Briar & the Dreamers of Midnight

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

I don’t know how much time I have, so I don’t dawdle. The wolfkin get grouchy if my people are late to meetings, even though I’ve explained a million times that it’s not my fault. They’re not exactly the warm and fuzzy kind of canine.

So I always make an effort to get everyone to the meeting on time as best I can. That means preparing my dreamers ahead of time.

Luckily, this isn’t the first time I’ve met with castle agents. That makes it a whole lot easier to enter their dreams. It also cuts down on the time I need to convince them that this is a real message and not just some throwaway dream.

But first, I step out of the Dreaming and into my tower. As much as I dread being stuck here, I need to check the time.

If I tell the agents about the meeting while they’re in the middle of their sleep, they’ll likely forget. It’s best to catch them right before they wake. They’re much more likely to remember that way.

I wish I could tell time in places other than my tower, but it’s the only place I know where time ticks regularly and predictably. It took me a long time before I figured out that my tower is at a juncture of Dreaming and Waking. Like me, my tower is suspended in a twilight place that overlaps the two realms without belonging to either.

Eventually, I learned how to step into the Dreaming without being a dreamer. The Waking held nothing good for me, and so I abandoned it. Same with lying in my body and entering the Dreaming as a dreamer. I abandoned that as well, except for the few times when I get really, really bored.

Being an ordinary dreamer is like riding in a carriage that someone else is driving. Being alert and walking into the Dreaming is like being able to turn that carriage into a sled and flying with it. It’s pretty amazing. It’s hard to go back to being an ordinary dreamer once you’ve experienced the Dreaming while you’re internally “awake.”

Once I get back to the tower, I do what I always do when I’m here—I do my best to avoid looking at my sleeping body. Instead, I peer out through the arched window.

I swear the thorns have grown since the last time I looked. The courtyard has been covered in them for years, but now, it’s creeping up my tower to my window.

Leafla warned us that there would be something dangerous that kept the prince away from me. People assumed it would be a dragon or some such beast.

It turned out to be deadly thorns. Hundreds of thousands of them. That’s what my parents got for naming me Briar. The evil fairy must have thought it was funny. I suppose I should be glad my name isn’t Fang-Claws.

To hide me from the evil fairy, my parents built this tower in a secret location for me and surrounded it with a high wall that protected the courtyard. Despite all his reassurances about how the spell will never get me, my father had the tower built anyway. He finished it before my sixteenth birthday when the curse was supposed to trigger, just in case.

I miss him, even after all this time.

As I look out my tower window, I see movement.

At first, I think it’s a couple of red birds. But they couldn’t be shifting and jerking the thorn bush beneath them.

A head appears between the two birds. It’s only then that I realize that the birds are really bloodied hands.

It’s an ogre. A giant one. It must be for it to climb over the courtyard wall like that.

The walls have crumbled a little here and there over the years, but it’s still high. The thorns cover it. I’m sure it’s as thick on the other side as it is on this side.

When the ogre drags himself up, he is streaked in blood. I can’t see the details from this high up, but I can see that his clothes are torn to dirty rags and every part of him is bleeding.

He roars as he climbs to the top of the wall. He tears at the thorn branches that are stuck to him. They cling to his skin and tear at his hands. As the branches tear away from his body, they rip his flesh along the way.

These aren’t ordinary thorns. They’re meant to pierce, slice and kill with a thousand little wounds.

They covered the walls and half the courtyard by the time I figured out how to escape my body. The first time I looked out my window, I saw the dead body of an ogre who had climbed to the top of the wall.

The thorns were meant to keep out my prince until the evil fairy could find me. But so far, there have been no princes. So far, the only ones who’ve tried to reach me have been ogres. Big. Ugly. Terrifying.

My nannies used to tell me stories of ogres when I was bad. They’d tell me that I couldn’t ever leave their sight, otherwise, an ogre might get me. And everyone knew that ogres ate children and dragged off maidens to some nightmare place.

Ogres are crazy strong, and this one looks especially muscular. The other ogres who tried to reach me all ended up dead, so I shouldn’t be nervous. I really shouldn’t.

Why they keep coming or how they even know where to find me, I’ll never know. Perhaps my parents hid me too well for a prince to find me. Perhaps they accidentally hid me in the middle of ogre territory.

This one makes me more nervous than I care to admit.

I quickly check the time. It’s four in the morning.

In my previous life of being a princess, four o’clock would have seemed too early even for castle servants. But I know better now. Nobles and royalty don’t want their fires stoked and breakfast served until midmorning, but there’s an endless amount of preparation and cleaning that needs to be done before that.

Perfect time for me to catch some dreamers before they wake. I rush out of my tower, trying not to think about the monstrous ogre outside my window.