My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(113)

So would the other man, who walked in such arrogance and pride that he didn’t guess he wasn’t Neve’s only suitor—let alone that her other suitor was a god.

The Dreamer watched him come each night and leave his dry and useful tokens on her porch. A wooden spoon, a bottlebrush, an apron of sturdy gray. He watched him pause, every time, and stand in the yard, staring at the door as though he could see through it.

Considering. Considering.

Considering too long before finally going away. On the eighteenth night, it was raining hard, and the Dreamer watched him stand in the downpour, jaw clenched and water coursing down his face as he struggled with himself … and lost. He turned his head slowly, first one way and then the other. To be certain he was alone before he stepped onto the porch.

He was not alone.

He didn’t reach the door.

The Dreamer didn’t kill him, though it would have been so terribly easy. Fragile flesh, fragile spirit. Where is your god now? Will he come to protect you, or is that not his way? Does he only appear when it’s time to punish, or is it simply that that’s when you summon him?

He contented himself with spinning the reverend toward home and planting a fear in his gut like a canker: from this day on, whenever he sought to master a woman, whether by threat or strength or even with a look, the fear would flare and overtake him—so wild and sudden it would drop him to his knees to cower in terror, gibbering for solace from his distant, punishing god.

One supposed his life would be quite different now, and his parishioners’, too.

And then it was the Dreamer’s turn to stare at Neve’s door, rain coursing down his face, the feel of her radiating outward as though she were a sun and he a flower. He understood temptation, but not the weakness that would succumb to it. He turned his back to the shed and stayed there through the night, standing guard in the rain, which, though it was his own creation, he’d never felt in quite this way before.

Six more days, he thought, and wondered what Neve would make of his final Advent gift to her.

And wondered, with a frisson of nerves, what she would make of him.

*

Scarman’s Hall was the grandest structure on the Isle of Feathers, and never grander than on Christmas Eve. The gather was the social event of the year, and the betrothals were its heart. Every marriageable girl had been planning her gown for months, and every suitor his final gift: a ring.

Neve had a ring already. It had been her first gift from the Dreamer—the jewel beetle—and she’d carried it in her pocket ever since.

Tonight she would wear it on her finger.

She would also wear the dress she’d made of fabric he had given her. It was blue as the sky and as cunning as all his gifts: it wasn’t one blue but every blue—all the hours and moods of the sky. From minute to minute, it changed its hue, deepening from cobalt to midnight and setting out stars. And when she smiled—she discovered, looking at herself in the mirror that had also been a gift—it flushed to sunset orange, as bright as flame.

Imagine: the last of the plague orphans turning up at the gather in such a gown! It was like the story from Neve’s book, about the cinder maid and the fairy godmother. She didn’t have a pumpkin coach, though, or slippers made of glass—only of spider silk, with a sheen like dew on a petal—but she had her old cloak and boots for the long walk, and when had she ever had qualms about mud on her hem?

She looked in the mirror and wondered if it were true or enchanted. How could she know if this was herself reflected or some dream version. Did it matter? She smiled, and watched her dress again flame from midnight to sunset. Her heart felt like an ember in her chest, ready to catch fire and throw sparks.

What would happen tonight? She didn’t know. Spear’s hand would never hold hers. She knew that much, and Fog Cup would never be her home. A mere twenty-four days ago, those had been her only two choices. Now miracles were her daily fare and her pulse still beat its one simple question: Who?

She understood that he was the Dreamer, whom she’d called upon in her despair. But how could she know what that meant? What was he? She’d felt his presence in her dreams but had never seen him, and he didn’t leave tracks in her yard as the reverend did (or as the reverend had, anyway, until six nights ago, when his gifts abruptly ceased).

Once, she’d dreamed she embraced a hill of black feathers and felt the pulse of a heartbeat deep within.

And then last night, a miracle unlooked for: she’d opened her book to read a story and found in it not the eighteen that there had always been, but nineteen, and the last was called “The Dreamers.”

He was one of ten, born before time, who had, through the millennia, taken it in turn to sleep, and dream. It was they who conducted the symphonies of growth and death that turned the world. They were gods from before there were men to invent the word god, and they cared nothing for worship or thanks. Only for the act itself: creating.

Sometimes destroying.

And so she knew who he was, but not what form he might take. There had been no illustration to accompany the tale, and no description, either. It didn’t matter; by now she loved him in any skin. In her book there was another tale—one of the original eighteen—of a dragon who had a human wife, and Neve had never understood it before, at least from the wife’s point of view. But she did now. Love was love.

But she hoped that he was not a dragon.