Waking in Dreamland by Jody Lynne Nye Page A

that broke off and swirled through the Dreamland. They almost always appeared at inopportune moments, and interfered with normal activity. Roan flailed at the crowd of investment brokers, trying to see over their
    shoulders. Someone bumped his elbow. He dropped his staff, and was unable to bend to pick it up in the crush.
    In between the confusion of margin calls and buy orders, Roan managed to catch glimpses of the scientists. One by one they were breaking free of his glass cages and running away. Roan tried to apply his will to one apprentice, then another, to get them to stay where they were, but each time, a fragment of the nuisance got in his way and broke the connection.
    Roan realized he was letting his attention be drawn in too many directions. Instead of trying to capture the group, he tried focusing directly on the next individual he saw, a thin young man with a plastic half-envelope sticking out of his coat’s breast pocket, and gazed at him, making him sink into the sand. Roan would have one captive, at least. Up to his armpits, the apprentice cried out to his fellows for help. Roan filled his mouth with cotton. The nuisance buffeted him up and back, until he lost sight of his prisoner.
    Through the crowd of cellular phones and Armani ties, the face of Brom suddenly appeared and leered at him.
    “You see, young man? There is no master but science.”
    Roan saw the end of his own staff shooting down toward his forehead, felt an appalling pain in his skull, then everything went black.

Chapter 8

    The sky that had been empty over the desert was full of twittering birds now, swooping down to circle around his head and off again into the sky, in triumphant patterns. Roan stood tall and straight before the throne.
    King Byron, dressed in blue silk velvet and rows of snowy ermine, and looking more regal than ever before, congratulated him warmly.
    “We shall be proud to have you in the family, my dear young man,” he said, shaking Roan’s hand in a firm grip. “You’re a hero! You have saved the Dreamland!”
    Roan smiled, and bowed deeply, feeling his head swim at such compliments. “Your Majesty, I am honored to have been of service, but I have to give credit to those others who helped me by arriving in the nick of time.”
    Byron smiled back and raised his hands high. “Your modesty ill-defines your courage and abilities. You have swept aside any objections I had to you marrying my daughter. The wedding will proceed at once!” He clapped his hands.
    “Her Ephemeral Highness, the Princess Leonora!” the herald bellowed, but even he sounded elegant, and was clad in yards of sea-green velvet and golden lace.
    The princess, looking more lovely and remote than ever, dressed in a filmy lace gown that was nearly insubstantial and yet still opaque enough to protect virginal modesty, stepped forward and laid her fingers on Roan’s arm. She smiled brilliantly up at him as trumpeters played a slow march. Roan and his chosen lady walked together along an aisle carpeted with white silk and strewn with flowers, to an altar of gold and warm brown wood, backed by a colored window that looked like the intricate branches of a tree with blue sky and green leaves of stained glass between the thick black lines. As the triumphant music rose around them, the princess turned toward him and raised her sheer, white veil; her beautiful brown—no, blue—no, green eyes were full of worry as she looked up into his face.
    “Can you hear me, Roan? Darling, are you all right?”
    The headache centered behind his forehead throbbed with every single word she spoke. He opened his mouth to reply, and wondered why her wedding dress had turned into a heavy, dark green, roll-neck silk tunic that matched her eyes. Behind her, instead of the stained glass window, was a tracery of branches like black lace. He groaned. He wasn’t back in Mnemosyne, getting married. He was lying in the middle of a public footpath within sight of a real