Dream King by Elise Knight
21
Aethelu let me wash and change in her house before we set off. The bathroom was just that—a bath that filled the whole room. I stripped down and stepped in to find that there were no taps.
“Is this one of those fill-with-a-bucket type of baths?” I shouted through the door to Aethelu. Immediately, I found myself knee-deep in hot water.
“It’s one of those fill-with-magic type of baths,” she replied with a chuckle. “Is it warm enough?”
I sat down and let the water go right up to my chin, savoring the heat. I’d never really been cold in this world, but I’d never really been warm either, just stuck perpetually between the two.
“Mmm,” I groaned as the heat seeped into my bones. After the bath, Aethelu let me borrow more of her clothes, giving me a whole bundle of them, which I wasn’t sure I’d ever use. Maybe Dream had a tragic back story, but at the end of the day, that didn’t absolve him of the shit he’d laid on me. The red door was ever-present in my mind throughout the walk back to it. I was surprised to find the clearing empty.
“I’ll be fine from here,” I assured Aethelu.
She hesitated. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you until the king comes back?” Aethelu asked, always full of concern. “You never did tell me why you were running away from him again.”
I shook my head. I needed to see him alone. If he hated me, then so be it, but I didn’t hate him anymore. I wasn’t sure how I felt about him. My emotions had become a rollercoaster that was threatening to get away from me. When Aethelu left, a heaviness pulled at my chest. She was my only friend in this place, but I couldn’t predict how Dream would react to her being here without him knowing.
Not that I had to worry. He didn’t come back that night, nor the next. I survived by drinking the water at the stream and foraging for what little food I could find. The threat of the wolveries was enough to ensure I didn’t wander too far from the small camp. Even more noticeably absent was Raven. Wherever they both were, I hoped they were together. Just the thought of Dream being alone for so long was enough to pull at my already pulverized heart.
On the third night, I woke up to the sound of rustling leaves. I opened my eyes a slit to see a familiar figure sitting down across the campfire. The doors had started moving again. I didn’t need to look, to know. The sound they made with each movement was enough.
I watched him through my eyelashes as he took a seat. If ever there was a tortured man, this was it. He sat with his head in his hands, his hair a mess. I’d never seen him anything other than perfect before now. Sadness engulfed me at the sight of him. He looked exhausted, done with everything. Bereft, lost and haunted in quiet despair. This couldn’t be the King of Dreams, the huge masculine hulk of a man who’d dragged me kicking and screaming into his world, then just as abruptly kicked me right back out of it. I resisted the urge to go over to him, to offer him comfort. He was looking the way he did because of me.
His eyes flicked over to me, and I clamped my own shut. My breathing increased, and I tried to pass it off as being in a deep sleep.
“Are you awake?”
His voice was unusually low, like a quiet hum. To answer him and give myself away would mean I’d have to have a conversation I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
I chose to pretend sleep and worry about that conversation in the morning. As I was already breathing like I was asleep, the edges of my conscious began to darken. As I began to fall into real sleep, I was sure I heard him utter the words “I’m sorry.”
I woke to him gone and the doors still again. For some reason, It had not bothered me the previous two nights. I’d always known he would come back, but now he had come back and then gone again. Fear crept into my soul and with it, the question of whether he’d ever come back again. He’d been keeping the world running for years. Both worlds. His and mine. Maybe I’d pissed him off to such an extent that he didn’t care about either anymore and was leaving both to rot. But then that word he’d said last night. I could have sworn he’d said sorry, but then I could have dreamed it. Dreaming about Dream. The irony of it didn’t escape me.
I stood and brushed myself down, letting the dirt from the ground fall from my dress. Maybe he was through one of the doors? I walked through the gaps to the rows of parallel doors.
It was impossible to know if they had just moved and Dream was inside one or if they had died, doomed to be still forever. I held out my hand to the closest door handle. As I did, a noise to my right startled me, and I pulled back my hand as though it had been electrocuted. Dream emerged from the red door, his arms full of food.
We both stood stock still, staring at each other. Like we were frozen in time. My heart pounded, and my body shook as Raven flew over my head and then settled on the nearest door frame.
“I was trying to see if you were inside,” I said lamely, knowing I’d been caught doing the one thing that was bound to bring on more of Dream’s wrath.
His expression didn’t change much. There was no anger in it, not even quiet resignation.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, nodding to the food in his hands. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d been expecting him to say, but I ran with it.
“Starving,” I answered truthfully. My stomach had gotten used to crappy forest food over these past weeks, but that didn’t mean I liked it.
We sat back in the camp area. He passed me a plate on which was somebody’s breakfast by the looks of it. The plate had an old-fashioned pattern around the edge of it, like ones my grandmother used to have or ones you might find in a thrift store.
Why was I focussing on the pattern on the chinaware instead of on the food? Oh, because things were weird between Dream and me, and I didn’t know what to do or say. The last time I’d seen him, he’d blamed me for everything wrong with the world, and I’d stalked off with the intention of murdering the guy.
How things had changed. I shot him a glance as I picked up the cream cheese-covered bagel. He was laying the rest of the food on the ground neatly and deliberately. Two bottles of coke, a bag of chips, some chocolate bars. My kind of meal—one full of delicious calories that I didn’t have to cook.
He was deliberately not looking my way. Was this contrition? It was hard to tell. He kept his emotions in check pretty well. All except the bad ones. Those he was quite capable of showing.
“Why didn’t you stop it?” I asked, knowing full well I was walking a thin line with him. I could have started with ‘thanks for the bagel,’ or “what a nice day we’re having,” but no, I had to go and start an argument. What was it with me and my big mouth?
He stopped what he was doing but didn’t look up. His silence unnerved me, had my flight or fight instincts on full charge.
“I could no more stop them than you could,” he finally said quietly.
The anger I’d felt toward him for so long evaporated, to be replaced by something else, something much worse. Sadness. I saw him as a small boy, left alone in a big palace. His father dead, his mother overcome with grief, having to do this ridiculous job alone. My heart broke for him.
“I saw Aethelu. She told me everything.”
That was the point at which he looked up at me, his dark eyes filled with the reflection of the stars that shone through the forest canopy above his head.
“Aethelu doesn’t know everything. Nobody knows everything, but me and...”
“Your brother?” I hazarded a guess. “She said he lives in the Nightmare Court. Does that mean he watches over nightmares while you watch over dreams?”
He licked his lips as though I’d said something distasteful. “In a manner of speaking. I don’t want you to mention him to me again. I told you. Aethelu knows nothing. You take too much of her word, but I barely know her. She’s one of my subjects. Nothing more.”
Aethelu had said as much to me, but with a lack of anyone else in his life, Aethelu was probably the closest thing he had to a friend. Even if they didn’t see each other very often.
“If your brother watches over the nightmares, and you watch over the dreams, why did that last one slip through? Why did you have to see it?”
He looked right at me, as though I already should know the answer. And then it dawned on me. It wasn’t the woman playing back a memory in her mind. The dream had been that of the bastard that had raped her. It was a dream and not a nightmare because he’d enjoyed it. The thought made my stomach curdle.
“It was him.”
Dream nodded. “It was him. I hate him. I hate a good many humans that are like him, and yet, I watch them night after night, month after month, year after year, I watch the hatred you all hold for your fellow humans, and it makes me wonder if my mother wasn’t right in the first place.”
“I hated it as much as you did,” I objected. “It made me sick to my stomach.”
He nodded his head and spoke, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. “I know. As soon as I stormed off, I knew I was wrong about the whole thing, but when I returned, you’d gone. I couldn’t find you. I thought you’d gone back through the red door. I hoped you had, and I hated that you had at the same time and...I don’t know!”
He threw the last item to the ground - a chocolate bar and stood. This time when he made to stride off, I jumped up, knocking my bagel to the ground.
“Don’t,” I said, hurrying over to him.
He turned to face me, his eyes burning with both fear and anger. “Don’t what?”
I took a deep breath. “Don’t run away from me.”
His eyes were steely. “You are one to talk about running away. You ran away from your world, and you’ve run away from me. Twice if I remember correctly.”
I hung my head. He wasn’t wrong. I’d spent my life running away. “Yeah, and look where it got me. A shitty apartment with peeling wallpaper and no money for food. Neither of us has to run away.”
He was silent for a second, the brooding man-hulk that he was, but then he sat back down, picked up a bagel, and tore into it with his teeth.
“Aethelu told me about your mother,” I started.
“Don’t mention her to me again,” he warned, and I could see that he meant it.
Not that I was surprised after what she had done to him. So his mother and his brother were both off the conversation menu, and I had a feeling bringing his father up wouldn’t help matters either.
His eyes were fixed down at the ground in front of him. “It’s time for you to go home, Ana.”
“What? No!”
He looked up. There was anguish in his gaze. “Why do you want to stay here? You’ve had plenty of opportunities to leave. I’ve...I’ve not treated you well. You have no reason to be here, and yet you stay. Why?”
I swallowed. Now was the time to tell him about my mother, but I couldn’t because that wasn’t really it. Not anymore. “ I stayed because I was worried about you.” So help me god, it was the truth. I hadn’t gone through the red door these past two days because then he would be well and truly alone, and the thought tore me up.
He stood up, running his hands through his hair as he did. “No. This cannot be. You don’t even know me. Why would you worry about me?” His voice was harsh. “No one worries about me. I’m not worth it.”
I stood up and took his hand away from his hair. “I think you are.”
“I wanted to kill you,” he bit back.
I nodded. “True. I wanted to kill you too before...before I knew the truth.”
He cleared his throat and shook his head, his mouth set in a grim line. “You don’t know the truth. Aethelu doesn’t know the truth. The truth is that you are not safe here. You’ve never been safe here. I don’t want you here.”
His words were enough to hurt me, but I had a feeling that was the intention. “I think you do...want me here.”
He nodded, and though he didn’t say as much in words, he accepted mine.
He pulled his hand free. A part of me thought he was about to take off into the woods again. That I’d misread him, but this time, he walked over to the row of doors. He stood between two, his hand holding onto one of them as he turned toward me, a questioning look on his face.
“What?”
His eyes flicked to the door next to him, then back to me.
“You want me to come through the doors with you?” After what happened last time, I silently added.
“Only if you want to.”
I jumped up and grabbed one of the chocolate bars, strangely excited by being allowed into the dreams again.
Dream took my hand in his, and together we walked through the door into darkness. “If I can’t get you to leave my world, then you are not leaving my sight again.”