My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (44 page)

She looked in the mirror and wondered if it were true or enchanted. How could she know if this was herself reflected or some dream version. Did it matter? She smiled, and watched her dress again flame from midnight to sunset. Her heart felt like an ember in her chest, ready to catch fire and throw sparks.

What would happen tonight? She didn’t know. Spear’s hand would never hold hers. She knew that much, and Fog Cup would never be her home. A mere twenty-four days ago, those had been her only two choices. Now miracles were her daily fare and her pulse still beat its one simple question:
Who?

She understood that he was the Dreamer, whom she’d called upon in her despair. But how could she know what that meant? What was he? She’d felt his presence in her dreams but had never seen him, and he didn’t leave tracks in her yard as the reverend did (or as the reverend
had,
anyway, until six nights ago, when his gifts abruptly ceased).

Once, she’d dreamed she embraced a hill of black feathers and felt the pulse of a heartbeat deep within.

And then last night, a miracle unlooked for: she’d opened her book to read a story and found in it not the eighteen that there had always been, but nineteen, and the last was called “The Dreamers.”

He was one of ten, born before time, who had, through the millennia, taken it in turn to sleep, and dream. It was they who conducted the symphonies of growth and death that turned the world. They were gods from before there were men to invent the word
god,
and they cared nothing for worship or thanks. Only for the act itself: creating.

Sometimes destroying.

And so she knew who he was, but not what form he might take. There had been no illustration to accompany the tale, and no description, either. It didn’t matter; by now she loved him in any skin. In her book there was another tale—one of the original eighteen—of a dragon who had a human wife, and Neve had never understood it before, at least from the wife’s point of view. But she did now. Love was love.

But she hoped that he was not a dragon.

She stepped onto her porch, ready to walk to town, and found there was a creature in her yard.

It gave her a start, considering her train of thought, but then she had to laugh at herself, because this was only a mount to carry her. It was a buck, a splendid beast, all white, its antlers festooned with ribbons, and its tack and bridle glittering silver. It dropped a knee for her to mount, and Neve laughed again at the wonder of it. Would she become numb to wonder, if this kept up, as she once had been to misery?

Never.

She rode and it was like gliding, down the long sodden lane from Graveyard Farm into town. Either the drizzle stopped or an unseen bubble curved above her, but not a drop fell on her the whole way. The beast carried her to Scarman’s Hall, right up the broad stone steps to deliver her to the door, and it was as though the scene froze around her and became a painting, and she the only moving figure in it.

As many candles flickered in the hall’s hoisted lanterns on this one night as had burned in all the previous six months together. Mist diffused the light to haloes, overlapping by their dozens, and the pangs of a solitary cello wove among them, sweet and pure.

Neve dismounted. Everyone else just stood and stared. There was Keillegh Baker and her boy, both agog, and Bill Childbreaker, ill at ease in his cheap Sunday suit. There was a gaggle of First Settlement girls in matching crowns of holly berries—their shock held no wonder, only envy—and Dame Somnolence, whose eyes had never looked larger or less doom-struck.

And then there was Reverend Spear, as motionless as all the rest. He stared and stared, Neve’s splendor diminishing his own. He seemed to shrink before her eyes like a shadow at the rising of the sun.

Neve faced them all and smiled, and beheld the deepening ripple of their shock when her dress flushed from blue to flame, and when she walked past them, she felt like she was floating.

Maybe she was. Nothing seemed impossible now.

The corridor was wide, its ceiling vaulted high, and at the end of it, the ballroom glowed with a light too bright for lanterns.

He was already there. She felt it even before she heard the singing—the language of her dreams, wind through a forests’ worth of leaves—and she knew that the isle folk were crowding behind her as she drifted; she felt them, too, but with nothing like the pulse of radiance that drew her onward. They were the past, already receding.

In her spider-silk slippers, she came into the ballroom.

And there he was.

The senses have their limits, and we can never know how short they fall in revealing to us the truth of a vision, a scent, a sound. Gazing on the Dreamer, Neve felt herself careen into the boundary of her human limitations … and push past it. The others were left behind. They saw him too, but only a mirage of him.

Perhaps they saw a man.

He was not a man. Had she really thought he would be?

She had never been able to imagine him, but when she’d pictured this moment, Neve had thought she would go to him, that he would hold out his hand and she would take it. But how could she go to him when he did not stand on the ground?

He drifted above their heads, up amid the glittering bowers of paper snowflakes, precious glass icicles, and lanterns whose copper chains swayed with the draft of his wingbeats. The Dreamer had wings.

Of course he did.

He had found his black feathers, wherever they’d been buried, and they were as glossy now as they had been the day ages past when he shook them off to lay down to his dreaming. His hair was black, and wasn’t hair … not only. In one glimpse it was pelt, the next feathers, the next the bright obsidian of scales, and then again the long luxuriance of new-spun silk. He was dragon and bird and wolf and orchid and lightning bolt—and he was man, too. A thousand facets, he was like a jewel of infinite dimensions.

The facet he turned toward the gathering crowd was human, and so that was how Neve perceived him … mostly. He was darker than any person she had ever seen, his skin a deep umber, so rich with hue that the shadows cut by the planes of his face read as color to her artist’s eyes, too: indigos and violets, shades she associated with rarity and riches, because the dyes were so precious that only the best of embroiderers were allowed near those threads. His eyes weren’t color, though; they were black, in the way the sea is black under starlight, and she beheld the form and limbs of a man—though not clad and hidden as was “decent” and “proper” to human society as she knew it. She saw his body. His chest. The dip where muscles met to form a smooth channel to his navel.

His navel.

Looking up at the Dreamer, her head tilted back and every nerve alive, Neve became aware of her hands. The whole surface of them from palm to fingertips began to tingle, petitioning to discover the texture of those dark contours. This was a new sensation, and her lips were not immune to it.

Nor the tip of her tongue.

I wonder what his skin tastes like.

Neve’s face grew hot. She had woken the Dreamer, and now it was her turn to wake. It was like hatching out of a small, dark life into a great, unfathomable one, and the man before her, the god before her—above her, adrift in a sphere of his own radiance—was waiting to take her hand.

But how could she reach him?

She needn’t have worried. No sooner did she lift her own hand toward him than the rest of her began to rise—

I will lift you …

—and … to change. Her honeysuckle hair came unpinned, transforming, as it tumbled free, to a sheath of pale yellow feathers. For an instant, this concealed her other transformation, but only for an instant, because wings such as these could not be hidden.

A god of the old world took a girl into his arms, and she was no longer a girl. She was still herself, still flesh and blood, and still lovely—eye-bright, slender, smiling—but Neve was no longer human, not quite, and she was no longer bound to the earth. She beheld the sweep of her own new wings—the same pale yellow as her hair—and remembered when wanting had seemed futile. She reached for him.

Her hand, his hand—finally. The Dreamer drew Neve close and whispered his true name in her ear. Mystery flowed into her like music. The paper snowflakes detached themselves from the ceiling of Scarman’s Hall, and by the time they fluttered down to the upheld hands of the isle folk, they weren’t paper anymore.

All evening long, real snow would fall from the ceiling to glitter on the lashes of dancing girls and ardent boys, but Neve and the Dreamer didn’t linger.

They had other things to do:
all
of them. All the things, dreamed and undreamed, in the depth and breadth of the whole spinning world.

Amen.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Holly Black
is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, a finalist for an Eisner Award, and the recipient of both an Andre Norton Award and a Newbery Honor. She lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret door. Visit her online at
www.blackholly.com
.

Ally Carter
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the Gallagher Girls, Heist Society, and Embassy Row series. She grew up on a ranch in Oklahoma. Visit her online at
www.allycarter.com
.

Matt de la Peña
is the author of five critically acclaimed young adult novels, including
Mexican WhiteBoy
and
The Living.
Matt received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and his BA from the University of the Pacific, where he attended school on a full athletic scholarship for basketball. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches creative writing and visits high schools and colleges throughout the country. Visit him online at
www.mattdelapena.com
.

Gayle Forman
is an award-winning, internationally bestselling author and journalist. She is the author of
Just One Day
and
Just One Year
, and the companion e-novella
Just One Night,
as well as the
New York Times
bestsellers
If I Stay
and
Where She Went
. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughters. Visit her online at
www.gayleforman.com
.

Jenny Han
is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy, co-author of the Burn for Burn trilogy, and most recently,
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
. She is also the author of
Shug
and
Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her online at
www.dearjennyhan.com
.

David Levithan
is the author of a good number of books about the strange things that love can do to people, including
Every Day
,
Two Boys Kissing
,
Boy Meets Boy
,
How They Met and Other Stories
, and (with Rachel Cohn)
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
and (with John Green)
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
. His feelings about Christmas are largely shared by his character Dash in
Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares
(also written with Rachel Cohn). Visit him online at
www.davidlevithan.com
.

Kelly Link
is the author of four collections, including
Pretty Monsters
and the forthcoming
Get in Trouble
. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited the young adult anthologies
Steampunk!
and
Monstrous Affections
. Together they run Small Beer Press. Kelly Link lives with her family in Northampton, Massachusetts. Visit her online at
www.kellylink.net
.

Myra McEntire
is the author of the Hourglass trilogy, which has been nominated for two RITAs and a YALSA Teen Top Ten, and was chosen as a SIBA Okra Pick. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Visit her online at
www.myramcentire.com
.

Stephanie Perkins
is the internationally bestselling author of
Anna and the French Kiss
,
Lola and the Boy Next Door
, and
Isla and the Happily Ever After.
She lives with her husband in Asheville, North Carolina. Visit her online at
www.stephanieperkins.com
.

Rainbow Rowell
lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with her husband and two sons. She’s also the author of
Landline
,
Fangirl
,
Eleanor & Park
, and
Attachments
. Visit her online at
www.rainbowrowell.com
.

Laini Taylor
is the internationally bestselling author of the Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy, as well as the Dreamdark books, and
Lips Touch: Three Times
, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, illustrator Jim Di Bartolo, and their daughter, Clementine. She is hard at work on secret things. Visit her online at
www.lainitaylor.com
.

Kiersten White
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the Paranormalcy trilogy, the Mind Games series, and several other books for teens. In her house in San Diego, it is always Christmas and never winter. Visit her online at
www.kierstenwhite.com
.

These short stories are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME
. Copyright © 2014 by Stephanie Perkins. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.