The Moonstone

by gisho, Vriah

Summary:

Morpheus finds a way to avoid killing a vortex - he gives Rose his own heart, forcing her to take his place as Dream. The new Dream has to deal with a life she never expected and try not to repeat her predessor's mistakes.

In the waking world, the people she left behind grieve and wonder. And when Roses's little brother Jed is offered the chance to switch from superhero to questing knight, with some help from an old friend, he leaps at the opportunity.

Notes:

Done for the 2023 Endless Big Bang. Ably beta'd by Essie.

Illustrations are by Vriah -view them on Tumblr at https://vriah.tumblr.com/post/724551436708495360/the-moonstone-by-gisho . Thank you for doing such a gorgeous job and going above and beyond with three of them.

Prologue: In which the King of Dreams makes a choice

--

They are nowhere. Nowhere looks like an abandoned quarry, pale rock gesturing at the concept of ground without bothering with the details, a blank grey sky without the embellishment of enshrouding clouds. The only real things here are Rose and the being staring at her, who looks like a man in black clothes. Everything else is gone.

"You've done a great deal of damage," Dream tells her, "but nothing that cannot be repaired."

Her hands are scraped up, covered in chalk dust, a strange touch of realism. Rose dusts them off as she scrambles to her feet. "What happened to Jed? To my friends?"

"They're asleep in their beds. I will not say safe." Dream's feet make no noise on the stone as he walks to her. "No one is safe with a vortex alive in their world. Nonetheless, I believe the matter can be brought to a satisfactory resolution."

A satisfactory resolution. Rose does not scream. She has a lifetime of practice not screaming. She knows what comes next; she talked to the grandmother she will never get to know better, gave her brother a hug and told him she loved him. She has made all the preparations necessary. Rose clenches her fists, and wonders if dying is going to hurt.

And, suddenly, without having done anything as straightforward as arrive - in a swirl of dust, maybe, or a glimmer of light out of a fairy-story - Gilbert is there. Gilbert is stumbling toward them. "Wait! Sir!"

"Gilbert? What are you doing here?" Is he real? Were her friends real, in that last swirling confusion of their minds?

Can Gilbert tell them what happened to her?

Dream is looking at them. He looks like a man doing a puzzle in the back of his head. "You know him as Gilbert? This is his home. He is Fiddler's Green."

Of course. Of course he wasn't real. "A dream," Rose says, and she thinks of the strange creature she met at the hotel, of Lyta and her miraculous child, and wishes she could live long enough to know what was going on.

Gilbert bows his head. "I am. I left my post here to experience life as a human being." He does not pause, but he gives the impression, somehow, of taking a deep breath. "A life which I humbly offer in exchange for yours." He looks Dream in the eye, firm in his resolution. There is a challenge in his look which speaks volumes Rose cannot read.

Dream looks aside first. "I'm afraid that's not possible. Yours is not the life that can be exchanged for hers."

Gilbert's eyes go wide, and Rose doesn't scream. It's habit by now not to scream. Part of her wants to drag out the last moments of her life by falling into her friend's arms and weeping, and part of her wants to yell at Morpheus to get it over with, and part of her doesn't want anything at all. She says nothing. Gilbert says, "My lord - it is all I have to offer."

"No. You are the heart of the Dreaming. I trust you will look after my new aspect." There is something terrible and brittle in his smile. "Rose Walker, take this."

Morpheus reaches into his chest and pulls out his heart.

It's a beautiful thing, ruby-red and glimmering with a deep, inner light. A jewel. He is smiling as he offers it to her.

"Yours?” Gilbert is clutching his walking-stick, and his face has gone pale with shock. “Is this the only way?"

Morpheus doesn't waver. "You said the vortexes arose to remind us of our duty," he says, "but I think the answer is simpler. I should have seen it long ago. Tell Lucienne ..."

Sometimes there aren't any choices at all. Rose takes the heart in two steady hands.

"Never mind. She knows what to do."

The Dreaming implodes. It's as easy as waking up. Colours vanish; the sun in the sky was always a moon; all about them is the emptiness of flatland, a glitched-out setting never meant for players, a theatre with the curtains drawn back and the ghost light gleaming. It lasts forever. It lasts for half a breath. It lasts for the timeless blink of a narcoleptic and then there is only a bare vale, stormclouds overhead and the echo of distant, dying thunder.

Gilbert - Fiddler's Green - is taking great slow gasps that are not, quite, sobs. "Precipitous," he says, cuts himself off, starts again. "Surely we could have ... Rose? Or, well ..."

And the King of Dreams clenches her fists and looks at her friend and says, "Not exactly."

--

 

THE MOONSTONE

--

 

 

Chapter 1: In which secrets are revealed

 

Six months later:

The text says: Divorce selfie! (: In her photo Barbie's smile looks pasted-on, but she's dressed to the nines, flamingo-pink suitjacket and elaborate rose-quartz necklace and dangly silver earrings. Her sunglasses are a little too big for her face. It's a good look for her. The papers she's waving have an official-looking seal and the blurry background might be a brick wall.

Unity leans over to squint at Lyta's phone. "Is divorce usually so fast these days?"

"Depends on if they fight it. No kids, no house - Ken just wanted to move on to his next bimbo, I figure - I didn't say it like that to Barbie - so he didn't fight."

"I suppose it's for the best." Unity looks away, out the kitchen window. It's raining again, and the flock of birds that hang around under the oak tree have vanished again. Starlings? She really should look it up. Unity goes on, "It seems a terrible pity that a love story can turn rotten like that, but at least all she has to grieve is the man she thought she had."

"Right. Just a dream."

"My dear, don't put it like that," Unity tells her, and pats her hand. "I think we both know that dreams can be things of immense value."

They have that in common. Lyta had Hector back for just long enough, and now her son - their son - is napping in the next room. Unity had her golden-eyed man, and a whole happy life in dreams. Now her grandson is sitting on the sofa reading a picture book. Silently, in deference to the sleeping baby.

Jed's gotten so attached to Daniel. He reads to him, sings lullabies to him. He insisted Lyta show him how to pick up a baby properly and feed him from a bottle, then put himself in charge of the first morning feeding. So you can get a little more sleep, he'd said to Lyta, looking very earnest. As if she could ever have slept through Jed creeping into her bedroom to lift Daniel from his crib, barefoot and still in his dinosaur pyjamas. It should have been touching. It made her want to cry. Once upon a time, Lyta had imagined kids with Hector, and she'd imagined her friends Miranda and Rose looking after them when she and Hector went out for date nights.

Hector is dead, gone, doubly gone. Miranda died before she found the son she had lost to the monster she had married. Rose is - missing.

Her mind skitters away from the thought of Rose.

They should send Jed to grief counselling, but how much of the truth would any counsellor believe?

"It's funny," Unity says, and takes a sip of tea. "I've been having such lovely dreams lately. You would think it would all be nightmares, after. Well."

The things they don't talk about. Lyta nods. "What kind?"

Unity's smile turns a little conspiratorial. She can still act like a little girl sometimes, telling Lyta confidences as if she were whispering them in her ear at the lockers between first period English and second period biology. "I've seen my lover again."

Her heartbeat thumps. Lyta picks up her teacup to blow on it. "Again?"

"I didn't, you know, after I woke up - not dreaming just one night at a time. Not for months and months. But lately I've dreamed of wandering through a wood." She is looking at the rain dripping down the kitchen window as if it were the kind of writing you see in dreams, an arrangement of shapes that seem impossibly familiar without quite being something you can read. "And my lover is with me, holding my hand as we walk. We used to hold hands all the time. We'd walk through the park, and go to see parades and visit the elephants at the zoo. City things, though. Our house was enough privacy. I don't know why I'm dreaming of a wood now."

Lyta turns this over in her head a few times. She's wondered who Unity's lover was; she is sure he was not someone Unity made up. "Is it a good place?"

"I don't know," Unity says, after slightly too long a pause. "It doesn't look dangerous. Dark and cool, but not - not the sort of wood where there should be a Big Bad Wolf, you know. But my lover seems like he's trying to be brave. He says that none of this worked out like it was meant to. I wouldn't have thought my poor golden-eyed lover could be so sorry." She frowns at the window, and doesn't say anything more.

There is nothing Lyta can say to this, so she doesn't. She touches the back of Unity's hand in silent comfort. It does not feel like the hand of a woman of a hundred and nineteen. Her skin is warm and supple and her hand, when she turns it over to clutch at Lyta's, is strong.

--

"You want to see something?"

Diana frowns at Jed. She's been offering him her Freddos for weeks and he's never taken one. Who doesn't like chocolate? But here he is, catching at the sleeve of her jumper and tugging her away from the crowd. "Sure," she says. She's not sure, but if she says no he might never talk to her again. "What is it?"

"It's a secret," Jed tells her.

There is something very funny about Jed and Diana wishes she knew what it was. He turned up abruptly in the middle of term and he talks with an American accent like someone off the telly. He always looks around when he walks into a room, like he's counting the exits. His mum - Diana assumes it's his mum, anyway, it's a white lady but she acts like his mum, maybe he takes after his dad - drops him off right at the gate every morning and picks him up every afternoon, in a big old car with tinted windows like something out of a spy story.

Which probably just means his mum likes big old cars. Diana knows real spies aren't anything like the ones in stories.

They're under a tree now, the big old oak on the corner of the grounds that nobody is supposed to climb but people climb anyway on dares. The air is cold and damp; Diana hunches her shoulders and sticks her hands in her pockets. "So where is it? Is it in the tree?"

"No it's not," Jed answers, as if the idea is unutterably stupid. "I'm not going to leave it where anyone can find it. It's up my sleeve."

"Oh."

"That's what you do with secrets," Jed informs Diana.

He has to fish around for a little bit to get it, and it doesn't look like much of anything at first. A big black feather. It looks like something he could have picked up on the way to school, if he walked. Diana blinks at it, and then -

- it looks exactly the same. But Diana gets the sudden idea that it's not real.

It should turn rainbow colours or start floating in the air all of a sudden. It should do something. Prove it's not real. Diana wants to yell at it for being so supernaturally disappointing. She hisses.

"You see it too?" Jed sounds nervous all of a sudden.

Diana balls her hands into fists and scowls. "Yes I see it. It's really - something. Where'd you get it?"

"It was under Daniel's pillow."

Well, that's disappointingly mundane. "Who's Daniel?" There's a ringing in her ears. She gets that whenever she's near something supernatural. Her grandmother says it's a symptom of unusual sensitivity, but Diana wishes she just got auras.

But Jed is stuffing the black feather back up his sleeve, and the ringing is already going away. "He's Lyta's baby." When Diana still looks blank he goes on, "You know? The lady who picks me up from school?"

"She's not your mum?"

"My mom is dead," Jed says.

He doesn't sound very broken up over it but he's staring at the wall, eyes very wide, not really looking at Diana. Somewhere outside there's a noise of roaring traffic, the distant beep of an ambulance. "Oh." Diana looks at her feet. "Sorry about that."

"It's okay," Jed says, in the kind of voice that means it's not okay at all but he'd rather they both just pretend so he doesn't have to think about it too much.

They stand there in awkward silence for a few seconds, until it occurs to Diana she still has today's Freddo in her pocket. She's still clutching at it. It must be half melted by now. She pulls it out anyway, and spreads her hand. "D'you want it? As a trade. For showing me the secret."

He won't take free Freddos, but apparently Jed will take them as a thank-you. He takes it from Diana's hand like he's afraid it's going to break.

"D'you not like these?" he bursts out. "You keep trying to give them away."

Just to him. Diana half-shrugs, and shoves her hands back into her pockets. It's starting to drizzle through the oak leaves. They should go in before they get soaked. "I can get more," she says. "I think that was a big thing you showed me. Worth more than one Freddo."

"Just don't tell anyone." Jed looks very earnest.

"It's okay," Diana says. "I know how to keep a secret."

She knows how to lie, too. She hopes it doesn't show on her face.

--

She has not, of course, allowed grief to blunt her dedication to her duties. There is a sense in which there is nothing to grieve. Lucienne still serves the King of Dreams, and there are things she has been told about facets and aspects that, if she understands them correctly, would render her grief an absurdity.

Besides, she has been far too busy to grieve. The reconstruction of the realm was still incomplete when her lord - the reconstruction of the realm is ongoing despite additional damage. Her lady trusts her utterly to supervise the process. Lucienne has enough to do.

For example, right now she is assisting her lady in a review of the contents of her most secure vault, the trunk she keeps in her private quarters. The first thing Dream had lifted forth was the bottled city, and she stared at it so long Lucienne had been moved to say, "You received that from the Caliph Haroun al Raschid, in the year - "

"I remember. We made a bargain." Dream frowned, as if the memory discomfited her, and set the bottle down gently with both hands.

They examined the skin of the Painted Lizard for damage, and found none. They tied another knot in the drawstring of the bag of winds. The still-gleaming claws of the god whose bones her helm was made from, Dream hesitated over for so long Lucienne wondered if the story needed to be retold, before Dream wrapped them back up in an isabelline scrap and shoved them into her pocket. Each precious thing, each dangerous thing, was brought forth and examined and set aside.

There is an amber sphere, deep and shimmering but with nothing caught inside, that Dream holds between her hands for a long moment. Then she smiles, and tosses it at Lucienne. Lucienne catches it before she can think, hissing in surprise. "My lady - are you sure I should touch this?"

"Did I ask you for the opal back?" her lady answers. There is a warmth in her smile that there would never have been before - before.

Lucienne swallows. She had offered, of course, when her lord had returned from his long absence, but he had requested that she keep it with her as she had for so long, in case of great need, and never specified what that great need might be after his return. "No."

"This isn't any riskier. The dreamstones ... " She trails off, staring at the wall. Lucienne glances at it, but it is still blank white stone, nothingness and nothing of interest. Lucienne has wondered sometimes why her lord made the place he retreated when he was at his worst so blank and cheerless. She had, of course, never asked. "The dreamstones," Dream finally continues, speaking slowly as if picking the words out of a mire, "aren't radioactive, or cursed, or anything on their own. They need a mind to direct them. I wonder what happened to the rest of them?"

You don't know? Lucienne doesn't ask, because she doesn't want to know how deep the gaps run. It is cowardly. She should do better. "The ruby was destroyed. I still hold the opal, and most of the rest are somewhere in the palace. I don't know what became of the rose quartz, or the moonstone, or the heliotrope."

Dream blinks slowly, staring at something only she can see. "The rose quartz," she murmurs, "was left in a skerry. I saw it when I was the vortex. The moonstone ..."

"My lady?"

"The moonstone should have come home by now. I'll have to hunt it." She plucks the amber stone from Lucienne's hand, and rolls it between her fingers, still staring fixedly at the blank wall. Only her hand moves, for all that the motion is one of relentless, nervous energy. She's not herself, Lucienne thinks, and does not laugh. "Don't worry about it. Come on. What's left?"

The last artefact is the tiny, three-mouthed skull that was the Corinthian's.

Dream balances it on the tips of her fingers, staring into its empty eyesockets like a bad caricature of Prince Hamlet. Lucienne folds her hands and waits.

"He offered me - this," Dream says. It makes Lucienne start; her lady has not spoken of the Corinthian since his abrupt unmaking. "Before I was myself. I thought he was trying to trick me into something. I didn't think it was something that could happen. Something real."

"Very nearly unprecedented," Lucienne allows.

Her lord had a strange laugh, a laugh that was frightening to listen to. He laughed at his enemies, at the absurdity of the thought that they might defeat him. Her lady laughs like a distant bell, a few pale notes with no echo. She looks down, and Lucienne cannot see her eyes. "Still real."

The silence stretches between them. There is too much to say, and Lucienne does not know where to begin.

Dream sighs. "I owe him," she whispers. "The Corinthian. He taught me something I should have noticed long ago. He wasn't made right, but I can do better next time."

"Will you be recreating him, my lady?"

"Someday." Dream clenches her fist on the tiny skull. "Not yet. I'll have to, but I have to think about how to make him better next time. And there are those I should bring back much sooner."

---

 

 

Chapter 2: In which Jed Walker meets an old friend and gets some unhelpful advice

 

He put on his pyjamas, brushed his teeth, checked the nightlight, gave Grandma a goodnight hug, and checked that Daniel was safe in his crib. He laid down,closed his eyes and fell asleep. Jed knows when he is asleep. So the only surprising thing about the woman perched on his windowsill is how familiar she is.

She never had wings before. They're awesome wings, all pink and blue and green and the colors keep changing. His friend at school, Diana, has a notebook cover that's all shimmery colors like that but these wings look like what the notebook cover is trying to be and not making it. He just stares for a few seconds, trying to get his mind around it. The full moon is reflecting off them.

"Jed?" she says. She sounds nervous. She never sounded nervous before.

He never knew her name before, but now he does. "Gault," he says, and throws himself from the bed into her arms.

It's embarrassing to blubber, as old as he is. But he can't help it, he remembers watching her vanish. It hadn't looked any different than when the Terrible Tailor had used his Ultra-Cloaking Device to vanish and sneak away, but Jed had known she didn't want to go away. The strange man in black had sent her away. He tries not to sniffle too hard.

"Sorry," she whispers into his hair. "I'm sorry. I couldn't come back any sooner."

Jed makes himself take a deep breath, which doesn't really work to stop crying but at least makes it quieter. "I didn't think I was ever going to see you again. I thought that man had - Gault? Who was he? Was he really - "

"The King of Nightmares," Gault says. She's shivering.

Right. Maybe he wasn't ever really the Sandman, protector of dreamers, and maybe Gault wasn't ever really his mission control. But he's not stupid enough to think that just because he dreamed something means it wasn't real. She's his friend. Something is wrong. Jed takes a deep breath. "It's okay. I won't let him get you again."

Gault shakes her head. "He - he won't be hurting anyone again. He's dead now. There's a new king."

"And he let you go? Or - you escaped?" Jed's head is spinning. Is Gault on the run? Does he have to figure out how to keep her hidden?

But Gault says, "She let me go."

"Oh."

And he has been trying not to think about it, but Jed remembers the last time he saw his sister. Not the last time waking, when she tucked the quilt up around their shoulders and smiled at him and the big old house creaked like there was a storm coming -

But the dream he had, a few days later, falling asleep crumpled across the foot of Lyta's bed while she tried to rock newborn Daniel out of his wailing, too exhausted with terror and change for even the wailing of a baby to keep him up. He had dreamed he walked through a swirling mist, and up a flight of marble stairs. The stairs were a little too tall for him. The mists were a little too blank. He was dressed in the same clothes he had fallen asleep in.

At the top of the stairs was a doorway, and arrayed about it were three statues. A dragon, a winged horse, a griffin. They all turned to look at him at once.

"You shouldn't be here, boy," said the griffin.

"Yes he should," said the dragon. "If he weren't supposed to be here he wouldn't be."

"Don't philosophize with me. Don't you know what's going on tonight?"

The winged horse leaned down to look at him. "Who are you?"

Jed had wanted to answer, I am the Sandman, protector of sleepers, as he'd answered so many villains. But this wasn't a comic book. When he opened his mouth, what came out was, "I am Jed Walker, and I want to go in."

"Lots of people want to go in, and - "

" - he is welcome here," his sister had said.

And there she was, standing in the doorway. Her hair was longer than it had been, and there were jewels pinned through some of the locks. It looked like she was wrapped in a bedsheet instead of clothes. He hadn't seen her in years and years and then he'd seen her again for a day before she'd vanished. Jed tried to stick his chin out and look like he knew what he was doing.

"My lady, are you sure?" the griffin growled.

"Yes." His sister knelt down in the doorway. They were the same height like that. She looked him in the eyes. "Jed Walker, you have the freedom of my realm. Walk wheresoever you wish." There was a funny echo to her words. It sounded like they were coming from somewhere really far away and really close at once.

"Thanks," Jed said. He hadn't know what else to say.

His sister laid her hands on his shoulders, and they weighed more than they should. "You deserve more, for all you have lost, but this is what I can give you tonight."

He'd looked at his feet, and felt very small and very human beneath the gaze of a woman he thought might not be his sister at all anymore. Three statues that were monsters out of a myth were standing above him, and he was surrounded by swirling mists and a world that wasn't quite there, not quite right. He had said, "Are you okay? Do you need help?"

"I'm okay."

"Because if you need anything, I'll do it for you. Anything."

"You shouldn't say that," the woman who he was starting to think wasn't his sister, not really, told him, and then she wrapped her arms around him. "But I'll remember it. Thanks."

That was six months ago. Jed's dreams since have been disconnected things, rough images of swordfighting with an indistinct opponent, of climbing endless flights of stairs, of reading books whose contents vanish as he wakes. Until tonight. He swallows. "Did she say why?"

It's hard to focus on Gault's face. It looks a lot like his mother's face, but just different enough to feel strange to look at. He gets the feeling it would look like a different face completely if he caught it out of the corner of his eye.

"She said," Gault says, slowly, as if she were trying to remember the powers of some inconsequential villain from his Rogue's Gallery, "that I didn't deserve it. That she needed me. That you were going to need me to help you."

Oh. So it's like that. Jed squares his shoulders. "What do we have to do?"

Gault's face is strange again, but it's just her expression. She looks sad. All twisted-up. "We don't have to do anything, Jed. You don't work for the King of Dreams. She has no claim on you."

Dreams, not Nightmares. Jed kind of figured. He got the impression, that last time he saw his sister, that something big and important and magical had happened and he'd just missed it - real magic, the kind that doesn't explain itself with advanced sonic technology or secret military chemicals or outer-space aliens playing games. Magic. That's what the castle was, and the talking statues, and the woman who looked like Rose and who promised him the freedom of her realm. She knew this was coming. She knew he was brave enough.

"I'm not going to turn down a quest," Jed tells Gault. "Come on. My sword's under the bed." It wasn't before, he never had a sword before, but he knows it's there. He just has to reach out a hand, and it's there, just the right weight for him, a two-edged sword like something out of King Arthur, with an hourglass etched into the hilt and a ruby embedded in the pommel.

--

The moon is bright enough to read by, so that's what Diana is doing. She knew she wasn't going to sleep tonight. Not that her book isn't doing its best to put her to sleep. She's mostly keeping awake by the effort not to throw it across the room.

"Not your book?"

It would be nice if her grandmother would knock, instead of slipping into her bedroom like a cat, but Diana supposes that isn't her way. She sighs and leans into the hair-ruffle. "It's stupid," she mutters. "There are all these magical things going on and this girl just ignores them all and she wants to go home. She didn't even like being home."

Her grandmother chuckles. "You'd be surprised how many people are afraid of the world."

"Not surprised." Diana decides she might as well, and wings the book at the middle of the Van Gogh poster on her wall, right at the smear of moonlight. It hits dead on with a thump. The noise it makes as it falls is like a crow taking off in a hurry. "I just think it's stupid. And it doesn't make much of a story. If someone's on an adventure they should let it be an adventure. If someone's in a magical world they should pay attention to the magic. I bet a lot of people would find a gateway to a parallel universe and decide it looked all spooky and it might have bats in it and run away."

"Well, how lucky we are you pay attention." Her grandmother kisses her on the ear. It tingles a little. "Long day?"

"Not really. But something happened at school."

Her grandmother sits up a little straighter. Her eyes sparkle. "With Tommy? Can I rip his throat out for you?"

"No! No, he gave up on me after I broke his nose." That was a month ago, and it had been a very satisfying crunch, just as her grandmother had said it would be. And she'd managed to act so horrified none of the teachers had believed Tommy that she'd hit him with her book on purpose. "It's a good thing. I think. You remember Jed? The American boy?"

She tells the story with only a faint twinge of conscience. It's Grandmother Bendis. Grandmother Bendis knows how to keep a secret, and Diana has no secrets from her. She fiddles with the end of her grandmother's moon-coloured braid while she tells it, and snuggles up close enough to feel the zipper on her grandmother's coat and the hard stone lump of her necklace, and by the time she explains about Jed's dead mother the tie has come off the braid. Diana rolls it between her fingers.

Her grandmother doesn't complain. Diana is her favourite. Instead she frowns, with the air of someone trying to catch a distant scent on the air.

Diana clenches her fists in her nightgown, and wishes the moon was a little brighter, and listens to the echo of ringing in her ears. She used to go to school with a girl called Elaine. She moved away before she ever figured out Elaine's secret. Jed never felt like that until he pulled the feather out of his sleeve, but Diana is suddenly, hideously, certain he has a secret just as big.

When her grandmother speaks again there's an edge to her voice that puts Diana on edge. "I want you to keep an eye on him," she says. "This boy. Jed. Find out everything you can about his family."

"You don't think something's wrong? Is he in danger?"

"Danger," her grandmother says, like she's tasting the word. "Maybe. Something like that. I just think this is something worth paying attention to, right now. You'll be fine, Diana. You're brave."

It will be alright, then. Diana knows it will be alright. She turns enough to give her grandmother a proper hug.

--

They have walked for so long Jed's feet ache with it, so long he feels like they must have crossed their own path over and over again. Gault is tired. He can tell because her wings are drooping. They are walking through an empty landscape of twisting stones, wind-weathered into ridiculous shapes, the air thick with mist and the ground soft sand that swallows their footprints.

He wishes he had his radar still. This would be faster with a radar beacon. All he has is his sword.

Jed looks down. There's a trickle of water just in front of his feet, a brook that should burble and laugh but makes no sound at all.

"Let's stop for a minute," he says. "My feet hurt." Maybe if he says he has to stop Gault won't feel bad about stopping.

Sure enough, she sinks to her knees almost as soon as he says it. She's smiling, though, and reaches out to cup her hands in the brook. Well, if Gault thinks it's safe it's probably safe. She never steered him wrong when she was Mission Control. Jed flops down and splashes water at his face, and drinks, and drinks, and drinks.

Eventually he flops onto his back, feeling full and comfortable for the first time since - they started walking. No point trying to be more exact than that. He's lost track. "Hey. Gault?"

"Jed?" She's looking every which way, as if she expected an enemy to leap at them out of the mist. As if they'd have time to do anything but scream.

"How will we know when we're close to this Oracle?"

"We won't," she answers. She folds her hands in her lap. "Only those who are lost beyond hope can find the Oracle."

"Huh. So how does anyone know about the Oracle, if people have to get lost to find it?"

"The Oracle must give them directions to safety," Gault frowns at him. "I'm sorry. I don't really know much about it. Only what the King of Nightmares told me."

The King of Nightmares was was all cryptic and mysterious and she didn't say anything useful like why she thought Jed could find this missing moonstone. Or what it looked like. Proper mysterious, he thinks that's how they'd say it in an English book. "Gault? How lost are we?"

She smiles. She looks like his mom did when she was telling him bad news. "Lost enough I hope we find the Oracle."

"Right," Jed says, and pushes himself up to his elbows. "I guess we have to keep walking, then."

They keep walking.

There is no telling how long. Maybe it should be getting dark by now, but there's no telling where the light is coming from anyway. For all Jed knows they could be walking under a bright full moon. Besides, they're a knight and his fairy guardian looking for an oracle, it only makes sense that time is getting a little weird. Jed read enough fantasy books to know how they worked, even if he liked comic books better.

They walk past towers of obsidian, cracked and sharp-edged. They walk past towers of sandstone, soft with the slow wearing of the wind. They walk past towers of some strange blue-green stone Jed cannot name, warped into the shapes of whirlpools and waves.

He thinks, now and then, that they are walking on their own footprints, The sand is uneven.

"This is a soft place," Gault whispers. "We could be lost here for a very long time."

"Don't you mean forever?"

"What?"

"Lost forever," Jed repeats, and squares his shoulders. "If we could just be lost for a very long time, that means we'll get found. Sometime."

"I mean we could die and that would be the end of it." Gault's voice is so quiet he can barely hear it. "I shouldn't have brought you here. I'm sorry."

He's a knight. Knights are brave. "We're not going to die. We're the heroes. Heroes always find a way."

They keep walking.

It's colder, even though it isn't any darker. The wind is picking up. Jed wonders if he should be chivalrous and give his tunic to Gault, but he doesn't think it would fit her. He puts a hand on the hilt of his sword, feeling the embossed hourglass, and whispers, "Gault?" Then when she doesn't answer, feeling stupid, he says it louder. "Gault!"

She grabs his other hand. "Stay close, we don't want-"

That's when the sandstorm hits.

It hits like a wave. It slams into them so hard it knocks them over. Jed tries to keep his grip on Gault's hand but he can't really feel it, and it's not right, they're supposed to be doing this together. He has to let go of the sword to try to grab on with both hands. He thinks he hears her voice somewhere far off but Jed's not about to move even if he could get to his feet.

There's a roar, and something smacks into his ribs and throws him to the shifting ground. Jed grabs for his sword but it's pinned underneath him and he can't move, he doesn't know where anything is. He closes his eyes. He used to have a whistle. He used to know what to do. For all he knows this is going to keep going forever, he's just going to be stuck here until his lungs fill up with sand and he suffocates, and that's it for the quest.

All he can hear is the noise of the storm and a low rumble like the sound of a truck idling. There used to be someone on the street he lived on in Homeland who drove a delivery truck and brought it home overnight, and he'd hear its rumble for a few minutes, sometimes, while he lay with the blanket pulled over his head and tried not to cry too loud. It said A+ Airport Drayage on the side and had a logo of a jet plane taking off. Jed told himself stories about how he was going to climb out the window and hide in the back of the truck and get loaded onto an airplane and fly away. Maybe New York, it was where his mom and sister had gone, or close enough. Maybe somewhere foreign and exciting. Rio de Janeiro. Hong Kong. They weren't very good stories. Eventually the truck driver moved away and the noise stopped and Jed tried not to think about it anymore. He doesn't know why he remembers it so vividly now, when he's so far from Homeland. The noise is stopping. Jed coughs, and it hurts to cough and there's blood in his mouth.

"Shh," says something that sounds like Gault but deeper and louder. "It's almost over."

The weight that's pinning him down lifts, and Jed opens his eyes. There's a shape right next to him that wasn't there before, huge and sandstone-colored. Cat-shaped. One big paw still in the air. Sphinx, throws up some part of his brain that's not busy curling in a ball.

It has Gault's face. It says, "Are you okay?"

"Think so." He coughs again, and tries to brush the sand from his front. He's covered in it. His whole side is starting to hurt. Well, he doesn't really show bruises, it'll be fine. "I didn't know you could do that." He doesn't know why he's surprised.

Because he's fallen into that kind of story. Here he is, with his sword, wandering through a mysterious desert where time doesn't work quite right, questing for a magical artifact with a magical advisor. That she can turn into a sphinx and grab him to keep him from getting swept away in a storm doesn't even count as weird. Not any weirder than any of the rest of it, at least.

Six months ago a lot of things happened at once and at the end of it Jed was swept away to live happily ever after with his rich grandmother who'd just woken up from an enchanted sleep her solicitors used a lot of fancy words about but that's what it comes down to - and his sister's best friend had a baby she may as well have gotten from a fairy godmother, and his sister vanished from the bed next to him in the middle of the night. He's asleep. That doesn't mean what's happening right now isn't real.

It's gotten dark. Sometime in that storm it got dark. He can sort of see stars overhead, and all the rocks have turned blue. They're not the same rocks, either. They look - painted. Not on the surfaces, but like the backdrop of a play.

"Gault? Where are we?"

"Very, very lost," she says, and sits up on her haunches to look around.

"Oh."

"You are in the lair of the Oracle," says another impossibly deep voice from all directions at once, and before Jed can draw breath to answer it the ground opens beneath their feet.

--

The lady Dream is walking in Fiddler's Green. She spends much of her time here, in the heart of her realm, and she invites Fiddler's Green to walk with her in his human aspect almost as often.

He tries to take it as an honour, and not dwell too long on the reasons why. Gilbert wishes there had been some way to save Rose Walker, and not only this echo of her. She deserved better. In Dream's impossible position Gilbert thinks he would not seek out the company of someone who has been present in his old life; it would be too painful a reminder. He thinks this, but the thought feels more like Gilbert than like Fiddler's Green, and he cannot help but think of himself as Gilbert after so many years in the waking world. How much worse must it be for someone whose whole life has been spent there? Who came to this realm not as a home they had ventured away from in search of adventure, but a place that, for all they visited it each night, for all it was theirs in a soul-deep way only Fiddlers' Green and a few other beings in similar situations of location and consciousness at once can understand, could only look to them as a bitter exile?

Which is to say, Gilbert can sympathize, but he cannot help except by his steady presence.

Six months ago, the night of Lord Morpheus's funeral, he had not attended. To eulogize the lord he had abandoned would have felt petty. He stayed in the castle, to keep his friend company while she waited for her family to arrive. When she went to the gates to speak to her - to speak to Jed Walker, who should not have been there - he waited, and watched, and did not make himself known.

Not until the boy woke up did he ask his lady, "Will he be alright?"

"I hope so," she said, and said no more.

Now he sits beside her on a mossy rock beside a burbling brook, as her raven, Matthew, goes on at length. " - and Loosh says the well is secure, so I guess we don't have anything to worry about - do we? There's not going to be, like, breakout attempts?"

"Unlikely in the extreme." The words fall in deliberate order; it's so like Lord Morpheus that Gilbert almost winces to hear it. "The things down there aren't awake."

"Oh, Uh. That's good, I guess? It's not like solitary confinement or anything? Because that's supposed to do a real number on people's brains, I mean, not that most of what you've got in there counts as people - right?"

"It is not. They can experience nothing but a distant sense of passing time."

"'Cause there are a bunch of nightmares still down there, I think he was - you were - dammit this is hard. Just. Like. Grammatically. Someone was stuffing them down the well to deal with later. And then you went all funny about Gault."

"I woke up Gault because she deserved it," Dream says. Her hand tightens on Gilbert's. "I'll handle the rest of them. It's not later yet."

"Okay. Okay. I'll tell Lucienne."

He flaps off, trailing complaints. It has ever been the privilege of Dream's ravens to speak frankly, but Gilbert thinks sometimes that Matthew abuses the privilege just as Mervyn Pumpkinhead does. Dream never complained of it. Never complains now.

When he is gone Dream turns to Gilbert and says, with an expression twisting just like his dear friend Rose's used to, "Am I being stupid?"

"I - don't know how to judge that, my lady," he admits. It does not typically fall to Fiddler's Green to offer advice; that was the province of Lucienne, and the ravens. "What about?"

"The ones who left." She huffs a breath, and brushes some of her long jewel-studded hair over her shoulder. It still gives Gilbert a twinge of unfamiliarity every time he catches the motion from the corner of his eye, a gesture that belongs neither to Morpheus or Rose. "Should I be more careful with anyone I had to track down? Or should I just do a general amnesty? You left, and it wasn't like I can't count on you now. You had good reasons."

To call his reasons good smacks of poetic license. They were not noble, not in the service of any great cause; it was only that he could no longer bear to watch the lives of humans at a remove, without ever understanding what could make something so brief so bright. The world is more full of glory than you can understand, said the poet whose face he had borrowed for his quest, but Fiddler's Green was sure he could understand, could grasp it entire, if only he reached out and tried. Perhaps it was a foolish wish. Quixotic. Still it was his, and he cannot wish he had done otherwise.

"I think there is no perfect answer, my lady," he says, helpless in the face of her regard. "You are being as merciful as you can; you are being as cautious as you must. The Corinthian is not the only nightmare who went beyond his writ."

"Hah." Lord Morpheus would never have spoken so casually. "I'll just have to wait and see what goes wrong. Later."

Gilbert can only point out, "You have all the time in the world."

"Not all of it, I don't think." And with that unpleasant suggestion she goes silent, staring at the brook. It is clear and shallow and its bed is a scattering of grey-and-white pebbles, long worn smooth; it would be delightful to wade in, refreshing to drink. Gilbert does not recall seeing Dream eat or drink since her assumption of the role. A subtle thing, but a reminder nonetheless that life is a human is something they have both set aside in the name of their duties here. He cannot affect the sun, but he tries to make it sparkle off the water, a small and beautiful thing to be a comfort to her. He lets the willow tree beside them rustle in the breeze as if it wanted to whisper a secret. It was not his habit, once, to pay much heed to such small things, preferring to let dreamers imagine for themselves the details of leaves and flowers and light, but Gilbert has learned the importance of conscientious detail. In a poem, every syllable counts. And in the poem that is his home and self, every leaf, every pebble, every momentary gleam of light, should be set in its proper place. If he is no longer here every moment - if he has taken to haunting the library when his lady does not require his presence - all the more reason to keep things perfect when he is.

They have sat in anxious silence long enough that Gilbert thinks Dream does not mean to say anything more when she says, "I don't want to do wrong by my people. I brought Gault back, and I let her have a new job. She can't be the only one who wasn't happy."

"My lady, we all have our responsibilities. You've said as much to me before."

"We are the servants of the dreamers," Dream says, soft and distant. "But that doesn't mean I don't have a duty to the dreams, as well. Tell me - " She stops, and bites her lips, and Lord Morpheus would never have done that and it hurts to watch Dream be so uncertain. "Gilbert? Would you rather I still call you Gilbert?"

He is sitting beside her in his human aspect, coat thrown aside in the warmth and hands resting on his unnecessary walking-stick. "I admit, I still think of myself that way. But don't feel it's necessary. I need to remember my responsibilities, too."

"I don't want to imply," Dream answers, "that you aren't allowed anything outside them. Gilbert."

"Gilbert, then, when we're alone. We'll reserve Fiddler's Green for company." If it makes her feel more comfortable. Looking after Dream is another one of his responsibilities, after all. The last thing Lord Morpheus asked of him.

"Gilbert. Do you know if there are others who feel as Gault did? That they are ill-suited to the role they were made for? Or that - anything else is wrong, that they have a better idea for how to do something or there's someone they want to work with or ... they want a night off. To go see the waking world. To understand life better."

Gilbert blinks. "Formally? I expect there are a great many who would take you up on that offer, although it seems redundant when so many of them took the opportunity of your long absence to leave on their own. I could hardly say who, though. All my gossip is decades out of date."

"Whose is more recent, then?" There's a sudden steely determination in Dream's voice. She's taking this quite seriously, for someone who was always so dutiful and expected the same of their subjects.

Well. It's not the greatest change in Dream of late.

Fiddler's Green cannot recommend Lucienne; she is too dutiful herself to have a finger on the pulse of discontent. Cain and Abel talk to everyone, but they stayed and might not understand the concerns of those who left. The obvious candidate, he realises with growing horror, is - "Mervyn Pumpkinhead."

"Oh, he'll have a lot to say."

Is that a smile? It is. It's good to see Dream smiling. Gilbert smiles back. "Some of it unprintable, but he won't hesitate to say it."

--

The lair of the Oracle is a sand-floored cave, full of mist drifting up from cracks in the floor as if hidden vents were letting off steam. There are gleaming jewels set in the walls. There are pillars, of all different heights and construction like someone was setting them around at random. Jed can see one carved with Egyptian hieroglyphs, and one that looks like a marble lady with a very flat hat, and one that's got lines where someone peeled off the concrete mould and rebar sticking out of the top. He grabs the nearest one, which is some deep reddish wood, to pull himself upright again. Gault landed on her feet. She's still being a sphinx. Jed figures a sphinx is half a cat so it's not weird she made it okay.

"Why have you come here?" the booming voice from all directions calls out.

Jed brushes the sand off his knees and tries to find somewhere to look. "You're an oracle," he points out. "You should know."

"They have to ask," Gault whispers. In her sphinx-shape it's an awfully loud whisper. "That's how the story goes."

Right. It's a fairy-tale. Jed just hopes he gets to ask enough questions. He takes a deep breath.

"We're looking for the moonstone. How can we find it?"

The silence lasts just long enough to make Jed think he annoyed it, and then there are answers. Voices, plural, now, echoing off the cave walls without anything to echo from - deep voices, high voices, rasping voices, singsong voices, voices with an unplaceable accent. They're all speaking at once. If this weren't a dream Jed would never stand a chance of hearing them all, and even in a dream he can only make out fragments.

"The first is nothing."
"a perfect knight will find the way but knight is never perfect"
"You must be brave. You must be wise."
"THREE."
"You must know when to give"
"under and through and bones everywhere and wood is made of"
"RIDDLES."
"The third is your own neighbor."

Jed is shaking. Not from cold, or from fear, but like a struck gong. His hands are clapped to his ears. He makes himself pull them away. That was - not really an answer. Maybe because it had been too big a question.

Riddles. Does that mean he's going to have to answer them? If he asks for the answers, will he get them, or is that cheating?

It's gone quiet.

He wants to ask Gault how many questions they get but he's afraid the Oracle would count it as a question. Jed isn't sure if oracles are like genies and they try to misinterpret things out of spite, or if they're just vague and unhelpful in general.

He doesn't like being down here. There aren't any rats and he has his sword if anyone tries to hurt them but there's something not quite right about the whole cave. Like it was put together from spare parts that don't exactly fit.

Maybe this is a riddle right now. How do you ask for help without putting it in the form of a question? I'll take Fairytales for four hundred dollars, Alex - and that's a Daily Double. He wasn't allowed to watch television often but Clarice thought Jeopardy counted as educational. At least she pretended to so she could keep him in the living room while her husband watched sports in the bedroom. Jed was pants at it - that's a new word he learned in England. Pants, meaning rubbish, meaning useless. All he could do was the math. Figuring how much somebody could afford to stake on an answer. He and Gault sort of got one useful answer, they can't un-hear it, so whatever happens next isn't a true Daily Double. That comes later. They have to win every time. Jed's not going to be pants at asking questions. He got picked for this. The Nightmare King trusts him.

"Gault. I don't know how many questions we get."

Gault doesn't answer right away. When she does her voice sounds funny and Jed can't figure out why. "I think we get as many as it knows we need."

"Oh. Okay."

"But no more than that."

So they have to guess right, first go. And he already used one question. He looks around the cave again just in case it gives him ideas. Pillars. Mist. Rock walls. Nowhere a voice could actually be coming from.

Before he can decide what to do, he hears Gault's voice behind him. "Where should we go?"

"ONWARD."
"through the dark and over the river and through the woods"
"Follow the bird."
"You must go home."
"and along the long road and through the gates of glass"
"NOW."

And before he can do more than grab blindly for Gault's giant paw, they are falling again.

It feels like it lasts longer this time, and Jed hits the ground hard enough to knock his breath away.

He blinks. Sits up. Tries to look around. The pillars are gone, but the cave looks exactly the same. It's like the whole falling thing was an illusion. Same sandy floor, same cracks in the floors, same swirling mist. Gault has gone back to - her fairy shape, but a tiny version, fluttering in midair, glowing faint purple as if she expects the light to fail.

He should ask some sensible question, like where they are. What they should do next. What comes out is, "What kind of oracle was that?"

Gault flutters over to him, her face twisted in distress. He tries to grin so she knows he's okay. He holds out a hand. She settles onto it, delicately, barely a weight. Like an extra-large butterfly. He went to a butterfly garden once with his mom. He's not going to think about his mom.

"The leftover kind," Gault says. "All the spare pieces of the stories of oracles, drifted here and jumbled up."

"Oh." He blinks. "Like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

"Not really."

Right. Jed squares his shoulders. "Where do we go now?"

--

Lyta wakes up the noise of rain on her window.

It's funny. Usually she wakes up to the noise of Jed trying to sneak into her room.

She sits up, and looks over to Daniel's crib. He's still asleep, mouth half-open and hands curled into fists like he's clutching some invisible toy. They find strange things in his crib sometimes. Half a dozen inexplicable feathers, and just yesterday Lyta stepped on a tiny beast carved from some red stone, that Unity swore she didn't recognize. It sets her nerves on edge. After how suddenly Daniel came into her life, all the supernatural bullshit she still hasn't sorted out -

After what happened to -

She doesn't want to think about it.

Lyta gets up, and wraps herself in her robe. Her hair is still a little damp from last night's shower. England never seems to get warm, and the big old house Unity bought for them has radiators that make more noise than heat. She brushes it out, washes her face, puts on her makeup, smiles at the mirror. It looks very natural; the shadows under her eyes are hidden.

Her baby doesn't wake up when she scoops him out of his crib, but he does grab at the collar of her robe in his sleep.

He's awake by the time she has the coffeemaker started, though, and so is Unity, who pads into the kitchen already dressed, as if she's been up for hours. Maybe she has. She settles at the kitchen table while Lyta starts mixing up the baby formula. Six months, Lyta thinks, you're supposed to introduce solid foods at six months. She needs to do a grocery run and get some of those mushy foods in jars. She needs to set up the next well-baby checkup. So far Daniel's been absurdly healthy. She needs to actually read the next round of the child-development books she bought in a panic and Unity organized in stacks for her. She loves being a mother, but it would have been nice to have more than three days warning. Lyta bounces Daniel against her shoulder and presses a kiss to the crown of his head while she turns the kettle on with her free hand. "Good morning."

"Good morning." Unity's eyes are crinkling up with her smile. "You're up early. Isn't breakfast usually my grandson's job?"

"He was still asleep when I went past his room." Lyta shrugs. "He was saying last night he was knackered. I guess he's picking up the local slang."

"Oh dear. I do hope he's not ill."

"Probably just tired." Lyta does her best smile. "Have any good dreams last night?"

"No. No dreams at all."

She sounds knackered, too. Lyta rocks her son back and forth and gently pulls his hands away from her shiny, enticing earrings.

They all drink their breakfasts - formula or coffee or tea - in companionable quiet, and there's still no noise from Jed's room. He likes to have a bowl of cereal in the mornings. He's not going to have time at this rate. Unity sets the breakfast dishes in the sink, and Lyta goes back upstairs to give her baby a change and get him into a clean onesie, and when she looks in Jed's room again he's still asleep, flat on his back with the covers half thrown on the floor, making tiny snores. Lyta gives up, and knocks on the doorframe. "Jed?"

No answer.

Lyta calls out louder. "Jed? You're going to be late for school."

Still nothing. She pushes the door all the way open and steps in. The floorboards creak with every step she makes. His radiator is making some dyspeptic and alarming noise; maybe he can't hear her over it, Lyta tells herself, and resolutely ignores that it's on the opposite side of the room. The window isn't, and it's still rattling with the rain. Lyta shakes Jed's shoulder. "Jed? Are you not feeling well? Do you need to stay home from school today?"

Even in his sleep, he should have reacted to that. Twitched, or rolled away from her hand. He lies still. She can make out his breathing. Otherwise he might as well be a stuffed doll.

A twelve-year-old, lying so deeply asleep it looks like death, not waking at a voice or a touch or an increasingly frantic one-handed shake. It was more than a hundred years ago the Kincaids tried to wake up their daughter and failed, and no doctor they summoned could tell why, and it was a hundred years before -

There has been so much supernatural bullshit in their lives. At least he is still there. That's what Lyta tries to tell herself even as she screams for Unity. He is still there, they have his body, he did not vanish like - Rose. Lyta makes herself think the name. He is still here. There is still a chance.

Against her side Daniel starts to wail in pain, or terror, or sympathy. Whatever it is that can make a happy baby cry.

---

 

 

Chapter 3: In which Jed Walker proves himself a worthy knight

 

There is light, and not just from Gault glowing. Jed doesn't know where it's coming from. It's just a rule, maybe, that there's always a glow when adventurers are exploring a cave.

There's not much of anything else. It feels like they've been walking for hours and hours. Well. Jed walking, Gault flying.

So it should be a surprise when the cave widens out suddenly and the sun stabs through and there's a giant there.

The giant is wearing armour - full plate armour, with a closed helmet, not the mail shirt that Jed's been wearing for his quest. The armour is painted black. Painted, it's obvious, it's chipping off here and there, on the joints and the edges. The plume on the giant's helmet is shimmering white.

They're maybe three times as tall as Jed.

The light is a sunset light. It's like they're in an arena and it's leaking over the edges.

Jed takes a deep breath. "Hello?"

The giant draws their sword, and raises it with both hands. There's no device on the pommel, just a glossy black circle like the bottom of a bottle of soy sauce. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS."

Okay. Okay. He's a knight, fighting monsters comes with the job. He grabs for the hilt of his sword and hopes Gault knows enough to stay out of this and he brings it up and his bones ring as the armoured giant's sword slides down it, catching on the guard, and they ring. Like a bell.

He can do this. He's never done it before but it's obvious, now, the way to move.

Slash. Stab. Jump. Hope. You must be brave. Brave he can do; he's got practice.

He ducks under another swing, goes down, rolls away. The giant is slower than he is. He can use that. Their massive sword slams into the ground, It throws up a cloud of dust and Jed's blinking it out of his eyes. The giant steps forward and raises it again, and Jed gives up on getting any closer right now and scrambles backwards.

"BEGONE FROM THIS PLACE."

"Let us through and we'll begone!"

It's not much of a battle cry. He sees a flickering pink light out of the corner of his eye. Gault, swooping around the giant's head.

He sees the swing come down, but this time he ducks forward and makes a wild chop at his opponent's knees, which are just about chest high so it's not hard to aim. His sword goes clang against the armour. The noise sets his teeth on edge. Jed's never been in a car accident but he thinks that's what it would sound like, metal on metal and that horrible clunk.

It makes the giant leap back, which puts him right in their reach again and he can't afford to get hit, not even once. One hit would do him in, from that giant cleaver of a sword.

So Jed will just have to not get hit.

He feints right, dodges left, stabs up at the wrists. His sword catches in the joint of the giant's armour, just for half a heartbeat. Jed blinks and it looks like there's ink dripping out of it.

They're on the defensive now. Jed takes a deep breath. He doesn't expect it to work, but he has to say it, he has to offer, he's one of the good guys. "Surrender and I'll let you go!"

"YOU SHALL NOT PASS," they say again. The intonation's exactly the same. Are they actually an 'it'? Some kind of automaton?

Jed doesn't waste his breath on saying anything back. He scrambles left, watches the giant spin to follow him, but he's got the advantage of speed and they're only half-turned by the time he's made a full circuit and his third blow lands on the back of their knees.

The giant doesn't scream. They rock forward and their knees buckle and they slam their sword into the ground, point-first this time, but it's not at the right angle to hold them up. That's okay. Jed leaps into the air to land a wild swing on the shoulder, and the giant goes over like a felled tree.

He's not sure he could pick up the sword, but it's fallen away from their hand and they're not rolling to grab it. Jed jumps onto their back. There's some kind of black mist seeping across the ground and what it it's poison? "Surrender?" he asks again, just in case.

There's no answer.

Jed holds his sword out in one hand to balance while he crouches down to lift the giant's visor with the other. Gault has come down to hover just overhead. She must want a good look too.

But when he opens it there's nothing at all inside. Just blackness.

Jed blinks, and the blackness starts to roll out of the helmet, and the damaged wrist, and everywhere else there's a joint. He can't stay out of it now - it's filling up the arena. The light isn't sunset anymore. Even as he looks up it's turning from golden to deep purple, fading until there are only a few random specks of white that aren't enough to see anything by. Gault's glow is the only thing he can see properly.

"Gault?" His voice comes out weak and croaky and he clears his throat and tries again. "Gault?" Better. "What was that thing?"

"A knight, I think." She drifts a little closer and then she lands on his shoulder. He can just see her out of the corner of his eye. It's good to know she's there. Something to see by. "Where do we go now?"

He wishes he'd gotten a better look at the big open space. But the giant had come up so fast, and now it's too dark to see.

Perfect night.

That's got to be a riddle, right?

"I think we just walk, and wherever we end up is where we need to be," Jed says. The only light, now, are the tiny bits of stars and Gault's steady glow. Imperfections. He takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes.

--

The doorbell on Jed's big old house doesn't work. There's a lion-head knocker. Diana takes a desultory poke at it, decides it's there for decoration, and pounds her fists until the door rattles on its hinges.

It's been just long enough she's thinking about kicking it when the door finally opens. It's the lady with the big car, the one who always picks up Jed at school, the one he said was called Lyta. Diana tries to do a big friendly smile. "Hi," she says. "I'm Diana? From Jed's class? Are you Lyta?"

"I am," the woman says. Her hair is all tangled on one side, like something was grabbing at it. It takes another second before she smiles, and it doesn't look fake but it doesn't look completely real either. "Are you a friend of Jed's, then?"

"I am." She shuffles her feet and tries to look embarrassed. "And he didn't show up to school today so I was kind of worried? I figured I should come see how he's doing?"

"Oh! That's very kind of you." Lyta's shoulders relax a little. "He was feeling under the weather, that's all. Nothing to worry about."

"Can I see him?"

Lyta shakes her head. "He's asleep right now. Sorry. But I'll tell him his friend came by. He'll like that. He talks about you, you know."

"He does?"

"He said you're generous, and you have good taste in books, and you live with your mother and your grandmother. He never told me your last name, though."

Diana doesn't have to fake the embarrassed look this time. "Prince," she mumbles.

"Oh." Lyta presses a hand to her lips.

"I don't know what Mum was thinking." If Grandmother had been around then she would never have allowed it. But she wasn't, and so Diana is stuck with a name that's very nearly as bad as being called Clark Kent or James Bond. "She could have done Juno or Melpomene or something if she wanted classical."

For the first time Lyta's smile reaches her eyes. "Yes, I wonder. At least it's a compliment." Which is something Diana is getting sick of people pointing out when she complains, but it's inevitable. She sighs and twists her toe against the doormat. It doesn't say 'Welcome', which suggests someone in the house has sense. Maybe it's even Lyta. Lyta goes on, "I'd invite you in for a cuppa but I don't want you catching anything, you know? Maybe next time?"

"It's fine. I get it. I'll see Jed on Monday." She offers a little friendly goodbye wave as she turns away.

The door shuts before she gets to the front hedge. Still, Diana isn't stupid. She goes out under the rose arbour, turns down the lane, and makes sure to vanish around the big leylandii on the corner before she takes the alleyway to the back of the house.

It's obvious which bedroom is Jed's. Even if it didn't have a plush stegosaurus on the windowsill, just looking at the window makes Diana's ears ring.

She leaves her shoes and her bookbag at the bottom of the drainpipe. It's a good thing it's not raining or she'd probably slip and fall and break a bone, and that would just be impossible to explain to Grandmother. After she thinks for a few seconds Diana pulls her socks off too, and stuffs them in her shoes. She curls her toes in the earth, enjoying the way it squishes. Then she lifts one foot and curls her toes against the brick, and grabs with both hands at the drainpipe. At least it's not the modern kind that might as well be made of tinfoil. Those would never take her weight. As it is she's going to be a mess, and she's just lucky it's only one storey.

This would be a lot easier if it were a tree. Diana's used to trees. Jed's got a big beautiful oak tree in his yard, too, only it's twenty feet away and the branches don't actually touch the house and Diana isn't about to go swinging around like Tarzan on a vine, especially since there aren't any.

This would be a lot easier if she were a foot taller, too.

But she makes it, by a combination of shimmying and grasping at windowsills, and now she's braced next to Jed's window with one hand on the drainpipe, one foot on a jutting piece of brickwork, and one knee on the sill, which leaves one hand to thump on the window. She's panting and her arms hurt and there's a big smear of dirt down the front of her uniform. The window doesn't open on the first thump and Diana wonders if her library card is stiff enough to lift the latch.

But it opens on the second thump, and she grabs the ledge and hauls herself inside in a graceless heap whose sole virtue is that she manages not to land too loud. She doesn't know where Lyta went and she doesn't know who else is in the house.

The ringing in her ears is worse in here. Jed is lying in bed, looking like he never got out of it. Someone's pulled the blankets up to his shoulders and they're still straight.

On a sudden impulse Diana drops down to look under the bed.

There's not much there. A pair of fuzzy slippers. A crumpled red-and-yellow anorak. An unopened bag of fruit gums. Maybe that's what he likes better than Freddos. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that makes her head hurt just to look at.

Grandmother, she thinks, as loudly as she can. Something's wrong with Jed. I don't know what.

She doesn't get an answer, exactly. She didn't expect one. But the ringing in her ears changes tone, and the pressure against her skull eases a little, like a headache retreating with a change in weather.

Diana stands up, and brushes her fingers against Jed's cheek.

It feels like the cheek of a sleeping boy. She doesn't know what she expected.

There are voices, somewhere in the hall outside. Diana hurries over to the window, and hopes they don't wonder why it's sitting ajar.

--

Jed opens his eyes when he feels the breeze on his face. It's a hot breeze. He wonders if they're back in the desert. But when he opens his eyes they're surrounded by blank pale rock and scrub, the grey half-light of a very early morning, and the only interesting thing is the sphinx, leaning so close Jed can feel her breath.

She doesn't really look like Gault did aside from being a sphinx. She's got brown-and-white feathers and patchy fur that's a different shade of brown, and it's all patchy like she's been very sick, and the hair around her human face is a tangled mess. Her skin is pale. Her glasses have spots on them. Why is a sphinx wearing glasses? They're little rectangles like old-fashioned reading glasses and she's squinting at them over the top of them. "Oh," she says. "Are you here for dinner?"

Is that her first riddle? Is that what the Oracle was warning them about?

There's a thump. When Jed glances at it he sees Gault has gone sphinx-shaped again, all elegant and golden. "Of course not," she growls. "Watch yourself."

The sphinx - the other sphinx - rears back. Her tail is lashing back and forth. It looks like the tail of a dog that's not been taking care of itself. "I'm allowed," she growls. "If you can't answer, I get dinner. That's how it works."

Jed crosses his arms. It doesn't really make him look intimidating, he thinks, but it makes him feel better. He'd draw his sword but Jed is horribly certain that even with whatever it is wrong with her, the sphinx would pounce on him and run him right through with her claws before he could finish the draw. "And what do we get if we can answer?"

"Well, I don't eat you."

"That's not much. That's basic politeness."

Gault's tail is whipping back and forth, and her oversized whisper warms Jed's ear again. "Jed, are you - "

"Shh. Trust me."

Be brave. He can do that.

"What do you want, then?" The sphinx seems surprised to be questioned. Jed wonders how many people come through here. How many people come through here only once. Does she spend her days reading? Looking for better riddles? Is that what the glasses are for? "I'll give you safe passage. That comes with."

"Safe passage to where?" Jed demands. "We don't want to wander off and die of thirst and get eaten by rats. And just letting us go past without eating us isn't very much."

She keeps sneaking glances at Gault. Maybe she's scared.

Jed takes a deep breath. "Give us directions. You know where."

The sphinx springs back, and her wings curl forward. It makes her look like an affronted cat. For some reason Jed suddenly feels sorry for her. "Fine. Three riddles, and if you get them all, I give you directions, and if you don't, I feast on your flesh and crunch your bones. And your friend can go back into the dark," she adds, with a sniff, as if she weren't pawing the ground.

"Jed, this is a bad idea," Gault whispers again.

Jed pats - some part of her fur. He can't tell what without looking. Whatever is closest to his hand. "I don't have any better ones," he tells her. "It's okay."

It's not. He doesn't know what he's doing. But Jed is too used to gut-churning terror to let the idea of getting eaten by a sphinx stop him. She's acting friendly right now and if she tries to eat him ahead of time, or just gets mad and forgets the bargain, he has Gault to fight for him. That has to be allowed. He never used to be able to fight back. Barnaby was so much bigger than Jed and sometimes he got mad for no reason at all and Jed isn't going to think about that now. He has a sword now. He's used it. He's a knight of -

Who is he a knight of? The King of Nightmares?

Jed takes a deep breath, and thinks about the rainbow colors of his sister's hair, and the sparkling eyes of the lady who met him on the castle steps, six months ago. He should have asked for a favor, if he was going to be her knight. A token. Maybe he'll ask when they finish the quest.

The sphinx has taken off her glasses, one-handed. One-pawed, he means. She sets them down on a rock. She does look a lot more intimidating that way, for all she's still pale and sickly and maybe has mange. "First riddle," she announces, and extends her claws.

Jed takes a deep breath.

"My fire touches every tree, and burns it not. My fire spreads over the world, yet it stays in its own hearth. My fire is plunged below the ocean, and does not go out. Who am I?"

It takes a few seconds, and that's just because Jed is used to modern scientific thinking even if he is on a magical quest. But even if the real thing just gets hidden behind the planet while staying millions of miles away, poetically, in a riddle - "The sun," he answers. "Its light just makes plants photosynthesize, and its light goes all over but the actual sun is round, and it sets below the horizon but comes back in the morning."

He can see it now. It's turning the fog all rosy on the edges.

The sphinx growls, and her tail lashes back and forth. Beside him Gault lets out a hiss. "Fairly answered," she says, in a tone that suggests it had better be counted.

"Fine. One down. Two to go."

"Ask, then."

"And this one's for you. No consulting your pet hero."

That doesn't seem fair. She's changing the rules. Jed opens his mouth, then closes it again when he feels a claw press into his back. Okay. If Gault doesn't want to argue, he'll let her handle it. They're a team. He can get the third one.

"Second riddle," the sphinx says. She's blinking in the sunlight. "I am the bearer of bad news. I feast on battle and death. But when the world was dark I found light, and when the world was flooded I found dry land. Who am I?"

Okay, this one Jed isn't getting. The last bit sounds like a dove, he's read the Bible, but doves don't have anything to do with bad news. Maybe it's just as well he's not supposed to interfere. The light is turning golden now, proper sunrise. It's making dark silhouettes of the low scrubby trees. A big bird is sitting on one of them. Maybe a crow; he can't make out more than its shape. The sphinx is nuzzling at one claw like she's cleaning it, not even looking at them.

"Raven," says Gault. "And take care. That went all over the world. You're spreading yourself thin."

What's that supposed to mean?

"I am?" The sphinx arches up. Like a cat. Like, Jed thinks as his stomach starts to sink, a very smug cat that's got a little songbird in its mouth. "You can't even count to three."

"What are you talking about?" Jed grabs his sword again. Maybe he can get past her claws and get one good swipe in. The big bird lets out a horrible croaking noise that sounds like it's laughing.

"Simple. One riddle left, and you've both had your shot. I win by forfeit."

That's not fair, he wants to say. We didn't agree to that. But life isn't fair. Jed's too used to grown-ups changing the rules to really be surprised. Think. Can he just argue her back? She can be argued with. Did the Oracle say anything about this? Just that there would be three riddles, and - Follow the bird.

Raven. Has to be. They're supposed to be smart, right?

At least they can argue a little longer. Jed flings out a hand and points at the bird. "Ask him the third one," he says. The raven didn't show up with them but maybe the sphinx will ignore that. "He hasn't answered yet." Gault's breath is warm on his neck and Jed reaches back again and takes a handful of her fur. He might just have done something very stupid. What if it's just a bird? What if it flies away?"

"That thing? That's cheating." The sphinx sounds outraged. "Gods aren't supposed to - "

"She would hate it," the raven interrupts, "if you called her a god." His voice sounds sort of like someone who smoked so long they did their lungs in and sort of like someone scraping two pieces of wood together and a lot like he's just barely not laughing. It would be mocking laughter. It's deeper than crow noises. "I'm just being a nosy bastard. I have a right to be a nosy bastard. Ask me."

"I don't eat crow," the sphinx growls. "But I will rip your entrails out and leave you for them."

"No you won't. Ask."

"Fine. Third riddle."

Jed lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

"I go to Rome and China and Babylon, but first I must lay down and never move again. Who am I?"

The raven laughs again. It has to be a laugh. A crow of a laugh. "A road," he says. "There's a joke about that - "

But before he can tell the joke the sphinx screams in outrage, and pounces. She pounces right over him, scrambles up the rocks, and vanishes behind them. Her glasses sit abandoned on the rock.

Behind where she was sitting - although there's no way it could have been hidden there, the sphinx wasn't that big - is a gateway. Two big stone pillars with the fancy scrollwork at the top, a beam laid across them, and between them, laid out in smooth interlocking flags of ruddy sandstone, a road. They're standing on it. It goes right through the gate. It's almost too obvious.

"Thanks," Gault says. She sounds a little bit shaken. "Nice save there."

"Good thing the boss sent me to check up on you, hey?" The raven hops into the air, and he lands perched on the big upright lens of the sphinx's abandoned glasses. "Love the big cat look, by the way."

"I don't think I need it anymore," Gault answers. "Where does that thing lead to?"

"Only one way to find out, right?"

Against his will Jed finds himself grinning.

--

"Some kind of charter, maybe. Don't Cain and Abel have charters?" That just hit him. Bolt from the blue. Sometimes Mervyn surprises himself, the kind of bright ideas he gets.

Dream seems to consider it.

There's something funny about this new Dream that Mervyn can't really put a finger on. Oh, sure, some of it is just that she's not the old boss. He feels sorry for the kid. He's damn sure she didn't ask for the job. But she asked for his opinion. The old boss would never have done that.

"Cain and Abel," Dream says, "are a special case. But yes, I have made promises to them and recorded them formally. To them, personally, not to the realm as a whole. My duties to the realm as a whole are - an inalienable part of myself." She blinks. She sounds just like the old boss when she talks like that. Well, not exactly, she doesn't sound so damned gloomy and ominous, but Mervyn wonders sometimes just how gone is gone. Lucienne told him not to think about it too hard. Lucienne is standing there looking all perfectly prim and proper next to the boss. It's enough to make Mervyn want to throw chairs at people. Starting with the boss, who has her nice fancy chair at the top of the stairs but who's sitting down here on the steps anyway, pretty as you please.

Mervyn wishes he had a cigarette. "Yeah, and you know that and I know that and Loosh here knows that, but most of us working joes gotta take it on faith."

"And so you have," Dream says. "And I am honoured by your faith."

"Look, it's not like we're gonna go on strike. We got a job to do and we're in it for the long haul. Well. Most of us."

"The ones who came back," Lucienne says. Her face is perfectly blank.

It's not like he was deserting. This isn't the army, and just because Lucienne hung around while everything went to shit doesn't mean Mervyn is going to feel bad about having more sense than that. "Yeah. Exactly. You can trust us, this is all going to be cooperative, we're not gonna sit down and demand five percent cost-of-living increases and four weeks vacation. We don't even get dental, so what? We don't need dental. Except the Creature that Chatters, and Abudah's pretty good with a ball-peen hammer when it needs it."

Dream frowns. She's got a handful of robe bunched up in one hand and for some reason it makes Mervyn feel funny looking at it. "You don't get paid. It would be hard to give you five percent raises."

"I might point out," Lucienne interjects, "that the Dreaming does not, in fact, have a tax base from which to offer wages. We are all working pro bono publico."

"Yeah. Like I said. Not looking for a union contract." Not like they need to make rent. Mervyn lives in the castle and when he's busy he works round-the-clock and when he's not he hangs out in the kitchens and shoots the breeze. He used to have to pay for cigarettes. One thing he doesn't miss about the Waking.

There's one of those funny silences while they all turn it over in their heads. Mervyn stuffs his hands in his pockets. He had a good idea and now he just can't get the shape of it. No wonder, in here with all the glittery windows and the sky ceiling and Dream's big fancy chair. That she's not sitting on. Which Mervyn suddenly gets. She's trying to be nice. Do the whole man-of-the-people-first-amoung-equals shtick.

Hell. She's not used to being king yet. It doesn't come naturally to her.

And with that, the word he was looking for pops into Mervyn's head. "What we need," he says, "is a constitution."

"That hardly seems appropriate to a realm where peaceful transfer of power -"

"Happened six months ago?" Dream interrupts.

Lucienne gets even stiffer, if that's a thing. Does something with her shoulders, anyway. "My lady. You are the land. You cannot deal unjustly with yourself." There's something about the way she says it that makes Mervyn feel like he's walked in on a movie half an hour before the end credits. Lucienne and the old boss got like that all the time. He should have figured it'd be the same with the new boss.

The new boss straightens her shoulders, too, sits a little more upright. That bedsheet she's wearing is never going to be anything but a mess, but she shakes her hair back. The gemstones glitter. "I am the Dreaming, but I am not everyone who lives here. And my duties to them are an inalienable part of myself, but it wouldn't be a bad thing to write them down so we all understand, if that's what they want."

"Very well," Lucienne answers. "We can discuss it."

That was fast. Mervyn lets himself feel smug for a few seconds.

But only a few seconds, because that's not everything people want. And maybe they're not asking for a union contract but Mervyn knows what's up with all the working stiffs, which makes him the closest thing they got to a union rep. He fishes out his notebook. He's just glad Dream gave him a day's warning about the meeting. "So we agree on the big picture stuff. Good. Now let's talk about the little stuff. Personal stuff."

"Mervyn - " Lucienne looks like she's bitten a lemon, but she looks like that most of the time. "There are eleven thousand five hundred eighty-seven individual, independent inhabitants of this realm, not counting the skerries. L - Lady Dream can hardly be expected to cater to every one of their individual whims."

"Nah, nah, not like I talked to everybody. Just a couple dozen, and a lot of them said the same things." He flips through the notebook. finds the page at the end where he wrote down the ones that kept coming up, in a nice little list. "One, a lot of folks said they wished they could talk to each other more. Just hang out. Shoot the breeze. Trade some tips. Fiddler's Green may get everybody wanting to walk in the garden but Sahra's tired of not getting visitors, except, you know, for work. And the Gentleman Walrus got so bored he invited me in for a bit of slap and tickle - I said no, no hard feelings, I just don't go for blokes, and he said it was worth a try. Not that I'm not a hot piece of pie, but he mostly likes them with a bit of meat on their bones." Mervyn had gone in for a cuppa anyway, just because he felt sorry for the bloke, but that's beside the point. Or maybe it's exactly the point, because - "We're all doing our own thing. Hell, I only keep up on gossip because me and the lads have been doing so much patch work, ever since the vortex thing. We need a pub."

"A pub." If he didn't know better he'd say Dream thought it was funny, except Dream doesn't think anything is funny. "Not a grievance I was expecting."

"Or call it a community centre or a breakroom or something, just ... Somewhere us dreams can go and let our hair down, well, if we have hair, and bitch about work in peace. Maybe get someone who wants a career change to serve drinks. Ask that bird of yours, he'll tell you the humans are onto something with that Third Place business." Also Work-Life Balance, but save that for point two about holidays. That's gonna be a sticky one. "Where is Matthew, anyway? Woulda thought you'd want him for this little chat."

"On an errand elsewhere," Dream says, in a voice that sounds just like the old boss again and brooks no further questions.

--

Jed is breathing. Lyta is going to keep thinking about that and not about anything else. It has not yet been twenty-four hours since he went to sleep. The thick cloudcover makes it feel like night, but the sunlight is only just now starting to vanish. It's raining. She can tell by the way it runs down the window. She can't hear it on the roof. She can only hear the radiators complaining.

Daniel is asleep. Daniel is asleep in his crib in Lyta's room next door and this is completely normal and she put him down to nap herself after completely failing to eat dinner, and if he sleeps a lot that is because he's six months old and doesn't have anything to do with the strange man in black who took Hector away from her. Again. She doesn't have to worry.

Not about Daniel.

Jed's friend from school came by. Lyta thinks she managed to act perfectly normal. She doesn't want anyone to ask questions. They wouldn't be the right questions. They'd start with 'why didn't you call a doctor?' and she does not want to explain that she did not call a doctor because she was sure that what she needed was a wizard. She doesn't know any wizards. She doesn't think they advertise. Seven months ago she would have laughed at the idea that wizards existed. Six months ago Lyta gave birth to a baby she hadn't been pregnant with the week before and her best friend vanished overnight, and Lyta has spent six months trying not to think about trades.

She managed to act normal then, too. For the police and the distracted CPS agent she put on her nice-white-lady worried look and brought out her newborn for cooing and they were perfectly happy for her to keep looking after Jed while his grandmother's solicitors sorted things out, and for Jed she had been calm and reassuring and promised, as if she could guarantee it, that she wasn't going anywhere, and in her own locked room while Hal and Barbie bounced the baby and Jed kept an eye on them, she took deep breaths and didn't throw anything across the room. Not even a pillow.

There is a medicine cabinet in the bathroom. It has bandages and baby aspirin and calamine lotion and antiseptic wipes and antibiotic ointment and antihistamine tablets and a thermometer and tweezers and Pedialyte and petroleum jelly and nothing at all that will help someone wake up.

Jed has gone away somewhere. In dreams.

Lyta gets up and walks into the bathroom and opens the medicine cabinet and takes out the bottle of antihistamines. The back of the box says to take one tablet every day to relieve allergies. Lyta is not trying to relieve allergies. Lyta snaps four pills out of the foil packet into the palm of her hand. Lyta stares at the pills and wonders if that's enough. She doesn't feel tired at all.

"Don't be silly," Unity's voice comes from behind her.

Lyta doesn't move. The pills sit in her palm.

"You wouldn't even end up in the same place."

"I can try," Lyta says. Her voice sounds as if it's coming from very far away. "I can't go to sleep just by trying right now."

Unity's hand closes over hers. "Then don't. I'm not going to try. But you can't help him that way."

"How do you know?"

"I spent a long time dreaming," Unity says. She closes her hand on the antihistamine tablets. "I could travel the world just by deciding to step on a boat, and I could raise up glass palaces with a wave of my hand, but I could never make anyone come near me by wishing except my golden-eyed man."

Lyta takes a deep breath. Another. She feels numb. She feels like she could set herself on fire by twisting against her clothes, just a little. "I made a promise."

"Wait until morning." In the mirror Unity looks tired. She does not look like a woman of a hundred and sixteen, and that is another mystery, but there is something ancient and exhausted in her eyes. "If he's not back by then -"

"Then what?"

"I'm his grandmother," says Unity. "I'll take the risk myself. Daniel needs you."

--

They emerge from the gate into a misty rain, under a clouded sky glowing with reflected city light.

Jed's sneakers squelch on the flagstones. He looks around the mess of trees, he should probably know what kind of trees but he doesn't, and then looks back. Behind them is a wrought-iron gate set into a grey stone wall. There's a big sun-shaped decoration set into it, and a padlock and chain wrapped around the bars. The hinges are rusty.

It's raining, but Jed's anorak keeps the worst of it off him. Which is funny, because he was wearing boots and a cloak.

Gault hisses. She's gone back to her human-woman guise, hair frizzing in the damp and suitjacket already going dark with the damp. "Where are we?"

"Dunno." Jed shuffles his feet. He doesn't think they can go out the gate. The padlock looked shiny and new. And his arms ache, and his head hurts, and he can hear a noise like barking dogs and a noise like trucks on a highway half a mile away, and something is tugging at his hair -

Oh. It's the raven. The raven has landed on his head.

The raven says, in its voice that sounds at once like a croak and like an ordinary human voice, "In trouble, I figure."

"Please let go of my hair," Jed manages, through the mounting lump of terror in his throat.

"Wh - oh. Sorry, kid." The raven lets go, and a moment later it lands on Gault's shoulder instead. Gault's eyebrows furrow, but she doesn't complain. "Anyway, I figure we have to be getting close or the gate wouldn't have dumped us here. I'm not an expert on this stuff - kind of new on the job, honestly - but this is a capital-q Quest, right?"

"Yes." Gault hunches her shoulders and stuffs her hands in her pockets. It's such an ordinary human thing to do Jed almost bursts out laughing.

He can still feel the weight of his sword. They're still on their quest. He doesn't laugh.

"So this must be the right road. That's how it works, right? Fairy-tale rules. Let's keep walking."

Jed shrugs. "Okay. I'll go first," he says. He's still the one with the sword.

So they walk.

The gate vanishes behind a turn of the path. The trees grow thicker, and more covered in moss, and the branches above them grow thicker. The distant motor noise vanishes. Nobody speaks. Jed keeps his hand on his sword. Just in case.

The path isn't quite so damp, beneath the thick leaves. But it's darker, and so Jed is startled when he turns a corner and there's a building there.

It looks like a Greek temple, all white with pillars in the front. It looks half-ruined, roof crumbling, ivy up its sides. Folly, some part of his mind throws up. Built to look ruined. He doesn't know why he knows that.

And before he can think about it more than a few seconds, there's the baying of hounds again.

Jed hisses. Behind him he hears a noise like a raven taking off in a hurry. His sword is already half out his sheath when the dogs show up.

They're big. He doesn't know what kind of dog they are. Big dogs, with pointy ears and grey fur, and they're making doggy noises and showing their big teeth. Not actually lunging at Jed, though, which is good because he figures he could stick his sword through one of them but he doesn't know what he'd do next. He doesn't want to do that anyway. They're just dogs. They're just - defending something. Something important. In the temple. He can't just kill them.

He can hear their doggy noises. Gault and the raven breathing behind him. Someone's shoes on stone.

Wait.

Shoes?

"Jed? What are you doing here?" The voice is familiar. It's the voice of his friend Diana.

He doesn't know what to do. He stays still. The dogs don't come any closer.

"I thought you were sick," Diana says. He can see her, now, out of the corner of his eye. She's in a blue raincoat and her school shoes. "What are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here?" Where is here, he wants to ask, except it would sound incredibly stupid and he doesn't want to sound incredibly stupid in front of Diana. Gault and the raven are standing dead still. Waiting for his signal. He's the knight. He has to do something. Diana doesn't look like she's noticed the sword. Or maybe she doesn't care.

"I," she says, and tosses her hair, "am visiting my grandmother. It's okay, they're just big puppies really. They'll calm down if you give them a treat. Who're your friends?"

"I don't have a dog treat."

"I do." Diana pulls a handful of little bone-shaped biscuits from her coat pocket, and flings them across the clearing,

Friends, she said. Plural. She knows the raven is with him. Jed is so hosed.

The dogs run after the treats, snuffling into the grass, barking and barking. Diana is already hurrying into the temple. "Come on," she yells over her shoulder, and they hurry in. The temple door is an ordinary door like a house might have, with a window in the middle that's a stained-glass moon on a starry blue night. It slams shut behind them and Diana is standing with one hand on the doorknob, breathing as if she'd run a lot further than across a clearing.

The raven takes off, making a horrible noise. "You damn -"

"I am visiting my grandmother," Diana says. "You are all trespassing." She folds her arms and glares at them.

Jed realises a few things, then. The first is that there's too much light. Inside a building, in the night if not a very dark night, they should not see the inside of the temple by a silvery glow brighter than a full moon.

The second is that the inside of the temple is a lot larger than the temple was on the outside.

"I'm sorry, Jed," Gault whispers. She sounds strangled. "I shouldn't have brought you here."

Okay. Okay. He can do this. He's faced down a lot worse than somebody's grandmother. He takes a deep breath. "We're on a quest. The King of Dreams sent us."

Diana glares. "You're still trespassing."

"We'll go away if you give us the moonstone." Jed doesn't remember when he put his sword away, but he must have because his hands are empty. He holds them out. Peaceful. Reassuring. Not here to give anybody any trouble.

"So you're looters too?"

"That's a bit harsh, kid," says the raven. He's landed on the floor between them, and he keeps hopping in place like he wants to take off and he's only staying here because he'd feel bad about ditching them. "It sort of got stolen from Her Majesty in the first place. So we're just taking it home where it belongs. What does your grandmother want with a dreamstone anyway?"

The third thing Jed notices is that this isn't a dream.

It hasn't been a dream since they walked down the road the sphinx left behind. He should have noticed right away. The lights reflecting off the clouds are London lights. The cloudy weather is the same weather he was grumbling about, a day ago, a lifetime away, because he liked living in England mostly and Grandma Unity was amazing but the one nice thing about Florida was the sunny weather. There must be some stately home nearby with grounds and a folly built to look like a Greek temple and it's somewhere his friend Diana can get to on a bus after school. That's the real Diana glaring at them. And her grandmother is -

Her grandmother -

"It's alright, love," says Diana's grandmother. "I'll take it from here."

She can't be anyone else. She looks like she just stepped out of the moonlight, long grey braid pulled over her shoulder and eyes glowing. She's wearing a red watchcap and brown hoodie and muddy jeans. It doesn't make her look any realer. She doesn't look old enough to be anybody's grandmother, but Jed thinks that doesn't really matter.

Diana slumps against the door. "The lady's not real," she chokes out.

"I can tell." Her grandmother glides forward, and stops in front of Gault, tilting her head. "Which one are you, dear? Not the Librarian, she wouldn't lower herself to go hunting. Not the Corinthian, I can see your eyes ... "

"Gault." Her voice is tight. She looks like a tired woman who'll stand there all night if she has to.

"I don't think we've met."

"We haven't."

"Well, Gault, I've nothing against you. Go home now and I won't call the dogs -"

She breaks off then, because a raven's just crashed into her face.

Jed wasn't expecting it. He moves without thinking, anyway, and maybe that's why he's here. The flat of his sword slams into the lady's knees, and her hands are already upraised. She goes over like a tree. She kicks out sideways even as she's falling, and it hurts and Jed drops the sword but he's falling on top of her and the raven is going for her face and she grabs a wing and there's an awful noise on top of the other awful noises, and there's something that fell loose from her hoodie sparkling against her dishevelled braid, and Jed reaches out and pulls.

The necklace comes loose with a snap.

The raven is screaming. It doesn't sound anything like human.

Diana's grandmother is lying on the floor. She has the raven by its wing with two hands, still, and it's still flapping at her face, but the light has gone pale and shallow. "Give that back," she hisses.

It's an effort to roll away, but Jed makes it. He doesn't think anything is broken. "Or what? You'll call the dogs?"

She doesn't answer.

Jed tries to look at Gault but she isn't where she was before and he doesn't want to take his eyes off - the woman - long enough to look around properly.

"Please." It's Diana's voice. "Give it back."

Is this going to be one of those stories where the bad guys turn out to be right and the good guys have to help them? "Why?"

"She's my grandmother," Diana whispers. It echoes in the too-large temple hall, sneaks through the raven's weak protesting croaks. "I love her. And if you take it away she'll die."

"But I'll snap your friend's neck on the way out," Diana's grandmother hisses.

Oh. Okay. Not one of those kinds of stories.

He doesn't want anyone to die.

He can't -

"She will not die."

He does look up at that, because that isn't Gault's voice.

Where Gault was standing, there’s a woman wrapped in shimmering white robes, her hair studded with gemstones, like stars in a clear sky. Her skin is the dark brown that people call black; her eyes are the black of a moonless night. The light in the room, what's left of it, seems to bend toward her. Her face is not, exactly, like Jed's sister Rose. It is, exactly, like that of the woman he met at the palace gate. The woman he promised to help, however he could. He knows who she is. He knows exactly who she is. He knows, the same way he knows whether he is awake or asleep, the way he knew which way to step in the dark after he slew the giant, the way he knew the gate was safe.

"Hey, boss lady," the raven croaks. He sounds like he's barely stringing the words together. "Little help here? I'm kinda- "

The King of Dreams smiles, and raises her hand.

---

 

 

Chapter 4: In which Jed Walker goes home and the King of Dreams considers her future

 

The room that forms around them looks like a cathedral, or a throne room. Stained-glass windows gleam on each wall. Pillars reach up into the darkness. Their feet are set on rough granite. Jed is in his surcoat again. He lets out a breath and opens his fingers, just enough to look at the thing he grabbed.

A moonstone, in a plain silver setting. About the size of an Oreo cookie. He doesn't know what he expected.

The King of Dreams has, somehow, snatched up the raven into her arms. He's nestled there, making tiny pained noises like someone trying not to scream. Gault is behind her, a glittering winged shape again. Diana's grandmother is pushing herself up on her elbows. Diana is nowhere to be seen.

She lifts up the raven and presses a kiss to his feathers, right at the joint where one wing is spread out against her body. The raven falls silent.

"Bendis," says the King of Dreams, and her voice falls like rocks vanishing into the deep ocean. "You have stolen a treasure that was mine by right and injured my retainer. Can you give me any reason not to unmake you?"

"You did not make me, Dream-king. I am a goddess, and I still have my divine rights." Bendis, her name is Bendis, is levering herself upright. In her muddy jeans she looks terribly out of place.

The other thing she looks, Jed realizes, is translucent. As if she's holding onto existence by sheer spite.

The Dream-king says nothing.

"I still have a priestess," Bendis says. "I still have a temple."

"You have an echo," says the King of Dreams. "Without your theft you would be a name in dusty histories and nothing more, Thracian." Thracian? Is that her name too? "Do you think I would need to violate the old laws to silence that echo?"

Bendis is on her feet now. She clenches her fists. "You would be that petty, when your knight has already stolen my life?"

For a moment Jed wonders if he should throw her the stone, the wild look on her face is so hard to look at.

Dream still says nothing.

"It's hard," Bendis tells them. "There was Artemis, and Cybele, and I could hardly look out of their shadows. And then there was just Artemis, and I lived on her dog-meat scraps. They raced horses in my name in Athens, once. They celebrated the whole night through. And then I could hardly remember who I was. If I had not found the dreamstone I would have been nothing at all. You cannot begrudge me my existence, Lady. You cannot say I should have done otherwise."

Gault's wings are fluttering, casting faint sparkles across the stone floor. "Her argument is not beyond reason, my lady," she says.

Damn it. This is going to be one of those stories where the hero has to protect the defeated villain.

Jed holds up the moonstone, and takes a deep breath. "You got it back," he says, and tosses it at Dream. A soft toss, underhand, so she can catch it without jostling the raven she still holds in one arm. She does, and its light vanishes in her clenched fist. "It's done. I don't think you should kill Bendis. It's wrong to kill. And it'd make her granddaughter sad. I know her. Her name's Diana and she keeps trying to give me chocolate and she likes isekai novels and she loves Bendis, and she'd hate me forever if I let her grandma die."

The King of Dreams presses her hand to her face. There's a noise like a distant, badly tuned bell.

It occurs to Jed that she's laughing.

"You all leap to her defense," she says.

The raven squawks, and slaps at her shoulder with the one wing he has that's not sitting at a funny angle. "I'm not leaping anywhere! I say throw the book at her!"

"I cannot. Her first point was enough. Bendis I did not make and may not unmake. But I will keep what is mine. She must live by her own strength, or die by her own failure. And if it is the latter, I will welcome her here on her way home. Until then - go back to your priestess. Consider our business done."

The Dream-king raises her hand, and suddenly Bendis isn't there anymore. No motion, no twinkly lights, just an empty patch of flagstone. Jed feels himself slump with sudden relief.

"Jed," she goes on. The echoes are gone from her voice. "Thank you. You did well."

What is he supposed to say to that? You're welcome seems absurd. He was keeping his promise, and he was going on an adventure, and - Jed presses his hand to his sword. He can't see it, but he knows there's an hourglass on the hilt and a ruby embedded in the pommel. He's a knight, and he's standing before his lady and his king.

"I'm honored to have been of service," he says. Maybe it's too fancy, but it feels right. "I can do it again if you need me to."

She smiles. The jewels in her hair sparkle with it. "Is there any boon you would ask, in return for your service?"

Jed shuffles his feet and feels very stupid and blurts out, "Can I see Gault again?"

It makes Gault flutter in surprise again, but she doesn't say anything. Maybe she's afraid. Maybe Jed should be afraid, but even if he's staring at the King of Nightmares he thinks it's going to be alright.

The king smiles again. "As often as you and she wish it," she says. "I would not keep friends apart without reason. That is no boon. Ask again."

All Jed can think of to say is, "I didn't do it to get a favor."

The King of Dreams looks at him for a long moment with dark, glittering eyes. Against her breast the raven is still, wings half-spread. The moonstone necklace still dangles from her hand; it feels like the center of the room, pulling all the light to itself and reflecting it back soft and silver. Jed wonders what a dreamstone does, and what she's going to do with this one.

"Then know that you have my gratitude, and that is no small thing," she says. "We'll speak later. For now - go home. Your grandmother is worried."

And he's already waking up.

--

Unity does not look like a woman of a hundred and sixteen, and her bones are not worn with a hundred and sixteen years of use, but she is not young. She had Lyta bring the armchair from her bedroom to Jed's. Sometime not long after midnight she dozed off in it.

Lyta, cross-legged on the rug, still can't sleep.

A month ago she would be fetching Daniel's middle-of-the-night bottle at this hour, but he sleeps through the night now. He sleeps like a rock. He doesn't fuss. Lyta wonders if she will ever again look at her son lying still with his eyes closed without a twinge of fear. Jed's been lying still all day, not so much as a twitch.

Jed twitches.

Lyta's breath catches. She does not move. She does not dare.

He takes a deep breath, and his eyes flicker open. Lyta jerks upright. She can't help it. "Jed?"

"Yeah." He still sounds half-asleep. "What time is it?"

"One in the morning. You've been asleep all day. We thought -"

She can't make herself say it. But it must show in her face, because Jed sounds stricken when he answers, "Sorry. I didn't -" He breaks off, and rolls all the way onto his side, and reaches out one hand, a silent plea for truce. "I didn't mean to make you worry. I had the strangest dream."

Lyta takes his hand, and then she pulls herself close and wraps her arm around his shoulder, because right now she needs, really needs, to hear him breathing and feel him squeezing her hand and know, really know, that he's there. He pats her awkwardly on the back. Lyta tries to take a deep breath, and fails to think of anything useful to say.

"Jed?" comes Unity's breathy voice, still half-asleep.

"Grandma!" He probably wants to hug her too, it occurs to Lyta, and she makes herself let go. Sure enough, Jed's scrambling out of bed, and he flings himself into the armchair like. Well. Like a kid who's just had a bad time and needs his grandma. Unity makes reassuring noises.

The moonlight looks very bright, now the clouds are retreating. Lyta can almost make out the leaves on the oak tree outside. She wrestles down a sudden paranoid urge to close the curtains.

"Now," Unity says, and sits back, her hands on Jed's shoulders, so they can look each other in the eye. "Do you want to tell us about the dream? Maybe after we've all gone downstairs and had some cocoa. I think this calls for cocoa."

This throws Jed off. It's obvious, from the way he looks over at Lyta and then down at the rug and bites his lip. "It was just a dream," he whispers.

"So was your grandfather," Unity ruthlessly informs him. "So was Daniel. If you don't want to talk about it yet, we can just have cocoa, but I think Lyta and I could be relied upon to believe you."

They can. They will.

After all, if there's any more supernatural bullshit about to land on her family, Lyta wants to see it coming. That way she'll know which way to swing the bat.

--

Diana's house is dead quiet. Not even the refrigerator is running. Not even the noise of the road is coming through, and that's how Diana knows she is dreaming. She rises from her bed, drifts downstairs, steps barefoot out the back door into what should be a little patch of garden and looks up at the leaves of a forest that has grown undisturbed since before her grandmother's priests first raised a temple in Thrace.

The moon is shining, brighter than the waking world allows. She won't stumble. Six years ago, Diana found her way through an unlocked gate and into the abandoned folly Bendis had claimed for her own. And Bendis had claimed Diana for her own, for the irony of the name or because she thought Diana's sensitivity would make her useful or just from pity for a lonely child, and said, Call me Grandmother. And here she is again, wandering through the forest. Not lost. She doesn't get lost.

"Are you there?" she calls out. This seems like the sort of place Grandmother Bendis would be.

The moonlight answers, I'm always here for you, love.

"Are you okay? I didn't know what to do, you just vanished," and she's not going to cry, she's not. "If that woman hurt you I'll - "

What will she do? What could she do, without Bendis to give her strength?

The moonlight answers, She didn't kill me. She took something I loved that she has no use for, but I still live. I do have one priestess left. (Diana gets the impression of a smile.)

Priestess. Is that what Diana is? She's not really qualified for it. She'd met Bendis and then she'd had to look her up in the encyclopedia. She's never made sacrifices or said prayers. Just shown up at the folly to talk, and sometimes talked about things that made her ears ring. Unusual sensitivity, Bendis had called it. Maybe - maybe she could start. Hunt sacrifices for her - goddess. She has a goddess.

She knew that, of course. She'd just never really thought about it.

"I'll help you," Diana whispers. "If you need anything, I'll do it for you. Anything. I swear it."

The moonlight sings, You are helping me already. I can stay safe in your mind, and rest. Until we know what to do.

The trees are so tall and dark, they shade out the undergrowth. The ground is clear. Diana curls her paws into the dirt and scents the air. She wonders what the moonstone was, and why the strange woman wanted it back so badly. She wonders if she could find it again. Or anything like it. There's magic all over. All Diana has to do is listen hard enough.

The moonlight says, Once I was worshipped by torchlight. Once my people danced and sang my hymns all the night through. I don't ask for that back. I'll never have it again.

"I can find you other things worth having. And I can sing." Diana lets her ears twitch and her tail lash, without quite deciding on the motions.

Keep me, then, my only priestess. There are secrets in this world worth knowing.

Tomorrow she'll find Jed, Diana thinks, and make him tell the truth. After that - maybe she'll go hunting. "It's alright," she says, as if she could know that. "We're going to be alright."

--

The lady Dream is walking through Fiddler's Green. It is a perfect day; it always is, here. Sunlight dapples the moss beneath broad-leaved trees of no species any botanist could identify, and a gentle breeze carries a smell that might be a distant sea. Dream pauses, now and then, to brush her fingers against a leaf.

Fiddler's Green watches her in silence as she walks. If she asks for his company, he will appear in his human form. Until, or unless, she does, he will watch.

She comes, eventually, to a meadow, soft clover dotted with bright-coloured wildflowers. She stops there, and watches a butterfly making its way from flower to flower. It's a small white creature that looks like a drifting petal itself, the kind called a cabbage butterfly. It drifts toward her, and she holds out her hand. For a second the butterfly brushes against her fingertips, then flits away again.

"Gilbert," she says aloud. "I would speak to you."

He lets himself dissolve into view, hands tight on his walking stick. "Of course, my lady." He could go on, ask what she thinks of the clouds - there are a few he's quite pleased with - or mention the books of poetry Lucienne has been bringing him, most recently by a youth in Melbourne bold enough to commit them to paper but not alas to share, but her voice is solemn and Fiddler's Green thinks Dream has perhaps, despite her meanderings, come here with vital purpose.

And indeed, her next words are: "If I asked you to keep a secret, would you have a safe place to hide it?"

He has several. Beneath a stone at the bottom of a deep pool, within the twisted roots of an ancient yew tree, in the spray of a waterfall through a door that opens only by the light of the full moon. "Of course. My lady - what do you need to hide?"

"This," she says, and suddenly the moon is in her outstretched hand.

Or rather, Gilbert realises, a moonstone. Its silver setting glitters, even by day. It is, unmistakeably, a thing of power. His breath catches. "Surely it would be safer in the palace," he says. "Or with you. Lord Morpheus kept his ruby close at hand."

"Until he realised how easily a tool could turn into a trap." The stubborn look that flickers across her face is so much like Rose Walker that Gilbert almost winces at it. "No. I'm going to do this the hard way. But that doesn't mean I'm going to throw the dreamstones away, and I'm not going to stick them on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity for some enterprising hero to steal again. I will leave them in the keeping of someone I can trust. I trust you, Gilbert. Will you look after this for me?"

"Of course," he answers, because what else can he say? "I doubt my trusty swordstick would avail much against some enterprising hero, but I doubt any of them would think to look here." And then, because curiosity is hardly Gilbert's fatal flaw but it is a trait he possesses in notable measure, "Stolen again?"

The question hangs there, a smear of ugliness across the perfect meadow. Gilbert wonders if he should not have asked it.

But then Dream turns her hand over and drops the moonstone. It lands in the clover before Gilbert can think to grab it with his human hand, and already is half-hidden by the overlapping green. "It was stolen from the one it was lent to, perhaps unwisely, so I sent a knight on a quest to bring it back. Jed Walker. He proved a worthy knight."

It is a name that Gilbert knows well. He aided Rose Walker in her search for her missing brother. He was there when Dream spoke to the boy, the night of her predecessor's funeral.

With a certain amount of care,leaning on his stick more than is strictly required, Gilbert kneels to retrieve the moonstone. It feels cool to the touch. It's a little smaller than a pocketwatch, and he contemplates wearing it as one for a moment before he decides showing even the chain, even here in his own domain, would be foolish, and slips it into his shirt-pocket instead, beneath his vest. Next to his heart, inasmuch as this shape has one. Gilbert did not bother much with such invisible details in the waking world. He was a heart, Lord Morpheus had told him, the heart of the Dreaming, and he meant it in a metaphorical sense. Something central, and valuable, and vital. Fiddler's Green had known it for an honour.

The heart Gilbert had watched Lord Morpheus pull from his own chest to hand to Rose Walker had been, alas, significantly less metaphorical.

He gets up slowly, still leaning on his stick. Dream is watching him, face somewhere between impassive and sad, unmoving except for the soft fluttering of her robes in the breeze,

"Will Jed be coming back?" Gilbert asks.

"If he wishes it. I gave him the freedom of the realm, And I may call for his aid again; the moonstone is not the only treasure I have lost." Her smile is small and cold. "Jed offers me more than he owes. But I cannot turn away such loyalty."

"He loves you, my lady," Gilbert points out.

He does not ask if she misses him. If she regrets no longer having a younger brother. Dream of the Endless, after all, has a younger brother, and to mention that brother would only be to reopen an old wound. As to how much of Rose Walker is still present in Dream, well.

Gilbert suspects there is more than Dream would admit to, but he will not open that wound either.

What he will do, while Dream stands still as a statue on a gravestone in the midst of the delightful warmth of Fiddler's Green, is offer another truth. "My lady, he is not the only one who loves you." Slowly, giving her time to turn him away, he wraps his arms around his king.

They are very nearly the same height. It is easy for her to lay her head on his shoulder. "I know."

--