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The Dream was a place of the living, generated and perpetuated by living creatures. If the dead dreamed, then their Dream was entirely separate. Still, Oneira felt certain that the death of the mortal body wasn’t an end, but a transition. For all she knew, people carried all of their memories, which formed the core of the selves they’d built over that lifetime, into the next realm.

Causing someone’s death was a grave transgression, and she would bear the guilt of the deaths she’d caused for all eternity. But taking away a piece of their essential, immortal selves forever… That she would not do.

No, she’d put that image into Stearanos’s dreams and shecould not take it back. She could only hope he somehow wouldn’t notice. A vain hope, indeed. This could be the end of her, and she’d brought it all upon herself. Foolish and careless.

The black cat Moriah manifested out of the night, first a darker outline, soon filled in with languid feline movement, her emerald eyes gleaming with what could only be reflected starlight. She sidled up to Oneira, rubbing a long, slow, body-long caress of affection, then sighed into a sprawl, back against Oneira’s hip and feet. The sorceress combed her fingers through the plush fur, smiling despite everything at the purr welling up and thrumming into her with the deep vibration of healing comfort.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Oneira said aloud, repeating herself more than speaking to Moriah, who never answered anyway. Her words hung in the still night air, then faded, leaving only the sound of the distant surf against the cliffs. She hadn’t been able to hear the sea through the window in the Stormbreaker’s library, the irrelevant thought occurred to her. Either the sea there was as tame as it looked, or his castle sat too far above it.

“Even the sages do not know how the heart heals.”

It took Oneira a long moment to realize the voice was Moriah’s, the tenor velvet-soft as her purr, the words heavily accented by a language Oneira couldn’t identify. It took her even longer to parse what the cat had said to her.

“My heart isn’t broken,” she finally replied, pondering that this should be the subject of the first—perhaps only?—conversation she’d had with the keeper of spells and wisdom.

“Isn’t it?”

“I have never been in love, thus my heart is intact.”

“Is that the only way hearts are broken?”

“One must have loved to have then lost. I have never loved.” Or been loved, she acknowledged with an abstract ache, a distant part of her surprised that she still felt pain over that.

“Again, I pose the question.”

Oneira let her head fall back against the tree, giving the question due consideration. “I suppose hearts can be broken in all sorts of ways. We are fragile creatures, so easily damaged. But, though I have dealt suffering, I have not suffered, myself; therefore my heart is intact.”

“Haven’t you suffered, Oneira?”

It just figured that the voice of wisdom spoke primarily in questions, not answers. Though she’d been seeking a question, hadn’t she, when all this began. She’d first gone to the Stormbreaker’s library on instinct, following her intuition—and a mischievous impulse—to discover a question worth pursuing, and she’d found the book on roses. An answer and question in one.

“My suffering is all secondhand,” she said to Moriah. “I dispensed suffering freely, like a spring maiden showering petals of pain, destruction, and death over a thronging crowd, indiscriminately and with grotesque generosity. Feeling bad about what I’ve done doesn’t register in the same category.”

“Suffering isn’t quantifiable. It cannot be counted and weighed and totaled up to be compared to another’s. Suffering is personal and we all suffer in our own ways, struggling under the burden of it.”

A surprisingly long speech. Oneira very nearly didn’t ask her burning question, but her curiosity got the better of her. “Have you suffered, Moriah?”

The cat was silent for so long Oneira had decided she wouldn’t answer.

“We all suffer in our own ways,” Moriah finally said.

Oneira took that as a yes, bemused that an ancient and powerful creature would acknowledge such a thing. “So, you’re saying what’s wrong with me is that my heart is broken.Iam broken, so I’m behaving in broken ways.”

Broken, broken, broken—third time’s the charm, as the elementary school saying went.

Moriah said nothing more. She didn’t really need to.

Though Oneira had resolved—definitively, definitely, and without a doubt—that she would not return to the Stormbreaker’s library, she mentally composed her reply regardless.

She couldn’t seem to help herself. All the time she measured the soil amendments and worked them into the new rose bed, lines of dialogue circulated through her mind. She found herself in imaginary conversations with Stearanos, where she sometimes explained herself, other times eviscerated him with her wit, and at still others demanded an explanation from him.

Why was he studying those books on the Southern Lands? If he knew who she was, why hadn’t he attacked? In the time-honored fashion of all sorcerers, whether engaged in overt or passive wars, he should have sent a missive or done some small thing to inform her of his knowledge and intent to destroy her. She’d engaged in duels before, either personal or at the behest of another, so she understood how the escalation worked. Stearanos had dropped the ball, for some unknown reason.

Unless this was his strategy, to make her stew in anxiety, waiting for him to strike.

That would be just like him, puppet master and tormenter.

By the end of that day, her roses were planted in perfect orientation to their previous lives, every instruction followed, and even part of the novel she’d borrowed from Stearanos had been read. She liked it and wouldnotbe returning it, especially since she’d resolved not to visit his library again, under any circumstances. Still, though he’d never read them, the words of her mentallycomposed reply burned so determinedly in her mind that she had no choice but to write them down.