“Enough,” said Cathal. Generally, he tried to be reasonable with his men. He felt little inclination toward reason on this, but forced more explanation out regardless. “She’s helping us. You know of Fergus.”
“Is she truly helping, sir? And for what cause?” The tensing of Cathal’s muscles—or mayhap the way his lips drew back from his teeth before he could stop the incipient snarl—must have told Roger what sort of ground his question had landed on. “Meaning no offense, sir. None at all. It’s only that she’s foreign, and she’s odd, and aye, she’s pretty-mannered, but foreign women…”
If he closed his eyes, Cathal could still see the bruises on Sophia’s throat or the ring of frostbitten skin on her leg. If he didn’t stop himself, he would recall, clear as day, her body on the floor and the demon crouched atop her.
He could hear her voice much more clearly than Roger’s, thick with anger and conviction:What would I be if I turned and ran now?
“She is helping.” Cathal said it with infinite patience, or thought he did, but the words came from deep in his chest. “She’s an honorable woman. A woman with courage. And I trust her a damn sight more than most. You can remember that. You can tell your fellows too.”
And when Roger hurried off, Cathal turned and hit the stone wall—not with his full strength, but hard enough to split the skin over his knuckles. It could be that he’d managed that conversation poorly. Anger wouldn’t necessarily have helped; it might have just convinced Roger—and whoever he’d spoken to—that Sophia had too much influence. There might have been better, more delicate ways to handle the matter. He couldn’t think of any.
Waiting at Loch Arach, taking care of it until his father or Douglas could take the reins again, was less burdensome than it had been originally, thanks to her. It still wasn’t where he belonged, nor where he wanted to remain.
He wasn’t, Cathal realized, precisely certain where thatwas.
Twenty-four
Again, she was up a tree. Again, the shadow-things gathered below her. The dead forest stretched far beyond, and the castle lay at its distant edge, dark and almost as lifeless.
This time was different. The branch hadn’t broken; indeed, the tree’s limbs had all been sturdy, and Sophia thought that there’d actually been less space between them than there had the times before. The shadow-thing that had grabbed for her ankle hadn’t even broken the skin.
She’d considered fighting them. The world, whatever it was, had started responding to her will. She might have been able to make herself a sword or a bow. Possibly here she’d even be able to use either—but Sophia thought not. For one thing, her body seemed still to be hers, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, and she saw the sense in that. The body was one of the first and closest ways that a person knew themselves, and thus logically the hardest to change. For another, she didn’t know enough about weapons to know how to make herself good with them. For a third, the direct exercise of will itself was still new to her, and she used it clumsily. Her efforts before had been shouting or shoving, not delicate manipulation.
Last and most important, the world might not have belonged to Valerius entirely, but Sophia would have wagered that the shadow-thingsdid. Either they were his creatures, dual-natured and thus more at home than she was in the world of the forest, or they were direct projections of his will. Unless she had no choice, she would not set herself against him. She’d never do it and hope to win, nor even to survive.
And so she’d fled. She lay wrapped around a branch near the top of her tree, looked down at the moving mass of shadow, and then peered out across the forest.
She didn’t want to go to the castle. Then again, she didn’t want to be in the dream at all, and there certainly was no more inviting destination in sight. Now too, she wondered whether the forbidding appearance of the place might not be intentional. If so, if Valerius didn’t want her there, it certainly merited further investigation.
Very well, then. Options.
Giant birds—or dragons, in fact—would be difficult. Sophia had yet to try to create anything living, but it didn’t feel like a wonderful idea or even necessarily a possible one. If the shadows were dual-natured and pulled into the dream by Valerius’s magic, then trying to create anything sufficiently dragon-like might even force Cathal into the forest world, another only-in-dire-circumstances plan.
Bracing herself against the branch, Sophia summoned her will, stared at the castle, and tried just tothinkherself there. Very briefly she felt the fabric of the world respond—a deeply strange sensation—but it was as though she leaned against a very thick door. The frame shifted a bit, then shifted back. There was no real give. She hadn’t really expected any—she’d had to climb the tree herself, after all—but she would have felt foolish not trying.
Given that she didn’t much fancy going back down the tree and facing the shadow-things, there was only one other way forward.
Sophia stared at the open space between her and the castle and thought of bridges. She pictured slabs of stone, wide enough for horses and carts to cross; sturdy arches; high railings. Other images came to mind too—rotted, gapped planks, dangling from a few strands of rope—and she tried to ignore them, but they wouldn’t go.
As she focused on the images, she felt herself push with her mind again, and once more was struck by how odd it was, and how little control she still felt she had. How did one learn to work limbs that had never existed before? How did the mind learn that such a sensation meansgrasp, and another meanshit, and a third, elsewhere, meansstand? What did that process feel like? Perhaps children forgot so quickly because the memories were so much work.
Logically, her mind couldn’t ache, and thinking couldn’t make her sweat, but Sophia’s forehead was wet by the time the first side of the bridge appeared, and a low, muscular-feeling pain was starting in her temples. Logic didn’t govern everything, particularly not here.
Slowly the bridge took shape. It was a patchwork beast. Sections were stone, others wood, a few like nothing more than solidified light, and the division was not always neat. Looking out across it, Sophia saw a patch near the start where a thin rope handhold supported an immense stone block. Her eyes practically crossed as she looked at it.
She thought it would hold. She hoped it would hold. She hoped that falling in a dream didn’t make one die upon hitting ground, or if it did, that Alice would wake her before that moment arrived. Her hands were sweating too now, and the stomach she didn’t properly have threatened to disgorge a dinner that she’d never eaten in this world.
The edge of the bridge was a few inches away from her, perhaps a foot below. Sophia wished she’d spent more time in trees when she was a girl and less in her books. Holding on with both hands, she let her body dangle from the branch, swung forward, and dropped.
It was stone, and it hurt. Her skirt rode up, letting her scrape skin off her legs from knee down to shin. The impact shuddered its way through her body. But the bridge held firm.
Keep going. You don’t know how long it’ll last.
Her legs weren’t broken. Sophia pushed herself up to her feet and began to make her way across. She went as quickly as she dared, but it still felt slow, particularly on the mismatched parts, putting one foot gingerly in front of the other like a child walking a rooftree.
She knew not to look down, and of course she wanted to, even more than she would have on a normal bridge. It helped not at all that the view straight ahead of her was itself disconcerting. The sky was like a festering wound, and near the edge, where the outlines of the trees and castle showed up against it, Sophia thought she saw movement or perhaps gaps. Not everything joined as it should have. It was no pleasant sight, but there was nowhere else to look, and she didn’t dare close her eyes.
When she set foot on the first translucent part of the bridge, she truly wanted to. The railing and the bridge itself didn’t quite feel real either. They bore her weight and guided her, but there was a softness about them, a sense that they weren’t entirely solid, and every fiber in Sophia’s being screamed that this was a bad idea. Abandoning her better judgment, she crossed that section with more haste than the others; she hadn’t thought that flimsy planks could be such a relief as she then found them.
