Dreams Lie Beneath

by Rebecca Ross

Genres: YA Family; YA Fairy Tales & Folklore

Synopsis

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Divine Rivals comes a story about magic, vengeance, and the captivating power of dreams. A must-read for fans of The Hazel Wood and The Night Circus.

The realm of Azenor has spent years plagued by a curse. Every new moon, magic flows from the nearby mountain and brings nightmares to life. Only magicians—who serve as territory wardens—stand between people and their worst dreams.

Clementine Madigan is ready to take over as the warden of her small town, but when two magicians arrive to challenge her, she is unknowingly drawn into a century-old conflict. She seeks revenge, but as she gets closer to Phelan, one of the handsome young magicians, secrets—as well as romance—begin to rise.

To fight the realm’s curse, which seems to be haunting her every turn, Clementine must unite with her rival. But will their efforts be enough to save Azenor from the nightmares that lurk around every corner?

Release date: November 2, 2021

Publisher: Quill Tree Books

Print pages: 496

Sample

1

September’s new moon waited for the sun to set, and I found myself trapped in Mazarine’s library, drawing her twelfth portrait by candlelight. For as long as I had known her, she had never left her house during the day, and she kept her curtains closed while the sun reigned. She liked to summon me every few months for various things, the foremost to commit her face to paper with my charcoal stick as if she forgot what she looked like, the second to read to her from one of her leather-bound books. I was eager to do both because she paid me well, and I liked the stories I could sometimes coax from her. Stories that came from the mountains. Stories that were nearly forgotten, turning into dust.

“Do I look the same as I did the last time you drew me?” she asked from where she sat in a chair, its armrests carved as roaring lions. She was wearing her usual raiment: an elegant velvet gown the shade of blood with a diamond necklace anchored at her neck. The stone caught the firelight every time she breathed, winking with secrets.

“You look unchanged,” I replied, thinking that I’d drawn her only three months ago, and I continued with my sketch of her.

She was proud, even with her multitude of wrinkles and her age spots and her strange beady eyes. I liked her confidence, and I drew it in the tilt of her chin, the hint of her knowing smile, and the waves of her long quicksilver hair. I wondered how old she was, but I didn’t dare ask.

Sometimes I feared her, although I couldn’t explain why. She was ancient. I had rarely seen her move from the furniture scattered about this gilded, shadowed room. And yet something pulsed from her. Something I couldn’t identify but all the same cautioned me to keep my eyes open in her presence.

“Your father does not like when I summon you here,” she drawled in a smoky voice. “He does not like you alone with me, does he?”

Her words unsettled me, but I concealed my feelings. The dimness of the room was like a cloak, and while it seemed impossible to draw a portrait in such poor light, I did it well.

“My father simply needs me home on time today,” I said, and she knew what I implied.

“Ah, a new moon awaits you tonight,” said Mazarine. “Tell me, Clementine . . . have you read one of my nightmares recorded in your father’s book?”

I had not, because there were no recordings of her nightmares in the book my father filled and guarded. I didn’t want to confess such to her, for fear it might upset her.

And so I lied.

“My father doesn’t let me read all his recordings. I’m only an apprentice, Ms. Thimble.”

“Ah,” she said, drinking from a sparkling glass of wine. “You are an apprentice, but you wage war beside him on new moon nights. And you are just as strong and skilled as him. I have watched you fight in the streets on the darkest nights. You will surpass him, Clementine. Your magic shines brighter than his.”

I finished with her portrait at last. Partly because her words fed a hungry spirit within me that I strove to keep hidden.

“Your portrait is done.” I set down my charcoal, wiped my fingers on my skirt, and walked the paper to her. She studied it by the candlelight that burned from iron stands around her, wax dripping like stalactites.

She was quiet for a long moment. A bead of perspiration began to trace my back, and I felt anxious until she grinned, her yellow teeth gleaming in the firelight.

“Yes, I am unchanged. What a relief.” She laughed, but the sound was far from reassuring.

My blood hummed with warning.

I gathered my supplies, tucking them into my leather satchel, eager to be gone. I couldn’t judge the time of day, since Mazarine had the curtains drawn, but I sensed that afternoon was waning.

I needed to get home.

“A magician and an artist,” Mazarine mused, admiring my sketch of her. “An artist and a magician. Which one do you desire to be more? Or perhaps you dream of learning deviahmagic and combining the two. I would indeed like to see an enchanted drawing of yours someday, Clementine.”

I hefted the satchel strap onto my shoulder, standing halfway between her chair and the double doors. I didn’t want to say that she was right, but she had an uncanny sense of reading people. She had also watched me grow up in this town.

Since I was eight, my father had instructed me in avertana magic, a defensive magic that lent its strength to spars and duels. We often faced spells bent by malicious intent, which made for dangerous and unpredictable situations, such as the new moon nights. And I liked avertana more for those things, but I also had started thinking of the other two studies of magic, metamara and deviah—but deviah in particular. To take one’s skill and create an enchanted object was no simple feat, and I had read of magicians who had devoted decades of their lives to reach such achievement.

I needed more time. More time to hone my craft of art before I tried to layer magic within it. I had taught myself how to draw and had gradually become proficient with charcoal, as art supplies were hard to come by in this rustic town, but I knew my experience was lacking, and there were many other branches of art, waiting for me to explore.

“Perhaps one day,” I replied.

“Hmm” was all Mazarine said.

She at last rose from her chair with a slight grunt, as if her bones ached. I always forgot how tall she was, and I waited while she crossed to the other side of the room, where a bureau sat in a darkened corner. I listened to her open the drawers; I listened to the chime of coins as she gathered them in her hand.

“You claim I am unchanged,” she said, coming to meet me where I stood. “And yet you are not, Clementine. Your skill is improving, in magic as well as art.” And she extended her fist—knuckles like hills, veins like rivers beneath her papery skin, fingers full of coins.

I turned up my palm, and she paid me double. More than she had ever bestowed upon me before.

“This is very generous, Ms. Thimble.”

“Your father and that housekeeper of his who looks after you may not like me. But you are the only one in this town who does not fear me. And I reward such valor.”

I held her gaze, hoping my wariness wasn’t shining like ice within me.

“Let me walk you out,” Mazarine said with a sweep of her arm. “The day grows old, and you must prepare for tonight.”

But she didn’t move, and I sensed she wanted me to precede her. I led the way to the double doors, and she remained two steps behind me. We passed a mirror hanging on the wall, which I had never noticed before. Its frame was golden and elaborate, fashioned as vines and oak leaves. I saw my reflection—a girl with a smudge of charcoal on her chin and thick copper hair that refused to be tamed by a braid. My gaze began to shift to the doors when I caught a glimpse of what walked behind me.

Not Mazarine. Not the elderly woman I had drawn multiple times.

She was something else, tall and broad shouldered, her face creased and jagged like rocks, with a long nose that hovered over a thin, crooked mouth. Her skin was pale and her hair was still silver, but it was long and wiry, and threaded with leaves and sticks and thorny vines, as if she had risen from a forest. Two horns crowned her head, small and pointed, gleaming like bone.

Her eyes, large and dark and glittering with glee, met mine in the mirror for a fleeting moment, and I knew that I had just beheld her true nature. She knew it, too, and yet I didn’t react. I told myself to walk no faster, to breathe no deeper. To remain calm and poised. I swallowed the urge to bolt and I paused at the doors, to give her time to open them for me.

“You can find your way out from here?” she asked.

I smiled. My face felt strange, and I imagined I was grimacing. “Of course.” Once more, she appeared as the elderly woman that I had always known. But her eyes . . . I saw a trace of the wild being that she truly was, flaring like embers.

“Good. Until next time, Clementine.”

I slipped past her and made my way down the curling stairwell, my boots clicking on the marble in a measured pace, because I knew she was listening.

Her butler—an old, craggy man dressed in livery of a lord long dead—was sitting in a chair by the front door, snoring. I tried to sneak past him, but he startled and stood, fumbling for the door handle.

“A good day to you, Miss Clem,” he said in a raspy voice. “And may you be victorious in battle tonight, with the new moon.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wetherbee.”

While his eyes were gentle and haunted by cataracts, the sort of eyes a grandfather might have, I couldn’t help but wonder what reflection he cast in a mirror: if he was the old human man he appeared to be, or if he was something quite different.

I passed over the threshold, descending the steps to the gravel path that led to the road. Triangles of shrubs grew in perfect symmetry, and when I reached the iron gate, I dared to glance back at the house.

It was a grand manor, built of red brick and three stories high, with square windows that glistened like teeth. The first magician of Hereswith had dwelled here, and then her successor. This had always been the domain of the town magician, and one would think magic still lingered in the walls and had seeped into the floors. And yet Mazarine had lived here for many years, according to the town records, and she was no magician.

She was not even human.

I wondered how she had accomplished such a feat, hiding her true face. Fooling us all.

I hesitated, as if to turn my back on the mansion was foolish. But at last, I pivoted away from the gate and began the brisk walk home.

Hereswith was not a vast town. My father and I could walk the entirety of it in the span of an hour. It was quaint, if one forgot the curse of the adjacent mountains. Cottages were snug, two storied, and built of stone and cob, capped with thatched roofs. Some had little gardens with ivy that attempted to eat the house; others had brightly painted front doors and mullioned windows blown from an erstwhile era. And then there was Mazarine’s mansion, which felt overwhelmingly out of place with its grandness, but still lent character to the town.

To me, Hereswith was home, beloved, even as it seemed to languish beneath summer’s final days. By late afternoon, when the sun began to set, the shadows from the Seren Mountains would reach us, and the breeze would smell of cold grass and smoldering wood and damp stone. Like old magic.

I never wanted to leave this place.

With each step I took from Mazarine’s demesne, the more my doubt began to simmer. By appearances, Hereswith felt idyllic and charming. But I began to wonder if the town was hiding something beneath its exterior.

I learned a vital lesson from Mazarine that day. One that made me vow that I would never trust appearances alone.

2

“What is Mazarine?” I asked Imonie the moment I returned home. She was exactly where I knew she would be—in the kitchen, preparing dinner. My father and I always ate well on new moon nights, just before the streets turned deadly. If it wasn’t for Imonie, the two of us would have been shriveled-up magicians with threadbare clothes and wounds that never healed properly.

She stood at the counter, peeling a mountain of potatoes. She was like a grandmother to me, although she was too young to be such a thing. She had never confessed her age, but I guessed she was in her early fifties. She was tall and trim and had threads of silver in her corn-silk hair, and while she rarely smiled, a few wrinkles touched the corners of her eyes.

“What do you mean?” Imonie asked, her attention devoted to her task. “Mazarine is a grumpy old woman.”

“No, she’s not.”

It must have been the tone in my voice.

Imonie stopped her peeling and met my gaze. “Did she threaten you, Clem?”

“No,” I said, despite the fact that there had been a moment when I’d felt afraid of her. When her gaze had met mine in the mirror.

“I’ve told you for years now to stay away from her.”

“She’s lonely and she pays me well. She also feeds me stories from the mountains.” I intently watched Imonie’s face, and I noticed how her brow furrowed. She longed to return to her ancestors’ home in the Seren Mountains.

“I could tell you the same stories,” Imonie said, and resumed her paring, viciously.

“Then why don’t you?”

“Because they fill me with sorrow, Clem.”

I fell quiet, feeling a twinge of regret. But in that silence, I thought of the mountain story she had told me often when I had begged her as a girl.

The realm of Azenor had not always been beset with tangible nightmares, although it was difficult to imagine such a world. It was all I had ever known, but Imonie had told me the legend that had started it all: Once, the mountains held a prosperous duchy. Magic itself had been first born in the summits, where the clouds touched the earth. But when the Duke of Seren was assassinated by his closest friends, the mountain province had sundered. Well versed in magic, the duke had cast a curse as he lay dying. No death and no dreams for those in his court who had been touched by the betrayal. They would live endlessly, watching as those they loved grew old and perished without them. And without dreams . . . their own hearts would become dry and brittle.

One does not realize how powerful a dream is, in the sleeping world as well as the waking one, until it has been stolen from them.

The duke had died on a new moon, and that was when the mountains began to spin nightmares into reality, all across the other two duchies of Azenor—the valleys and forests and meadows of Bardyllis and Wyntrough. No one could escape it, and so magicians had risen to answer the danger, perfecting the avertana branch of magic and becoming wardens of intricately mapped territories. Like my father.

Imonie hefted a sigh, as if she knew the exact story I was imagining. It seemed fitting for a new moon day, though. And she set down her potato and knife, leaning on the counter to fix a firm gaze on me.

“I can smell her from the road when I pass that ugly manor,” she said. “Moss and stone and cold winter nights.”

I waited for Imonie to continue, eager to know the truth. Eager to know who I had been drawing over and over for months now.

But then Imonie smirked and asked, “What do you think Mazarine is, Clem?”

“I think she’s a troll from the mountains.”

“You’re probably right, although I haven’t gotten close enough to her to see for myself.”

“Is she cursed?”

“Cursed? I think whatever guise she dons is one of her own making, how she wants to be perceived. For while Hereswith has warmly welcomed those such as me from the mountain duchy . . . do you think the mortals here would be delighted to know a troll dwelled among you?”

“Most people would be afraid of her,” I confessed. “Although it seems people already are.”

“And perhaps she likes the fear,” Imonie said. “Just enough to keep people and their suspicions away. So she can live peacefully here.” Her eyes narrowed at me. “And how did you come to know her true nature?”

“I caught her reflection in a mirror,” I answered, and remembered seeing her two steps behind, crouching toward me with her bloodied teeth and fierce, dark eyes. Would she have harmed me? I wanted to believe that she wouldn’t.

I began to consider a spell I might craft to protect myself, sharpen my senses when I was in her presence.

“A foolish blunder on her part, then,” said Imonie.

“Actually, I think she planned it,” I countered, tracing the bow of my lips. “She wanted me to see who she truly is.”

“Why?”

I realized I still had charcoal on my fingertips, that I must have smudged a mustache on my face. My hand drifted away to hold the strap of my satchel.

“I think she wants me to draw her true self.”

“Of course she does!” Imonie grumbled, returning to her task. “Trolls are insufferably vain.”

“Is something burning?” I asked, sniffing the air.

Imonie went rigid, and then rushed to the oven. A thin plume of smoke rose when she cracked the oven door. “You’ve made me burn the galettes!”

“They look fine,” I reassured her as she took a mitt and retrieved them from the oven.

“Clementine?” my father called from upstairs.

Both Imonie and I froze. When she looked at me, I saw the worry in her expression.

“Is he still sick?” I whispered.

“His fever has yet to break,” Imonie said. “Best you go up and see what he needs. Here, take him this cup of tea. Make sure he drinks it.”

She took the kettle from the stove and poured a cup of a pungent-smelling brew that made my nose crinkle. But I took it as she ordered, nearly burning my hand on the mug. I didn’t realize it, not until I was on my way to the stairs. I set my art satchel down and glanced at the table and saw only one place was set with the fine china. My place. Imonie had not set a dinner plate at my father’s chair, which meant she believed he was too ill to face the new moon.

I had never encountered a new moon night on my own. He and I were always together in the streets, fighting as one.

Dismayed, I climbed the stairs and stepped into his bedroom.

My father was sitting up in his bed, leaning against the headboard, waiting for me. He seemed to get sick every year, right around this time. When summer surrendered to autumn, my father inevitably fell prey to a fever and a cough, blaming it on a final bloom of some vengeful valley weed. And while he always recovered within a few days, I still didn’t know what to do with him when he was like this.

“Papa?” I tried to hand him the tea mug, but he motioned for me to set it on the bedside table. “Did you need something?”

“I received word of a nightmare this morning,” he said.

“Whose?”

“Spruce Fielding’s youngest daughter.”

“Elle?”

“The very one. She had a nightmare last night. According to Spruce . . . it frightened her so badly that she hasn’t spoken a word today.”

I quirked my mouth to the side, my heart aching with this news. Children’s nightmares were always the worst. They were the recordings that kept me up at night when I read them. They were the dreams I dreaded to see stalking the streets on new moon nights.

“And you need me to go and record it,” I surmised, and a quiet thrill went through me. I had never been the one to divine a nightmare, or to record it in my father’s book. I accompanied him most of the time, and I observed, and I read his recordings afterward so I could prepare for the new moon. But never on my own.

“Yes, Clem,” Papa said, and I could not discern if he was proud or nervous. “Don’t use the divining spell unless you absolutely must. And if you must, please use my spell, word for word.”

I nodded and felt his gaze as I moved about his cluttered bedchamber, gathering supplies for the visitation.

“I will, Papa.” I opened his cupboard, where a hoard of tiny blue vials waited within, gleaming in the light. Remedies. I selected two, the corked glass the size of my pinkie. The dark brew sloshed within them as I hesitated, thought better of it, and grabbed three more vials, slipping them into the deep pocket of my charcoal-streaked skirt.

“Divining,” my father continued, as if he was about to impart a lecture. I inwardly braced myself. “Particularly done with . . . oh, how do I say this, with precarious intent, can open a door that you might not know how to close.”

As if to prove a point, I shut the cupboard door, more forceful than necessary. I could hear the vials rattling in protest, and I met Papa’s gaze, swallowing an impatient response. Sometimes he acted like I had no inkling how to cast a charm or divine a nightmare. This was a lesson I had heard countless times from him, before magic had even sparked at my fingertips.

“I haven’t done anything precarious in months, Papa.”

And by precarious, I meant spontaneous, when magic came to me in the moment. The sort of magic he was afraid of. That was why he was diligent in studying the nightmares, so he could prepare potential spells. His memory was immense and deep, and while I admired him for it . . . my strongest magic was forged from intuition.

I felt him watching me, thoughts churning. He was stern and imposing, even as he perspired from a fever, bedridden. I favored him in appearance, far more than I did my mother. My father and I were both tall and willow thin, with square jaws and large brown eyes and wiry auburn hair, lustrous as copper when it met the light. A stranger could tell we were kin from a mile away. But that was where our similarities ended. Our souls were two different points on a compass; the intent behind our magic flowed in opposite currents. He was cautious, reserved. Traditional. And I wasn’t.

I knew what he saw in me. I was young and reckless. His one and only daughter, who favored the wilder, natural study of magic. My ideas and spells scared him sometimes, although he would never say such a thing aloud. Because without me, Papa would never take a risk.

“Pack what you need for the divination,” he said.

Relieved that he believed me capable, I walked to his desk. A detailed map of Hereswith was spread over the wood, river rocks pinning down the four corners. It was a map I had memorized with its crooked, winding streets. Above the desk, shelves lined the wall, burdened with leather-bound spell books, stacks of paper, jars brimming with crushed flowers and salt crystals and swan quills, ornate ink pots, cast-iron spoons with jewels embedded in the handles, silver bowls nestled into each other, a potted fern whose wilting leaves dangled like unrequited love.

I gathered what I needed: a bowl that shone like a full moon, pink salt, dried gardenias, a spoon with an emerald chip, a pitcher full of water, a swan quill, a silver inkwell that was crafted as an octopus, its tentacles holding a vial of walnut ink. I charmed them all beneath my breath with a shrinking cantrip—a spell my mother had taught me—until the objects could sit cradled in my palm, and I slipped them into my pocket, where the remedies waited. The objects clinked like musical notes when they met, weightless as air.

My father made a noise of disapproval. Of course, he wasn’t fond of any sort of metamara magic, which transformed and influenced objects.

“Why don’t you pack a bag?” He indicated his worn leather satchel, sitting on the floor beside his writing chair, like a sad dog awaiting a walk.

“My pockets will do fine.” My leather satchel was for my art supplies alone, and I didn’t want it mixing with magical ones yet. “Now, then. Where is the book?”

“There will be absolutely no enchanting the book to make it fit in your pocket, Clementine.”

“Very well. I’ll carry it in my arms, like a good avertana.”

Papa wasn’t amused. But he relented, feeling the urgent pull of the afternoon, the slant of sunlight as it began to shift across the floor. I wouldn’t have much time to fetch the nightmare. So he uttered a spell in his storytelling voice, smooth and polished like sanded oak. And the book of nightmares materialized. It had been sitting on the map of Hereswith, in the center of my father’s desk, charmed invisible.

Clever, I thought. All these years, I had believed my father had simply hidden the prized ledger in a secret nook.

I took it reverently, surprised by how heavy it was. Seven magicians had kept detailed dream recordings before Papa had come to Hereswith, and I had always hoped to become the ninth magician, after my father retired. But I felt the weight of those inked dreams of people now dead and buried. I felt them as if I had embraced a millstone.

I met Papa’s gaze, and he saw my shock. I hadn’t realized it until now. The weight he carried as the town’s magician. And suddenly . . . I didn’t know if I was strong enough to bear it.

“Come here, daughter,” he whispered.

I crossed the room, the book heavy in my arms, and sat on the edge of his bed. I could feel the feverish heat rolling off him in waves, and it made me worry.

“I’ve taught you all that I know,” he said. “You’ll do just fine recording this dream, as long as you stick to the rules and predetermined spells.” He paused to study me with squinted eyes. “You know, it’s not a bad thing to be fearful every now and then. The fear reminds you of limits, of what lines you should not cross. Of the doors you shouldn’t open.”

“Hmm.”

“And what does that sound mean?”

I smiled. My dimples I had stolen from my mother, and I knew my father softened at the sight. “It means I hear you, Papa.”

“Hear but do not heed?” he countered, but he was teasing. “Regardless, it’s time for you to do a visitation on your own. Go to the Fieldings and come directly home. If you’re not back before dusk, I will come searching for you. And we both don’t want that.”

“I will return with time to spare,” I said, rising from the bed. “And if you’re not feeling well by nightfall, then I can—”

“I will be more than fine when the new moon rises,” Papa growled. “Tell Imonie to set me a place at the dinner table. We’ll eat before we go, as we always do.”

There was no sense in arguing with him, no sense in telling him that he might be more of a burden, that his fever would make him and his enchantments weak and frail.

“Drink your tea,” I told him, and slipped from his bedroom.

I descended the curling stairwell of the cottage, scaring Dwindle, my old calico cat, on the way down.

“Did I hear your father say to set him a place at the table?” Imonie asked, her back angled to me as she tended to meat sizzling in a skillet.

I often forgot how sharp her hearing was. She could hear through walls, it seemed.

“You did, and I don’t think he’ll listen to reason.” I stopped at the counter, where the pan of almost-burned cherry galettes was cooling. “And you should stop eavesdropping, by the way. One day you’ll hear something you wish you hadn’t.”

“We’ll see about that,” Imonie said with a snort, seeming to answer both dilemmas—my father’s stubbornness and her keen hearing. She glanced up at me, a rare smile warming her solemn face. “Now, are you going to help me fry this venison, or are you going to tend to that nightmare?”

“Ugh, I’m off, of course.” I pushed away from the counter but swiped two cherry galettes.

“Clementine!” Imonie cried, but she wasn’t surprised as I grinned and shoved one of the pastries in my mouth, bolting out the front door.

I lingered by the withering jasmine at the front gate, long enough to tuck the remaining pastry in my pocket and look up, to where the clouds were streaked like ribs across the sky, exposing a burning heart of sun.

What a strange day.

I glanced at the book of nightmares in my arms. It was a tome, the sort that could hold back an ironclad door. I had read only portions of it, and some accounts had made me laugh at their absurdity, while others had actually made me fall asleep, only to wake hours later with my cheek pressed against the caramel-tinged pages. But there were some recordings that made me shiver, dreams influenced by the mountains. They had sparked such fear in my bones that I hadn’t slept for a week after reading them, although none of these nightmares belonged to me.

No. I studied nightmares, and I confronted them every new moon in the streets of Hereswith, when the magic flowed freely from the mountain fortress and dreams were cursed to materialize. But I didn’t know what it was like to experience a nightmare. What it felt like to wake frightened from something that felt hauntingly real.

As a magician, I chose to never dream.