“What? No. It was rotten—” I choked as its taste clung to my tongue. Grabbing the nearest cup, I motioned for the Bringer to fill it. “Fill this—please—ugh.” I took a drink before the liquid had even pooled halfway up the glass, desperate to rid the foulness from my mouth.
Except I almost spitthatout, too.
I hadn’t taken more than a few sips of wine in my entire life, but the taste of it never bothered me. No, normal wine was fine. It was the fact that the Bringer’s concoction tasted watery, mud-like, and vaguely sour.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
I gaped at him. “Do you not taste it—or smell it? It’s all wrong.”
At first, the food and drink appeared perfect, pristine. But now the truth of each smell was unmistakable: The fruit was rotten, the meat was burnt leather, and the dessert looked to be powdered with ash, not sugar.
“Ah.” His eyes widened behind his helm, a rare glimpse of mortification dawning there. “My ability to conjure food was stunted in the castle. I may have forgotten the taste of things.”
His sense of taste was forgotten? More like absolutelydestroyed.
“How long has it been since you ate something from outside of the Dream Realm?”
The Bringer stopped to consider, still drinking from his glass. “Five hundred years, give or take.”
My mouth dropped open. “Five hundredyears? Maker, stop drinking that—you’ll poison yourself.”
“It is fine enough for my tastes.” He avoided my attempts at stealing his drink, waving the glass just out of my reach. Still, when he took another sip, his mouth twitched in displeasure. “But if it does not suit yours, craft your own.”
I inspected an empty cup, willing it to fill to the brim with a rich, fragrant wine. When nothing happened, I sat back in frustration. “It’s not working.”
“In my castle, you walked into an entire dream from memory. A cup of wine or a slice of bread should be simple.”
“Coming from someone who can’t even make a strawberry taste edible,” I muttered, earning a stiffening of the Bringer’s posture. “What?”
He moved closer, the wine stain on his mouth looking more and more like blood. “You insult me casually for someone who desires my knowledge.”
“Show me how, then. It can be the first thing you teach me. As per our bargain.”
“That’s what you want your first lesson to be? A tutorial on the art of food?”
“I’m just interested in the act of creating, is all,” I said, bristling.
And it was true. I wanted to be free from the Dream Realm, but part of me also wanted to learn more about it. What it meant, how it worked—how to move within it and become powerful enough to withstand a demon’s attack. Dreaming had proved itself to be a double-edged sword of beauty and pain, reality and illusion, and I couldn’t deny that parts of it were fascinating. If that meant cooperating with the Shadow Bringer, then so be it.
“Are you, now?” With a slight furrow to his brow, the Bringer grabbed my empty cup. “Perhaps I’ll attempt to explain. But I expect you to produce something edible.”
I couldn’t help it. I almost smiled.
He must really miss food—even though he’s trying to hide it.
“Then I’ll make you the finest wine in all the world,” I said.
He tilted his head, nearly smiling himself. “We will see.”
The Shadow Bringer explained the process with a surprising amount of care, detailing the importance of past experiences and memories as key ingredients when crafting something in a dream. Even if the creation was a new object or special ability—something like wings, or erupting fire from one’s fingertips—it needed to be drawn from memory to be fully functional. Effective wings, for example, required the memory of birds in flight, the feel of feathers, and the sensation of jumping and falling. But when honed correctly, imagination could be even stronger. A dreamer with a strong imagination could craft extraordinary, lifelike creations, drawing from thoughts as powerful as memory itself. Untamed, however, imagination held risk. An imagined sword might erupt into a serpent. Or a candle. An inferno, even.
As I concentrated on the glass in front of me, I leaned into both techniques, remembering a summer drink of plum juice and crushed rose petals but also imagining what it might feel like to taste liquid silk. The glass filled slowly as I decided upon the right color, finally settling on a shimmering purpled ruby.
I drew the glass to my lips, expecting something dreadful.
At the first sip, it tasted wild. Fragrant rose, oak, and plum. It wasn’t wine, exactly, but it wasn’t juice, either. And the texture was exactly as I had imagined: Softer than silk upon the tongue, it slid down my throat like a caress, tingling as it moved. The Shadow Bringer must have noticed the delight in my expression—or the rapidly dwindling liquid in my cup—because he snatched it from my fingertips, looking quite smug as he brought it to his lips.
“Hey, I wasn’t finished!”
