I awoke in a cold sweat, jolting upright and staring around the room. It was the same as it had always been. It was just a dream. Just a dream.
But if it had been a dream… where was Mina? I looked around the room for her, and then looked in each of the rooms in the palace. Empty. Had they left late in the night? Alexander would know.
I lit the candles in the dressing room that Mina and I shared and donned my favorite dress. It was the black and lilac dress with silk ribbons lacing up the back of the outer corset. I loved that dress.
Before I left, I called into the great entrance hall, "Hello?" I was answered simply, "Hello?" It was only my echo.
I stepped out onto the walk, shutting the door behind me. The grounds were not the same as when I fell asleep. The great oak that I had climbed in as a child with Alexander was gone. The rosebush was nowhere to be seen. Where were Mama's tulips and mums?
I stepped off the path and headed toward Alexander's house, or at least, that SHOULD have been the direction that I was going, but nothing looked right. Strange noises came from the direction that was once a garden planted by Alexander's mother. They were like an odd rushing of a river… I shook the thought away and went on. The river of death was only a dream. The pale man was not real.
Or so I thought until I almost fell over his shoe.
"What's the trouble, Miss?" he asked me, perplexed. "Here for the festival, I see. Are you looking for someone?"
I tried to remember what Mama had taught me. Be courteous. "Yes, I am sir, but his home should be just beyond those trees."
The pale man (who was dressed very funny in blue trousers and a black shirt of some sort) looked in the direction I was pointing. "Ma'am, no one's lived there for nearly eight hundred years."