77
I KNEW I was dreaming, but I knew it wasn’t my dream. I was wearing a dress from a century that I’d never lived through. The skirt was heavy with one of those odd hoops, if that’s what you call it, that made the dress go out to either side of your hips like you should be able to set plates on the stiff satin cloth. The cloth was red and gold, and the tight cinched waist pushed my breasts up too much so that even I was distracted when I saw myself in the mirror that was leaning up against the stone wall. It was a very realistic dream. I could feel the long skirts brushing against the rough stone floor. I had enough of Jean-Claude’s memories to know that there should have been sweet rushes or something on the floor, but it was rough-hewn rock, almost cavelike, except there were windows, long, thin, and reaching almost to the high vaulted ceiling. I could hear the ocean, feel the wind of it. I thought, But where is the smell of the ocean? And that was when I knew it was a dream. There’s no scent in a dream; that part doesn’t work when we sleep, which is why most people don’t smell smoke from fire in time. Noises wake us, but not smells.
Whoever had picked the dress had left my hair loose, curling thick and utterly black around the whiteness of my skin. My eyes were dark. Some trick of the light in the room made them look black, but I had Rodrigo’s eyes carved into my brain and I knew my eyes were brown, because his were truly black. A natural blond with black eyes, you didn’t see that much.
“The Welsh come colored like that from time to time,” a woman’s voice said.
There was a woman in the mirror now, and it wasn’t me. She was taller than me, slender, model thin, but not starved, just built that way. She had long, straight blond hair that fell well past her waist to swirl in the white dress she wore. It was from a much earlier century than mine, loose with long belled sleeves that almost hid her hands. Gold ribbon laced her tight through the bodice so that it showed her small, high breasts to good effect. Her eyes were a clear pale blue, the shade that coloring books tell you is what water looks like, but it almost never does in real life. She was almost everything that I’d ever wanted to be when I was about twelve to sixteen, when I realized I would never be any of it.
“Wishes,” she said.
“When I was a child, before I knew my own worth, yes,” I said.
She walked closer to her side of the mirror; the room looked identical, as if we were both standing in the same place. She was shining in the sunlight in a way that hair and skin didn’t if you were human. She was almost unearthly in her beauty, like a shimmering white goddess.
“Yes, I was a goddess once.”
“They worshipped you as one,” I said.
“You don’t believe I’m a goddess?”
I started walking toward the mirror as I said, “No.”
“Could anyone but a goddess build a dream for us to speak in?”
“I’ve met other people who could create dreams, and they weren’t gods.”
The shining light of her flickered for a second like a bad connection on a video, and then it steadied to shine and be lovely again. I stood in front of the mirror now. It was a very old mirror, the glass full of imperfections, dark marks in the glass itself, a bubble here and there.
“It was a marvel of craftsmanship in its day,” she said.
“I bet it was,” I said, and looked at her like a tall, thin, blond reflection in the mirror. I could see that there were flowers and leaves embroidered on the gold ribbon of her dress now. Why had she put me in a dress that was closer to Belle Morte’s taste than hers? Or did she want to wear bright colors, but they washed her out?
“I wear what I wish to wear,” she said.
“Pastels look terrible on me, but I bet they look wonderful on you,” I said.
The image of her flickered again, the shining white light gone for an eyeblink, replaced with darkness, rough stone, like a cave, or a tomb. Then the white figure was back, shining harder, as if trying to make up for that last glimpse. Take no notice of that man behind the curtain.
I could see that her high cheekbones were paired with a chin that was a little too pointed for my taste, a nose a little sharp; witchy, I’d have said once, but I knew too many witches now and none of them looked like that.
I got another glimpse of the dark cave, and her face bare of the light for a moment, and anger in those pale blue eyes. Too pale, not as rich a color as she was pretending to have here in her dream . . . our dream.
“It is not your dream. It is mine!”
“Have it your way,” I said. “Why did you bring me to your dream?”
“I thought this would be more pleasant.”
“It’s not a bad dream, so what do you want in this pleasant dream?”
“You have something I want,” the image in the mirror said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Power.”
“Yeah, you and everybody else.”
“What?” she asked, as if I’d confused her. If she could read my mind it shouldn’t have confused her, which meant she could only read part of my thoughts.
“I am in your mind,” she said.
“But you still don’t understand everything I’m thinking, or everything I’m feeling, do you?”
“I understand all!” But there was that flicker again, and I saw her standing in the dark place, her thin face closer to mine than it was in the dream.
“I don’t remember the early deities claiming omniscience,” I said.