Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(103)

“And what it is over there is dangerous.”

“Dangerous things can protect themselves,” Ronan said.

She could see he didn’t judge Lindenmere for it. Ronan Lynch could be dangerous, too.

“It’s not only dangerous,” Ronan said. “Watch.”

He held out his hands and said some words in an appropriately archaic-sounding language. Above him, small glowing lights winked into being among the fall leaves. They began to rain down around them. Ronan walked backward, admiring the lights, keeping his hands held out to let the lights sink into them.

Hennessy flinched as one sank into her skin with the slightest feeling of warmth. Not all of them dissolved. Some of them caught on her clothing, or in her hair. One caught in her eyelashes, and as she blink, blink, blinked, she found herself looking right into the light. It didn’t burn her to look right into it as an ordinary light would have, and as she gazed into it, instead of a sensation of visual brightness, she felt brightness inside her. Like happiness, or optimism. As if she was gazing into a sun of actual bliss.

Ronan said, in a reverent voice quite unlike his usual, “Gratias tibi ago.”

“What are you saying?” Hennessy said, finding her words only after the little light had finally dissolved from her eyelashes.

“That means ‘thank you’ in Latin,” Ronan said, “and it’s goddamn polite to say it when you like something. Opal! Come on, now! Here, come on, look over here.”

It was like a devil’s bargain, a fairy dance. Ronan Lynch stood there, dressed all in dark colors, only his eyes gleaming with color, his hand held out to her, glimmering lights drifting down around him. Come away. He didn’t say it, but Lindenmere remembered the words for her, somehow, as if he had.

“Don’t think, Hennessy,” he said. “Just be.”

She let herself be led.

They walked by an unforgiving field that grew only swords, blade-down, the hilt two or ten or thirty inches above the ground. They walked by a cave entrance guarded by an enormous white stag with horns tipped with blood. They walked by a meadow that was actually a lake, and a pond that was actually flower petals.

Lindenmere was beautiful and complicated in ways that the real world was not. Air and music were two different things in the real world; in Lindenmere, they were not always. Water and flowers were similarly confused in this forest. Hennessy felt the truth of it as they walked. There were creatures you didn’t want to meet in person if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch. There were places you might get trapped forever if you weren’t with Ronan Lynch. It was feral and confusing, but in the end, it followed one rule: Ronan Lynch. His safety, his desires, his thoughts. That was Lindenmere’s only true north.

She could feel it: Lindenmere loved him.

“Kerah!”

“Opal, finally, you little puke,” Ronan said.

A creature capered from between the woods, a scrawny, hollow-eyed child. She wore an oversized cable-knit sweater and a skullcap pulled down low over her short white-blond hair. Someone might have mistaken her for a human girl if not for her legs, which were densely furred and ended in hooves.

“I told you, that’s Chainsaw’s word. You have lips. Call me Ronan,” he told her. The little creature threw her arms around his legs and then pranced around him in a hectic circle, her hooves leaving divots. He lifted a foot. “That was my foot, come on.”

Hennessy sat down, hard. She was just staring at Opal’s furry legs, the twinkling lights falling around her. All her bravado was quite stripped from her.

This immediately caught Opal’s attention, and she spooked back behind Ronan.

“Easy, shithead,” Ronan said. He wiped a little dirt off her cheek with a thumb. “That’s Hennessy.”

“Kruk?” Opal asked.

“I told you, stop using Chainsaw’s words, you have English. She’s a dreamer, like me.”

No, Hennessy thought, feeling quite drunk. She was not a dreamer like this. Not at all.

Opal stalked over to Hennessy, who held quite still. She knelt beside her, her posture decidedly unlike Hennessy’s, since her goat legs bent the opposite direction. She smelled quite wild and animally. She babbled in a language Hennessy didn’t understand.

Ronan said, “You could say hello to her.”

Opal asked Hennessy, “Do you eat meat?”

Ronan looked impatient. “She’s not going to eat you. Don’t be a coward.”

“I’m not afraid,” Opal said, but in a surly way that meant she had been.

Hennessy, who’d also been afraid, snapped her teeth at Opal.

Opal leapt back, catching herself on her hands, and then righted herself as Hennessy grinned at her.

“It’s good,” Opal decided inexplicably. With a sly look, she drew in close again and tried to pluck one of Hennessy’s tattoos off. She was waiting to get in trouble.

“Slap her,” Ronan advised. Hennessy didn’t, but Opal skittered away as if she felt she might. “She’s a psychopomp, like Chainsaw. She’ll focus things, keep stuff from going to shit.”

“Going to shit?”

“Usual dreamfuckery,” Ronan said, as if that explained anything. “Opal, we have an important task today—will you help us, or do I have to ask Chainsaw?”

Opal shot a suspicious look up at the sky and hurriedly began to shake her head. “Nope nope nope!”