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Moriah ambled by, looking amused by Oneira’s labors as only cats can, full of supercilious condescension, and not remotely interested in assisting. She leapt easily to the top of the nearby high wall, sunning herself lazily. Adsila came to observe also, perched on an overhanging limb, head cocked from side to side, obsidian gaze alert with interest.

Oneira—sweat-soaked, grimy, crimson hair falling in damp, brick-dark snarls around her face and neck where it had fallen from the knot and she hadn’t wanted to pause to put it back—nearly told them all to go away. She didn’t need an audience for her humiliating struggle to do something so simple.

It had been humbling to discover exactly how little she could accomplish without resorting to magic. All of her experiments with gardening and housekeeping, of which she’d been rather proud, doing for herself without servants and support staff, now showed themselves to be false and flimsy, not truly the work of her own hands.

Those hands had grown sore, blistered, rubbed raw and bleeding from gripping the shovel. She knew she should be using her feet to leverage her weight as the ancient gardener had demonstrated, but she couldn’t seem to quite get the knack of it. She also lacked the proper footwear; the boots she wore for hiking the mountains or descending the steps to the sea were decidedly awkward in this circumstance. The slippers she wore inside were even worse. She could magically modify some, but that might be again skirting the no-magic rules and she was determined to do this by the book, as it were.

In the back of her mind, she relished the pain and sweat as a sort of atonement. This small and transient suffering of course paled compared to what she’d caused others, but at the same time, the part of her that wished to be washed clean—or whatever metaphordidwork—nursed the fragile hope that this task had been given to her as a sort of test, a trial as in the tales of old, whereby she might at least prove her sincerity, much as she lacked anything resembling purity of heart. So she scrupulously adhered to using no magic at all in the digging of the new rose bed.

She’d referenced the Stormbreaker’s book to identify the perfect location. She carefully paced out the precise distance for the roses—resting in the shade, their rough-fabric sacks moistened—to be separated from one another. They could survive for some time uprooted, the book explained, but then cautioned that too long out of the ground could jeopardize their ability to adapt, especially to a foreign environment. On top of which, spring had suddenly turned intensely warm, galloping toward high summer with reckless disregard for the stately progression of seasons. If she delayed, Oneira would potentially miss the perfect window for planting the finicky roses, and she could not see herself returning to the ancient gardener, tail between her legs, asking for more rosebushes.

No, if she failed to make these live and grow—that is, she mentally corrected herself, if she failed to properly nurture these plants and coax them into flourishing—then she’d have to abandon the project. Every time she imagined that failure, an image of Stearanos looking down his hooked nose, gloating smugly, filled her mind. Ridiculous, as he’d never know who she was, much less that she hadn’t succeeded. Somewhere along the way, she’d begun to see this as a personal competition with her enemy-in-theory.

She kind of wished there had been a way for her to linger in his library, to observe his expression when he found the rose leaf and read her reply to his arrogant missive. Pausing to drag her sleeve across her forehead, wiping away the dripping sweat that had been falling to sting her eyes, leaving a trail of prickly grit behind, she indulged in picturing the moment, smiling in imagining him jumping around in a fierce tantrum, frothing at the mouth.

It was tempting to return to his library to see if he’d left her a reply. What had he thought ofThe Adventures of the Beastly Bunny? Perhaps he’d taken the book’s youthful simplicity as an insult. She hadn’t explained in her note why she’d picked it for him, figuring it wouldn’t matter, to either of them, in the long run. Although the story of the bunny evading the gardener had been a bit of a clue, Stearanos couldn’t possibly have enough information to follow that clue to the riddle’s solution. Still, she’d given him a glimpse of herself, which had been only fair play after she’d gleaned something of his inmost heart from his dreams.

The two of them were nothing alike, and yet she shared an odd affinity with Stearanos. Yes, she’d borrowed his interest in the Veredian roses, but she’d also immediately understood his fascination with them, beyond her own personal connection. Also, the way the Dream swirled around him, the darker elements ofregret, bitterness, despair, and guilt that sharked through his dreaming self, attracted to the blood trail that waked behind him… Well, she understood that, too.

Although she’d written in her note that she wouldn’t return to his library, she very much wondered if he’d left a reply anyway. As she resumed digging, extracting more rocks from the soil for the growing pile nearby, she distracted herself by imagining what that note—the one he’d surely never written—might say to her. She composed and revised his words in her imagination, ending up with a message so vivid in her mind that she also framed her own reply.

By the time she’d finished digging the rose bed, the sun was sinking and Oneira had constructed an entire fantasy correspondence with this man she’d never met and never would.

She went inside to bathe, washing the embedded dirt from her bloodied hands. Honest blood this time. Not the blood shed by innocents, but her own, given freely in service of this effort. All right, fine: it was hardly a selfless task. Oneira recognized her own pride in her determination to make these roses grow. That is, to discover the way to nurture them into flourishing, she mentally corrected herself, for thenth time. Nevertheless, regardless of her self-interest, this project was in the service of creation, of adding beauty to the world, propagating something rare and precious.

It wasn’t about destruction and waste and death. That was the point.

She bandaged her hands and reheated soup, toasted some bread, deeply grateful that she already had both made, as every bit of her ached with exhaustion. It might not have been the wisest choice to work all day digging this rose bed after walking the Dream all night. At least, she’d sleep hard.

That would be good, as tomorrow night she needed to enterthe Dream to obtain the soil amendments the book listed as necessary before planting. Hopefully that didn’t count too strongly as using magic, as she had no other way to gather them, not without mundane travel back into the world of men, and she wouldn’t do that for any reason. No, she’d have to go via the Dream and pay with coin. Tomorrow. Even she wasn’t so arrogant and cavalier as to venture into the Dream in such a worn-out state.

An oneiromancer who lost themselves in the Dream, either in their body or severed from it, became part of the fabric of the Dream. Oneira’s teachers disagreed in principle, certain that only actual dreams contributed to the soup that was the Dream, not entire beings. They didn’t know the Dream as thoroughly as she did, however.

The Dream subsumed all sorts of elements into itself that weren’t strictly the dreams of animals and people. Once, when traveling the Dream, Oneira had come across a person trapped there. He was real—or had been, at some point—and not a construct of some dreamer. She’d thought so because he looked different. He hadn’t born the hallmarks of dream beings, disproportionate in some way or oddly colored, not shifting in the mutable way of people in dreams, wearing first one face, then another. When he saw her, he’d tried to speak to her, she’d been certain.

At first he’d stared at her, likely recognizing the same aspects of her relative reality, then he’d yelled, waving his arms, desperately trying to reach her. But the Dream responds to dreamers and oneiromancers, not ordinary people, and the currents of a purple wave carried him off, still screaming for help. Or so she supposed, as he hadn’t used any words, his mind distorted by the Dream. No one could live in the Dream for long, the reality eroding away, until they became just another fragment. There was nothing she could have done for him. Even if she’d extracted him from the Dream, he wouldn’t have survived in the waking world.No amount of magic could have restored his living body—if he didn’t have one out there already, gradually dying.

Sometimes, when Oneira fantasized about laying herself down upon the bier she ritually prepared every morning, she thought she might simply sleep and step into the Dream forever, severing her connection to her body. It would be a kind of death, and a realm far more familiar to her than actual death, which was a foreign land to which she could not pay an exploratory visit and from which she could never return.

Who knew? Perhaps stepping into the Dream for all time would be the next and final phase of her self-exile. As a skilled oneiromancer in the Dream, she might be able to retain the integrity of her mind and spirit. She could move about and through the dreams of others. Stearanos, for example. It might be fun to meddle in his dreams, extending the game they’d begun.

And why did her thoughts keep returning to him?

Banishing the Stormbreaker from her mind, she stood, taking her plate with her, and discovered Adsila, Bunny, and Moriah all watching her from various poses of rest, their gazes as keen as if they still observed the digging of the rose bed, something of accusation in them. Ah, yes. If she stepped into the Dream forever, they could not follow. Well, perhaps Adsila could, but then the kestrel could never return on her own.

“I wouldn’t take that step without giving you notice,” she reassured them all. “And in that case, the house would be yours.”

They seemed unimpressed and Oneira shrugged it off. She hadn’t asked for any of them to join her behind her white walls. All she’d wanted was to be left alone. That wasstillall she wanted, which was why she would not indulge in this insane impulse to visit Stearanos again. There would be no correspondence such as she’d constructed in her imagination. If she went to look, he wouldn’t have left her a reply anyway. Why would he, when she’dexplicitly said she wouldn’t return? Which she wouldn’t. So, if he had replied, she would never know.

There, that should put that line of thought to bed, which she did, along with herself.

And yet.

And yet, the next night as she readied her list of supplies for the rose bed, she found herself contemplating a visit to the Stormbreaker’s library, also. Just to see if he’d left a reply. Her old friend curiosity prodded her relentlessly. Despite the dreary adages about curiosity leading one into trouble, Oneira had never been able to regard her insatiable curiosity as a failing. Following her curiosity had led her down the most rewarding paths of her life, including the most recent excursion into the realm of Veredian roses.

Her rosebushes seemed to be all right, still. Following the book’s instructions, she hadn’t disturbed the soil around their roots, only dampening their sacks and rotating them where they stood in a sheltered nook, so all sides could receive sunlight. With the help of the ancient gardener, she’d marked on the swaddling where the bushes had faced due south in their former home, and she checked to be sure those marks hadn’t washed away. When she planted the roses, she’d set them in the ground at the same orientation.

Other than checking on the roses and refreshing the bier with some spring blossoms, she’d spent the day resting and puttering at small tasks in the garden and kitchen. She’d made more soup and bread, enjoying the regular rotation of kneading, allowing the dough to rise, and punching it down again. Not unlike the pattern of life, she often reflected, though she’d yet to decide what the metaphor would be for the final stage of baking. The crucibleof eternal torment, perhaps? Except that one didn’t emerge as a baked loaf from that.