Chapter 5
In Your Dreams
T abitha Brewer often had dreams about a mystical faerie land where everything was much brighter than the world she currently knew, and now she was seeing it in the flesh. Trees that were a more vibrant shade of green. Birdsongs that seemed to build in perfect harmony.
But where was Tom?
“Leo? Prince Leopold?” She put the hair bead into her apron pocket and started walking, searching for any sign of the errant prince. But the shadows lengthened, and the forest grew dark without success. The birdsongs were joined by other stray sounds. Whispered voices. Laughter. Her heart beat faster in her chest, and she gripped her gray cat more tightly.
She couldn’t stay out here much longer.
But she had been so focused on searching for Tom that the trees around her had lost any semblance of familiarity. How could she find her way back home?
Bandit shifted in her arms, and she was reminded again of the cold winter night when she had gone to the Tailor’s shop. Even if she couldn’t make it home tonight, would it be possible for her to seek the aid of a stranger? Any sort of forest cottage with a few extra table scraps and a fire should do. That’s what she needed, an older matron offering some food and warmth. As the thought became more prominent in her mind, Tabitha passed another curtain of branches and stopped short.
There, in the next clearing, was a merry-looking cottage. Smoke rolled from the chimney, perfuming the air with the smell of sweet meat. Food. Warmth. Had she dreamed it there?
Could she even afford to question it?
She didn’t even make it all the way to the front porch before the door opened.
An elderly woman smiled at her, showing the gaps along her gums. As she looked Tabitha and the cat up and down, her eyes widened into orbs, like an eager owl. “Hello, dearie. What are you doing out here in the cold?”
Tabitha steeled herself. This was what she needed. What she had dreamed of. “I’m lost. Could you direct me back to Castletown, please?”
The woman cocked her head. “Castletown? A human village?”
“Do you not know it?” Her heart sank. “I must have traveled farther than I realized.”
“Well, there is no need to fret.” The woman opened the door wider, beckoning Tabitha inside. “You can stay here tonight. I was so hoping to have a guest for supper. One might even say that I dreamed you here.” She winked, as if sharing a private joke.
“You dreamed me here?” Tabitha shook her head. “But I had that dream too.” Or at least, she had carried that hope once she had become lost. She had wanted this to happen.
The woman only became more eager. In fact, she might have started to drool as she guided Tabitha to enter the room behind her. “Another dreamer, are you? And fresh from the human village? Then you must come in at once. You know there must be magic when a pair of dreamers meet, and who are we to question the will of the fates?”
Dreamers. Fates. The words sounded right. Something out of a matron’s tale. And there was something about this place—more than the thin connection it shared with Granny Tailor and their shop in Castletown. Mingling with the kitchen smoke, cinnamon scented the air and led Tabitha to find a table with a plate piled high with bars of pastries the same shade of brown as the cottage walls and trimmed with white icing.
There was something eerily familiar about it. “Is this gingerbread?”
The woman’s smile widened as she herded Tabitha toward a chair and turned to lock the front door with a brass key. Was it troubling that it locked with a key instead of a latch or board that could be easily opened from the inside, like she was trying to keep them both in rather than keeping the rest of the world out ?
The shutters on the windows seemed to be locked in the same way as well.
“Yes, of course,” the woman said, sunnily. She was too eager. She put her key into her apron pocket and waved her arms about as if to make herself the most interesting thing in the room. A distraction? An obvious distraction, but a distraction from what? “Sit down and have some of my special sweets, dearie. I’ll tend the fire, and we will have the most marvelous feast. Something worth dreaming of. Something worth dying for.” There was that wink again, the words that seemed more a joke for the eccentric woman’s own private amusement, but Tabitha couldn’t catch her true meaning this time.
The old woman had already gone through an open doorway that must have led to the kitchen, her movements accompanied by the banging of pots and pans.
Tabitha stood by the offered chair but didn’t sit, holding Bandit closer. She had wanted this. She had wished for this. A pair of dreamers . . . It had sounded so right. Perhaps it was a sort of magic that might be blessed by the benevolent fates who served the Light-Bringer. But even without the extra locks, the room was unsettling . Odds and ends were piled about like the old dress shop, but Tabitha focused on wire cages large enough to kennel dogs and tanning tools that cast twisted shadows.
Bundles of herbs and crows’ feet hung from the ceiling.
The only inviting thing about the room was the plate of gingerbread, but when Tabitha looked at it again, picking up a small piece to smell and test in her fingers, a female voice sounded behind her.
“You’re not really going to eat that, are you?”
Tabitha started, dropping the gingerbread and glancing about the room. “Who said that?”
“Me, of course,” the same voice answered, causing Tabitha to look farther down at one of the wire cages. Inside was a white and silver-tipped cat. Speaking. Even raising her eyes to the heavens with haughty exasperation. “Don’t act like you have never seen a cat before; you are holding one in your arms.” Her sapphire eyes went to Bandit like she expected he might be the true brains of the party. “Tell me handsome, is she always so dense?”
Bandit remained silent, and since Tabitha was still struggling with the idea of a talking cat, she remained silent too.
“The strong, silent type, I see. I can handle that,” the caged cat concluded before turning her attention back to Tabitha. “What about you, cat-holder? Are you ready to speak to me yet?”
Tabitha took a step back, bumping the table and shaking a few pieces of gingerbread to the floor. Would the old woman hear them and come running? Did Tabitha want her to? Someone had to explain this all to her. “He can’t . . . You can’t . . . ”
“Oh dear. You really did just come from a human village, didn’t you?” The cat said the words with an aloof condescension that it seemed all cats should have. Perhaps it was the only natural thing in this whole place. “Well, I don’t have time to explain everything to you, but you should know something of the old tales. Perhaps one about wily, old crones who live in the woods and seem a bit too eager to offer sugary sweets to unfortunate travelers?”
Tabitha frowned, trying to put the pieces together. She did remember a matron story about a witch who lived in a house made out of gingerbread. It seemed they might have exaggerated a few of the details, but that wasn’t the troubling part. “She eats children.”
The cat gave a slight nod. “If she can get them. If not, I suppose she thought a couple of cats might do. And a skinny cat-carrier.”
Tabitha shook her head. The walls might be the same color of gingerbread, but they seemed far too thick—like they were keeping out all the air along with keeping her trapped inside.
This couldn’t be real. “Is there no way to stop her?”
“Of course there is a way,” the cat answered, exasperated. “She’s half-deaf and half-blind and standing by an open oven. What do you think you should do?”
Tabitha shuddered. Shoving the witch into her own oven was part of the story . . . “But I couldn’t just kill her.”
“Why not? She wants to kill us. And if you kill her, you’ll be able to get her key and get us all out of this place.”
When Tabitha came to live with Granny Tailor, there had been so many people ready to pity the young girl and call her mother horrible, but Tabitha had still mourned the woman when she died. Tabitha mourned the beautiful and vivacious woman she knew from before the plague, the one who had all the men fighting over her when she served at the bar and lived so freely.
The one Tabitha had loved and had surely loved her too.
She had never known what to do with that tangle of mixed emotions, and a part of her still wondered what really would have happened if she had gone home that night? When the plague ravaged the village, her mother yelled, cursed, and threatened, but that was as far as it ever went. Her mother might have been cross when Tabitha returned home without coin or the goods she had gone to sell, but perhaps not as badly as her younger self had feared?
And perhaps, somehow, they might have survived the rest of the plague together and returned to sharing the brighter moments they had before.
Or at least, a part of her had always thought she would return home once the plague had ended.
Instead, her mother had died in the snow, and Tabitha sometimes wondered if she should be blamed. How could she leave her mother alone with no one to love and care for her?
No. Tabitha couldn’t be responsible for another death. She couldn’t be expected to kill an old woman, no matter what her crime. This was far too much. “There has to be another way.”
The cat blinked, still staring up at Tabitha steadily from her cage. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Can’t we just leave? Maybe she has another key somewhere?” Tabitha looked about the room, only to find another brass key sitting by the plate of gingerbread, a bit too conveniently. She shifted Bandit in her arms so she could pick it up. “That wasn’t there before.”
The faerie cat’s sapphire eyes narrowed. “You are a dreamer then? Truly? That will make things far more interesting. But don’t just stand there. We need to use that key to escape. My cage first, if you please.”
Another metallic bang came from the kitchen. “I’ll be out in another moment, dearie,” the witch said with too much cheer. Were the ominous sounds from the kitchen coming closer?
Or was it only the frantic beating of her heart?
Tabitha forced herself to move, sticking the key in the padlock.
“Faster,” the cat said. “Unless you intend to conjure us something else to fight that witch directly.”
Tabitha shook her head in a whole body way. Her hand trembled too much around the key. She couldn’t do this. “I can’t conjure anything.”
“Well, not with an attitude like that. Just look, the key is already fading.”
It did feel a bit less solid in her hand. She could almost see through the brass. But how could solid brass become see-through? It had to be some sort of magic.
Weak magic. Useless magic.
Her magic. “I made it appear.”
The cat nodded. “And you will make it dis appear if you don’t focus. Now, what do you want this key to do? What do you believe it can do?”
She wanted it to help them escape. To take her and both the cats far away from this place. And she wanted it now, already picturing the old woman returning with a raised kitchen cleaver.
Leave. Now. She might not be able to kill an old woman, but she needed to save the cats.
She couldn’t stand it if something happened to either of them.
A sudden light filled the room, brighter than the sun.
And just like that, everything around Tabitha changed.