by J. J. Faulks
She did not argue with his logic, although ten years of living in the Land of Gods herself had not made her any less mortal, but instead asked, “Who is your mother?”
His nose wrinkled as if there were a bad smell, but the only aroma in the air was the perfume of the roses. “Nestra,” he said, his tone sinking like gravel through water.
“Nestra?” she repeated. “As in the mother goddess? My friend’s mother used to tell us stories about Nestra the whole time, and she encouraged us to pray to her every day. What was it that we used to say?” She stared past Beighlen as she tried to recall the little rhyme they used to recite as children. “Mother dear, hold us near, please warm our hearts and home. Send us love, send us hope, wherever we shall roam.”
She smiled and closed her eyes. She was sat under the old oak tree with Piprin at her side as they chorused along with the other children in the village. Meila was perched on a small wooden stool nestled amongst the exposed roots. After they had said the prayer and made an offering, the story would begin.
For many years, a war had raged between two neighbouring realms in the Land of Mortals. Though the king in the East wanted to make peace, the king in the West refused and continued to send his soldiers over the border. The army of the East was forced to defend its lands, and many men lost their lives.
The war angered the gods and they sympathised with the East’s plight. The gods tried to buy peace in the region by offering the king in the West riches and a beautiful wife, but the king would not be bought. They tried to scare the king into standing down by threatening him with war, but the king was undeterred. The gods did not know what else to do and they feared that they might have to carry through with their threat, eliminating the realm in the West, but they did not want to end so many innocent lives.
The gods met in order to discuss what they might do to resolve the conflict. But before any decision was made, the goddess Nestra stepped forward.
“I will go to the Land of Mortals and I will convince the king to make peace,” Nestra said.
Some of the other immortals laughed. Gods far more powerful than Nestra had spoken with the king but had failed to secure peace. They did not believe that Nestra, a simple mother goddess, could be successful where they had failed.
“And how will you convince the king?” one of the gods asked. “With your beauty? He has already been offered a beautiful wife and he refused. No offer that you make can match that.”
“Does it matter how I convince him, so long as he agrees?” Nestra replied.
With the permission of the other gods, Nestra travelled to the Land of Mortals, but when she went she hid her beauty, taking on the guise of a plain woman who—like any other—was subject to the spoiling of age.
Nestra acquired a position in the king’s household, helping the other women to launder clothes and linens. All the while she observed the king and the company that he kept. If she was ever to convince the king to make peace, she would have to find what was more valuable to him than war.
The king had many visitors, but among them were a number of healers. None of these healers visited more than once. Thinking this odd, Nestra asked the women she worked with why the king entertained so many healers.
“We’ve heard that the king has an ailment,” one of the women said. “But no healer so far knows of a cure. It is rumoured that the cure lies in the East, but the king has not yet found it.”
“What kind of ailment?” Nestra asked. They were speaking in whispers, leaning in close to one another so that they would not be overheard.
“People say that he has sores all over his hands and feet, and that’s why he always keeps them covered,” the woman said.
Nestra nodded. She had heard of such a condition before. “I think I know of a cure,” she said. “But I will need to see the wounds for myself. Can you help me to meet the king?”
“These sheets are for the king’s chamber,” the woman said, laying her hand atop a neat stack of linens. “Take them and wait for him there.”
The king was not pleased to find Nestra, still disguised as an old woman, waiting in his chamber. Though the running of his household depended upon the workers and servants, he did not like to be reminded of their presence.
“Who are you?” the king demanded. “You have no right to be here! Get out!”
“Where I am from there is a plant known for its abilities to heal lesions such as those that cover your hands and feet,” Nestra said.
The king had been ushering her towards the door and he was ready to call for his guards, but he stopped.
“Here.” Nestra handed him an ointment. “See for yourself.”
Reluctantly, the king removed his gloves to reveal his blistered hands. Keeping one eye on Nestra, he rubbed the ointment into his sores. One by one the sores vanished, leaving behind smooth skin.
The king was amazed. “How—?”
“Without further treatment the sores will return,” Nestra warned him. “But I can supply you with enough ointment to keep them at bay. It will come at a cost, though.”
“What cost?” the king asked. “You can have anything that you desire.”
“You must make peace with the East,” Nestra told him. As she spoke, she took on her true form, revealing herself to be one of the immortals.
“Nestra?” the king recognised her from her beauty.
Nestra nodded. “The gods are not pleased with your actions, but make peace now and I will ensure that your affliction never returns. You have my word.”
Without hesitation, the king agreed. He sent word to withdraw his army from the neighbouring realm, and soon after he made peace with the king in the East.
Nestra kept her promise, treating the king with kindness and thus maintaining peace across the realms. She had not used her beauty to convince the king, as the other gods had suggested, but she had used her intelligence and her kindness to bring peace to the Land of Mortals.
Orleigh’s smile weakened as the memory of home, with its pastel shades, faded and she opened her eyes to the sharp colours of the Land of Gods.
She turned to Beighlen and asked, “Do you have any powers? Seeing as you’re a demigod?”
Beighlen puffed out his chest, a sly smile tugging at his lips. “The other gods call me the Dreamspinner,” he said.
“The Dreamspinner?” she repeated. In all the myths she had read, she had never heard that term. “What does that mean?”
Beighlen’s eyes lit up, a golden halo surrounded his emerald green irises. He shed the monotone that had spoken of his mother, and his voice now sparked with life.
“I pull threads of perception from the air and I weave them into visions or dreams that can be used by the gods to deliver messages to mortals,” he said. “But they’re more than just images. They’re extremely powerful. They can influence people to do things that they wouldn’t have otherwise done, or to believe things that never really happened.”
Orleigh drew back, her arms crossing over in front of her. “Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to deceive people?”
“It’s not deception,” he said, and his eyes darkened. “The other gods and I have a duty to ensure that everything happens as the Script dictates. Once it has been written in the Script, it must happen. Sometimes that requires a little push.”
She shifted in her seat at the edge of the fountain, her legs growing numb against the hard stone beneath her. Maybe it wasn’t deception, but it didn’t sound right.
Beighlen offered her an easy smile, but the corners of his mouth twitched. “They’re just messages,” he said. “And whether I deliver them or not, the Script will be completed. One way or another. And, if they like, people can always ignore the visions.”
She gave a slight nod, but her discomfort had not eased.
“Maybe I could spin you a dream,” he offered. “Next time t
hat I visit? You’ll see that they’re perfectly harmless.”
“All right,” she agreed. She wanted to believe him. “I’d like that.”
She offered him a taut smile and then twisted round to face the water.
Orleigh had settled back into silence, her gaze focused on the fountain as she raked her fingers through the water. Her expression revealed nothing, giving Beighlen no sign whether his offer had appeased her or not. It wasn’t deception, it was duty, it was talent. He would show her.
A vague orange glimmer burnt against the backdrop of Orleigh’s mind. It looked like the trace of a dream, but it was old and weak. He wanted to look closer, to see what it was, but he couldn’t extract it without disrupting Orleigh’s memory. Once a dream was embedded in someone’s mind, other memories would become linked to it and it could not be removed without severing all of its connections, destroying all memories that were dependent upon it.
He shook his head. No one else had the power to spin dreams, and he would remember if he had created one for Orleigh.
Chapter Twenty-Six
A delicate fog had settled on the estate. Strand-like wisps hovered over the grass and gravel, and they weaved their way through the roses to form a misty blanket over the water of the fountain. The gate that led to the Great Forest stood hazy in the distance.
Orleigh gazed out from the window of her room. The view of the gate would be clearer from the library, but with Teymos’s study only paces away, his presence would hang over her, stifling her. He had not left her alone on the estate since Beighlen’s appearance, and everywhere that she went she felt eyes on her, prickling at the back of her neck.
When the fog cleared, she took up her place at the edge of the fountain, her eyes still trained on the gate. Beighlen had not said when he would return. She tried to imagine what it would be like, dreamspinning, but all she could see were dark threads snaking their way into the fabric of life, producing a murky undercurrent that did not belong. Dreamspinning was harmless, Beighlen had told her himself, it was perfectly harmless.
“Waiting for someone?” Teymos’s voice shot through her.
She jumped and her neck jarred as her shoulders shot up. With her back to the house, she had not seen Teymos approaching, she had not even heard his footsteps on the gravel.
“No!” she said—too sudden, too sharp—and blushed.
“I told Beighlen that he’s welcome to visit whenever he likes,” Teymos said. “I’m sure he’ll come back soon.” He paused, and then added, “It’s good that you have a friend.” He turned and headed back to the house.
Was Beighlen a friend? He had insisted that he was more god than mortal. Surely that should tell her where his allegiances would lie. An ally would be useful though. With Teymos’s persistent presence on the estate, her progress in uncovering the mystery surrounding her birth and the fire had stalled, and the only person she could ask for help was Beighlen.
“Orleigh!” Beighlen shouted and waved to her from the gate.
The geese gathered around Beighlen’s feet and protested at his intrusion once again. Their wariness, unlike her own, was unwavering.
Beighlen wound his way through the maze of roses to reach the fountain. Before he could step free of the rose garden, he snatched his hand to his chest with an, “Ow!”
“Are you all right?” she asked. She took his hand in her own and examined each side for scratches.
“Just a thorn,” he said, but he did not pull his hand away.
“I can’t see anything,” she said. The soft, unblemished skin showed no trace of a graze or puncture.
“It’s fine,” he said, and looked for himself. “Just took me by surprise, that’s all.” But he continued to inspect the skin as he sat with her by the fountain, and he frowned in a way that suggested that something wasn’t quite right.
His gaze soon turned to the grounds, his eyes lingering on nothing in particular. His expression was flat, a marked difference from the wonder that had danced upon his features before, as if the magic that the estate had held on his first visit had already faded.
“So,” he said. “What exactly do you do here all day?”
“There are lots of thing to do,” she said, but for a moment she could not think of one. “I read a lot, in the library. I look after the vegetable garden and the animals. I…I don’t know.”
He raised his eyebrows, unimpressed. “Don’t you get bored being stuck here all the time? I mean, there’s so much out there—” he motioned towards the Great Forest and the Land of Gods beyond “—and you never get to see it.”
“No, but I read about it, and that can be enough,” she said.
He shook his head and gave a snort of a laugh. “No, it’s not! It’s not the same!”
“But it’s as close as I’m ever going to get,” she said. As she looked to the ground, her hair fell across her face but she swiped it back. Her jaw jutted out into the silence and she stared away from Beighlen, towards the geese. She shook her head. It wasn’t Beighlen’s fault that he would never understand.
“How did you find out that you could spin dreams?” she asked.
The change in subject eased the tension, as if the first pages of a book had been torn out and rewritten. Beighlen was right: books weren’t the same as real life. Real life was messy and random and rambling, full of false starts and no clear ending.
“I don’t remember,” Beighlen said. “It’s just something that I’ve always been able to do. My mother said that I was only a baby when she first noticed. Most babies babble with sounds, but I babbled with my hands, spinning dreams.”
“Could you show me how you do it?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. He gave a half shrug, as if he didn’t care either way, but his eyes lit up with an eagerness that said he couldn’t wait to show her.
Beighlen spread his fingers wide, as if holding a ball too large for his grasp. As he concentrated on the space between his fingers, the air inside grew hazy. The air twisted and turned, and within the space fine threads formed from cloud-like wisps. He dipped his forefinger into the gap, his fingertip tapping one of the threads. The strand attached itself to the very tip of his finger. He repeated the action with his opposite forefinger, picking up a second strand. As he rotated these two fingers, the threads began to wrap around one another.
The two threads spun in the gap between his hands. As they did so, he dipped his free fingers into the space, collecting more threads and bringing them into the woven structure, adding further complexity to the composition.
When he had finished, he held a small orb of interlacing threads in the palm of his hand. The orb gave off an eerie glow, like the flicker of a dying candle.
She peered at it with a faltering smile, trying hard to look impressed, but she could not see how the creation was a vision like those that Beighlen had described. It just looked like a luminescent bundle of twine.
“Watch this,” Beighlen said. He lowered his hand into the fountain and with a puff of breath he sent the orb tumbling from his palm into the water.
The orb skittered across the surface of the water before slowing and sinking down to the bottom of the fountain. She leant over the edge of the stone to watch.
The threads untangled in the water and, once separated, each took on a life of its own. The strands darted back and forth through the pool like minnows, surging up to the surface and then diving back down to the shallow depths. As they danced around one another, they grew in length and once more they became intertwined. This time, however, they did not form a tight ball; instead, they wove themselves into moving images.
Her eyes widened and she laughed. The images appeared as real as if she were looking through a window.
“That’s amazing!” she said.
Beighlen smiled and he gestured towards the water. “Just watch.”
The vision showed t
he myth of Ardus and his journey through the Forest of Greed. As she watched she almost forgot that she was sat at the edge of the fountain. She was inside the vision, walking with Ardus. Not only did she see with his eyes, but she felt his emotions too. This was what Beighlen had meant when he said that the dreams he spun were powerful.
*
Ardus lived a blessed life, but this was not the way that things had always been. He was born into a comfortable family, but after his father was summoned to the Afterworld, he knew only poverty. He grew up always wanting more—more food, more money, more love. But the more he sought after these things, the less he had.
A young man, struggling to survive alone in the world, Ardus felt lost. He knew that he could not continue to live the way that he was living, but he did not know what else to do. Ardus had seen others succumb to a similar fate and he was adamant that he would not follow that bleak path. He had spent his whole life battling to acquire what he lacked, and it had only driven him deeper into desperation. Ardus knew that if he was to change his life, he would have to change his actions.
Ardus took the little that he owned and he carried it to the temple. At the temple, he made offerings to each of the gods, until he had nothing left to give. That night, with no money for his lodgings, Ardus slept beneath the stars.
There was no great miracle, but slowly things began to change for Ardus. Each day brought a new blessing, small but significant, and for everything that he received he gave thanks to the gods. With time he found that he had a job, a home, and a beautiful wife—everything that he had ever wanted. But he never forgot the poverty he had known, and he continued to make offerings to the gods and to help others in need.
Ardus lived a blessed life, but one day the god Efrinon decided to steal his happiness. Efrinon had encountered Ardus’s wife, Dyna, on a visit to the Land of Mortals and he had fallen for her beauty. Dyna was faithful to Ardus and she refused Efrinon’s advances. Efrinon was not accustomed to being rejected, and as a punishment for Dyna’s stubbornness he took her away from Ardus, holding her captive in the Land of Gods.
