by Jessa Lucas
Even now, I could feel the dream of Earth fading as dreams do. Feel the remnants of it sweeping out of my mind slowly and unnoticed like dirt blown gently from a room. I wasn’t even sure how much of it would be left when I was ailing and old (should I be so lucky as to live that long)— maybe a name of a teacher, a vision of my shoes against the pavement, those brilliant flames against the bleak night… but all the tangled emotions and the faces that had haunted every step as I ran away— those would linger with disappearing attachment.
And it was good, wasn’t it? It was what anyone in my place would’ve wanted. To vanquish the demons and be free of their ghosts.
But how could I name the fear, the passion, the tenacity inside me if I couldn’t identify the source of it? Even if we got out of here... even if I accepted my role and came to understand this whole new world, I might be resigned to a half-life, to never remembering who I was before the dream I would eventually forget.
I didn’t want to lose the dream. Perhaps it gave evil entirely too much credit, but the dream made me. Who was I, if not that dented and scarred runaway I knew myself to be?
The answer came clanging back in my mind like the sound of a garish church bell.
Oh, right. A fucking princess.
“No, Saylora,” Jude said. “Even if I could, I would not put you back in that dream if my life depended on it. Dreams are merely a tool; whatever you need from yours, whatever truth the Grimms meant to conceal— that is in you. Oh, here!”
Jude directed me right and lifted the torch, the firelight dancing across the walls of a massive round chamber. Crumbling stone tables lined the space, tipped over benches and piles of broken pottery littered the dirt floor. The ceiling was wide and high, but as grand as the chamber seemed compared to the tunnels we’d passed through, the rough edges of the windowless walls were heavy with the reminder that people had once been enslaved here.
“What is this place?” I murmured.
“This is where the miners gathered to eat, where your father was found. Some of us were children when it happened, some of us were not yet born; regardless, every territory was taught it, every school child knew their king’s story.”
Jude’s feet wandered, taking with him the radius of light, and I scurried after him, not wanting to be left in darkness.
“He was but a teenager when he was pulled from these mines. The prophet’s guards charged in, knowing exactly who it was they sought. It is said that they found him, right here,” Jude crouched, his finger brushing against the rock wall, “marking his 3064th day in the mines. His last.”
I bent on my knees to get a better look, and sure enough, a series of the smallest marks— some white, some grey, some mere indentions in the wall— lined the base of the room in the likeness of a miniature fence.
“God, can you imagine being stuck down here for that long?” I asked, the awe and horror of it sickening.
“You were trapped in a much smaller space for far longer,” Jude reminded me quietly.
“I don’t remember it though, so I hardly think it counts the same way,” I snorted, trying not to think about what it would’ve been like to be conscious underneath that glass for a second longer than I had been when I woke up.
“I’m not altogether sure that the things you recall are much better than imprisonment in the mines.” Jude raised those curious eyebrows, as if he thought I might be willing to tell him more.
I wasn’t.
I stood to get away from those eyes, constantly drawn to me with questions in them, and reached for the torch. Jude released it to me easily, and I began to wander along the wall of the chamber, running my hand carefully against the hewn stone. A strange mural jumped out at me, archaic and primal, and I held the torch high to get a better look.
“Ah, yes.” I heard Jude come from behind me to take the torch. He set it in a sconce on the wall, the edges of its light infringing on the perimeters of the scene. My eyes tracked along with the primitively drawn figures. “This is how the slaves commemorated that day, and your father’s departure. Such drawings are scattered throughout these mines. There was a word to light the torches in these chambers, too… what was it... éclarate!”
The chamber lit instantly, fire erupting in a great arc of torches along the walls. Scattered across every vertical surface were these etchings, the same scenes playing across stone with the fervor and brilliance of the passion that carved them.
Chills rose on my skin. The reverence of it astounded me. I tried to choke back the thoughts that clawed at the proof before me— thoughts that told me my father was a cruel and untrustworthy man. Thoughts which were a lie.
“They weren’t jealous that he was freed and they weren’t?” I frowned.
“The slaves were never powerful enough to overthrow their masters, and yet it was their mines which birthed a king. A king who eventually set them free. So he is honored in this place. Your father was worthy of it, just as you will be.” Jude’s breath was ragged as I turned to look up at him, suddenly dazed by the desire to be enveloped by those strong arms. “Just as you are,” he amended as I inched closer, his breath whispering across my face.
Good god, the way he looked at me. It was as if he was the siren and I was nothing but his willing prey.
I did not even give a single damn.
“It was kind of sexy in the dark,” I said, voice thick with sultry intent.
“Easily mended,” Jude whispered. “Disparaté.”
The torchlight evaporated, leaving only the scant flames of the torch we brought with us. I stepped closer to him, unable to help myself.
My heart sputtered in my chest... everything in me wanted his touch. My breath caught in my throat as I envisioned it— his firm hands on my hips, my legs wide— fuck, it had been a long time since I’d felt the craving that came with such explicit thoughts surge through my body. A long time since I’d wanted to feel it. I was so used to stifling the side of me that was prone to indulge in it.
I tilted my chin up to Jude, considering the sincerity in his kind brown eyes. He was looking at me that way again, like he had a million questions. And then the look dissolved, and something devilish replaced it.
The glint in his eyes drew me, taunted me, as he raised his eyebrows ever so slightly as if to ask me what I really wanted. So starved was I for touch, for affection, for a man who was finally worthy of these needs in me, that I silenced my thoughts as I moved slowly forward, cursing every thunderous pound in the heart that was doing a terrible job keeping its cool.
I leaned my forehead to his lips and Jude set rough hands on either side of my face. My breath caught and then I looked up, unhurried as I closed the space between our lips. His mouth grazed mine, and he pressed in closer.
More, the woman and siren sang in me, their voices knit in perfect harmony. I crushed myself against Jude, his body soft and hard in all the right places.
More.
His mouth parted. His tongue skimmed my lower lip—
The dreamer awakes
The shadow—
I gasped, drawing immediate breath and pulling out of Jude’s arms without realizing it.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I could feel that there was something there, something to be gleaned from just beyond that veil of amnesia. Something that the magic of his touch exposed.
I shook my head quickly, smiling. “Nothing at all.”
I reached for him again, our mouths meeting, his fingers twisting in my hair. The rush of pleasure careened through me again and the words hit me like a tsunami, reverberating in my mind with such stunning clarity:
The dreamer awakes
The shadow goes by
The tale I have told you
That tale is a lie—
I withdrew again, despite my best effort. Breath wouldn’t satiate my lungs. The storm of words and images that had exploded in my mind as Jude pressed his body fervently against mine was too intense.
“Saylora?”
/> He put a finger lightly to my cheek and I tore myself from the powers in me that yearned for my body to be used by this man.
“One more question,” I stuttered, glancing up at him and blinking. “Is it possible you could have inserted yourself into the dreams the Grimms gave me?”
Jude pushed back hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear. “I tried, the first few years,” he admitted. “Their sleep was so deep. My ‘scapes were fully formed, but I was never advanced enough to transfer them mind to mind. I was still distributing in bottles when I was called to Lithron.”
Dreams in bottles, princesses in towers. Such a strange, strange world this was.
“I tried to put us all in, actually,” Jude said, lost in thought. “I knew it wasn’t working, but I was desperate. I was certain you had grown to love one of us— or all of us perhaps, in your own way— but it was impossible to know if anything you had felt before was strong enough to break the sleep even if it made it to your mind. The dream breaks at the revelation of only the most powerful truths.”
But that poem… I had definitely heard it before on Earth, and though I couldn’t place it, the clarity in Jude’s touch woke something distant in me, calling it forward. Perhaps he’d succeeded after all.
“Can you tell me what this means?” I asked. “The dreamer awakes, the shadow goes by, the tale...”
“The tale I have told you, that tale is a lie,” wonder filled Jude’s eyes as he recited. “But listen to me bright maiden, proud youth, the tale is a lie; what it tells is the truth.” He nodded and considered me curiously. “That is a poem from Dramon Dagma. It’s what we remind our patrons in farewell. When I didn’t know what to do, I would sit by you and repeat it over and over again while you slept. How... how did you remember that?”
I instantly felt the need to backtrack, so I lied. “I think it was something we used to end fairytales with, on Earth. I’m not sure why it came back to me, it just seemed important in the moment.”
“Oh,” Jude said, not hiding his disappointment. “That makes sense. Another of the Grimms’ signatures, I suppose.”
I immediately felt guilty, getting his hopes up like that and then lying… but I wanted to to figure this out for myself first.
Clarity had begun to form in me, hope and fear intertwining. If this fractured, resurfacing memory meant what I thought it meant...
“You should not be here.”
We turned in unison to see Sy standing in the doorway, torchlight burning in his eyes and displeasure marking the hard planes of his shadowed face.
Chapter 6
The Devil’s Whore
“It is not good for her to be in the mines.”
“Just keep talking about me like I’m not here, that’s cool,” I muttered.
“Of course,” Jude said, putting a hand on my lower back. “We should leave, Saylora.”
I maneuvered out of his touch, and as we walked past Sy, I caught his eye. He reluctantly looked up from where Jude’s hand had been moments ago.
I swallowed, feeling weirdly guilty, as if I were sixteen again and found making out under the bleachers. I didn’t like it, and I steeled myself against the scrutiny as I stared back. Sy’s gaze softened and I looked away, leaving him to whatever tribute he’d come down here to pay.
“What am I, a quarter fae?” I asked as Jude and I meandered back.
“I believe so,” Jude said. “Exposure to iron would be hard pressed to do you much harm beyond a headache, but even still Sy’s right. No need to be down here longer than necessary… no matter how sorry I am to have been interrupted by company.”
I smiled over at him, trying to keep a bit of distance between me and that gleam in his eye as we trekked back up through the mines. Despite how much I wanted him to thrust me up against one of the dark walls before Sy caught up to us, I needed to think before going any further.
I kept seeing Jude watch me out of the corner of his eye as I stomped over rock and clay decidedly without his help. I was trying not to seem too withdrawn, but I wasn’t the best liar; I hadn’t been a particularly adept one as a kid, and after puberty I’d relied entirely too much on my abilities of persuasion.
When we’d made it back to the top of the staircase, a journey that left me embarrassingly breathless, I parted ways hurriedly, saying I wasn’t feeling too well after all. I hastened to the next endless mountain of stairs, pausing to catch my breath as soon as I’d disappeared from Jude’s view.
I flung my body on the bed dramatically after I’d made sure the deadbolt to my room was secure. Time to get my brain in order, before it exploded.
What I knew: the queen had wanted to curse me with death, but had resigned instead to let me dwell in a land living nightmares. A world I’d unknowingly endured for the better part of half a century, a world that’d been carefully crafted to draw out my most fearful self— my most destructive, my most self-loathing— until the world of the dream was the life I let define me.
She’d fortified this sleep in any way she could devise— iron to weaken me, a looming eclipse to bind me, and just in case I’d been strong enough... or something inside me true enough… she’d cursed this powerless siren to love a man who loved her in return.
An out, a loophole, Wivhelm had called it.
Fuck off, Evil Grimm Brother #1. Falling in love in two weeks is not what you call “a loophole.”
Things were not looking good.
Not with my trauma, my baggage. Whatever feelings these men might’ve had before I went to Coma Town would quickly disappear with the sobering reality that it wasn’t cute to be holed up with a woman stripped of her identity and forced into impossible circumstances.
The quirk of my identity loss, the miracle of my waking— it was all awe-inspiring now, but how long would it take my watchmen to realize I wasn’t going to save them, and for them to resent me for it?
Only the most powerful truths can break a dream as deep as the Grimms’. That’s what Jude had said. And he had confirmed that love might be one of those things— my love, for one of them. It seemed such a fragile wish, such a desperate grasp at hope... but perhaps in the life I’d forgotten, I had loved before. It would explain the closeness and intimacy which seemed to exist outside of memorable experience, why I seemed so ready to act apart from my decimated trust of men...
Maybe that was why kissing Jude had woken something in me. I had loved him, and he had loved me, and we were finding each other again. Maybe there was hope after all.
But I wouldn’t know unless I allowed myself to be vulnerable. Unless I let myself have the touch I yearned for, the touch that made me dangerous. Maybe that was the key to unlocking everything.
I just wasn’t ready for it. And I wasn’t willing to risk the siren hooking her talons into anything or anyone without some sort of confirmation first.
I hurried out of my room, grateful to see that Jabari was the one stationed at my door. I waved as I skipped past him, not giving him enough time to consider what I was up to before I set off down the hall to find my way to the Reflection. I had some questions, and rhymes or not, I felt she might be the only one with helpful answers.
Especially considering our little secret.
The door creaked as I pushed it open and I waited for the shimmer and glow of the Reflection to manifest in the mirror in front of me. Seconds later, her ethereal features replaced my own in the glass, her cold blue eyes staring out at me with that heavy sorrow laid bare in them.
“Princess, you return with eyes full of fright. What is it that I may do for you this night?” Technically it wasn’t even dark yet, but I’d cut her some slack on account of the whole damned-with-eternal-rhyming thing.
“Can you see the future, the way you can see the past?” I asked her.
She shook her head, the sway of her floating curls slower than the movement of her head.
Of course not. That would’ve been too easy. I sighed. “Okay. Are you required to tell me the truth?”
&nb
sp; “No one can offer more than words which are true; though the truth of this truth is known only by few.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, a picture of patience.
“If it interferes not with the curse you must break, I will answer with my most, for my lady’s sake.”
Great, I’d take that as a yes.
“I know there’s a traitor. Someone who told you to contact the Crown. But...” I felt so stupid asking, felt the contradiction of it twisting deep into my belly, “can I trust my watchmen? I mean—”
“Trust,” the Reflection mused softly, “is a word to use with care, but remember, you should, the burdens they bear.”
“Yeah, aka the burden of me.”
“Nay, Princess, not in the way which you suppose— their fate in this tower is not the one that they chose, but when we came to this place their grief was unmistakable, and overcoming trials is what makes loyalties unshakable.”
“Then why would someone betray me? Betray all of us?” I said, taking a seat on the edge of the fountain. I swore for moment I heard the gentle flap of wings and the sound of rustling leaves, as if this conservatory truly held the life of a whole forest inside it.
“Fear is a foolish thing, but oh to the heart does such a thing cling.”
I nodded, understanding. If Valtronya had been half as terrifying in real life as the visions implied she was in her weird-ass dungeon, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the threat of her wrath might incite. Fear had molded me with its own hands… maybe giving the benefit of the doubt to my men was only fair.
I couldn’t honestly say that if I’d been imprisoned in a tower for the better part of my life, I wouldn’t do all that I could to get out unscathed and free from further peril. Maybe the betrayal was nothing more than selfishness and desperation... and could I truly fault any of these men for that? They had given up their lives to watch me go comatose. They deserved to be free... not only of this tower, but of me.
