Chapter Text
In the beginning, she likes the way things change in this other place, this not-dream place. When the light fades into soft darkness, all the grass and trees and the house and the people are the same as they were when it was light. They smell the same. They taste the same. They’re just harder to see, although Orphan Girl can see much better in the darkness than people can. When the dark evaporates with the sun, everything is just as it was the last time it was light. Everything does change, but mostly just a little at a time, in ways she can understand and predict, in ways not caught in the tempest of Kerah’s heart and mind. That spider web starts as one strand, is woven into many, and breaks apart when the spider catches its prey. Beautiful shimmering threads remain exactly where they should be, only taking life with a breath of breeze, rather than growing to strangling tentacles. Winter comes and all the plants and animals go to sleep. It stays and stays until it goes and the leaves bud and unfurl, and rabbits linger in the dusk, and the birds return to sing the songs they sang before they left.
Kerah is a little strange and different. In his dream place, he did not hide from her, and he was so loud there –all terror or anger or joy or sadness or swallowed in darkness or bursting with light. In this place, he is still those things, but they’re all buried deep in his soil, nurturing his roots, mostly flashing to the surface after a big storm. There’s more joy and light, now, than there was in the dream place, and she sees those more than the others in the turning of his leaves and the shape of his branches.
She can still feel a little of what Kerah thinks and feels. She is not inside his dream place anymore, every element screaming it at her, but she can feel the shape of it flowing around him anyway. When Adam is with them, or even just with Kerah, it is an enormous, bright, colorful happiness that tickles the backs of her arms and brightens the edges of her vision. Better than this, though, is that when Adam is with them or just with her, she feels safety and calm belonging to her alone. In the dream place, Adam could only be to her what he was to Kerah - needing and hoping and happy and afraid. But out here, as much as Adam is Kerah’s, he is his own too, and he can be a little hers as well.
She loves Kerah, but they are pieces of each other, and she’s not sure loving Kerah is any different from loving the wind in the trees or the taste of dew on the grass or the sun or the stars or herself. She loves Adam a little because Kerah loves him so hugely it makes Adam shiny to her, but mostly because she chooses him and he chooses her too and her own choice is glorious to her.
Time, specifically the way it’s considered in this place, it new to her. She asks Kerah about her watch and he tells her numbers. She asks Adam about her watch. He starts with numbers, but moves from hours to days to weeks to seasons to earth to moon to sun and she gets bored and loses track, but she likes to hear him talk, so she watches him move his pretty slender hands as if he is organizing the entire universe just for her to look at. When Adam is away, she asks Kerah about her watch and seasons and moon and sun. Kerah shakes his head. “Fucking Parrish,” he sighs, but there is adoration coloring it a warm orange. Kerah digs up crayons and paper. They draw some pictures and make a story and she begins to understand. But Orphan Girl has whispered secrets with the tir e e’lintes and she knows time only imposes on you when you measure it too much. Kerah has also whispered secrets with the tir e e’lintes, though he has buried most of them deep in his head, so he only measures a few things, time not usually being one of them. He saves most of his measuring for the thousands of things related to Adam, who is always measuring everything.
There is a series of seasons after Orphan Girl is freed from Kerah’s dream place. She prefers to be outside to observe this marvelous, slow, gradual progression from fall to winter to spring to summer and back again in the same unrelenting order. During much of the first winter, she is shut up too much in house places: the main house of the Barns and Gansey’s huge awful warehouse. Everything in the house places smells and tastes dead, not decomposing but inert, not having lost life but having never seen it at all. These places are far too static for a dream girl from a dream forest. They make her feel bored and lonely and trapped.
Kerah keeps trying to give her things to sooth her moodiness: dream things, toys, food. She doesn’t want any of these things. She needs to let the shifting air play over her tongue, to test the varying textures of the leaves as the days bleed into one another, to hear the intricacies of the birds’ secrets. Without these, why leave the dream at all? Without these, she is just another of Kerah’s things.
Adam, of course, magician, teases out the source of her growing melancholy enough to find a solution. It is another cold, dreary day and she is imprisoned in the Barns house place, which is far better than the Monmouth house place, with Kerah and Adam. She and Kerah have been slashing at each other all morning and they are both bleeding, but Orphan Girl is bleeding more because she can’t stand to see Kerah bleeding and Adam is spending all his attention soothing Kerah’s wounds and not hers. They vanish into the depths of the house place by themselves for what might be short but feels long (she scowls at her watch, turning its measuring face away). Kerah comes back and sits on the floor beside her. His dream place says to her, guilty. She leans into him and he hugs her, sealing up most of the cuts he made before.
Adam returns with his magic picture cards. Orphan Girl is very interested in these. They are pretty and a little scary in the same way as a dream. They feel a little like Cabeswater felt and smell a little like Cabeswater smelled. She licked the back of one once, when he wasn’t looking, but they don’t taste like dream places at all, and she dared not bite one for confirmation. When Adam shuffles them, she can feel his dream place growing and stretching and sniffing the air. His dream place is as powerful as Kerah’s, though he keeps it wrapped much closer around him than Kerah does, and his song always sings hungry, know, fix, protect.
He sits down on the floor across from her and offers her the deck. She is nervous, he’s never given her all his cards before.
“Pick two,” he says.
The cards are so large she has trouble handling them. All of them call in contradictory voices as she sifts through them, but there are two that call loudest. She hands these reverently back to Adam. Kerah frowns over the whole proceeding, but he is watching.
The first card is the High Priestess. The second is the Sun. She likes this one in particular, it screams outside, explore to her, the smudgy image seeming to her to be green shadows and secret streams. The first, the High Priestess, seems to be the vague shape of a thoughtful face, and is colored in a changing way, something like dream places. Adam lays a hand on the floor, delicately touching both cards. He looks somewhere beyond the cards and she can feel the pulse of the ama via reaching up to meet his seeking. It scares her a little, feeling his dream place pulling from the ama via and reaching for her own essence. He takes a deep breath, his dream place settling back close to him again.
When he looks at her, something extraordinarily bright shines from his eyes, peering directly into her deepest self, the mysterious dream thing even Kerah could not understand. “What does it mean?” she asked, her voice trembling a little.
He taps the High Priestess. “You know about a lot of things we don’t see or understand. You need your freedom to know them. Without it, you’re less than you could be.”
She nods emphatically. Yes, she needs to be her own, just like he needs to be his own.
He taps the Sun. “This house isn’t good for you.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Nothing’s wrong with the house. It’s not like I chained her in the fucking basement! She’s outside most of the time anyway. Where is she supposed to go?”
She shrinks under Kerah’s fresh wave of hurt. Adam frowns at him. “Shut up, Lynch. This isn’t about you or the house.” He turns back to Orphan Girl. “Ronan’s right though. The Barns is the best place we have for you to live.”
“It’s just so . . . not alive.”
Kerah’s expression barely covers the raw devastation this tiny sentence wreaks. Orphan Girl flinches, assaulted by the silent screaming. Still, she is growing dusty and shriveled. She has to scream louder.
“Maybe . . . I could have my own house place. Still at the Barns. Just, near the woods?”
“By the goddamned woods? There could be fucking bears or cougars out there. You’d be a fucking midnight snack! You and your bullshit witch cards, Parrish!” Kerah cries, jumping up to pace.
Orphan Girl and Adam are both frowning at him now. “Are you a dreamer or not?” Adam asks coldly. “Can’t you come up with some predator repellant? Have you ever had anything going after your totally helpless sleeping cows?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean-“
“Kerah!” she calls, and it is more like a bird than a girl but she can’t help it. “Please?”
“Look at her,” Adam says softly, and she knows she will win because she has won Adam and Kerah will not deny Adam anything, ever.
The interminable winter begins to improve as her special house place takes shape. Kerah dreams her socks and boots she hates, but must wear when they leave the Barns to look like she has feet like everyone else. Orphan Girl is not particularly interested in being like people, but Kerah and Adam both insist she wear them if she leaves the Barns. It takes her two miserable days, crying and cawing and screeching to learn to walk in them. Kerah says he’s going to just cut off both her legs and feed them to a wild boar, but he picks her up just as gently every time she falls. When Adam appears, even though his shoulders and eyes sing tired, he quietly holds her hand as she drags herself, stumbling, up and down the stairs, over and over, calm and steady no matter how she shrieks.
Once she has mastered the horrid boots, she is allowed to go to more outside places with Kerah and his friends. Adam takes her to the library to look at pictures books with animal dens or tree houses or fanciful fairy dwellings. She gets to go to Fox Way. Blue’s room is like a forest and a dream and a house place all at once. It’s more of a dead house place than she wants hers to be, but it’s appealing. Alone with Blue, she talks about the things she wants her house place to be. Blue tells her about different kinds of nests and burrows. Blue draws pictures for her, which they decorate with bits of feathers and fabric. They make squishy little doll furniture out of scraps of cardboard and colorful cotton. Orphan Girl uses these treasures to show Kerah a vision from her very own dream place.
Some of her house is built from things Kerah buys at a store – wood and nails and blocks and mortar. Most is built from things she gathers from the woods – particular smooth stones in a carefully designed pattern before her door; at least one branch from every type of tree surrounding the Barns; mud and clay from the creek. Some is dream things – a huge, glowing lily hanging from the ceiling that can go dark when she wishes; a bed of the softest, sweetest-smelling moss, ever growing; blankets of fiery-colored feathers and black silky fur.
Alone there, in her own little den, Orphan Girl can step swiftly and silently as only a hooved girl can in and out of her dreams, which may find her galloping through the ice shards in a comet’s tail or the pores of a leaf or the years in the life of a squirrel. She can wake and taste the living night on her tongue and know with certainty that she is not just another of Kerah’s dream things. She is her own thing.