Dreamwalker's Bride - Chapter 185

Chapter 185: Springing a trap
Trace waited anxiously. How long was this going to take? Was Anaisa all right?

He should have gone himself, as a prisoner, but… well, he still wasn’t sure if Barnabas’s commands might reactivate in his presence or some strange quirk like that. Sanders’ hadn’t known, and his vision hadn’t specified.

Trace considered it a positive sign that the man was apparently at the mouth of the cave, far less than 50 miles away, but no stamp of commandment had yet reappeared on Trace’s soul.

Even so, magic was unpredictable. Take the two men who stood beside him in the darkness. One gained magical strength, a rather straightforward power with which he could increase the weight his body could bear and lift. It was simple to understand, and easy to see the applications for it. The other had gained a rather abstract power that it had taken some minutes to understand.

Renaldo, as he was called, had gained the ability to perceive the emotions someone was going to experience about a minute before they felt them.

Trace still didn’t see what sort of applications it might have when it came to their plan, but he kept Renaldo close anyway. It was a very limited sort of way to see the future, with no absolute method of predicting exactly what would make the foreseen emotion come about, particularly in so short a time frame.

It might even add more confusion than if no information was had at all.

So Trace shifted in place, his borrowed guard’s uniform a bit small. He’d traded clothes with an obliging soldier for the sake of the plan; Barnabas was liable to ignore one man in the group of guards that stood outside the chamber containing the jewels.

He should not suspect, if all was going at least loosely according to plan, that Trace was amongst them. Still, he stood at the back, his helmet low over his eyes.

A man came rushing into the cave.

“Orders! No one is to touch the stones! His Majesty and His Lordship are both on their way!”

Trace smothered a smile. The lure was enough to bring Barnabas inside, despite the man likely knowing it was some manner of trap.

Oakdown wasn’t stupid. He was bringing the king in as a human shield, knowing that loyal citizens wouldn’t risk hurting the monarch in any reckless manner of attack.

Even those who would sacrifice themselves for the kingdom would balk at the idea of sacrificing their king just to get rid of an aspiring usurper.

Breathing slowly and deeply, Trace watched the path to the cave entrance. Soldiers stood lined up against one wall, squeezed to make room for the monarch and lord. They had not been ordered out of the cavern, at least, not yet, and Trace wondered if that was a good sign or bad.

There were contingencies to force the soldiers to evacuate if any were not on their side, but Trace hoped he wouldn’t have to use them.

Around the next bend in the cave, his mother and father lurked with Emily and Calvin to coordinate the other groups. Deborah and the doctor were down by the tree, with Deborah using the tree’s augmentation to her powers to sustain the gleaming jewels she had created.

In all her experiments, she’d never been able to create or sustain one that could still hold magic, using Calvin as a test subject, but she did gain the ability to make stones that looked exactly like the leaves of the tree, and had quite a range about where she could conjure them.

It was those pretend jewels that were the bait for Barnabas. Through Emily, Sanders had been told he could reveal the experiments Deborah was conducting on the jewels, but to keep information as limited as possible about it.

From watching, the seer would know that she was unable to imbue them with magic powers, but was still trying.

Even so, Sanders’ information was only as recent as the last time he slept. He had no way of knowing what was going on currently as long as he was in the conscious world.

In that way, he and Trace were somewhat alike; their magic was of a strangely limited use because it was only asleep when their powers were active… well, at least when Trace wasn’t near the tree.

With encouragement from Anaisa and the others, he had tentatively experimented and learned over the past days, while Deborah rested between her experiments, that his powers near the tree were not permanently altering reality.

Rather, he was subconsciously casting a dream bubble around him and the people nearest, so that they all perceived, as if it were real, anything that he created. Someone outside the bubble would not be affected by what was within, nor see what Trace conjured, but would see other people’s reactions to what was happening.

Any damage that happened to someone within the dream bubble–He tried himself to conjure jeweled rocks to fool Oakdown, and one that was too sharp fell and caused a tear in the hem of Anaisa’s dress–was permanent outside of it.

That was somewhat troubling. He was sure that if someone was hurt by his power, it would remain so. He’d never tried to hurt anyone in their own dreams before, so he had no clue whether this facet of his powers held true if he were, for instance, to try to hurt or kill someone in their dreams.

It was too risky a proposition to try to wait for Oakdown to sleep and try to attack him that way. If the man became conscious of the dream and tried to command Trace, things would become very complicated very quickly.

Besides all that, Oakdown was likely far too smart to allow himself to sleep within the radius of Trace’s range of power, if he could avoid it.

As Trace’s thoughts raced through all the worries and anxiety of what might be happening with Anaisa, he forced himself to calm down.

For there were footsteps echoing down the hall.