Chapter 19: The Nightmare Unleashed
The ledger of plants she and Oscar had begun mentally compiling was still a comforting scroll in her mind when she finally slept. The room, with its sighing floorboards and portraits of strangers, felt less like a tomb and more like a workshop awaiting tools. She curled on the thin pallet, the six copper coins a hard little knot under her pillow, and let exhaustion pull her under.
It didn’t last.
The dream came not as a memory, but as a sensory prison. One moment she was asleep; the next, she was standing on the cold marble of the Imperial receiving hall, the air thick with perfume and malice. She was sixteen again, the heavy ceremonial robes of her first wedding day dragging at her shoulders like chains.
Her father’s hands were not yet on her throat. They were on her arm, his grip a brand of ownership as he presented her to Jovi, whose handsome face held a sneer so practiced it looked bored. “A prize for your loyalty,” her father’s voice boomed, echoing in the vaulted ceiling. The courtiers’ whispers were a physical swarm, buzzing in her ears. Trophy. Political piece. Lovely little doll.
The scene shifted. She was seventeen, standing before Cai in a different hall. He winked at her, a flash of white teeth, and the whisper around them changed. See how she tempts him. Shameless. She tried to step back, but her feet were fused to the floor. Cai’s mocking smile widened as he took her hand, and his touch burned.
Eighteen. Kael’s turn. His ice-blue eyes passed over her as if she were a column of statistics. His indifference was a colder violence than any shout. The whispers coiled like vipers. Ice princess. She thinks she’s above them.
Nineteen. Oscar. He took her hand, his yellow eyes missing nothing. He leaned in, as if to kiss her cheek, and instead his voice slithered into her ear. “What a fascinating piece you are.” The court gasped, thinking it romance. She felt his calculation like a scalpel between her ribs. Calculating bitch. She’ll manipulate them all.
Twenty. Marcus. His large hands were gentle, but his eyes were shadowed with a suspicion she didn’t understand. The rumor this time was a roar. Murderess. She killed the Empress. She’ll poison them in their beds.
Then her father was before her, his face filling her world. The pleasant mask of the emperor was gone, replaced by the private face of the tyrant. His hands, jeweled and brutal, rose.
“You are nothing,” he hissed. “A tool that failed to cut true. A noise I will silence.”
His fingers closed around her throat.
The pressure was absolute. The glittering hall dissolved into a dark, airless place. She could not breathe. She could not scream. She clawed at his wrists, but her hands passed through them like smoke. She saw her husbands ringed around them, watching with their earlier faces: sneering, mocking, indifferent, calculating, suspicious. Not one moved.
The whispers became a single, hammering word. Whore. Whore. Whore.
She woke.
The cry that tore from her was a ragged, soundless thing, more a rupture of air than a voice. She jackknifed on the pallet, her hands flying to her own throat, fingernails digging into the skin, searching for the phantom grip. Her lungs seized, then released in a shuddering, deafening gasp.
Cold sweat soaked her shift to her skin, plastering the linen to her spine, her ribs. The room was pitch black, the candle long dead. The only light was a sliver of moon through a sliver of the window, painting a pale, accusing stripe across the portrait of a stern-faced man in a military sash.
The terror held her for three heartbeats, solid and real as the floor.
Then it broke.
A sob wrenched itself from deep in her chest, a raw, animal noise of pure hurt. It was followed by another, and another, a torrent she could not dam. She folded in on herself, arms wrapping around her knees, her forehead pressing into the rough wool of the blanket. The tears were hot and relentless, washing down her face, dripping onto the fabric. She wept for the girl in the marble hall, paraded and sold. She wept for the silence that had been her only armor. She wept for the years of loneliness in gilded rooms, for the betrayal that had framed her, for the visceral fear of every door opening.
Her body shook with the force of it. The choked, gasping sounds were the loudest she had been in years. She couldn’t stop. It was as if the nightmare had cracked a seal, and now five years of frozen terror was thawing all at once, a flood that threatened to dissolve her.
She didn’t hear the creak on the stairs at first.
The sound came again, deliberate. Not the house settling. A foot on a step.
Panic, sharp and clean, cut through the weeping. She froze, her breath catching in a wet hitch. She strained her ears, every muscle taut.
Silence.
Then, a low, hesitant voice from the darkness at the head of the stairs. “Elena?”
It was Marcus.
The fear spiked, different from the dream-fear. This was present, physical. He was in her space. The door had no lock.
“I… heard a noise.” His voice was gravelly with sleep. A floorboard groaned as he shifted his weight. “Are you… is something wrong?”
She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. She imagined him seeing her like this: a hysterical, soaked wraith in the dark. The proud, cold princess, broken. Shame washed over her, hot and suffocating.
Another long pause. She heard him take a slow breath.
“Bad dream,” he said, not a question. A statement. His tone was devoid of its usual blunt suspicion. It was just… flat. Tired. “This place. The quiet. It gets into your head.”
She closed her eyes, tears still leaking from the corners. She waited for him to come closer, to demand an explanation, to use her weakness as proof of some guilt.
He didn’t move.
“Oscar said you’d want to start early,” he said, his words awkward, as if dragged over stones. “With the plants. I can… I’ll find wood for the drying rack after sun-up.”
It was an offering. A strange, clumsy thread thrown across the dark. Not comfort, not quite. But a recognition. An acknowledgment that tomorrow existed, and had tasks in it.
He waited. The room held its breath.
Elena, her face still buried, managed the smallest of nods. A movement she knew he couldn’t possibly see.
But perhaps he felt it. Perhaps the air changed.
“Right,” he mumbled. Another pause. “The sun’ll be up soon.”
She heard his retreat: the careful, heavy tread on the stairs, descending back into the belly of the house. Leaving her alone with the aftermath of the storm.
Slowly, her muscles began to unlock. The sobs had subsided into shaky, ragged breaths. The terror of the dream was receding, leaving a hollowed-out ache. But the attic no longer felt quite so much like a void. His words hung in the air, pragmatic and solid. Wood for the drying rack. After sun-up.
She uncurled, wiping her face with the back of a trembling hand. The sliver of moon had moved, the pale light now falling across her own small pile of belongings: the worn apron, the shoes caked with garden soil. The coins under her pillow.
She lay back down, staring at the beam above her. The ghost-pressure on her throat was gone. In its place was a raw tenderness, and a faint, bewildering sense of something else.
Someone had heard her. And had not used it against her.
Outside, beyond the broken slates, the black sky was beginning to soften at the edges, hinting at the grey approach of dawn.
The tears didn’t stop, and she couldn’t sleep another wink. She didn’t sob so loud this time, but occasionally a soft whimper or hitch in her breath was audible.
The room’s deep quiet gradually reabsorbed her muffled sounds. She lay there until the grey light through the window slit solidified into something tangible, until the shapes of trunks and portraits resolved from mere shadows into objects. Her body felt hollowed, scraped raw, but the paralyzing grip of the dream had loosened.
She pushed the damp blanket aside and stood on unsteady legs. The floorboards were ice under her bare feet. She moved to the cracked washbasin on the stand, the water within shockingly cold. She splashed it over her face, the chill a sharp, welcome rebuke to the heat of her tears. She patted her skin dry with a coarse cloth, avoiding the sight of her own red-rimmed eyes in the tarnished mirror.
In the quiet, Marcus’s words echoed. After sun-up. A simple promise of mundane work. She dressed mechanically in a plain wool dress and her apron, her fingers lingering on the pocket where the six coins rested. They were cool and solid. She took a deep, shuddering breath that still caught halfway.
The house below was silent as a tomb as she descended the narrow stairs. She expected the usual tension, the heavy awareness of five other presences in the crumbling maze of rooms. Instead, she found the kitchen empty, the hearth cold. A note, written in Oscar’s precise script, was propped against a chipped jug. Gone to crossroads for glass. Back by noon. – O
She stared at it. He’d acted so quickly. It felt less like initiative and more like a retreat, leaving her to face the others alone. The familiar isolation began to creep back in. She set the note down and turned to stoke the fire.
A rustle at the kitchen door made her flinch.
Cai leaned against the frame, already dressed, his dark hair tousled. He held two rusted buckets. “Well, you’re up,” he said, his voice rough with sleep but devoid of its usual theatrical mockery. He nodded toward the window. “Dawn’s just cracking. Couldn’t sleep either?”
Elena shook her head, turning quickly to busy herself with the kettle. Her heart hammered against her ribs.
“Yeah. This place has its own soundtrack. Creaks, moans, mice in the walls having little political debates.” He hoisted the buckets. “Pump’s frozen. Took me ten minutes to get a trickle. Here.” He set one bucket by the hearth. “For you. Since you’re the one who makes the tea that doesn’t taste like boiled dirt.”
She glanced at him, startled. He was looking at the cold hearth, not at her. His offer was as clumsy and pragmatic as Marcus’s had been. It wasn’t kindness, not exactly. It was more like… adjacency. A shared burden.
“Thank you,” she whispered, the words barely audible.
“Don’t mention it. Seriously.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Oscar’s scheme. The medicine thing. He talked my ear off last night. Said you know which plants are which.” He finally looked at her, a faint, wry twist to his mouth. “You gonna poison us all and make a break for it?”
The old fear spiked, icy and instant. She froze, the kettle in her hand.
Cai’s smile faltered. He saw it—the sheer, terrified recognition in her eyes. He blew out a long breath, looking suddenly weary. “That was a shit joke. Forget it.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “The air in that palace got into everything, didn’t it? Even the jokes.”
He turned to go, then paused. “Marcus is out in the old shed, muttering at wood. Jovi’s probably complaining to the cows about the quality of the hay. Kael’s doing sums with the nothing we have.” He shrugged. “It’s just a day. We’ll get through it.”
Then he was gone, the door closing softly behind him.
Elena stood holding the kettle, the warmth of the newly kindled fire beginning to reach her. His words echoed. It’s just a day. Not a pardon. Not a declaration of faith. Just a day, to be got through. It was the most honest thing anyone had said to her in years.
She made the tea, using the careful pinch of mint leaves she’d dried herself. The scent was a green balm. She poured a cup, her hands steadier now, and took it out into the courtyard.
The world was washed in pale gold and deep blue shadow. Frost glittered on the thorny roses, and her breath plumed in the air. She saw Marcus’s large shape moving in the dilapidated shed, heard the sure, rhythmic sound of a saw biting into wood. He didn’t look up.
She walked to her plank bench, to her rescued plants. The rosemary looked stronger. The feverfew had unfurled a new leaf. This was a language that did not lie or suspect. It simply was. She touched the soil, checking its moisture, her movements falling into a calm, practiced rhythm.
The nightmare’s residue was still a thin film over everything, a tremble in her fingers. But beneath it was something else: the memory of a voice in the dark asking if something was wrong, the weight of a bucket of water left by the hearth, a terrible joke withdrawn. They were not apologies. They were not rescues.
They were facts. Like the plants. Like the six coins. Like the saw’s rhythm from the shed.
She sipped her tea. The sun cleared the eastern wall, pouring sudden, liquid warmth over the cracked flagstones, over her hands, over the silver of her hair. It chased the lingering shadows from the corners of the courtyard. From the shed, the sawing stopped. Marcus emerged, holding a rough-framed wooden rectangle—the simple beginning of a drying rack.
He saw her, gave a single, short nod, and carried it toward the kitchen door.
Elena set her cup down. She drew another breath, this one deeper, clearer. She looked at the wilderness of the garden, seeing not just an overgrown prison, but the specific, useful shapes of chamomile, ground ivy, yarrow. Her mind began to catalog, to plan the morning’s harvest. The dream was not gone. But it was past. And the day, for all its daunting unknowns, was here, demanding her hands.