Ronan couldn’t shake the idea that he was running out of time.
It was gonna work. It was gonna be great.
At lunchtime, Ronan abandoned his bed after two more failures to produce a successful armour. He pulled on muck boots and an already grubby hoodie and went outside.
The Barns was a conglomerate of outbuildings and sheds and big cattle barns; Ronan stopped at one to fill feed buckets and to heave a salt block on top of the pellets, a variation of his childhood routine. Then he set off towards the high pasture, passing the silent lumps of his father’s dream-cattle stubbornly sleeping in the fields on either side. On the way, he detoured to one of the big equipment barns. Standing on his toes, he felt around the top of the doorjamb until he found the tiny dream flower he’d left there. When he tossed it, the flower hovered just above his head, throwing out a continuous little yellow glow sufficient to illuminate his immediate path through the windowless barn. He made his dusty way past the broken machinery and unbroken machinery until he found his albino night horror curled on the hood of a rusted old car, all white ragged menace and closed eyes. Its pale and savage claws had scratched the hood down to bare metal; the night horror had spent more than a few hours here already. The creature opened a pinkened eye to regard him.
“Do you need anything, you little bastard?” Ronan asked it.
It closed its eye again.
Ronan left it and continued on his way with the feed buckets rattling productively, letting the dream flower follow him although he didn’t need it in the daylight. By the time he passed the largest cattle barn, he was no longer alone. The grass scuffled on either side of him. Groundhogs and rats and creatures that didn’t exist pattered out of the field grass to scamper in his footprints, and in front of him, deer emerged from the wood’s edge, their dusky hides invisible until they moved.
Some of the animals were real. Most of the deer were ordinary Virginia whitetails, fed and tamed by Ronan for no purpose other than delight. Their domestication had been aided by the presence of a dreamt buckling that lived among them. He was pale and lovely, with long, tremulous eyelashes and foxy red ears. Now, he was the first to accept Ronan’s offering of the salt block as he rolled it into the field, and he allowed Ronan to stroke the short, coarse fur of his withers and worry some burrs out of the soft hair behind his ears. One of the wild deer nibbled pellets from Ronan’s cupped palms, and the rest stood patiently as he poured it into the grass. Probably it was illegal to feed them. Ronan could never remember what was legal to feed or shoot in Virginia.
The smaller animals crept closer, some pawing at his boots, some alighting on the grass near him, others spooking the deer. He scattered pellets for them, too, and inspected them for wounds and ticks.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
He thought about what he wanted the skin armour to look like. Maybe it didn’t have to be invisible. Maybe it could be silver. Maybe it could have lights.
Ronan grinned at the thought, feeling suddenly silly and lazy and foolish. He stood, letting the day’s failure roll off his shoulders and fall to the ground. As he stretched, the white buckling lifted his head to observe him keenly. The others noted the buckling’s attention and likewise focused their gaze. They were beautiful in a way that Ronan’s dreams could be, the way Cabeswater could be, only now he was awake. Somehow, without Ronan marking the moment, the schism between his waking life and dreaming life had begun to narrow. Although half of this strange herd would fall asleep if Ronan died, so long as he was here, so long as he breathed in and breathed out, he was a king.
He left his bad mood in the field.
Back in the house, he dreamed.
The forest was Ronan.
He was lying on his face in the dirt, his arms outstretched, his fingers digging down into the soil for the ley line’s energy. He smelled leaves burning and falling, death and rebirth. The air was his blood. The voices muttering to him from the branches were his own, tracked over themselves. Ronan, looped; Ronan, again; Ronan, again.
“Get up,” the Orphan Girl said in Latin.
“No,” he replied.
“Are you trapped?” she asked.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“I do.”
He looked at her, somehow, although he was still all tangled up in his root-fingers and the ink branches growing from the tattoo on his bare back. Orphan Girl stood with a feed bucket in her hands. Her eyes were dark and sunken, the eyes of the always hungry or the always wanting. Her white skullcap was pulled down low over her honey-blond pixie cut.
“You’re just a piece of dream,” he told her. “You’re just some kind of subfuckery of my imagination.”