The Red Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

just under consciousness, where dreams and memories drifted like great soft jellyfish. Usually I had to be very careful not to be absorbed at this level if I wished to retain awareness even as my body and conscious mind slept, but the armour of dark residue seemed almost to ward off memories, so that they could not draw near enough to absorb me.
    I continued to descend, moving from my subconscious mind into the darker and more mysterious realm beneath. Here grey amorphous matter roiled and floated, waiting to be shaped into something that could rise to the subconscious as dream or vision or to consciousness as a thought. This was as it had always been, but when I reached the bottom of the unconscious level I became mired in a thin dense layer of sediment I had never encountered before, possibly something reacting to the spirit armour I wore. Unable to remove the armour without making myself vulnerable to the cryopod, I fought to pass through it.
    Immediately I felt it quicken about me, then I was on the deck of a ship on the open sea, a dazzling blue sky arching above. At the edge of the deck, staring gravely outward, was the mute farseeker, Gilaine, whom I had not seen in life since escaping from her father’s secret encampment in the White Valley years before. She had been a girl when last I had spoken to her, and little more than that in my occasional glimpses of her in dreams of Matthew, but in this dream she was a slender, lovely woman with silvery blonde hair bound in a complex and rather fanciful structure of intricate loops and coiled plaits. I could not see what she was looking at, because I could not widen my vision. Giving up the struggle to see more, it occurred to me that I had seen her several times in true dreams of Matthew in the Red Land, but never so clearly as now. That was because I was not, I realised, looking at her through Matthew’s eyes. Gilaine was the focus of the vision.
    Her expression was troubled, if no less sweet than I remembered, and I wondered if she had been sold. What I could see of the ship told me it was not of the Land, nor of Norseland, and neither did it have the characteristics of ships built by Gadfian or Sadorian shipwrights. Even the wood it was made from, ghost pale with streaks of smoky lavender, was unknown to me. Yet it was undeniably beautiful. It had been intricately carved, and there was a tracery of inlaid silver visible here and there – a technique I had only ever seen applied to jewellery and costly ceremonial weapons. The sails were lovely, billows of violet silk slashed here and there with bold black symbols. Gilaine’s clothes were made of silk too, grey and pearl hues that perfectly set off her moon-pale colouring. Her tunic had a pattern of embroidered feathers picked out in silver thread that flashed when wind rippled the cloth, and she wore a pearl suspended on a long delicate silver chain about her neck. I had never seen her so richly clad in any of my visions of Matthew. If she had been sold, it was to someone of wealth who valued her.
    She lifted a hand to tuck a long pale strand of hair behind her ear after it escaped its braid, her expression grave, but she did not look afraid, nor did she look ill used or unhappy. Merely worried. Without looking down, she reached beneath the neck of the tunic to draw out a small beaten metal disk on a leather thong and ran a thumb over it. I guessed that she was not conscious of doing it; indeed she was so deep in thought that she did not stir or react when two people moved across the deck directly behind her. They wore trews and a tunic like Gilaine’s, but the cloth from which they were made was rough, and both wore their hair in tight, waxed queues, as did many shipfolk from the Land. They paid no more attention to Gilaine than she did to them, but when an old man stepped from a door they stopped and bowed respectfully to him. He acknowledged the courtesy with a slight inclination of his head before coming to stand