Goddess of the Rose (Goddess Summoning #4)(70)

"Will you help me?"

"If I am able," he said carefully.

"Good! There's something you can help me with tonight." She ignored the way he instantly retreated behind his all-too-familiar expressionless mask. "It's a little like drawing the map for me last night." That seemed to reassure him, and when he nodded slightly, she said, "You know the gardens so well, I assume you know the palace equally as well."

He looked surprised but said, "I do."

"Well, I don't." She jerked her thumb at the glass doors leading to her bedroom. "The only way I've left my room is through there. I've not stepped so much as a foot into the hall outside my bedroom. I know there's some kind of fantastic dream making and magick brewing going on out there in the rest of the palace, though." Unspoken between them was what she had said earlier - that she wanted to weave a dream for the two of them.

"There is, indeed."

"I'd love to see it, but I also want to be able to understand it and weld it. Would you show me around, Asterius?"

His eyes were dark and they glittered with the fullness of the joy her request gave him. He smiled, showing a flash of sharp, white canines. "I would be honored."

Chapter Twenty-Four

WALKING through her bedroom with him was an oddly intimate experience. Mikki saw his eyes go to her opulent bed. His long, powerful stride was suddenly thrown off, and, for the first time, she saw him move awkwardly. She had to force herself not to smile. If he wasn't thinking about getting her into bed, then why should the sight of said bed make him jittery? She thought it was an excellent sign. Then he opened the door and stepped aside so she could go through, and all bedroom thoughts fled her mind.

Her room was the last in the hall and her balcony wrapped all the way around the side of her bedroom, which also was the eastern end of the palace. To her left, the vast main hallway of the palace stretched on and on. The hall was wide, the ceiling incredibly high. Huge mullioned windows faced the south, showing a nighttime view of the torch-lit gardens. The north side of the hall held door after door, each ornately carved with mystic symbols and designs, and stretching as far as she could see. Torches blazed from wall sconces on either side of each door, as well as up and down the hall on both sides. Mikki's eyes were drawn to the long marble boxes that covered the area between the doors. The boxes were filled with flowers that were - amazingly enough - not roses.

The air in the hallway was filled with a sweet, delicate fragrance that reminded her of daylilies. Actually, the flowers did look a little like daylilies, only their leaves were too big and round, even though the huge, trumpetlike white blossoms were lilylike. But the blossoms were weird . . . they were . . . she walked closer. They were surrounded by a glittering haze, like mist that had been sprinkled with glitter. What the . . . ? Then something about those blossoms pricked her memory.

"They're moon flowers! We have them in Oklahoma. They only open up like this at night. During the day their blooms close tight and droop down so they look almost dead."

"Yes, we call them moon flowers here, too."

"But what is the foggy stuff that looks like it's coming out of the blossoms?"

"It's not coming out - it's being drawn in."

"It's being drawn in? What is it?"

"The essence of dreams. Every night the moon flowers capture the essence of dreams and draw them into the rooms beyond, where the women of the realm take that essence and fashion it anew to send back into the world to create the magick that is born of dreams."

"All that's happening behind those doors?"

"It is." He smiled at her look of innocent wonder.

The smile she flashed him in return was brilliant, and when she squeezed his arm he thought his heart would burst from his chest and he had to remind himself that it was the magick of the realm that had excited her thus, not his presence. But no matter. Her happiness pleased him, whatever its source, and he was determined to enjoy it, as well as the joy being in Mikado's presence brought him, for as long as her destiny allowed.

"Lead on, Mikado, and I will follow you into the rooms of dreams." She nodded, drew in a deep breath and touched the knob of the first door. It swung inward. Mikki moved into the room and blinked, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

The room was misty with the sweet scent of moon flowers. All the women were blowing glass bubbles - that much wasn't hard to understand. It was warmer there than in the hallway, though not as hot as the open ovens that stood in each corner of the room should have made it. The women looked up from their tasks when she and the Guardian entered. They ignored Asterius but dropped quick curtsies to her and greeted her cheerfully.

"Don't let me interrupt. Keep doing . . . uh, whatever it is you're doing," Mikki said hastily.

"They are creating dream bubbles."

Asterius was standing very close to her, and his low voice rumbled into her ear, causing the skin on her neck to prickle.

"See how, as each bubble grows, so, too, does the dream within it?" She nodded, watching raptly as the women blew into long, slender tubes, turning and fashioning, until the molten lumps at the ends of the tubes were formed into bubbles that looked like delicate, iridescent glass globes of all different colors. As the bubbles got bigger and bigger, Mikki could see that there was something inside them. She moved closer and realized that she was looking at fantastic scenes. In one bubble, a young girl leaped off a cliff, but instead of falling, the child floated through a violet-colored sky singing to birds that looked like flying penguins. In another bubble, two knights jousted while scantily dressed women cheered them on. In yet another, an old woman was looking into a handheld mirror, and within the mirror her face grew younger and younger, until she was a tight-skinned teenager.