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Oneira held still. Not as frozen prey. No amount of solitude and silence could ever make her anything but the apex predatorshe’d been born as and molded into. She could kill this creature, except that she was done with killing.

Even in self-defense?Part of her ruminated over the philosophical question, one she’d mulled more than once.

Perhaps, perhaps…came the eternal answer. She couldn’t simultaneously exist as the woman who valued her own life so little that she decorated her own bier daily and as a sorceress willing to kill to save that life.

She’d also pondered whether she’d kill to save someone else, an innocent or someone she cared about. Or maybe to save many people, their numbers adding weight enough to offset their lack of innocence and her lack of caring about them. All academic, as she cared for no one, and innocents weren’t exactly thick on the ground.

All she truly wanted was to be left alone to ensure that such predicaments didn’t arise.

And now she faced one.

She knew what the creature was. Though she’d never seen its like in life, she’d learned of their ilk way back in the early days of her compulsory education. He—definitely male—stood out in her mind against the softer magic of the landscape, the magic breathed by natural living things. He’d been created, not born, radiating the enchantment that had crafted him and his kind, long before Oneira had been born.

In her mind, though not aloud, never aloud, she named him:scáthcú.

Dread wolf.

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If anyone had asked Oneira what manner of creature she anticipated would be the first to break the solitude of her self-imposed and vigorously enforced isolation, she would not have picked a near-mythical wolf designed by an ancient mage to wage brutal war. Though, given the life she’d led, it really just figured.

Thescáthcúsat on his haunches, eyeing her with riveted attention. Dirty ice matted his coat, turning him brown instead of his native white. Filth coated his belly, encased his great paws, and hung off the feathery underside of his long tail, which now curved around in front of him, the tip lifted in question. The unnatural magic that created his ilk shimmered about him, radiating a shade of purple not found in nature, an implicit warning to anyone with the wit to see it.

He must have come down from the forever-frozen peaks looming above. The ancient tales spoke of the packs ofscáthcúwho’d gone feral following the demise of their creator, roaming the cave-riddled wilderness of those altitudes too extreme for ordinary lungs to draw breath. Oneira had heard rumors from time to time of some ambitious young mage, burdened by oppressive debt and made brave by the desperation to rid themselves of it, attempting to ascend to the thin air and desolation of those peaks. They thought to obtain ascáthcúand make their fortune.

They died. Or disappeared. Or returned crushed in body and spirit, realizing their own insignificant skills could never allowthem to survive the extremes a created being so thoroughly permeated with magic could.

If those mages had bothered to read the books Oneira had, those hubris-laden and impetuous fools would have known that even if they could manage to ascend to such heights, they would return unrewarded.Scáthcúchose their own sorcerers. The fabricated dread wolves had been embedded with a craving for magic. The more powerful the sorcerer, the more attractive to them. If they befriended a mage, their loyalty was unbreakable, and they formed a symbiotic relationship with their sorcerer of choice. As an enemy, however, thescáthcúfed their hunger another way, devouring the sorcerer they found wanting.

Oneira knew herself to be wanting in many ways—but were they the ones that mattered to ascáthcú? She waited with distant curiosity to discover the outcome of the test. Perhaps death had finally sought her out, impatient with her dithering. Truly, it would be a relief to have the decision taken out of her hands.

Thescáthcú’s massive jaws opened, revealing ivory fangs. A black, forked tongue flicked out to taste the air between them. Jaws widening beyond what would be physically possible for a natural wolf, he revealed his pink maw and his native magic coiled out like that black tongue, visible only to her sorcerous senses. Braced, she held her magic in a still, folded cloak, allowing him to taste it… and he settled into a canine grin, giving her a yip of greeting.

Oneira sighed. There would be no getting rid of him now.

“There’s no meat in my house,” she told him, her voice an odd, rusty sound after such long disuse. “You feed yourself.”

She turned and walked away. Whatever would she do with such a creature? Undaunted by her lack of welcome, thescáthcúfollowed at her side, establishing a pattern that would endure.

“Don’t make me sorry,” she added, and laid a hand in the ruff ofcoarser hair around his neck and shoulders. Such was his height that her hand rested there easily, her elbow at a relaxed and comfortable bend. As if they’d been sized for each other. “Perhaps you can address the rabbits savaging my garden,” she suggested.

He emitted a growl of pure delight. It didn’t count, Oneira decided, if herscáthcúcommitted bunny murder. After all, the rabbits were far from innocent, determinedly avoiding her non-lethal deterrents with arcane cleverness. She’d spent an undue amount of time—not to mention magic, though she had plenty to spare these days—on devising wards that wouldn’t injure the fuzzy pests, but her humane solutions left loopholes for them to get in and savage her greens.

Many of her former cohort in the world of the ruthless employment of magic would construe a lesson from that, along the lines of kill or be killed. She willfully refused that premise. Or, rather, she’d done enough of the former that she’d resigned herself to the latter. Eventually, anyway. In the meanwhile, it could be frustrating that the immensely powerful magic she possessed all lay in the realm of the Dream. And that she excelled in destruction above all else.

Well, now she apparently had a petscáthcúto kill for her. How scandalized her former handlers would be to know she planned to use such a lethal weapon for gardening.

Oneira decided to call thescáthcú“Bunny,” in honor of his labors on behalf of her greens. She’d gotten him to bathe himself in the deep, freshwater pond she’d added to the walled garden. It was easy enough to coax him into it as Bunny gleefully took to water. She then spent several nights by the fire—she lit a fire every evening, regardless of the weather, for its quiet comfort—meticulously combing the snarls from his matted coat. His furturned out to be as soft as a rabbit’s and as pristine white as their winter coats.

She ended up with a pile of extracted fur that she regarded with considerable bemusement, recalling excursions to various outlying fiefdoms where the women—it was almost always the women—would gather to spin piles of fluff like it into threads or yarns or some such. Oneira had always regarded their chattering circles, busy hands, and clacking instruments with a similar sense of befuddlement. Their lives had so little resemblance to her own that they seemed like a foreign tribe, a people who existed in spaces that weren’t battlefields or council chambers crowded with greedy or frightened men. It didn’t matter which emotion motivated the men, as they behaved in the exact same ways.

The women, though, they’d appeared content enough from a distance, as unmoved by the scheming of their men as the sheep in the meadows. It had seemed an enviable sort of peaceful ignorance and a kind of magic Oneira lacked, one made of nimble fingers and keen attention. As if by focusing on the simple tasks, they elevated the importance of small creations, putting the epic sweep of wars and kingdoms into the far distance, a tumult of landscape irrelevant to them.

So, remembering their ability to retire violence to the background of their lives, and confronted with a pile of white fur, Oneira attempted spinning.

She located a book in her library with instructions on the techniques, and which included several illustrations of the necessary tools. Selecting the spindle as something that looked as easy to use as a child’s toy, she entered the Dream to find one.

Oneira was powerful and skilled enough to travel physically through the Dream that connected all living beings and emerge in a location where she could purchase—or steal, depending onthe provenance of the item—anything she needed. But to create something as simple as a spindle, she needed only to reach mentally into the dream, which was much easier, though by no means easy. Stilling herself, allowing her folded cloak of magic to unfurl just a small amount, she walked her thoughts along the familiar pathway into the Dream.