Fearsome Dreamer

by Laure Eve

  They stepped out of the coach.

  ‘Some of the students might still be awake, even though they shouldn’t be,’ said Frith, opening the door of the building in front of them and ushering White inside. ‘So let’s go and say hello. Nervous?’

  ‘No,’ said White. His heart squeezed.

  In truth, he hadn’t been at all sure what to expect. How old were the other students, here? Maybe they were more advanced than him. Knowing and mature, giving him an imperious glance before dismissing him as a child.

  Or maybe they would be embarrassingly younger than him, all noise and rabble, and he sticking out above their heads like an idiot.

  They were quite a mix, as it turned out.

  There were several of them still awake and lolling by a huge hearth in what looked to White like the social room of the house. Their faces turned towards him as he heard Frith say, ‘Good evening. I’ve brought you a present.’

  Some looked as young as twelve. Others close to adulthood. They were silent.

  ‘He’s a new student, and his name is White.’ Frith paused. ‘Just White.’

  He could actually feel the entire room’s humming interest go up a notch.

  ‘As you may be able to tell, he’s not Angle Tarain, but I’m sure you’ll treat him the same way as you do each other. He’ll start tomorrow with you.’ Frith smiled at them all. ‘Be nice.’

  One or two of them grinned, brazen. The rest didn’t take their eyes off him.

  Please, don’t leave me here.

  ‘We should get you a room,’ he heard Frith say, and thanked him silently. ‘Let’s go.’

  White tried not to look grateful that he was fleeing. He felt stares tickling at his back.

  It had been that way since; the staring and the whispering. The other students all seemed to find White utterly fascin-ating. None of them would talk to him; they looked away if he challenged their gazes. He hadn’t yet said a word in class. He didn’t want to seem frightened, but neither did he consciously want to give them another reason to stare once they heard his accent and strange way of speaking.

  He hadn’t seen Frith again, though the evening after his arrival he’d walked into his bedroom to discover a package of clothes in his size. Cream shirts with oversized cuffs, waistcoats with matching indoor jackets that reached his knees, and a pair of softened leather boots.

  There was also a stiff purse containing coins sitting on the bed, together with a brief note from Frith explaining that he should go into the town and buy whatever he wanted, and that he would get a small amount of money at regular intervals.

  But White hadn’t yet dared to venture beyond campus. He would, he promised himself. It wasn’t cowardice. He’d slept on those streets, hadn’t he? It was just absurd to be afraid of going back to them, now he was safe and warm and fed.

  In World, he at least had been able to go home after a day of school and escape from his peers’ babble, and mock fights, and laughter. Here, when they finished training for the day, he went back to Red House with them all; back to the squat, dusky building where the Talented students lived together on campus. He ate with them. Studied with them. Endured their whisperings. Locked himself in his small bedroom when it became too much.

  Which, frankly, had so far been most of the time.

  ‘There are all sorts of interesting rumours flying around about you,’ said Wren, through mouthfuls of egg.

  White tried to clamp down on a sudden flare of nervousness.

  ‘Such as?’ he said, pushing his food around on his plate.

  ‘Oh, that you’ve had to run away from your country because your government wanted to kill you. That you fought off a dozen guards when they tried to arrest you, blasted them with your mind. That kind of crap.’

  Well, actually, White wanted to say. That’s not too far from the truth, in fact.

  ‘That is stupid,’ he said instead, with an effort.

  ‘Yeah, I know. But I’ve heard that you’re very Talented. Maybe even the most Talented they’ve found. Do you think that’s true?’

  White stared at the tabletop, irritated. What kind of a question was that?

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Oh stop it, Wren,’ said someone else. White looked up. A girl had sauntered up to their table and was in the middle of sliding into place next to Wren, who put his hand out and gently lifted her long hair back over her shoulder, so that it wouldn’t spill in her food.

  She glanced shyly at White, her eyes barely touching his before blinking away.

  ‘I’m Areline,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you don’t remember all our names yet.’

  White hadn’t remembered her name, but it was extremely hard to forget a girl as lovely-looking as her. No wonder everyone perpetually tossed envious glances Wren’s way.

  ‘How are you finding it so far?’ she said.

  White shrugged.

  ‘Well … weird, of course. It was weird for us when we first got here, too. Being trained in something we don’t even know how to describe. I don’t even know what the Talent is, really.’

  ‘But I think you do, right?’ said Wren, watching White. ‘I think you know a lot about it.’

  He can see it on me, too, White realised. He can see it like I can.

  White felt his curiosity grow.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got a free hour after breakfast, before our first lesson,’ said Wren. ‘Why don’t you show us what you can do?’

  ‘Wren, leave him alone.’

  ‘What?’ he protested. ‘For fun, that’s all! He’ll have to show everyone in our next Talent class, anyway. Mussyer Tigh said so yesterday.’

  White took a gulp of his coffee. He knew this game. Normally he would ignore someone like that until they took the hint and left him alone, but this was Wren. Frith’s favourite.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, standing up.

  They stood in Red House’s communal study.

  Areline had draped herself over a couch, and pretended to be reading. White thought he could feel her eyes on the back of him.

  ‘So,’ said Wren. ‘Can you Jump?’

  Areline tutted.

  ‘Of course,’ said White, starting to enjoy the game. The circling. ‘You cannot?’

  Wren laughed. ‘Well, not everyone can. Not yet.’

  ‘No one can,’ said Areline. ‘Apart from Wren.’

  Is that a challenge?

  White folded his arms.

  ‘Let’s start with something easy,’ said Wren. ‘You can hook, right?’

  ‘Hook?’

  ‘You might call it something different, where you’re from. It’s when you send your mind out into the black, to find a place to go. But you anchor part of yourself here, so you don’t get lost.’

  White understood immediately. He had never heard someone else talk about it before; it gave him a surprising shiver of pleasure. Someone who knew what it was like to have Talent like that. Someone who would understand him, and know him.

  Wren took his hand. White pulled it away in surprise.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Wren with a laugh. ‘I need to touch you, that’s all. So we can do it together.’

  ‘Do … what?’

  ‘Hook,’ said Wren, glancing at Areline with a roll of his eyes. She had given up pretending to read and was watching them both avidly.

  ‘I have never … done that with anyone else before.’

  ‘No?’ said Wren. ‘Can’t pretend I’m not relieved. I’ll lead. Close your eyes.’

  White hesitated. People closed their eyes when they did this? Maybe he had been doing it wrong. Maybe he was about to find out, right now, that he didn’t know a thing about the Talent after all. That Frith had been mistaken about him.

  Wren had his eyes closed.

  White did the same.

  After a moment, he felt something brushing insistently against him. Not his body. His mind. It was a strange sensation. A warm feather stroking gently on his brain.

>   It was Wren.

  They were in the blackness. The nothing that existed between places. The dark that you had to cross whenever you Jumped. White had only ever been there for microseconds. He had never paused in it, too afraid to linger. Afraid that somehow, if he stayed there, he would get lost and confused, and never find his way back.

  Yet here he was, standing in it with Wren.

  It was like a dream. He could feel Wren next to him, but wouldn’t afterwards be able to say if he’d actually seen him or heard him when he spoke.

  Wren tugged at him, trying to get him to follow; but he suddenly had a better idea. He clutched tight to Wren and pulled him his way. Wren resisted for a moment; then let himself be moved.

  The blackness was sucked backwards, stripped roughly away by light and air and the smell of living things.

  They moved through it and stepped out into the real.

  ‘Er … this isn’t where I wanted us to go,’ said Wren, looking around with puzzled eyes.

  ‘It is my bedroom.’

  ‘Which bedroom?’

  ‘In Red House. Mine. Upstairs.’

  Wren turned and stared at him, until he started to feel uncomfortable.

  ‘You’re trying to tell me you Jumped us a few feet?’

  White shifted, embarrassed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Is that … unusual?’

  ‘Gods, it’s impossible! At least, I thought it was.’

  White folded his arms defensively. Now he felt like an idiot for trying to prove himself. He had gone too far. The expression on Wren’s face was too close to the ones he remembered from childhood.

  ‘Do it again,’ said Wren suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come on. Jump us back to the study. I want to see it properly this time.’

  Wren held his hand out.

  After a moment, White took it, and pulled him back.

  They came out into the study, inches from the spot they had, moments before, been standing in together. Areline clapped her hands, her eyes shining in delight.

  ‘I think I’m going to like this one,’ said Wren to Areline, putting his arm around White’s shoulders. ‘You won’t believe what he just did.’

  White felt a pang of happiness deep in his belly.

  He would be all right here.

  CHAPTER 10

  ANGLE TAR

  Rue

  The sun shimmered and winked at her as she walked through the village. It bounced off a piece of glass in the dust and tickled her eyes. Or maybe it was a glass fairy, trying to catch her attention.

  She let that fancy unwind for a moment more, before letting it go reluctantly.

  All fantasy had to end sometime.

  It hadn’t been so in her childhood. She’d grown up on a farm, where hard graft and good food was supposed to give you all the satisfaction you needed. They hadn’t cared much for the child Rue’s insistence on chasing sprites through the long grass, or coming back from the stream and swearing she’d seen tiny freshwater mermaids, or her tendency to sit still and go blank for hours at a time while she was supposed to be sweeping out the kitchen.

  A city family might have worried about her mental state and sent her to doctors under a cloud of shushing secretive privacy. The farmer had neither time nor money enough to care about that sort of thing, so learned to let her alone about it, then shout at her when she hadn’t done her chores.

  It didn’t make any difference.

  The gods knew she didn’t like to get into trouble. Just if the alternative was never dreaming and so never getting shouted at, she’d take the dream and the consequences every time. She knew that it wasn’t quite daydreaming, what she did. It felt too thick and cloying for that.

  When she was older, she stopped seeing mermaids, and sprites, and tree boggarts. But she still had the memories of them. She knew that either they’d been real, and she just couldn’t see them any more, or that she’d made them real for herself, and then forgotten the trick of it. That loss of magic pained her deeply, more than she could allow herself to think about.

  They first started talking about witch’s touch when she was twelve.

  It began as a silly thing. One of the farmhands had liked to tease her. He was brown and muscled and she hated him with all her heart, because when he teased others joined in, and their laughter was as humiliating as the time when she’d been slapped around the legs as a child for being back home three hours late from crab-picking at the rock pools.

  ‘You had me worried to DEATH!’ screamed the farmer’s wife as she’d done it.

  Every time that stupid boy made a joke at her expense, that slapping flashed like a burn on her mind, and she felt herself grow hot. So she said what she said out of nothing more than pure wrath.

  ‘It don’t matter anyway,’ she had said. ‘It don’t matter a bit what you ever say to me, cos tomorrow you’ll be pra’tically dead.’

  ‘Oooh,’ the boy whistled. ‘You heard that, din’t you all? You heard, she’s going to kill me. Best be on alert, then!’

  General laughter. Rue wanted to scream.

  ‘I didn’t SAY that,’ she shouted. ‘I said you’d be pra’tically dead, not that I’d kill you. Why should I lift a finger when you’re gonna be all lumpy and bloated like a rotted old fish? And serve you right!’

  The laughter swelled, and she’d got up, meaning to storm out the room in a graceful, icy sweep. But her feet had got tangled in the forest of chair legs, and she’d stumbled to a crowd of hooting, and the whole thing was a mess.

  Of course, the next day, when the boy was bitten by a snake while collecting hay and swelled up like a balloon from the poison, things took a bit of a different turn.

  She couldn’t say exactly how or why she’d said what she’d said, you see. She just felt that it sounded right when it fell out of her mouth. She had the image right there, as if she’d dreamed about it not long ago and still had a ghost of it in the back of her head.

  And it couldn’t exactly have been her fault. Only fate had taken the boy to that particular field at that part of the day when he could have been any number of other places, with Rue in the house with the women all day and nowhere near him. Fate had made him step on the snake’s hidden tail, a tail placed just so in order to cause everything that followed.

  Things changed after that.

  People treated her funny, and kids pointed and wouldn’t talk to her any more, and sometimes the farmer’s wife would come home after selling cheese and meat out at the town, sigh loudly, and complain that two people had come up to her and asked if Rue could tell their futures for them.

  She couldn’t, she didn’t think. It wasn’t like she normally walked around looking at people and just knowing what they’d be doing the next day. It had just happened that once, and she had no idea how to do it again.

  It wasn’t too long before they heard a hedgewitch was looking for an apprentice. She hadn’t been at all sure about going for something like that, but what she did very firmly know was that farm work wasn’t for her. It was hard to tell who was the more relieved when Fernie chose her – the farm or Rue.

  She looked up to find that she’d reached the oak meadow at the back of the village. As she came down the last of the cobbleway, she saw a few figures crowded around Old Stumpy in the middle of the grass.

  Old Stumpy was a famous meeting place for the young of the village. Struck by lightning not three seasons before in a particularly tempestuous autumn, it had been discovered in the aftermath, lying across most of the meadow like a corpse in a tangle of enormous, broken limbs. It had taken most of the day to clear the meadow and chop the rest of the tree down to its present three-foot-high trunk. No one lived close enough to have heard its death above the more general noise of the storm that had caused it – everyone with sense had barricaded themselves in for the night and sealed every nook and cranny of every door and window as best they could against the fury outside. It had been a mainstay of the oak meadow since before Che
ster, the eldest inhabitant of the village, could recall, and he reckoned it was about seven or eight hundred years old when he’d been a child. Back in its more magnificent days, it had been known by the nobler name of Baron. In its death it had been changed to the wildly witty Old Stumpy, and though it now existed in reduced circumstances, it still served the same important purpose in keeping the village alive, namely by facilitating the meeting, romancing and procreating of its inhabitants.

  Rue stopped short. The unmistakeable outline of Pake was amongst the small knot of people there. She felt a blush creep up her neck. It wouldn’t do to go near enough so he could shout something at her, and have them all join in like a pack of barking dogs. She’d rejected him in front of his friends. Rue knew enough about men to know that they took that kind of thing badly.

  And she cared enough about appearances to hesitate, and more than she would admit, for she liked to put on an air of careless apathy around people of her own age. It had earned her a reputation for arrogance, which she professed to enjoy. It had also made her lonely, without really realising it.

  She struck out a path towards the edge of the wood – far enough away from his group for them not to bother with her; close enough so that she didn’t look scared of them.

  She heard their voices tail away as she got halfway through the meadow.

  I’m not going to look at you.

  She felt her shoulders hunch under their stares, and flattened them down.

  A few seconds and she’d be clear.

  I’m not looking.

  And there was the tree line, and there was safety. She slowed, relaxing.

  Then she heard a voice behind her, clear on the air, say, ‘She ain’t very pretty, is she?’

  She passed into shadow, her feet crunching on dry nut husks, and the trees crowded around, solid in their comfort.

  It had stung. It had. But it didn’t matter. None of them mattered. She kicked a pine cone out of the way with a vicious little flick of her foot, and immediately felt like a petulant child.

  She was an outsider here, her home having been another village a way down the coast. Some said Fernie had had a whole county’s worth of girls to choose from when she went looking for an apprentice. And Rue knew what being an outsider meant in places like this. It was almost three years since she’d first arrived, but it still wasn’t enough to integrate her with anyone her own age here. She hadn’t been to the village school; she hadn’t grown up with them. And she was apprentice to the hedgewitch.