over her shoulder one more time to find that Rùnach and her father were standing at the doorway, obviously following her. Well, if things totally unraveled, she supposed they might at least offer her sympathy on her way out of the world.

She could bring to mind any number of other ridiculously long passageways she'd traversed over the course of her life, mostly ones finding themselves in the Guild. She had slunk down them, keeping to one side, shrinking as far as possible into herself that she didn't garner the notice of anyone in authority. She had perfected the art.

Only now, that art was useless to her.

She knew, based on too many evidences to deny, that the souls in that glorious hall were looking at
her
. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to, nowhere to go but forward. She also knew, with the same sort of resonance in her soul, that the choice was hers to either accept a birthright she hadn't asked for or to walk away from it. The world would continue to turn, no doubt, and the Nine Kingdoms along with all the other undiscovered places that didn't crave a seat on the Council of Kings would continue to march doggedly along as they had for millennia before she'd been born and would no doubt for millennia after she was dead.

Only they would do it without dreams.

Unbidden, she caught the faintest glimpse of just exactly what she could do if she continued forward.

She looked up at the vault of the ceiling above her and felt herself sway slightly as the realization struck her. She had spent the whole of her life locked in the Guild, trapped in a large chamber with an unwholesome number of looms and weavers, but never in her life had she imagined that the world could be any bigger. Her life had been in that room, her task the very small one of continuing to weave endless reams of ugly cloth, her future nothing but more of the same. It hadn't occurred to her that her life could be made up of something else.

Something like the place she was standing in.

She continued forward, then hazarded a glance at the people flanking the path she was traversing. They all looked different, true, but there was something about them that was hauntingly the same. It took her a moment or two to realize what it was, but when she did, she found herself less surprised than she would have thought.

They all had the same look in their eyes, as if they saw things that perhaps just weren't visible to others.

She continued on her way to the dais, comforted by knowing that the choice to continue on was hers. She could have stopped, turned, and then walked back down that beautiful, faintly sparkling path, out the door, and back to an ordinary life. It would have been safe, perhaps. It also would have even been comfortable, if she looked at it in the right way.

But it would have been small.

Now that she had stepped out beyond the Guild, stepped into the dreamspinner's great hall, she knew that taking a step backward was simply unthinkable, no matter where her steps forward led.

She thought about that until she was a score of paces away from the dais, then she looked to her right at the souls lining that side of the path. She blinked in surprise, for she recognized more of them than she would have thought possible.

Ceana was there, the king of Neroche's spinner. The woman whose chambers she'd used in Cothromaiche, leaving her a spinning wheel made of sunlight in payment, stood there as well though Aisling didn't know her name. She recognized a dwarvish man who had loaned her a wheel in Durial, and she wasn't entirely sure she didn't also see an elven maid she had almost run into bodily in Tòrr Dòrainn.

She looked to her left. She didn't recognize any of the men and women standing there, but she suspected they all had one thing in common.

They spun.

She looked up at the dais. There were several people there, six, seven perhaps. She didn't know any of them, yet they seemed familiar, as if she had seen them lingering at the edge of her dreams for years. They were watching her gravely, then a thin, white-haired woman stepped from behind one of them.

Muinear.

Aisling almost wept.

Muinear walked down the pair of steps and drew Aisling into an embrace. She said nothing, she simply held her so tightly, it was almost painful.

“You came,” she said, finally.

Aisling nodded, because speech was simply beyond her. She closed her eyes and tried not to weep. She had loved the weaving mistress first because Muinear had been kind to her when no one else had been and later because she'd taught her everything worth knowing about negotiating not only the Guild, but also life. But now to know she was clinging to her great-grandmother . . .

She found it very hard to let go.

Muinear seemed to have an endless amount of patience. Aisling supposed she might have stood there all day if it hadn't occurred to her at one point that there was a hall full of people watching her and perhaps even something left for her to do. She pulled away from her mother's grandmother and looked into blue eyes that were quite a bit less watery and vague than they had been in times past.

“Thank you,” Aisling whispered. “For staying with me at the Guild.”

Muinear kissed her on both cheeks. “I'll respond to that properly, my love, when we have privacy. For now, there is choice laid before you. Bruadair has held its breath for this moment for many years, but it won't make any decisions for you. Neither will I. If you choose to step forward, it must be because you've chosen to do so.”

Aisling felt a little winded. “I'm not even sure what I'm committing to.”

“Aren't you?” Muinear said with a gentle smile. “Still?”

Aisling took a deep breath to answer, then realized there was no need. Perhaps she didn't know what the particulars were of the path that lay before her, but she knew that if she continued forward, she was going to be accepting her birthright.

As a dreamspinner.

Muinear stepped aside and off the path that was still glowing faintly on the floor. Aisling took a deep breath, then looked at the souls standing there on the dais.

There were, she could now say, six people standing there watching her. There was nothing unusual about their clothing; it was nothing she couldn't have found in the shops of Beul. They ran the gamut in looks, some very ordinary, one not particularly handsome at all, and the others almost too difficult to look at. But that wasn't the most remarkable thing about them. The most remarkable thing was they had
her
eyes.

She couldn't say she had spent all that much time looking at herself, but she knew what her eyes looked like.

She continued forward, then paused at the edge of the platform. She looked, one by one, at the six souls standing there. They didn't look displeased to see her; they were simply there waiting. And then they eased apart, three to one side and three to the other.

A spinning wheel sat there behind them.

Aisling put her foot on the dais and stepped up. All the people standing there, the six closest to her and the others who had apparently come to watch the spectacle, made absolutely no sound. She didn't dare look behind her to see if Rùnach was still there in the building, because she knew he was.

She walked forward until she was standing in front of the wheel.

She realized she was surprised by the sight only after she had stared at the thing for what seemed like an eternity. Perhaps she'd allowed herself to speculate too much over the past pair of days about what the wheel of a dreamspinner might look like, but what she was seeing was not at all what she had expected.