Chapter 150

Behind her smile, though, she was flustered. She wouldn’t have believed she could be attacked in a dream. She looked at Aden for a long moment, as though trying to convince him with her smile, before turning back to Bertha.

“Grandmother,” she said.

“Yes, child?” Bertha said. She smiled warmly at her granddaughter, inviting her to speak.

“Have you . . .,” she hesitated, not sure how to phrase her question. “Have you ever possibly met a person in a dream?”

Not if she’d seen someone in a dream. Of course she had, they both had. But met someone. Another dreamer.

Aden perked up at the question. Bertha’s assumption had been correct – Ilyin had been attacked in a dream.

“Yes,” Bertha said solemnly. Ilyin adjusted herself on the pillow, wincing just a little at the movement.

“Is it . . .  often?” Aden asked. It was an important tactical question. If it happened often, the chance of Ilyin being in danger increased.

“No,” Bertha answered, meeting his eyes. She looked back at Ilyin. “Just once. The day you were born – not with you, with my daughter.”

Viscountess Arlen. Ilyin had never heard this story before.

“You . . . you talked with my mother in a dream?” she asked. This was new to her – it meant Berth had been having dreams for decades.

“Yes,” Bertha replied. “Both of us had seen that mobile in a dream. We even touched it together. It was amazing.”

She stared at the mobile, drifting into her thoughts for a moment.

“I don’t know everything,” she said finally, “but your mother and I learned something twenty years ago – that people with foresight can share the same dream.”

Ilyin’s eyes widened.

“Foreseeing the same thing . . .,” she breathed. She remembered meeting the gaze of the violet-eyed being she’d seen in the dream of Delrose fighting the Mollys. She gingerly traced the bandages on her abdomen as she put herself back in that moment.

Even in the warm room, Ilyin felt a chill as she remembered how it had looked at her. She had been so frightened she had tried to get away from it, shifting from hilltop to hilltop as she could do in dreams, only to have the creature pursue her with the same dream-speed.

Because it was dreaming too, she thought. It had the same foresight.

“Because we were in a dream together,” she muttered, looking down at her wound. Aden placed his hand on her shoulder. Pulled from the memory by his touch, she looked up at him, smiling softly.

She glanced about the room. Aden, Bertha with her foresight that had likely saved her life, Etra who had served her so closely and Idith, Aden’s trusted aide. And over in the corner, there was Milo, whom Bertha had dragged out into the winter. The notion of being attacked in a dream sounded ridiculous, but not one of them treated it as anything but serious. Knowing that, she could speak freely.

“I was watching the Delrose attacking the Mollys at the Yesters’ base,” she said. She could still see the red-scaled Mollys’ formations collapsing in panic as the Yesters fled in a rout. “I wanted to watch. I was worried about Delrose.”

I thought the monsters couldn’t see me in a dream. She shuddered a little. Aden’s hand flexed, hugging her shoulder encouragingly.

“And in the midst of it all, I saw . . . him again,” she said. She called the thing him only because it resembled a human, though she knew more than ever that it wasn’t. Pale skin like someone who’d lived only in winter. Long, whitish, blonde hair. He looked a bit smaller than Aden, but larger than Ilyin. From the back, it could have been mistaken for a human aside from what it wore.

“He was dressed very lightly, even more so than Den,” she said, looking at the clothes of the assembled Delrose. “Even someone from the winter region couldn’t dress so lightly here.”

“I had seen him before in dreams, a few times,” she continued. “I’d looked him in the eyes before, but I always woke up instantly, like I’d been kicked out of the dream.”

Bertha listened intently. Aden had heard this story before, but he still leaned in attentively, as though some new, important scrap of information might fall out of it this time.

“I was trying to avoid him in this dream, afraid I would be kicked out again,” she said, “but this time, he saw me first.”

She could still seem those violet eyes now, as they had been in the dream – when they’d turned dark with murderous aggression.