Excerpt: The Garden of a Thousand Dreams

"Really? How will the ship take that?" Irene asked, slightly worried. She'd never been in an airship during a storm.

"Oh, she'll be fine. If we have trouble we'll just go up or down a bit, get out of the thick of it. And we can always jettison some of Amanda's dresses", he added, grinning at her, tilting his head back so his face was practically upside down. Amanda rolled her eyes good-naturedly.

"Those are vintage designer gowns, I'll have you know. Besides, like you're much better, with your suits and hats and things. Maybe we should just go ahead and get rid of all of your obscure first edition books of poetry and incredibly random non-fiction. Why on Earth do you have a book on..." Here Amanda paused to peer at the huge pile of books taking up most of the coffee table. Most of them had precious little to do with their whole situation, at least on the surface. Irene would be very surprised if that was any different when you got further into it. "Ancient Rome as seen through salad dressing? What the hell is that supposed to be about, anyway?" Amanda concluded, waving her crochet hook about wildly.

"That's really interesting, actually. Did you know that the American motto comes from a recipe for salad dressing?" Sebastian replied, perfectly serene. He was shuffling a deck of cards over and over, occasionally flicking one the right side up or holding it up and showing it to a rather indifferent audience of the large bookcase.

"No, and I don't know anything that would compel me to care", Amanda rejoined lightly and went back to her craft.

"And this mockery of my collection of fine literature is coming from a woman who owns a dress that is essentially a swan costume", Sebastian said in a way that made it sound more of a rhetorical statement than anything he expected a reply to, so Irene jumped in in a desperate endeavour to salvage some of her crossword-solving attempt.

"Does anyone know of a eight-letter word for a nickname?" she asked, waggling her pen between her fingers.

"The only eight-letter one I can come up with is, well, nickname", Sebastian said, entirely unhelpfully, "But epithet has seven letters and sobriquet has nine, so I suspect you have made a minor miscalculation."

Irene frowned, annoyed at the other's condescending and patronising tone. (Come to think of it, patronising probably did fit seven down, and... Goddamnit, ten across was indeed going to be sobriquet.)