again.”
“Young ... ?”
Isabelle turned toward the nearest window. The image reflected back was hard to make out because of the streaks of frost that striped the pane, but she could still see what he meant. It
“Let’s get out of this cold,” John said.
“Where can we go?” she asked.
He pointed to the fire escape, festooned with Paddyjack’s ribbons. Isabelle hesitated, not sure she could go. What if she found herself inside, crying into her pillow, brokenhearted? But when John took her arm and led her toward the metal steps, she went with him, up the fire escape, hand trailing along the metal banister, fingers tangling in the strips of colored cloth. At the top of the landing, John took a small penknife from his pocket and inserted it between the windows. It took him only a moment to pop the latch. Stowing away the knife, he pulled the window open and ushered her inside. As he closed the window behind them, keeping out the cold and snow, Isabelle gazed about at the familiar confines of her old bedroom. It looked exactly the way she remembered it except it seemed smaller.
The warmth inside was comforting, but Isabelle still shivered, as much from the eeriness of being where— and when—she was as from the chill she’d gotten outside. Her cheeks stung as the warm air settled on her skin. John made a slow circuit of the room, then sat down on the edge of the mattress.
After a moment, she followed suit.
“What were you saying earlier?” John asked. “About starting over?”
Isabelle turned to him, pulling her gaze away from its inventory of the room’s contents—all the remembered and forgotten objects that at this point in her life, almost twenty years later, seemed to be so much found art, gathered here together in her old bedroom by someone else, like a set for some kind of
“This Is Your Life” television show.
“I feel like I’m being given a second chance,” she said, “Returning here like this, I mean. This time I can do everything right.”
“This isn’t the past.”
“But ..... Isabelle gazed pointedly at the mirror on the far side of the room, where a reflection of her younger self looked back at her. “Then what
John shook his head. “We’re in a maker’s dream—just as we were that other winter night all those years ago.”
“I don’t understand.—What maker?”
“You. We’re in your dream.”
Isabelle stared at him. “You’re telling me it isn’t real? That I’ve made this all up?”
“I don’t know if you actually made it up,” John said, “or if you simply brought us here. But what I do know is that what happens here reflects back into the world we’ve left behind us.”
Isabelle’s throat was suddenly dry. The exhilaration, the freedom she’d felt when she’d finally taken matters into her own hands and followed in Kathy’s footsteps, had utterly drained away. It had seemed as though there’d been no other choice at the time. Now all she could see was choices. Had it been this way for Kathy as well? First the exhilaration of finally having done it, and then the regret when it was too late?
“I ... killed myself,” she finished in a small voice.
“You cut yourself,” John corrected. “Badly. But you’re not dead yet. If you were, we wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m alive?”
Isabelle’s relief was immeasurable.
“For now. We don’t know how badly you’re hurt. And we can’t judge your survival by how long we spend here since time moves differently in a maker’s dream. It’s like fairyland. We could be here for hours while only a moment passes in the world we left.”
“I see.”
And she did. Nothing was free. She’d gained the knowledge of a new level of enchantment, but she’d only gained it when she might no longer be able to use it beyond this one last time.
“Have I always been able to do this?” she asked. “Could I have come here whenever I wanted to?”
“Ever since you became a maker.”
“But why didn’t I
“I thought you did.”
Isabelle gave him a blank look. “But the only other time I’ve ever done it was almost twenty years ago.”
“Are you so sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’d know, don’t you think?”
John shrugged. “So you never dream?”
“Well, of course I dream. It’s just ...”
Her voice trailed off. Yes, she dreamed. Very vivid dreams, often peopled with the numena she’d brought across from the before. Horrors courtesy of Rushkin for a while, but then later, other, mundane dreams in which she simply interacted with her numena. She just hadn’t been aware of a difference between what she now realized had been maker’s dreams and ordinary ones. And they’d all stopped, after the fire. After she shut herself off from the alchemy that Rushkin had taught her and refused to bring any more numena across.
“Why did I never dream of you again?” she asked. “Why did I never bring you back into one of those dreams?”
“I can’t answer that for you,” John said.
Isabelle nodded slowly. He couldn’t but she could.
“It’s because I shut you out of my life,” she said. “I wanted you back, but I wanted you on my own terms and I guess some part of me realized that you can’t do that. I would have had to take you as you are, or not at all.”
“But you didn’t forget me entirely,” John said. “Sometimes a maker’s dreams are prescient, or at least the patterns in them reflect on life and repeat toward certain meanings.” He held up the bracelet of woven cloth that was on his wrist. “Like colored cloth.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s one of the pattern that keeps repeating in your life: the bright clothes that Kathy always wore, Paddyjack’s ribbons from which you made these bracelets, the Maypole dance that was never consummated because of the fire. Even the abstract designs on your canvases that replaced your realistic paintings.”
“But what does the pattern mean?” Isabelle asked.
“I can’t answer that for you either, but I do know that if you hadn’t made me this bracelet, you wouldn’t have been able to trust who I was after you’d met Bitterweed. We might never have come here, to this moment. We might never have had the chance to finally put an end to the shadow that’s hung over us for most of our lives.”
“You’re losing me again,” Isabelle said, but it wasn’t true. She knew exactly what he meant. She simply couldn’t face it.
“We have to go to his studio,” John said. “Now. Tonight. Here, in this dream. We might never get another chance.”
“But—”
“He’s not protected from me here, Isabelle. He told me as much himself.” He bowed his head, staring at the floor. “I carry as much guilt around with me as you do. I could have finished him that night in the snow, but I was too hurt and too full of pride. I chose to turn my back on you. It was your fight, I told myself, not mine, and because of that decision hundreds have died. I won’t let that happen again.”
Isabelle shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known things would turn out the way they did.”
“But I did know. I had only to look at Rushkin, to know the honors he was capable of committing.”
“But to just kill a person in cold blood ..”
John lifted his head to look at her. “He’s not a person. He’s a monster.”
“I still couldn’t do it,” Isabelle said.
“I’m not asking you to. I’m the warrior, the hunter. All I’m asking you to do is to accompany me to his studio.
