by Kit Alloway
“You brought those charges against her,” Speggra replied, “back when this council really was a fascist junta. I want a vote. All in favor of vacating the previous conviction against Amyrischka Rousellario, rise.”
Five judges rose from their seats while Peregrine scampered to sit back down in his.
I can’t believe this, Mirren thought.
“Then that’s that,” Speggra said. He settled back into his throne; despite its size, the wood still creaked beneath him. “Ithay, tell them what we decided yesterday, when Peregrine conveniently failed to mention he was going to pull this stunt.”
Mirren had forgotten how much Speggra hated “malarkey.”
Minister Ithay rose.
“To clarify,” he said, “no one is doubting Miss Rousellario’s identity. However, because she has no experience in our current form of government and has been raised in hiding, outside the bosom of the dream-walker community, she will be required to pass Agastoff’s Trials before her proposal will be accepted.”
Agastoff’s Trials, Mirren repeated in her mind. I should have thought of that.
Agastoff’s Trials had been created to prove the worthiness of rulers who were either not of royal blood or only distantly related to royalty.
“For those of you who haven’t read your dream-walker history, there are three trials. The first is the Learning, an exhaustive interview intended to test the knowledge of the applicant regarding our history, laws, culture, and traditions. The second is the Tempering. However, because no one has ever seen Miss Rousellario dream walking, we will instead ask her to prove her ability to dream walk by resolving three nightmares that the junta will select for her. The third is the Proving, a terrible task that will test the applicant’s cleverness and loyalty. Miss Rousellario, do you accept Agastoff’s Trials as a means for determining your worthiness?”
What could she say? Historically, she had little room for argument. Agastoff’s Trials had been the accepted course for more than a thousand years. She could have argued over the modifications, but she wasn’t certain she’d win.
Davita met her eyes from the crowd and shook her head.
Mirren knew that Davita would tell her to go on the defensive and demand to know what evidence they had that she wasn’t loyal, well trained, and well educated. But Davita’s main goal was to protect Mirren, even more than to see her succeed. She’d proven that an hour ago when she’d given Mirren the envelope from home. And what Mirren realized was that enough of this audience was against her that she needed to win their affection. If they needed to see her triumph over impossible odds, she’d show them that.
Or die a martyr trying.
“I agree,” Mirren said.
Through a Veil Darkly
Interview with Princess Mirren
Princess Mirren was presented to the junta yesterday, amid gasps of surprise and the awed faces of those in attendance. She demonstrated phenomenal poise as Peregrine Borgenicht hammered at her and tried to reinstate her original sentence of beheading. (Good for Minister Speggra for calling Borgenicht out on attempting to use the legal systems to enact personal vendettas.) When the junta demanded that she pass Agastoff’s Trials, not only did she know what those are, she agreed without complaint. No one else running in the AC is being forced to pass weird trials. When is the last time Peregrine Borgenicht even went into the Dream?
Today, she took a break from preparing for her trials to chat with me. Click here to listen to the audio of this interview, or read the transcript below.
Me: So, Princess Mirren, how are your preparations going?
Mirren: Really well. I’m excited.
Me: You have the Learning in just a couple of days. Are you ready for it?
Mirren: Absolutely. The Learning is the trial I feel most confident in, actually. My aunt and uncle were a little obsessive about my education, so I’ve spent a lot of time studying.
Me: How do you feel about the other two trials?
Mirren: I have to admit I’m nervous about those, because I don’t know what to expect.
Me: The dream-walking trial seems pretty straightforward, but what about this Proving? What sort of terrible task do you think the junta is likely to assign you?
Mirren: I haven’t the slightest idea. Historically, it could be anything. A lot of people think that Agastoff included the Proving in his trials as a way to veto truly unsuitable candidates. The basic idea is to test the candidate in whatever arena he—or she—is weakest.
Me: What are some previous Provings?
Mirren: Well, they’ve run the gamut from riddles to feats of strength. One man was asked to bring the head of his newborn daughter in a box.
Me: Ew!
Mirren: Luckily, he was a very clever man. He cut a hole in the bottom of the box and stuck his daughter’s head through it. He actually ruled for some years.
Me: Is it true that legendary dream-walker wunderkind Josh Weaver has agreed to help you prepare for your dream-walking trial?
Mirren: Yes, and I’m deeply grateful. She’s an amazing teacher. I’m learning a lot from Will Kansas, too.
Me: Has Josh made you do that Romanian circuit-training video?
Mirren: No.…
Me: Good. Don’t let her, or you might never walk again. Well, that’s all I have right now, Princess. We’ll be rooting for you. Good luck at the Learning.
Mirren: Thanks, Whim.
Comments:
jlouston says: She forgot to tell him not to call her princess.
BParKw2 says: That’s because she secretly loves it.
Mari_Onette says: She told everyone not to call her princess when she was presented to the junta. She shouldn’t have to remind each individual person.
sWord says: Rock on, Princess!
Byzantine_m993 says: In 1492, Agastoff’s Proving for Paijenno Barikna was to sentence his own father to life in prison for selling DW secrets. I hope she gets something like that.
Trewbador says: Make her admit to everything her parents did.
Mari_Onette says: She’s not her parents. Why can’t people figure that out? She didn’t even know them.
amynewhousen2415 says: She’s so beautiful!
knight_of_darkness says: Shame on Borgenicht and the rest of the junta for laying the sins of her parents on her. She didn’t even know them.
pratto391 says: Let’s not go royal-crazy. This isn’t Britain. Sure, she’s hot, Borgenicht’s not, but she hasn’t proven herself in any way yet. Hold off on the unadulterated worship.
Thirteen
It was a beehive.
At least, Will thought it was a beehive. Wax hexagons formed the walls, floor, and ceiling, and they were thin enough to diffuse the light passing through them. In the center of the six-sided chamber, in an even larger wax cell in the floor, the light outlined a body curled into the fetal position.
“Assessment,” Josh said to Mirren.
“Ah…” Mirren glanced around. “We’re in a beehive, obviously.”
“What are common associations with beehives? What do they represent?”
“Honey?”
“What’s the source of danger?” Josh asked.
Mirren winced. “Unclear?”
“Where’s the dreamer?”
“In the big wax cell in the floor? I don’t know.” Mirren tugged on her earlobe. “She’s the only person here. Shouldn’t we be doing something?”
“No,” Josh said. Will—who had been her pupil for much longer than Mirren had—knew that unless Josh saw something requiring immediate action, she was more than capable of standing around dissecting the situation with no more anxiety than an audience member lingering in a theater complex hallway discussing a film. Will also knew how infuriating her calm could be.
Will was fairly certain that Mirren was dealing with some post-traumatic stress from having spent four days in the Dream. Josh had been training her for a week already, but every time they brought her into the Dream, her usual poise gave way to stutter
ing and shaky hands. Will was hoping that enough trips back into the Dream would act as a sort of exposure therapy to help her work through her anxiety.
Assuming none of the nightmares retraumatized her, of course.
As Mirren struggled to answer Josh’s questions, Will noticed that within the cells that made up the walls, black shapes were moving against the light.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Bees!” Mirren cried. “We should go.”
“They don’t look like bees,” Josh said, and that was when the first finger burst through the wax and toward them.
A field of fingers followed, popping through the walls like dandelions. They shot out of the wax in ones and twos, not just pointing fingers but digging fingers, fingers eager to escape their enclosures.
“What’s happening?” Mirren cried.
Before another word could be uttered, the fingers freed themselves, and they were not only fingers but hands, hands that ended before they could become wrists. Some of the hands sprang from the walls to the floor, but many launched themselves directly at the three dream walkers in their midst, an avalanche of appendages.
Even Josh screamed.
The first hand that landed on Will grabbed his elbow and crawled toward his shoulder. He shouted and swatted it, but it held tight to his arm.
Then a dozen hands were clinging to him, climbing up his pants like spiders, grabbing hold of his hair, weighing down his shirt, digging nails into his skin. With his own hands, he tore at the vermin, but for each one he pulled off, another half dozen jumped onto him. Somehow one got a thumb inside his mouth at the same moment a pinky slithered into his ear canal.
He bit frantically at the thumb, but its fingers were joining it, forcing Will’s mouth open and climbing inside. Another hand jammed two fingers into his nose.
They’re suffocating me! They’re going to choke me to death!
Josh shouted something unintelligible. Will stomped his feet and felt small bones crunch beneath his sneakers. Fingernails scraped the back of his throat, and he stuffed his own fingers into his mouth, forcing his jaw open to an unnatural degree, as he tried to get a grip on the spit-slick intruder.
Josh shouted again, and this time Will heard her: “Lighters!”
Only when he heard her voice so clearly did he realize that Mirren had stopped screaming.
He yanked his lighter out of his pocket and lit it on the first spin of the wheel. He held the flame so close to his face that he smelled his hair burning. One hand and then another dropped to the floor, skin singed pink, and Will stomped the life out of each one. He paused only to hook his finger around the thumb in his mouth and yank the hand out of his throat. He stomped that one really, really hard.
“Cough, Mirren!” Josh was shouting. “You have to cough!”
The hands—They must have some kind of group consciousness, Will thought—realized he was winning the battle thanks to his lighter, and they fled his body in an exodus of extremities. Together, they began digging open the cell in the middle of the floor where the dreamer lay trapped.
“Will!” Josh said. “Mirren needs the Heimlich! I’m too short!”
Mirren was in serious trouble, Will realized. A hand had managed to get all the way into her throat, and it was now too far down and too wet for either Josh or Will to extract. Mirren was swaying on her feet, her lips a dusky violet shade getting bluer by the second.
“I’ve got her,” Will told Josh, wrapping his arms around Mirren from behind. Josh had taught him the Heimlich maneuver months ago, and it wasn’t very complicated, but he’d never performed it on someone actually choking.
He made a fist and wrapped his other hand around it. Then he jammed his fists into Mirren’s diaphragm and forced them upward—hard. So hard that he felt bad.
But Mirren coughed.
“Bend over!” Josh ordered, and Will released Mirren so that she could bend at the waist while Josh dug around in her mouth and finally tore out a squirming hand.
A buzzing sound made Will look away from Mirren, and he finally got a glimpse of the person in the floor. Mirren had been right that she was the dreamer. She was also a giant bee.
Her woman’s body had sprouted thick black-and-yellow fur from head to hip, and instead of legs, she had a stinger with multiple razor-sharp barbs. Her eight-foot wings beat so hard that not only did they fill the room with a buzzing as loud as an airplane engine, they kicked up a gale.
She had domelike bee’s eyes, too. And barbed antennae. And for some reason, a mouth full of dagger-shaped fangs. Will pulled the plastic compact out of his pocket and ran to the only doorway—a six-sided opening that led to an identical chamber.
“Josh, we need to go,” he said, watching the dreamer rise through the air to hover near the ceiling. He used the mirror to reflect his lighter’s flame into the doorway, and a rainbow shimmer filled the opening.
Mirren was still coughing.
“She just needs a minute—” Josh said.
The bee-woman turned toward them, and her buzzing intensified. Her stinger dripped a substance that looked like honey but sizzled where it hit the wax floor.
“Josh!” Will shouted. “Now!”
He’d never told her what to do in-Dream, let alone shouted at her, but it got her to look up.
“Holy shit!” she yelled, and she grabbed Mirren’s arm and yanked her through the glittering Veil.
Will followed, and an instant later he tumbled onto the archroom floor. Beside him, Mirren coughed and cried simultaneously.
“Well,” Will said, “I think we’ve succeeded in retraumatizing her.”
* * *
They took Mirren to the kitchen to calm down. Josh made her hot chocolate, and then Deloise wandered through, and when she heard what had happened, she insisted on making Mirren a batch of her famous gingerdoodle cookies.
As Deloise was beating the butter and sugar together—and swatting at Josh’s hand to keep it out of the bowl—the back door opened and Whim walked in. He looked at Mirren’s white face and hunched posture and asked, “Do I even want to know?”
“Where have you been?” Deloise asked, turning off the hand mixer. “I couldn’t find you.”
Whim balked just long enough that Will knew the answer.
“I went down to the minimart for a KitKat,” Whim said.
Sure you did, Will thought.
While the girls argued over the safety of eating raw eggs, Will said, “Hey, Whim, did you notice that scratch on the Lincoln’s bumper?”
“Scratch?!” Whim cried.
“It’s not long, but it looks deep. Come outside and I’ll show it to you.”
Will led him out the back door and down the steps to the Lincoln.
“I don’t see it,” Whim said.
“Forget the scratch. I made it up.”
“What? Why would you do that to me?”
Will opened the driver’s-side door and stuck his head inside the car.
“Do you know what that smell is?” he asked.
“Vintage luxury?” Whim suggested.
“Perfume. Which Deloise doesn’t wear, because she has allergies.” Will opened the backseat door and examined it. “Right here, we have dirt on the inside of the door.”
“I’ll get some leather cleaner,” Whim said, but Will went around the car to the other side and opened that rear door. After a few seconds of looking …
“Hah!” He raised his arm triumphantly. “And here we have the smoking gun.”
“I can’t even see what you’re holding,” Whim said. His expression was decidedly unamused, and he’d put the uneaten half of his candy bar in his pocket.
“It’s a hair. It’s a very long, very dark brown hair. I found it on the seat on this side, which is where Bayla was lying while you two made out in the backseat, your shoes rubbing against the inside of the door and leaving that dirt because you’re too tall to fool around in the backseat of a car, but you had to do it in a car so that no one would s
ee because you’re cheating on Deloise!
“And then you stopped at the mini-mart to buy a KitKat on your way home so you’d have evidence to back your story up, right?” Will slammed the car door shut.
Whim rubbed his mouth and chin with his hand. “Okay, all right, just … hold your horses for a minute. Stop freaking out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” Will said indignantly. “And if you think I am, then that tells me exactly how little you care about Deloise, because you ought to be freaking out over what you’ve done to her.”
“Oh, my God, Will, calm down. Can you hold off your next nervous breakdown for five minutes so we can talk about this like reasonable people?”
“What the hell does that mean?” Will shouted, even as his mind said, It means you’re shouting.
Whim threw his hands up in the air. “It means you’ve been so high-strung and judgmental lately that there’s no point in trying to have a rational conversation with you!”
Whim turned and strode away across the back lawn, which stretched for several acres. Will was too stunned and hurt to even think of following him.
I haven’t been judgmental, he told himself.
Yes, I have. But I’ve had to be, because everyone else is being so careless!
No, that’s a ridiculous thought. Whim’s right—I’m becoming really high-strung. I can’t even think clearly.
He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly aware of how tight and painful it was.
Everything needs to stop, if it would just stop for a couple of minutes, if I could just catch up …
The thoughts were coming too fast for him to keep up, and he realized he was actually holding his head in both hands, digging his fingertips into his scalp the way the disembodied hands in the nightmare had. He let go, cursing himself.
I can’t think, I can’t think.
“Will.”
Will opened his eyes and saw Whim was standing in front of him, and the concern in Whim’s expression far outweighed the anger.