Between - By Kerry Schafer
Prologue
Later she will remember him so: impatient with the waiting, restless feet carrying him back and forth in the grassy space in front of the fountain. She will remember the murmur and splash of falling water, the fragrance of roses, her own heart fluttering against the wall of her chest.
If only there were time, more time, enough time, she could spend an hour loving him from this distance: his chestnut hair silvered by moonlight, the lithe flow of muscle across his shoulders, the easy, swinging step. But time is something she has little of and so she steps out into the open and he turns to her in midstride, although she has made no sound, done nothing to betray her presence.
“Isobel.” Only the one word, but his heart’s blood is in it, and she sees by his face that he knows what she has come to say.
“When?” he asks, and she answers him, “Tonight; soon.”
She crosses the dew-damp grass and they stand, not quite touching, feeling in that space between them the form and shape of a long good-bye.
“Must you go?”
Later, she will remember her own laughter, cool as the water, falling, always falling. So young, she was, her head full of widening horizons. “Silly boy, it’s not forever. My father has come, as I told you. I am to become a Dreamshifter, as he is. I’ve so many things to learn.”
All of the blue gone from his eyes, behind them the water falling, always falling like rain or tears. “I have a gift for you,” he murmurs against her hair. “Come and sit.”
She lets him seat her on the stone bench beside the fountain, where the breeze blows a spray of mist onto her face and hair. He drops to his knees before her and pulls a velvet box out of his pocket. Inside nestle two circles of gold. He lifts the smaller and she sees three drops of crimson set into the band.
“My heart’s blood,” he says, in a voice scraped raw with loss and hope. “If you wear it, it will bring you back to me.”
“And the other?” she whispers, no longer laughing as the ring encircles her finger.
“Blood calls to blood.” He holds out his hand and she slips the ring onto his finger.
“One thing more,” she whispers, “just to be sure.” She holds out to him a crystal sphere, a precious thing, and rare. Even in the moonlight it shines, and she knows if she looks into it she will see a miniature of this place: a tiny fountain, a space of grass, the bench where she is sitting. “Keep it safe,” she says, curling his fingers around it.
“A dreamsphere,” he says, eyes wide with wonder. “I’ve never seen one. Is it permitted? Where did you get it?”
“I was summoned, last night, to the Cave of Dreams, and given this. Our secret, yours and mine. Nobody else need ever know.”
This she believes, as she kisses him good-bye, for she is very young and knows so little of what lies in the worlds beyond.
This, too, she will remember with regret.