Six more days, he thought, and wondered what Neve would make of his final Advent gift to her.
And wondered, with a frisson of nerves, what she would make of him.
* * *
Scarman’s Hall was the grandest structure on the Isle of Feathers, and never grander than on Christmas Eve. The gather was the social event of the year, and the betrothals were its heart. Every marriageable girl had been planning her gown for months, and every suitor his final gift: a ring.
Neve had a ring already. It had been her first gift from the Dreamer—the jewel beetle—and she’d carried it in her pocket ever since.
Tonight she would wear it on her finger.
She would also wear the dress she’d made of fabric he had given her. It was blue as the sky and as cunning as all his gifts: it wasn’t one blue but every blue—all the hours and moods of the sky. From minute to minute, it changed its hue, deepening from cobalt to midnight and setting out stars. And when she smiled—she discovered, looking at herself in the mirror that had also been a gift—it flushed to sunset orange, as bright as flame.
Imagine: the last of the plague orphans turning up at the gather in such a gown! It was like the story from Neve’s book, about the cinder maid and the fairy godmother. She didn’t have a pumpkin coach, though, or slippers made of glass—only of spider silk, with a sheen like dew on a petal—but she had her old cloak and boots for the long walk, and when had she ever had qualms about mud on her hem?
She looked in the mirror and wondered if it were true or enchanted. How could she know if this was herself reflected or some dream version. Did it matter? She smiled, and watched her dress again flame from midnight to sunset. Her heart felt like an ember in her chest, ready to catch fire and throw sparks.
What would happen tonight? She didn’t know. Spear’s hand would never hold hers. She knew that much, and Fog Cup would never be her home. A mere twenty-four days ago, those had been her only two choices. Now miracles were her daily fare and her pulse still beat its one simple question: Who?
She understood that he was the Dreamer, whom she’d called upon in her despair. But how could she know what that meant? What was he? She’d felt his presence in her dreams but had never seen him, and he didn’t leave tracks in her yard as the reverend did (or as the reverend had, anyway, until six nights ago, when his gifts abruptly ceased).
Once, she’d dreamed she embraced a hill of black feathers and felt the pulse of a heartbeat deep within.
And then last night, a miracle unlooked for: she’d opened her book to read a story and found in it not the eighteen that there had always been, but nineteen, and the last was called “The Dreamers.”
He was one of ten, born before time, who had, through the millennia, taken it in turn to sleep, and dream. It was they who conducted the symphonies of growth and death that turned the world. They were gods from before there were men to invent the word god, and they cared nothing for worship or thanks. Only for the act itself: creating.
Sometimes destroying.
And so she knew who he was, but not what form he might take. There had been no illustration to accompany the tale, and no description, either. It didn’t matter; by now she loved him in any skin. In her book there was another tale—one of the original eighteen—of a dragon who had a human wife, and Neve had never understood it before, at least from the wife’s point of view. But she did now. Love was love.
But she hoped that he was not a dragon.
She stepped onto her porch, ready to walk to town, and found there was a creature in her yard.
It gave her a start, considering her train of thought, but then she had to laugh at herself, because this was only a mount to carry her. It was a buck, a splendid beast, all white, its antlers festooned with ribbons, and its tack and bridle glittering silver. It dropped a knee for her to mount, and Neve laughed again at the wonder of it. Would she become numb to wonder, if this kept up, as she once had been to misery?
Never.
She rode and it was like gliding, down the long sodden lane from Graveyard Farm into town. Either the drizzle stopped or an unseen bubble curved above her, but not a drop fell on her the whole way. The beast carried her to Scarman’s Hall, right up the broad stone steps to deliver her to the door, and it was as though the scene froze around her and became a painting, and she the only moving figure in it.
As many candles flickered in the hall’s hoisted lanterns on this one night as had burned in all the previous six months together. Mist diffused the light to haloes, overlapping by their dozens, and the pangs of a solitary cello wove among them, sweet and pure.
Neve dismounted. Everyone else just stood and stared. There was Keillegh Baker and her boy, both agog, and Bill Childbreaker, ill at ease in his cheap Sunday suit. There was a gaggle of First Settlement girls in matching crowns of holly berries—their shock held no wonder, only envy—and Dame Somnolence, whose eyes had never looked larger or less doom-struck.
And then there was Reverend Spear, as motionless as all the rest. He stared and stared, Neve’s splendor diminishing his own. He seemed to shrink before her eyes like a shadow at the rising of the sun.
Neve faced them all and smiled, and beheld the deepening ripple of their shock when her dress flushed from blue to flame, and when she walked past them, she felt like she was floating.
Maybe she was. Nothing seemed impossible now.
The corridor was wide, its ceiling vaulted high, and at the end of it, the ballroom glowed with a light too bright for lanterns.
He was already there. She felt it even before she heard the singing—the language of her dreams, wind through a forests’ worth of leaves—and she knew that the isle folk were crowding behind her as she drifted; she felt them, too, but with nothing like the pulse of radiance that drew her onward. They were the past, already receding.
In her spider-silk slippers, she came into the ballroom.
And there he was.
The senses have their limits, and we can never know how short they fall in revealing to us the truth of a vision, a scent, a sound. Gazing on the Dreamer, Neve felt herself careen into the boundary of her human limitations … and push past it. The others were left behind. They saw him too, but only a mirage of him.
Perhaps they saw a man.
He was not a man. Had she really thought he would be?
She had never been able to imagine him, but when she’d pictured this moment, Neve had thought she would go to him, that he would hold out his hand and she would take it. But how could she go to him when he did not stand on the ground?