Eithne swayed on her feet, drunk with drowsiness, and laughing soundlessly like Liadan. With one hand she hung her weight from Cian’s shoulder, but with the other she tugged determinedly at his belt. It was a new game she had discovered during the night, and she was eager to play it again.
“It isn’t mine!”
The door Egelric had thrown open banged against the bookshelf only after his cry, serving as vehement punctuation.
Egelric threw up his arms, and grabbed, and held on. Somehow he already knew he was no longer dreaming, but he meant to cling to the dream as tightly as to the girl. Too many times she had eluded him, waking him to run away, tormenting him with doors she slammed behind her, teasing him with echoes of her laughter down corridors he no longer knew.
Aia skewed her shoulders straight and twisted her mouth into a smile, though her heart fluttered like a tiny bird trapped in a snare.
“E-gel-ric!”
Harald Pinknose woke with a sense of something good. It was a feeling of something long looked-forward-to finally arriving… but it was something he could not quite name.
Aia lifted her low shoulder as high as she could and let her weight fall against it. The young beech was still slender enough to shudder in protest, but lacking leaves it could not sigh.
“Temanyeh?”
Dantalion only snorted. His mind was still murky, his body still heavy and numb with first sleep. He had not even begun to dream. He knew it was not yet time to wake.
“Damn damn damn damn!” Eirik seethed. “Who built this house? A race of dwarves?”
“Irishmen,” Sigrid sighed.
Caedwulf was in a bed not his own, alone. It was such an unlikely occurrence that he was all the more certain he was dreaming the closer he came to waking. Either the unfamiliar, scratchy sheets were a dream, and he was at home in his own bed—in the bed upon which never feminine body had lain since the death of his mother—or there was a girl beside him, albeit a remarkably ethereal, undetectable girl.
In such high-ceilinged halls only the foulest smells stayed at nose-level.
“I can’t hate him, he has his moments, but I can greatly dislike him!”
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