Doscach lowers onto his front legs, telling me to climb on his back. Because it is a dream, I do. I don’t need to think in a dream, to make decisions, to worry whether I’m doing the right thing. I don’t need to take my sword or put on my clothing or tell anyone what I’m doing. It’s only a dream, and the shadow is gone, stars shining bright overhead. That fog still slithers through the camp, making me sleepy and content, moving as if in a trance.
Only a dream.
When I look around, everyone is asleep. The fire is indeed out, burned down to ashes. Wilmot sleeps beside it, as if he’s collapsed there. Malric snores next to my sleeping blankets. Only Jacko stirs, and I smile at that. Even in a dream, he’s the one I can’t leave behind. He notices I’m on Doscach’s back and jumps up, only to stagger and blink.
I reach down, but he can’t quite make it. He’s dopey and sleep-dazed. I ask Doscach to lower himself again, and he does, and I scoop Jacko into his place. Then we’re off.
Doscach is a creature of the water, happiest there. Yet, unlike many aquatic mammals, he moves just as fast on land, and he stays on the water’s edge, running at full canter toward the mountains. As Jacko chitters on my lap, I pet and soothe him, and I smile up at Mount Gaetal, majestic and beautiful against the night sky.
I almost wish I were awake, to count this among the perfect moments in my life: racing on a ceffyl-dwr’s back, holding my jackalope, hearing the burble of water and the wind sighing in the trees, inhaling the faint smell of campfire. Yet were I awake, it would not be so glorious. I’d be in a panic, seeing that terrible mountain drawing near, my companions left behind, me on Doscach’s back, clad only in my nightclothes with nothing but my dagger, sheathed on my hip. No, this is better as a mere dream.
And then it is not.
I don’t know exactly how I realize I’m awake. I don’t pick up a new smell or see a new sight or hear a new sound. It is as if I’m swaddled in soft hides, blissfully warm and sleepy, and then, slowly, those hides fall away, my mind clearing and the cold night wind slapping me into wakefulness.
I’m not dreaming.
I’m awake.
I am on Doscach’s back.
Running full-tilt toward Mount Gaetal.
Wearing only my thin nightclothes, with my feet bare and nothing but a dagger at my side.
“No!” I say as I jerk upright.
Jacko startles and blinks up at me, as if still half-asleep himself.
I yank on Doscach’s mane. “No! Stop!”
He only runs faster, and this waking dream turns to a nightmare. I am on Doscach’s back, and he is running to Mount Gaetal, and I am trapped, like in the legends where a ceffyl-dwr’s mane binds its victims to its back.
Maybe this is what the legends actually mean—that once you climb on, you cannot get off, because it’s galloping at such a speed that throwing yourself from the monster’s back means certain death.
I’ve been tricked. Like a maiden in a bard’s song, who comes across a beast in the woods and befriends it, only to realize it is an evil creature. Doscach never wanted to be my companion. He only pretended to be until I lowered my guard, and now he’s snatching me away to devour me…
Yet, even in my panic and groggy state, I realize that’s ridiculous. I have never heard any true story of a monster befriending a human as a trick. Why would they? Their needs are simple. If Doscach wanted dinner, there were far easier ways to get it than hanging out with a princess for weeks on end.
I have joked about Malric devouring me in my sleep, but that’s more about me than him—my lack of confidence in his true feelings about me. I have heard of animals turning on their masters and killing them. Never monsters, though; not unless it is a situation like the one those terrible villagers trade in—taking monsters from the wild and selling them as pets. In that case, yes, a monster can be even more dangerous than an animal. It has been enslaved and will kill for its freedom.
That is not what this is. So what is it?
The answer comes as soon as that sleep-fog clears from my brain. Last night, Doscach very clearly wanted us to keep walking. I’d worried he didn’t like the spot we’d chosen, but that hadn’t seemed to be the problem. What I never considered was the other end of the spectrum. He wasn’t warning us against staying in that spot—he wanted us to continue on because there was something farther upriver he wanted us to see.
We’d been so close to his goal, and then we stopped, and his reaction was frustration and annoyance. And now, sleepy and mistaking the moment for a dream, I’d climbed onto his back and he was taking advantage of it.
Fully awake, no matter how much I might have wanted to see what the ceffyl-dwr thought was so important, duty and responsibility would have won out. I have a duty to my guardian—Wilmot—not to go tearing off into the most dangerous part of our world, no matter how curious I might be. I have a duty to my people not to risk my life satisfying that curiosity. Yet even while I think that, I struggle to feel it. I can blame sleepiness, but I think the true blame lies with my blood. My Clan Dacre blood.
Earlier, in that dreamlike state, I’d sworn my blood was catching fire, urging me up, urging me toward something. An unknown something. The urge still beats there, like a second heartbeat, pushing me onward. Prodding me to just see. Just take a look.
This is important, it whispers.
I do try to stop Doscach.
