D2
an excerpt

I slipped further under the blankets, the better to warm myself against my sleeping husband. He stirred, worked an arm around me, and gathered me to him. I rested against his shoulder, staring into the darkness, and enjoyed his warm solidness. When I slept touching him, the nightmares weren't as bad.

I kissed his cheek, nestled against him, threw one arm firmly across his torso to anchor myself, and closed my eyes against the night.

Since losing my sword a year and a half earlier, I had faced nightmares nearly every night. They did not fade over time, and usually featured similar elements: My sister sometimes made an appearance, road weary and filthy, traveling the wilds with a bearded man I could barely recognize as Prince Cassius. Always I would see a glint of Wirt's feverish eyes--feverish with madness or with power I could not tell. And always I would hear the blade. Sometimes it cried, but usually it screamed.

The dreams had been growing calmer lately. No less vivid and disquieting--they always brought a sense of being yanked from present time and place and forcibly transported into the body of an unhappy length of metal--but now the sword was focusing, intent. I sensed frustration in it, but also a mounting determination that kept it going. It talked constantly in the strange language I couldn't understand, a steady stream of gibberish. I woke every morning feeling startled and less than completely rested.

But Kyan made the nights easier. When I slept touching him, we'd found, the dreams lessened in intensity--became less an out-of-body experience and more a vivid dream.

I wondered what I'd see when I'd sleep tonight. Lately Wirt had been growing trees. I did not know why, nor did I particularly care, but the ongoing mural of his life--of their lives--was the backdrop against which I got my rest. And so I begrudgingly settled against my husband and waited for the drama to unfold.

I breathed deeply, enjoyed the cozy stillness of our room. Gradually sleep found me, and I dreamed of elms growing faster than normal under the ministrations of an intense Wirt and a cursing sword. The colors seemed muted somehow, less pressing than normal, and my consciousness gradually became aware that to the side of me, back in the bedroom I shared with the king, a physical presence waited. I snapped awake. Kyan was snoring.

Sitting on the edge of my side of the bed and watching me, for all the world as though he had nothing better to do, the lizard man waited.

The jolt I felt on seeing him knocked the last vestiges of sleep away. I sat up. The dreams I'd had lately might have messed with my sense of nighttime reality, but this figure radiated solidness.

The lizard man, the clerk of death, regarded me calmly, his skin faintly glowing in the darkness.

"What do you want?"

His tongue flickered. "Walk with me."

He stood and I climbed from the bed. He chivalrously offered his arm.

"Ah, I don't think so." I remembered the rending I'd received the last time he'd touched me. His touch had brought me closer to death than I'd already been.

"I am harmless to you tonight, Darielle Imogena." Ah yes, that curious flat voice. Polite yet bespeaking something inhuman beneath. "You will need my touch where we are going." Again he offered his arm.

My hand hesitated. "What if I choose to remain here?"

The lizard man considered me. "You would miss a sight few humans live to tell about."

I glanced back longingly at Kyan and our cozy bed.

"You would also miss an opportunity to save your husband's life."

Wariness moved me. I studied him. He looked deadly serious, no creak of a smile disturbing his placid reptilian features.

"Unless you'd rather rejoin your dreams."