“I don’t see how it could be anybody else’s. I saw you with me.”
Kessian’s cutlery scraped the plate, making my teeth ache. “How could you have been both in the woods watching the flutist, and on the shore being drawn into the river by the song?”
I finally looked at Kessian after avoiding his eyes all through breakfast. The trace rune on his temple glowed with a silvery light. “Maybe that spell can tell us?”
An hour later, Emery and Ambrose greeted us with a knock at the door.
“Sleep well?” Ambrose asked brightly. When we both cringed and muttered noncommittally, he added, “I’ll take that as a no.”
“Follow-up question, shall we take a look at the trace spell?” Emery said.
“How exactly does this work?” I asked delicately.
“It will give us an inclination as to how the dreams function. Whether it’s letting you share dreams, memories, a window into another realm. Hard to say what it will reveal until I perform the transfer.”
“It’s not a … recreation of the dream, is it?” I asked while Kessian avoided my eye like it’d turn him to stone.
“No, no. That would involve a memory spell. I have done that, but it would be useless in this case. I’d learn no more from it than you have from experiencing the dream. What was it about?”
We told him the non-pornographic half and left the rest out, relieved we weren’t about to cause a strange, magical variant of public indecency.
I leaned against the counter, twiddling my thumbs while Emery prepared the second half of the spell. I assumed that’s what he was doing, anyway, as he soaked a piece of parchment in a concoction that looked a mix of tea and soup.
When he removed the parchment, it was dry. He held it up in front of Kessian. “Excuse me. This part is a bit awkward.”
He flattened the parchment to the rune on Kessian’s temple and scrubbed a knuckle over the spot, as if trying to transfer a temporary tattoo. When he pulled the parchment away, the rune had stuck to the parchment and promptly began to disassemble, the ink spreading like ants across the page until it arranged into runic words.
I puzzled over it. I wasn’t adept at reading runes quickly, having never been formally educated and making up most of my spells through intuition and experimentation. Emery’s eyes glossed over the words before he sat back.
“This ability of yours is not average magic, Kessian. It’s far more complicated. According to the trace, you aren’t merely visiting Taliesin’s dreams or sharing your own. You’re tapping into the wild magic of the strid. It’s acting through you as a conduit, showing you things deliberately. Both past events and future ones.”
A selection of runes I could translate stuck out to me. “It calls him a time walker. Not like—?”
“Time travel,” Kessian said, huffing in disbelief. “Through these dreams, I can time travel?”
Emery flexed his fingers. “This is where it gets a little messy. If I’m reading this right, you can’t walk through time except from a specific location. A location only referred to here as the Bloodstream.”
“Doesn’t sound like a pleasant place,” Ambrose put in.
I silently agreed. The very notion of time travel set me ill at ease. My life had already gone off the rails when time was a chronological affair; I didn’t want to imagine how much worse it could become if I mucked about with the past and future.
But if I was to deal with my wraith problem, I’d have to find out more. Perhaps my Grandad’s research could shine a light on it all. He had been obsessed with clocks. Maybe they were related to time travel and this “Bloodstream.”
“It doesn’t get any more specific about where this Bloodstream is located?” Kessian asked.
“No, but I believe these dreams of yours are like clues. Breadcrumbs you can follow to find answers. This could be why the strid gifted you with the ability in the first place; it meant for you to have it, meant for you to meet and help one another,” Emery said.
“That’s … incredible.” There was something the matter with me, because while Kessian sounded delighted by the revelation, my heart sank.
I didn’t trust in fate. If the events of my life had happened by design, that only made me hate the strid more. So many of my choices had been taken from me, so I was only left with one: run away.
The past few days, I’d wrestled with my desire to kiss Kessian again, to let him in further than I’d let anyone for the past nine years.
I wish this night would last forever.
Futures were not fixed. Plenty of people who visited the spring saw events that never came to pass.
But plenty of them did.
