In Itun, we passed the road from my last dream with Lady Iltara: the road south, past the gentle beech trees and sleepy pond. The road that could’ve taken me back to Ilianath. I wish I could record here that I even considered it. That, as the little cadre of nomads mingled in the square with the villagers of Itun, I stood, brooding, upon the diverging paths and reflected upon my diverging futures. I suspect that it might’ve saved a lot of trouble: to return to Montigo with a broken leg and my “mark on the world” yet unmade, but with a new understanding of where and how it might be done (perhaps an exploration of the Halls). It would have bruised the ego to arrive at her tower with my work undone, to be sure, but bruises are to be expected in any great endeavor. And anyway, one bruised ego would have been a fair sight gentler than what came next for the three of us. All that came next, all because I simply kept on the path east.
But no: I spared a glance for the road, noted the canopy of lovely, bright spring leaves, remembered the searing threat that the Lady had made to me, and gave it no second thought.
The evening we visited Itun was when I noticed how distant Gena had been. I couldn’t remember seeing her at all in Clerriol, and she had been returning to the tent, late, wordlessly, every night.
I cursed myself for my inattention and swore to make up for it.
That night, I explained to Hester what I was doing and propped myself up at the entrance to the tent. I watched the dragonflies flit about in the twilight for a few hours until, finally, Gena arrived, stalking her way toward the tent. She didn’t seem to notice me.
I slammed my spellbook shut—not that I had been able to read it for the last half hour—and met her eyes. “What’s she been telling you?” I demanded.
Gena stared at me, surprised. Then she shook her head.
“Come on,” I said. “This isn’t like you.”
“Isn’t it?” She said. “It’s a…” she began. She was calculating her reply. “It’s a problem. To solve and study. And…”
“And you’ve been doing a great lot of solving and studying, have you?” I said. I sounded heated, even to myself.
She looked downcast. It was the effect, apparently, I had desired, but I found that obtaining it felt rather less rewarding than I had hoped.
“Let… let me help. What has she been telling you?”
Gena sighed. “It’s not what she’s been telling me. It’s what she’s been showing me.”
“How do you mean?”
“And you,” she continued. “The lucid dreaming. Howe, this… other world, of dreams…”
“Of meaning and insight, normally,” I added to her pause. “Sometimes of pleasure or of fear.”
“Howe, it’s just as real as this one, isn’t it?”
“Well, the experience is real, in a manner. It’s not as though…”
“No, Howe. I mean real. Indistinguishably so.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to reply, but…
“Howe, it can’t be, right?”
“No,” I started. “Nothing done there has any lasting effect. No injuries. Most memories fail to persist, but for our training. A dream-world itself… it vanishes upon waking. This one does not.”
“So?”
“So… so… those make it not real, Gena. We can call it ‘real’ in some senses. But it’s not the world we inhabit.”
She shook her head. “Suppose we inhabit it just as plainly as this one, but the law is different.”
I paused. “Gena, this is ridiculous.”
“You’re a student, right?” She met my eyes. Hers were firm, burning. “Your discipline is scholarly, like mine. Argue the point with me.”
“Fine, then. The real world is the one in which we truly perish when killed.”
“Have you ever died in a dream? Has that event been described to you?”
“What, you think you could be killed in a dream?”
“You have as much reason to believe you are immortal in your dreams as you have to believe you are immortal in this world.”
I sat there, mouth agape for the span of a half-second. “I concede, I suppose. Our knowledge of death does not help us make a determination here.”
“Agreed.”
“Consider then the stubborn persistence of, ah, reality. From one day to the next.”
“Full as it is with completely explicable phenomena, I imagine you want to say.” Gena replied.
“I would, but I know I’d be forced to concede that point, too. Forget the fact that the Mundus Medias seems to outgrow our understanding daily. Focus on the daily part.”
“Why should an intermittent world be any less real?”
“It certainly seems to have less bearing on our birth and upbringing for that fact.”
“Do you need me to make the point about being born?”
“I suppose it’s just like death, as you say. But have you ever seen anyone else born in any of your dreams?”
“No, but…”
“Or eat and grow? Learn and prosper?”
“No.”
“Surely you see.”
Gena sighed and stroked her chin. “I… well.”
“Well?”
“Return to your first point, if you will. This is ridiculous.”
“Huh? I’m sorry if that came off badly; I didn’t mean to…”
“No, you’re right, though. It is ridiculous.”
I froze.
“What, that this inner world of dreaming is an equal to the gods’ greatest work?” Gena continued. “It’s nonsense, surely. But I can’t shake the feeling… I can’t… disprove it.”
“Ohhh.” It clicked. “Iltara has been trying to convince you of her power. Don’t forget, right? The whole temptress act? It’s an effort of manipulation. Sophistry, if we’re feeling generous.”
“These concerns are duly noted,” she said. The dry, gentle rebuff warmed my heart—that felt like the Gena I knew. “But Howe, that’s thinking like a knight. Like Hester. Think like a scholar, like we just have. It is a knotty question.”
“Admitted, if we take her at face value.”
“I have to trust my senses, do I not?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“When my eyes, ears, and heart are all in agreement, I am at my best. I do my small part to bring greater glory to the Lightbringer’s work. It’s… well. My eyes and ears… they… are captivated by this idea. This other world. But my heart quails. It fears… knows this can’t be right. What kind of scholar, then, cannot trust her own eyes and ears?”
“An ordinary one, right? Don’t we all…” I began, but my voice was already betraying me. I knew her fear.
We sulked in the silence for a moment. She stood, gazing at the ground; I sat, my left leg stretched out on its splint to my left, staring off into the middle distance somewhere to the west.
“Well,” I said, thinking idly on it. “If you doubt we belong in this world, you can break free with the Word, no? And I with a simple spell.”
“Howe, I can’t. And… Howe… she taught me…”
She bent down and grabbed a loose stave of wood, an unused tent pole, from nearby. She held it in her two hands and stared at it, and began saying something in a foreign language. She looked and sounded grim. A dozen or so syllables unfolded, and I began to recognize phonemes from the east: the language was Uri-Kedis, or a close relative. Then I recognized something about the cadence… Then she stopped.
“That was a spell,” I said.
A sandy brown serpent lay draped between her hands where the stave had been. Its tail coiled lazily, its head searching, probing the air with its forked tongue.
She nodded slowly. “An illusion. It cannot bite.”
“What does it… How… I have very many questions.”
“It works there, too. In the dream-place. And when it does, I do not wake.”