Waking in Dreamland Read Online Free PDF Page A

disgusted. Some of the other historians offered Roan sympathetic looks.
    “Don’t start the same argument all over again, Datchell,” said one fatherly historian, coming up to put an arm around Roan’s shoulders. “You mustn’t repeat yourself.” Datchell didn’t reply. His back showed rigid indignation.
    “Tsk!” Micah said to Roan, with a shake of his head. “There are people who simply can’t stomach a new idea. Calls himself a member of the intellectual elite, does he?”
    “Never mind him,” Thomasen said, blandly. “He hates giving reports.” He nudged Roan with a playful wrist. “By the way, son, the lass has been asking after you.”
    Roan felt his breath catch on a warm feeling in his chest as he glanced to the right of the king’s seat, at the small throne with the white, marble pedestal as a footrest. It was still empty. He sighed, half with relief. Living as near the Dreamland court as he always had, it was ridiculous for him to feel as shy as he did about the princess Leonora. She had known him all her life. When she was born, he had been six years old. The two of them had made mud pies on the edge of the moat—when there was a moat. He’d helped her pull out her first wiggly tooth. They’d shared secrets, and chased butterflies, and he’d taught her how to make obnoxious whistles out of field grass. When there were minor threats, such as those times she provoked other children in the palace into chasing her, it was to him that she ran, and his pleasure as her devoted defender was to see off the attackers. He had always treated her as a beloved little sister.
    But things had changed a few years ago, the month she had turned fifteen. Three days after her birthday, an angry red dragon had attacked the castle. Leonora had been trapped on the roof. The whole court was in an uproar, everyone getting in each other’s way to rescue their beloved princess.
    Young Roan had managed to thread his way through the chaos and reach her before anyone else. Before he could think what he was doing, he had run straight at the fierce monster, shouting at it to get away from Leonora. It turned away from its intended victim to attack him, and he repelled it with an outpouring of powerful influence that surprised him completely. The dragon was thrown backwards in the sky and exploded in a shower of sparks. Roan couldn’t think what had possessed him to attack, alone, bare-headed and empty-handed, until he started to carry the shaking princess down the stairs. She clutched him, but when he wrapped his arms around her, she stopped trembling. He realized at that moment Leonora was no longer a child, but a young woman, one who was precious to him in an entirely new way. Moreover, he knew she loved him, too. But she was the king’s heir, the symbol of the future of the Dreamland, and the most beautiful woman in the land. He had been mortified at his audacity, but helplessly in love, and was so to this day.
    He was constantly torn between his new knowledge and the long history they had shared as childhood friends. In the great scheme of things, Leonora functioned as that absolute to which everyone in the Dreamland aspired. She was admirable. She was beautiful as a sunrise, remote as the stars, competent, charming, compassionate—Roan’s thoughts ran on pleasantly through all the complimentary words he could think of that began with the letter c . She ought to be consorting with dukes, presidents and angels, not the boy-next-door-to-the-castle. The king’s thoughts must have run along similar lines. He appeared to look favorably upon Roan’s friendship with the princess, but whenever the topic of marriage came up, as it increasingly did over the last few years, he had sent the young man on endless remarkable and frustrating errands. Roan thought these tasks might be intended to test his fitness for the princess’s hand, but then, they might be delaying tactics, a father’s protective maneuvers to keep his