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We did not spend as long as I would have wanted with Jackdaw. The revelation of my connection to her brother, and her to my estranged lover, had sat between us like a cactus. Neither of us was willing to fully embrace it just yet, for fear that it would draw blood we were not yet willing to spill. She had asked me the small questions, the expected questions. Did he still live? Did he know she still lived? There was an old bitterness there, though, one that she had not yet worked through. It would have been easier if she had lost her brother in a wholly normal way, but she had lost him because of his brutality, and that blade of truth was too sharp for her to walk across just yet.

For my part, I asked her very little. I had to stay focused. I had to keep moving forward or the tar pits of what I had lost and what could have been would suck me down and bury me alive. So, I took the shovel first and buried it—Jackdaw and her connection to Emrys, and what it would have meant to him if I had some way of sharing it with him—in the deepest hole I could find.

Our procession picked its way through the Nightmare wilds with a plodding consistency. Brittle Spear rode beside me, guiding me quietly on how to handle the horse. There was something soothing about the ability to maneuver on my own, especially since I had not enjoyed the same freedom in the human world.

In the human world, a car was a luxury I could never have afforded, so I never bothered to learn how to drive. It wasn’t like I had the money for lessons, tests, or the car itself to take the driver’s test. The barrier to entry to the simple freedom that so many others enjoyed with no thought at all was so far beyond my meager ability to earn money that walking and the occasional bus ride were the best I could do. Even that had often been too expensive. Walking shoes were hard to come by, and the ones I could get my hands on barely lasted more than a few months.

The horse I mounted every day, being gifted to me, would have been a stone around my neck in the human world, drowning me in the millpond. But here in Magh Meall, I could brush her down and let her feed on the tall red and gold grasses at night and still enjoy the freedom she provided. The lack of strings and expectations for the gift had thawed my ire, and I was back to amiably chatting with Brittle Spear.

The first night we didn’t share a tent was miserable. Nightmares in the land of Nightmares felt almost too cliché, but they were stronger than I had ever experienced before. I felt the blood of Fae I’d never met before spatter across my face. I felt the wind of an ax cutting past me as if it were real. I remembered feeling the abject grief dig its claws in and carve out my center as if I knew each of the Fae who were murdered before me. Some of them looked mildly familiar, but it was just a flash of green eyes here, a splash of oak-brown and gold hair there. Traits that could be entirely common among the Fae, and I wouldn’t even know it.

The faceless Fae were the worst, though. Terror. Confusion. Horror at being unable to stop myself from murdering them. A woman with golden hair flying around her head like a shimmering Medusa that I was meant to recognize, but I didn’t. Even when I smashed her head against a stone brick wall with a giant hammer, I felt like I should know who she was, like I was meant to, but I couldn’t place her face anywhere in the archives of my memory.

Goose had found my cold bed and yanked me from the nightmare’s claws by dropping the full weight of his massive, bony head on my own. I screamed, my head twisting into the head of the golden Medusa when I came awake, pain radiating through me.

Goose was up on his feet, twisting and snarling. Black teeth fully capable of piercing through the armor I had worn in the dream, snapping and biting at the air as if to warn whatever specter had come for me.

The light from a lantern, warm as breakfast egg yolks, ignited around me, filling my pavilion, and before I could calm Goose, Brittle Spear appeared, naked, within my pavilion on a breeze of falling leaves that came from nowhere. His russet hair was mussed from sleep, knots and snags twisting its length. Two black serrated blades, the length of my arm, twitched at the ready to destroy whoever had intruded on my sleep. His eyes were the most haunting part, though; gone was the black cosmos cut through with the outline of tree branches. In their place were silver orbs set into his head like brutal gems that could rip the soul from his adversary with but a single look. They boiled with barely restrained wrath and offense.

“What is it, my Pearl? Where are they?” he hissed, his voice the booming thump of massive logs clattering together.

“Will you two calm the fuck down?” I snapped, stomping my foot to get both of their attention.

“I heard you scream. I came immediately,” he explained as if it were perfectly reasonable for his delicious, partially erect cock to be swinging in my tent.

Goose leapt from my bed and began prowling the tight spaces, his nose sniffing at every seam and crack at the edges of the canvas.

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” I sighed. “It was just a nightmare. It’s fine.”

His brow knitted itself into an irritated scowl. “Which one?”

“What?”

“Which of my nightmares has haunted you?”

I rolled my eyes and flopped back on the lavish bed that he had insisted that I take. “Not a nightmare creature. Just a bad dream. That’s all.”

The vicious swords lowered just a fraction of an inch. He looked to Goose, who seemed satisfied that he had found no intruders and was licking his paws. “Even a dream can be an invasion of the mind; they could have found you a tasty morsel. What was the dream?”

Scrubbing my hand down my face to push the sleep that I wouldn’t be returning to from my eyes, I glared at him. “I don’t know, it was two different dreams inside of a dream. In one, I was unable to move but forced to watch soldiers kill a bunch of Fae. In the other one, I was moving but not in control of my body, and I was killing Fae with missing faces. It . . . it seemed so real. Like living in a memory.”

The swords dissolved like his clothes had, turning to dust and blowing away in an unfelt wind. “That is a strange dream, my Pearl. Have you had it before?”

“No. Now will you please leave so I can sleep?” I pouted, my whole body aching from the hours on a horse, and the only way I could keep up the pace was if I got proper sleep.

He hesitated, unsure if he wanted to press his protection of me or to give me space. The war between the two choices raged across naked muscles that twitched in the warm lantern light.

“I will sit at the flap to your pavilion, my Pearl. If it is the creatures of the Nightmare lands come to feast upon you, I will see that they are dispatched. If you require me, merely cry out, and I will come.” His voice was soft and apologetic, as if he were sorry he could do nothing more.

Breeches wove themselves around his legs and waist. A cloak fell around his shoulders as he worked the wooden toggle lock for the massive door to the canvas pavilion, and I was sad to see the well-muscled, toned globes of his ass disappear behind it when he left.

I got no more sleep that night. The dream did not return, just a soft, pillowy, euphoric nothingness that tasted sticky on my mind and was tinted dark purple.

I didn’t risk the nightmare returning after that. At night, Brittle Spear and I would play a pantomime dance of independence. Each of us would go to our respective tents and perform our lonely nightly routines: washing, scrubbing the road dirt from our skin with pitchers and basins, brushing out our clothing, and slipping into crisp, fresh night linens. We’d extinguish our lanterns and let night fall in a silent blanket over the camp.

I would lie awake in my bed, staring up at the massive spokes of the center pole, telling myself I could fall asleep. I could close my eyes and fall back into the dark purple cloud that haunted me when I was alone. Every night, I would convince myself I could do so.

And every night, I would lose the fight against the urge to leave my bed. Some nights, I would get as far as my own tent flap before I turned back. Sometimes I would get to his, chastising myself for being ridiculous.