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Lucas moves to catch up with Vialle and Lilly.

"I have something to show you," he says to Vialle.

The corner of Lilly's mouth quirks slightly at Lucas's choice of words. Despite that, her eyes held keen interest. Unless Lucas or Vialle asked for privacy, she was going to stay at the Queen's side.

"What is it, Lucas?" Vialle asks. She shows no sign of requiring or even desiring privacy.

"A sculpture," says Lucas. "A tiny one. Hope made it - and I promise I would obtain your opinion on it. She is taking to painting too - although her renditions are - I profoundly hope - not life-like. At least, not the one of me."

Earlier in the evening Lilly had vowed to give up trying to understand Lucas. Now his actions were threatening her resolve. Vaguely she wondered what truly lie beneath his skin. Surely most of his outrageousness had to be act. He was a subject she looked forward to discussing with Paige.

"You know I'm always happy to spend time with Hope," Vialle says, breaking into a genuine smile for perhaps the first time all evening, certainly since she welcomed Jovian.

After Marius breaks off with Jovian, he will be attempting to follow Lilly and Vialle to speak with them, but he would politely hang back if Lucas was there, just outside conversation range.

Lucas glances at him and quirks an eyebrow with a small gesture of his hand that says, "Join us, if you wish."

Aloud he says, "Marius?" with a faint interrogative note.

Marius steps nearer to take a more active stance, closer to Lilly and the Queen. "Cousins," he nods to Lucas and Lilly, and then, "Your Majesty," with the usual warmth to Vialle. "I had a chance moment of thought that I hoped to share on the nature of dreams versus reality. But please, Lucas, my musings are only that," he suggests letting his more debonair cousin take lead on whatever it is he's about.

Lilly gives a look to Marius that suggests keen interest in whatever it was he had to say. The subject of dreams was one of her current obsessions.

"Oh, no, I love talking about dreams," says Lucas almost greedily. "Particularly one's own, of course. So thrilling. One of the greatest trials of Amber is there are no decent Jungian analysts here. I think the family must have scared them all off generations ago. It happens, you know. I have several separate analysts in my past who declared themselves willing to commit to small but not neglible pensions for me as long as I agreed never to visit them again. People can be so thoughtful."

Lilly looks nearly stunned by his words. Why did people have to be so damn difficult to understand? If only she had the key to unlocking his mind. Certainly there must be a wealth of useful information contained within him. The problem, as Lilly saw it, would be retrieving any of it. The questions she asked may very well not be the ones he answered. That would only lead to further frustration.

He looks expectantly at Marius.

"If we are to have a long discussion, perhaps we should find somewhere to sit down," Vialle says. "We could talk about dreams for a long time, I think."

The corners of her mouth droop slightly as she speaks.

"That would be a wise idea," Lilly says quickly. "Since we all seem to have strong opinions on the subject, and since it is something at had wished to discuss with you, your majesty, perhaps it would be good to do it now while we are all thinking about it." There is an eagerness in Lilly's voice that is almost never present. She was actually looking forward to the chance to have this discussion.

"Take my arm, if you are tired," says Lucas to Vialle. He moves close to her and allows their forearms to brush together - a gentle way of allowing her to sense his position, and to take his support if she needs to.

"Very well," says Vialle, and her voice is half hopeful and half filled with dread. "Let's go to my office." She accepts the offer of Lucas' arm.

He will allow Vialle to choose their destination, and will there escort her to a seat - preferably a sofa where he can sit beside her and carefully take out a small clay sculpture of a lopsided bird for Vialle to hold and feel.

The foursome finds its way to the Queen's office. A page is sent for coffee and a selection of little chocolates, and when he returns coffee is poured. Vialle knows the tastes of each of her companions, and each of them finds his or her coffee perfect.

("Coffee, minus the coffee. Thank you." Well, that'd've been my preference. Marius seems to be a Strong Coffee drinker in the sense of, "It doesn't taste very good, but it probably will keep you awake two or three days on a normal constitution.")

She accepts the sculpture from Lucas and runs her fingers over it while waiting for Marius to begin.

Lilly finds a chair in a corner where she can view not just the group but the door as well. Her seat also allows for her to perch comfortably while still wearing her blade. For the moment, she sips patiently at her coffee seemingly content to listen to what the gentleman have to say.

Lucas looks up at Marius expectantly.

Marius rubs his hands together for a moment, and leans back, considering. "A brief visit with Cousin Lucas provided me with an interesting side trip. It involved an fairly unsuccessful discussing of the matter of dreams and fears with a number of people affected by the disturbances here in the castle. While I suspect that the ones who claimed they felt unnaturally weak may be of, `the more dramatic sort,' it did bring to mind something I had learned from the troops in regards of the trip from Chaos, and what had been said in regards to...bad dreams." He takes a breath. "I understand that dreams are very personal, so I must ask that you excuse the fact that I seem to have no hesitance to ask directly, have any of you been experiencing...unusual dreams?"

Without hesitation Lilly says, "While voyaging home from chaos I dreamt of snowcapped mountain peopled by giants, a man holding a dying boy in his arms, a woman running through an empty city fleeing a fire, a man and a woman sitting cross-legged on pillows while drinking from tiny cups. Throughout the dream there was this sense of urgency, unbalance, and quickness. As I awoke I had the feeling of something being very wrong with the universe at large.

"Later, after the return, I had a chance to discuss such matters with our dear Aisling. She told me that she had a dream that in tone sounded very like a piece of a dream she remembered having, once she finally slept after moving the valley. In her words her dream was 'Urgent, unbalanced, speedy' with bits of images. She spoke of a great tower falling; a man thrashing another man; a woman smashing a mirror; a woman singing to a group of very hairy deer-things. In her estimation her dream seemed more violent then mine.

"Like you I found this strange and thought to investigate further. With all that has been happening though I fear I have been lax in doing that," she finishes then takes a long sip of coffee.

Lucas is looking interested. "I seem to have been singularly free of dreams of vile portents ... of dreams of any kind," he says at last, a faint note of disappointment in his voice. Then he frowns. "At least - as far as I can recall." In a half involuntary gesture he raises his hand towards his mutilated ear.

Vialle says quietly, "I have also had disturbing dreams. But mine go back several years, as some of you know." She inclines her head toward Lucas.

"I can't tell you much about the dreams, but they're--very frightening. I know my son is dead. Not a baby, either, but a grown man. I don't think that's the only thing that scares me, though, but I can't remember much else."

Marius knows better than to ask what he looks like. He sighs just barely audibly, his smile growing thin.

Lucas moves forward slightly in his seat and - if she permits it - takes one of her hands in his. "I remember," he says quietly. "And my own experiences of fatherhood have given those images a new intensity for me."

Vialle permits Lucas to take her hand. In fact, she seems quite reassured by it.

Lilly gives the queen a wasted questioning glance then shakes her head as she realizes her usually tact will be of no use. She was just going to have to ask outright, "Your majesty, I do not wish to offend, but your son? I would like to assume we are speaking of a yet to be born child but I know better then to do that. Are we talking about an existing person? Or might your son be symbolic of something or someone else? Something you hold as dearly as you would your own offspring perhaps?"

Lucas waits for Vialle's reply, gently stroking the back of her hand as he frowns slightly.

"I don't know what it means. I've never borne a child, so it can't be a child of mine that died. If it's a symbol, I don't know what it's for." Lucas can feel a slight trembling in Vialle's hand as she speaks.

"It reminds me of another's dream I chanced to hear, where yet another identity was masked. I believe that it is a dream's method of allowing one to keep options open for the perfect fit. We will know who the individual is," Marius suggests, "when circumstances provide."

He looks up at Lilly for a moment, judging, then thinks better of what he was going to say.

"There are a number of experiments which come to mind immediately, but I fear I do not have the proper charm to lead them." [Marius] chuckles, self-depreciatingly. "Lucas, without prying too deep into your concerns, I find I must ask: have you had more contact with Chaos than the tip of your ear?"

Lucas shakes his head. "That - and a conversation with Aisling - amounts to about the sum of it," he admits. "I suspect your experience is more pertinent than mine ... "

He frowns thoughtfully. "Perhaps, cousins, we would undertake a more methodical investigation of this? Dreams are the stuff of anecdotes ... but there may also be a pattern here that we should investigate. If one person dreams of a tower struck by lighting, we might interpret it as fear of impotence, but if twenty people do ... it might be time to consider low level housing ...

"One thing I would is whether those people who have disappeared reported bad dreams to their family ... it's probably nothing, as her Majesty is still here, and so are you, Lilly. But that could be explored - as well as whether those in Chaos on the whole have more bad dreams than those who stayed. Again, her Majesty seems to share bad dreams ... but we might be able to establish trends."

He appears to consider. "Asking people to recount their dreams might alarm some people - I suspect a way round it could be found. Indeed, one or two occur to me already ... "

Marius chuckles. "It would be best if you did the asking, should you have a plan. I have," he glances upwards for a moment, then grins far more broadly, "a seeming knack for inciting people towards riot rather than reassurance."

"When you have a mother-in-law like mine," says Lucas drily, "you learn the gentle art of amelioration. I have some ideas, based around the fact that people in general just adore talking about themselves - frequently to total strangers if the strangers boast a Theory and a string of meaningless initials trailing from their name like an incontinent afterthought."

"Patterns may help to solve this puzzle. Undoubtedly if these dreams are being caused by one entity then eventually we should be able to determine a sameness to them." Lilly says. She takes a sip of coffee before continuing on.

"The question that keeps coming to my mind is why? Are we being given warnings and if so are they meant to be beneficial? If not for a benefit than to what aim? To keep us off guard? To keep us from a solid sleep and thus prevent good thought during the light of day?"

Lucas, who perhaps has rather different values on the virtues of sleep than the others present, decides not to point out that he frequently arrives at what he considers good thought during the dark of night.

"Perhaps they are simply to unbalance us and keep us ill at ease," says Lilly.

"Perhaps," says Lucas thoughtfully, "they are arising not from a malicious intent - but from the absence of a good one ... "

"Perhaps those answers can be found in more questions," says Lilly, "questions concerning not the reasons for the dreams, but their contents; Do they dreams hold portents or are they shards of the past? Is there physical truth to them or are they merely a reflection of our inner most thoughts and fear?

"The last question, and perhaps the most important, how can dreams be effected? What sort of sorcery allows someone or something to do what we suspect is being done?

"Over and over these questions play in my head, begging for answers. It frustrates me to no end that I have none to give," Lilly says finally.

"Do we know if any of the other members of the Regency Council have had such nightmares, either?" Vialle asks. "I wish Fiona were here. She promised me some help with my dreams, and she gave me a charm to drive them off, but it failed me when Random left."

Lucas looks up sharply at Vialle's oblivious face.

"None have revealed such to me, but I have been wroth to ask." [Marius] is quiet while he gets his thoughts in order. "Lilly, when you said patterns may help to solve this problem, did you think...of such things literally?" he asks. "If we are bespelled, could it relate to the break below?" He shrugs. "Otherwise, I have always dreamt, although there are now dreams of such...vivacity, I hesitate to deny them." He glances at Vialle. "Your majesty, if they were potent enough to require a charm, had Fiona any other advice or discussion?"

Lucas leans back in his chair, listening, the faint mark of a crease between his brows.

Vialle turns to face Marius. "She said it was a temporary measure, and it would help me if the dreams came from outside. And that she would do more later to help me. But that was before Brita was taken, of course."

She adds: "It could just be that the dreams come from inside me and I didn't have any between when she gave me the charm and when Random left, of course."

"I think," says Lucas, "we are in danger here of speculating on the basis of too small a sample. Some of the dreams seem related to Chaos, some perhaps to the situation in Amber. But .... until we have a rather wider sample of information, our guesses are likely to be best described as wild, or more charitably as vague.

"If my aunt was of the opinion that these dreams might come from without - did she suggest any particular potential source? Or was it more in the nature of an all points warning?"

Vialle swallows. She says, "Fiona said she would have to study me to see where the dreams are coming from. She didn't suggest anything beyond that."

Lucas's hold on her hand becomes more supportive.

"I think," he says, glancing at the Knights, "that if any of us have any more of these dreams, or hear of others having them, then we should share our information."

"Agreed," Lilly says before turning her attention to the Queen. "It has been a long evening your majesty, I am certain you could use some rest. Why don't you let me escort you to your rooms?"

Vialle smiles graciously at Lilly. "I would like that. Unless you have more counsel on the matter of dreams, Marius?"

"It would delight me, your Majesty, if I could offer solutions rather than questions, but for now, my counsel is warded with mystery." Marius smiles. "However, I offer you my appreciation for your time," he includes his Cousins in that with a gesture Vialle won't be able to see, "and the sincerest wishes of a peaceful night's sleep, in hopes that those alone may protect you from any thoughts and dreams that worry you. May Lilly and your guards be wary of anything but the fairest of sweet dreams." He winks at his fellow Knight.

 

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VII: Consuming thoughts | Index | Coming shortly