Dream a Deadly Dream Read online

  Dream a Deadly Dream

  by

  Remi Black

  The 2nd Novel of the Enclave

  Dream a Deadly Dream

  Copyright © 2017

  Emily R. Dunn writing as Remi Black & Writers’ Ink

  First electronic publishing rights: November 2017

  All rights are reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, or distributed via the Internet or any other means,

  electronic or print, without the author’s or Writers’ Ink permission.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Published in the United States of America.

  A Few Words to Readers and Writers

  After several years of trying to break into the big publishing houses, receiving “nice” rejection letters that gave me hope while crushing those same hopes, I shelved Dream a Deadly Dream. “Later,” I told it. In the meanwhile, I wrote Sing a Graveyard Song (which I will publish in the spring of 2018) then backed up to write Weave a Wizardry Web (which I published in the summer of 2017). Dream continued to haunt me, though, and it was pure joy to return to it this fall of 2017 and update it for publication.

  Writing is a solitary business, and writers spend most of their “free” time in their brains, working out characters and plots and considering themes and motifs. The best support system for writers are strong critiquers who spot problems and give their honest opinions. The best support system that I have ever found are my two First Readers, Diane and Steve. I can never thank them enough to giving me encouragement and criticisms.

  As for other writers, the best advice I can give is “Never stop writing.” If you are pursuing traditional publishing, write the second and third and fourth books while the first one is submitted to editors and agents. If you are an indie writer, having come to the Indie World after giving up on the Trads or bypassing the Trads entirely, the greatest reward is having others read your writing and praise it.

  Treat your work professionally. If it’s the dream you want, pursue it like a job. Present the best typescript possible for your readers, and hire professionals to polish the manuscript before you publish it. People who are content and line editors enable your words to look as professional as you need them to be. But humans are visual, and the first attractors to books are the covers. Cover designers are more essential than editors. What’s the old saying: A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.” Well, that works for cover designers as well. The designers I found, after an 18-month search, are professional and creative and clever, adding details that I would never think of. Deranged Doctor Design can take a few glimmering words of direction and create a cover that captures the novel, whether in an abstract way or more realistically. They never fail to amaze and inspire me. Thanks, DDD!

  Contents

  A Few Words to Readers and Writers

  The Binding Spell, based on the Five Tenets that guide Wizardry

  Cherai’s Lament

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  The Binding Spell, based on the Five Tenets that guide Wizardry

  Earth :: Pearroc Seale, the Fae :: Serve and Pay, inked in gold and brown / Service

  Fire :: Camisse, Alstera’s aunt :: Risk your Life in Sacrifice, inked in gold and red / Sacrifice

  Water :: Romert, Alstera’s brother :: Free an Innocent and Live, inked in blue and silver / Freedom

  Air :: Arendt, a healer of Clan Letheina :: Restore the Balance, inked in white and silver / Balance

  Chaos :: Rombrey, Alstera’s great-uncle :: Refrain from Power to Atone, inked in black / Energy

  Cherai’s Lament

  Rose petals scattered `round

  Fallen from the dried bud

  Withered and mortal brown

  Sorrowing, Sorrowing

  Blackened tree on the ground

  Sooty ashes for its heart

  Burning fire brought it down

  Sorrowing, Sorrowing

  Night’s silence fallen down

  Your voice I hear no more

  A hollow shell, without a sound

  Sorrowing, Sorrowing

  Dream of death has me found

  Locked me in its cold clutch

  Twined with roots, round and round

  Sorrowing, Sorrowing

  Prologue

  Like an old ballad, Cherai’s dream sang the fragments of what she had lived and lost. The details, the words changed, but never the melody. She dreamed of the past, of passion, each measure working her deeper and deeper, a haunting song that lured her in then trapped her as the dream changed into nightmare.

  She dreamed of her beloved. They lay together, her wish that life had never fulfilled. Rose petals drifted onto their bodies while jewels of sunshine sparkled through the arbor. Rumor had it that he was a colonel now. She had evaded his dragoons once, when they tried to arrest her for her father’s assassination. She still wanted him, the dream he represented. Her bitter lot was to love him and be hunted by him.

  Then she dreamed of a glittering palace ball, once again with her beloved. Held safe in his strong arms, she never wanted to wake. He twirled her around. His black eyes claimed hers, and she avoided her father’s disapproving frown at Guy DuBarrée. Guy had few lands and no title, yet he dared to ask the daughter of a king’s advisor to dance. She danced with her beloved, safe in his strong arms. A whorl of gold and white, rich silks and sparkling jewels reflected in the mirrored walls and night-black windows.

  Her lover spun away in a turn of the court dance, and Cherai crashed through the black glass. Shards rained over her, through her. The dream re-shaped itself into the nightmare of her father’s corpose on a bier in the marble-cold palace chapel.

  Lightning limned these night-black windows. Thunder cracked overhead, crashing into her bones as the flashes forked into her brain. Painted statues watched with white marble eyes watched her. Four torchieres guarded the bier. An eerie phosphorescence tinged their flames, as if the storm’s eldritch energy charged them.

  Cherai stopped at the penitent’s rail. She gripped the bar. “Please, please,” she prayed. “Stop the nightmare. Let me wake up.”

  Yet something dragged her forward, hauled her up the dais steps and towed her to the shrouded body.

  A gust of wind guttered the torch flames. Shadows leaped down from the
vaulted darkness to dance on the barren walls. “No one is here,” she whispered. I have nothing to fear.” Still she shuddered, her fear stone-cold and bone-deep.

  For the eon of a heartbeat, Cherai stared at the shrouded corpse. For many dreams, for the first dreams, her nightmare had ended there, standing over her father’s murdered body. Not so with these last dreams. The last dreams had spiraled deeper.

  She touched the webby shroud, the crepe rotted by more than the passing of three years. The black cloth fell away. Her father lay frozen by death, bloodless and stiff, pale marble skin transformed by the phosphorescence.

  Two days before palace guards had informed her of his assassination. Her greatest dread then had been his blood staining her lover’s hands. She looked on a face that death had transformed into a serenity that he had lacked in life.

  Then the dream changed. It melted into nightmare. The corpse’s eyes opened, and her father tried to speak.

  Green phosphorescence glinted in dead eyes. Garbled words worked out of his mouth. “Cherai. . .it is you. You came. . .not too late. Not too late to save—.”

  “You are dead.”

  “Not too late,” he repeated.

  Scripted words, like a palace masque, written for the king’s jaded tastes. Once Cherai had dreamed the first nightmare, the word had never changed—just as the nightmare never changed. It danced its macabre pattern deeper and deeper into non-reality. It crazed true memory. And the next time she dreamed, the nightmare began in other pathways of her mind. It snared more memories and spun its tangling web of fear. A web she could not wake from, not until the nightmare released her.

  Her father’s green-glowing eyes transfixed her. His mouth twisted. Cherai touched his shoulder reassuringly, but the corpse was cold and stiff and wasted. Below his ear a stab-wound oozed black blood.

  “What is it, Papa?” Whether she wanted to speak or not, her lines were always spoken, just as her father’s lines were.

  “Not too late.”

  “Papa, what is it? What can I do?”

  “You. . .keep it safe.” Black blood stained his parched lips. “Protect it. . .for the little princess, for. . .queen that she is.”

  “The princess? King Edvard is st-still alive and hale. What am I to keep? What is it?”

  “Keep safe. . .hid it. . .hollow. . .Muirée. For the little queen.”

  “Papa, what is it? What did you hide? Where did you hide it? Papa!”

  She reached to touch him, but his eyes rolled back. Black blood bubbled out of his mouth and nose, his ears, the wound.

  And Cherai jerked awake.

  An owl hooted. The dying fire crackled. Blood pounded in her ears, nearly drowning the sounds around their camp. Like a frightened hare, paralyzed by danger, she cowered under her blanket until the flames replaced the nightmare seared on her eyelids.

  “A dream, only a dream,” she muttered, over and over, until logic and reality reasserted themselves and her pulse no longer drummed through her brain.

  She was awake, out of the dream. The nightmare released her whenever she crossed some preordained strand. Greater terror lurked ahead, and she had escaped it for yet another night. She still had her sanity—until the next nightmare.

  Cherai levered herself erect.

  On the other side of the fire the bundled mound that was Raul slept. They were bound for Feuton, and he had a scheme that would pay their winter’s lodging. Three years ago Cherai, Comtesse Muirée, had not needed to scheme ways to survive. Cherai the bard had schemed to keep cold and hunger at bay. For Raul’s plan, she would need quick wits and a steady nerve. Tonight’s dream had shattered both.

  Fearing the nightmare’s return if she slept, Cherai wrapped an arm around one bent knee and fed twigs and small branches to the flames. The greedy fire licked over the new fuel. Sparks danced up, drifting and swirling, then winked out in the night’s chill.

  She tried to untangle dream from memory and nightmare. After her father’s assassination, she had dreamed of him, strange dreams mixed with old memories, disturbing yet not nightmarish. In time, those dreams faded. Yet this season, as the land wept for the dying year, new dreams began to haunt her. Nightly she dreamed of her lost past, of people and events that she had fled. The beginning dreams gave her no reason to fear, but all too quickly memories fractured into the repeating nightmare that warped reality with a grotesque insanity.

  Sometimes the transition to nightmare deposited her outside the chapel, the rain weeping on her and for her. In others, she shifted to the marbled sanctuary, as cold as her father’s corpse. No matter how her sleep began, her nightmarish destination was always that shrouded bier. And each night, no matter how she tried to wake herself, she was compelled another step further into the nightmare.

  The first time her father’s corpse had animated, Cherai had screamed, in dream and reality, waking both herself and Raul on the other side of the fire. As weeks passed, she became inured to the abrupt transition to the chapel, to her fear of the time-webbed bier, even to the shock of his green-lit eyes.

  If the nightmare were a vision or a visitation from her father’s ghost, what did he try to tell her? What was so important that she had to dream over and over and over, each time the same and each time advancing a step further, gaining one more line then another and another until she had all the fragmented sentences, until the corpse eyes rolled back, until black blood seeped out and the three-year-old shroud disintegrated into sticky tatters than tangled around her hands.

  The corpse urged her to go to Muirée. There, far from where her father had died, she would find the reason for his assassination. Cherai yearned to obey. But three years ago she had fled to save herself. She could not go, not even to rid herself of this haunting. Until the people who ordered her father’s assassination were found, until the king lifted the warrant on her, her self-imposed exile must continue.

  The nightmare was tied to her father’s position in the triumvirate that advised the king. And his assassination was tied to the subsequent execution of the queen.

  How will I ever find the truth? How will I ever separate dream from nightmare? Why do I dream now, three years after? Why this season?

  An assassin had stolen her father and destroyed her world. She had clawed out a life as a bard walking Vaermonde’s roads, with a pack for her pillow and the cold ground for her bed. She would not lose that life for a rash foray to her abandoned past.

  No matter what happened in the dream.

  . ~ . ~ . ~ .

  Alstera huddled in her cloak to escape the wind’s dank bite. Even a wizard with bound powers could spark a fire, but she dared not take the risk. In open country on this dark night, the flames would shine for miles. She had few protections against outlaws and none at all against her pursuers or sorcery. This fire would not ignite so easily, for the autumn rains had soaked land and brush. She would need power to get the wet tinder hot enough to burn. A flame sparked with power would strike a signal fire for the wizard who had pursued her for weeks. Only a fool could miss such a clear signal, and she did not think her hunders were fools.

  She had plunged into the marsh to lose the two-legged hounds tracking her. After a week crossing bogs that pretended to be land, spooked by eldritch creatures with glaring eyes and misshapen limbs, she didn’t dare return to the marshes, not at Dragon Moon, not with her bound powers, not alone. Her weak wards barely withstood the strange bog creatures. Their eyes gleamed in the darkness, silver as the vanished moon. Their claws clicked together, more lethal than other feral animals.

  Three nights ago she had faced a nightmare hunter with marbled eyes, red-tipped claws, and slavering fangs. It hadn’t crossed her wards, but it had tested them. Repeatedly. And Alstera decided then to get out of the Weirded Lands.

  Tomorrow she would cross into Vaermonde. She didn’t know if she had shaken her pursuers off with her coiled and recoiled trek or if she had lost them in the marsh. She sensed nothing on her backtrail, but she didn’t think the bogs fo
r the respite.

  Shivering with cold, she reached for the sticks she had gathered. Hard-won caution stayed her hand, and she tucked cold fingers back under her arm. She hadn’t come this far to risk losing her head for a little comfort. She was well enough. It could be worse. It could still be raining. And this little glen sheltered her very well.

  She had stumbled upon the hollow after dark and huddled into its scant shelter while a strong wind swept away rain clouds. She could see no danger, nothing to trouble her at all, nothing except the tattoos shackling her wrists and her power.

  Five tattoos, linked into chains around both wrists. Sometimes, when she had hoarded the dribs and drabs of her power, the five tattoos glittered with power. Five tenets of wizardry, each one broken by her and chaining her power until she served penance. Service, sacrifice, freedom, balance, and energy, the base potentials of each element. Reminders of the destruction she had wreaked when she tampered with spells forbidden to Enclave wizards.

  She was lucky she still lived. Nevil, guilty of fewer crimes, did not. She was lucky her clan had kept her crimes secret and took upon themselves her binding and punishment. She was lucky the Wizard Enclave hadn’t ripped rank and honors from her family because of her crimes.

  And if her pursuers caught her and dragged her home? Without her greater powers she could not evade a wizard-led hunt. Gage’s family, wanting justice for his death, had likely offered a bounty. Her lesser cousins would have leaped to earn coins for hunting her down. Ferrant and Allard, the so-honorable sons of her scrupulous uncle Raigeis, would disdain the gold and hunt her solely to redeem the family’s reputation.

  She wanted to wail her grief to the night. She wanted to scream that her punishment wasn’t fair. They had no right to shackle her greater powers then banish her. Yet she had wailed enough in gaol. She had screamed enough after they used power to ink the tenets into her skin and soul.