64
~ EIGHT MONTHS AGO: MILO ~
Milo’s ability to dreamwalk had gotten stronger – much stronger – since the Commander had come to him with the sword. That was the blessing part of his curse: He was practically guaranteed success at any shadow art he attempted. He stayed away from the shadow arts, of course. Not only did they remind him too much of the time he worked so hard to forget, they also scared him.
Milo’s greatest fear was that there was more shadow to him than mortal, and if he dabbled in the shadow arts, the shadow would take over completely.
But four years ago, when the unbearable news arrived that the Commander and the Empress had fallen in the Battle of Pellon – the battle that came to be known as the Empress’s Last Stand, Milo hadn’t been able to help himself. Something had told him that they were not lost, regardless of what Colonel Ollea said she witnessed. Perhaps it was childish refusal to believe the truth, like Linna said, but perhaps it was something else.
He’d always had a unique connection to the Commander, and not just because she’d rescued him from his prison. Both of them, despite the fact that neither had asked for it or wanted it, were inextricably bound to the Shadowlands. His link to that place was even stronger than hers, a fact that had always shamed him. And every time he used a shadow art, from the time he’d healed Princess Adela after she’d fallen on her way to the beach and broken her ankle, to the first time he’d tried dreamwalking to find the Commander and the Empress, that link had gotten just a little bit stronger.
He’d first dreamwalked four years ago because the two young women Milo had come to think of as sisters – the Princess Adela and Linna, both about four years his senior – had been so inconsolable after Emperor Mace delivered the news that the Commander and Empress had died that Milo felt it his filial duty to find incontrovertible evidence that the Emperor was was actually right. After all, no bodies ever came home to them, and the mountain men and the Brotherhood were both so prone to gloating that one would have expected some kind of grisly proof sent back to the capital city.
Adela started weeping constantly. Her handmaids applied ever-heavier layers of eye make-up to conceal her grief, but it was not enough.
Linna, meanwhile, blamed herself for things she refused to speak of. Unlike Adela, she did not weep openly. Where Adela’s eyes were red and swollen from tears, Linna’s eyes became hollow and blank, practically like a shadow infected.
All the while, Milo simply could not shake the feeling that they were still out there, the Empress and the Commander.
So he dreamwalked. It was hard the first time, but it was easier by the third time, and as simple as walking across the room by his fifth time. On his sixth attempt, he found them. It was clear to Milo almost immediately that they were under some kind of shadow spell, that the Commander and Empress believed themselves to be inside the palace gardens, enjoying each other’s company on a spring afternoon, but that their true situation was far more dire.
It was an open secret in the Empress’s inner circle that the relationship she had to the Commander of her Palace Guard was something greater than just Empress and bodyguard, but witnessing that truth first-hand was still a shock for the eleven year-old Milo. Embarrassed by what he’d just witnessed, he’d fled the illusion of the gardens before the Empress and Commander could see him. Another month passed before he tried finding them again.
But when Milo did try again, something was aware of him. Something dark and powerful. He never even reached the dream gardens. Instead, the dark force pushed Milo into a different dream, a dream of being back inside his cage within the belly of the ancient barrow. Snarling, snapping shadows whose bodies were only vaguely humanoid surrounded him, their shapes made even more grotesque by the torchlight flickering behind him.
For a night that felt like an eternity, Milo was trapped by the dark presence in a dream-prison of his own. When he finally managed to wake himself and came back to his body inside the mortal realm, he lay motionless for hours inside his small room in the guest wing of the palace. His heart raced. His breath came in shallow gulps. His fingers dug into the sheets as though someone – or something – might try to drag him back into the Shadowlands against his will.
“Linna,” Milo had said the next day, “there’s something I need to tell you – in private.”
His friend had been skeptical, then overjoyed, to hear that the Empress and Commander were still alive. But as months passed into years, Milo was unable to find the Commander and the Empress again.
Linna stopped believing him. “You thought you dreamwalked,” she said eventually. “But maybe you just dreamed.”
Milo never doubted himself. He kept dreamwalking, kept searching for a way in that would skirt the dark presence, but there was no backdoor, no way inside the dream of the palace gardens without triggering it. Instinct told Milo that if he made that dark presence aware of him again, he might never wake up.
But in the end, the Commander found Milo before he could find her. She brought Milo the great curved sword that had belonged to her teacher, and he hid it where no one would ever find it.
Weeks went by. The Commander did not come back.
Time moved differently in the Shadowlands, Milo knew. He needed to be patient. Yet there was also danger in being too patient. Too passive. What if Milo was waiting out of his own cowardice? What if the Commander needed him?
Milo decided it was time to dreamwalk again.
He didn’t search out the Commander this time; he knew he couldn’t get close enough to her without alerting the dark thing. So Milo set his sights on finding someone else – the pirate captain the Empress had hired to take them to the Kingdom of Persopos.
It took nearly a month of searching to find her, to locate that unique signature each person seemed to emit when they dreamed. And it was especially hard to find the pirate because Milo barely knew her. But Milo was practically half shadow; no one could escape him forever.
When he finally found her, Milo at first assumed she dreamed of a tavern common room. The smoke of tobacco and white cactus hung like a summer haze just below the low ceiling; drunken men laughed and shouted at long, rough-hewn tables; and a minstrel with a lute played upon a stage at the front of the room. Beside him, a big-bosomed woman sang bawdy lyrics.
Those few men actually listening to the singer cheered when she got to the chorus, banging pewter tankards against the tabletops and doing their best to sing along.
But then Milo realized there were more than drunken men, who looked like Adessian sailors to him, crowding the cramped common room. There were at least as many women as men – their faces heavily painted and their clothing so scandalously skimpy that their breasts looked ready to pop out at any moment. Many of the women sat in the laps of the sailors; a few danced suggestively in front of rowdy tables.
Milo realized with a start that this wasn’t a tavern common room. This was a brothel common room. And even though it was only a dream – someone else’s at that – Milo’s cheeks turned a fierce, hot crimson.
At fifteen summers, Milo hadn’t so much as kissed a girl yet. He’d had crushes and fantasies, yes, including a crush on the Princess for a time, but he knew he’d probably never know the touch of a woman. He was tainted with the Shadowlands – touching a woman’s bare skin with his fingertips, skimming his mouth along her neck… it would only lead to her being inhabited by shadows.
Once Milo got over the embarrassing shock of being inside an actual house of ill repute, he located Rizalt Akella of Perrintot in the center of the table closest to the stage. Like some of the other sailors, a woman perched in her lap, one arm draped across the rizalt’s shoulders.
Milo wove his way to the front of the room, skirting prostitutes entangled with sailors and the wild flailing arms of drunks. But he stopped a few feet behind the pirate captain, wondering what he should actually say to her now that he was here. He knew that the rizalt was not trapped in the same place that the Commander and the Empress were, but did that mean she was not trapped at all? Was she even in the Kingdom of Persopos, or had she sailed home and abandoned them completely?
He tapped the pirate on the shoulder. But she must not have felt his touch; the woman in her lap had leaned forward and was whispering something into the rizalt’s ear.
“Rizalt,” he said, forcing his voice to rise above the din. “Rizalt!”
Finally she turned, annoyance written all over her face. Annoyance mixed with confusion when she saw that the person insisting upon her attention was no sailor, just a scrawny boy wearing thick woolen gloves.
He wore them even in his dreams.
“Who are you?” the rizalt demanded. “No – better question: why are you bothering me? Can’t you see I’m with …”
Confusion momentarily clouded her face. As the rizalt turned, the woman seated in her lap transformed. Her hair had been ash-blonde and fashioned into bouncing ringlets. Now her hair darkened, straightened, the face paint disappeared, and the dress she’d been wearing morphed into an Imperial Army uniform.
“Can’t you see I’m with the love of my life?” the rizalt asked.
“You’re not,” Milo said. “This is a dream.”
The woman in her lap vanished. The common room grew quiet.
“Preyla’s tit, boy!” said the pirate, slapping her palm hard against the table. “You think I didn’t know that? The first dream I’ve had all week that isn’t a nightmare, and you have to ruin it for me?”
Milo felt his hold on the woman’s dream slipping. Either she was trying to push him out or he was simply exhausting his dreamwalking capacity for the night. Or both.
“The Commander and the Empress are alive, but they are trapped in the Shadowlands – or in the Kingdom of Persopos, or both – the Commander isn’t sure,” Milo said, words coming out in a rush.
“I know,” said the Rizalt.