And Lucy felt good about this hunch as well, especially once she was finished recounting and Diana remained quiet and pondering. It was clear that no matter how much the two of them had disagreed with each other since they first met, now Diana was taking everything Lucy was saying seriously. As Diana stood arms crossed with her head down-turned in thought, Kenneth locked eyes with Lucy, his eyes asking if they were okay. Lucy smiled and gave a nod, driven by a newfound hope blooming within her.

  “So,” Diana started up, her gaze still directed distantly and downward in pensiveness, “you were able to set the queen—Kenneth’s aunt—on fire after you showed Kenneth that she hurt Ricardo.”

  “Yes,” said Lucy. “I don’t know how true this is, but when I saw the look on Kenneth’s face, it was like he had a big revelation. That she wasn’t hard on him for any good reason, but because she was just a mean and hurtful person.”

  “Right, I get the picture.” Diana uncrossed her arms and raised her spear slightly off the ground before bringing it back down into the grass and dirt with as controlled but definitive slam, as if making a proclamation. “In that case, it’s obvious what we need to do next.”

  Lucy’s eyes went wide as she was caught off-guard by the certainty in Diana’s voice. “And what would that be?”

  “We’re taking the kid back to that queen,” said Diana, her voice sharp and resolute, “and getting him to call her out and reject everything she’s spouting, right to her face.”

  Lucy stared at her blankly, startled by the viciousness with which Diana laid out her intentions. “That’s…”

  “That’s what?” Diana leaned in, her posture suggesting she was ready to leap forward and strike Lucy for any foolishness that was about to leave her mouth. “Too harsh for your wee little heart to handle?”

  “I…” Lucy gulped, grasping at the words she could use to put her immediate intuition into a coherent form. “I just think that’s a very…confrontational way of looking at it. To me, it seemed like Kenneth changing his opinion on his aunt is what made her vulnerable.”

  “And? How is that any different from what I just said?”

  “It sounds similar, I know,” said Lucy, consciously releasing the tension in her body as she tried to take on the informative but relaxed tone of her favourite TAs. “But I think it’s less about what he thinks of his aunt as a separate person, but more what he thinks of himself in relation to his aunt.”

  Diana sighed and shook her head. “Sounds like splitting hairs to me, but I’ll bite. Elaborate further, please.”

  Lucy faltered for a moment, but she realized that neither Diana’s tone nor expression showed any actual annoyance. There was a flicker of genuine intrigue, hidden under the embers of fiery spirit. Spurred on by that, Lucy said: “It’s less about Kenneth thinking ’My aunt is a terrible person,’ and more, ‘I did nothing wrong, so I don’t need to take her punishments.’”

  “I see.” Diana pondered this for a moment, then gave a snide smirk. “Typical for a Standie to take something so simple and twist it into some complicated mental thing.”

  “What do you mean by twisting it?” Heat flared up in Lucy’s chest as she felt her earlier calm dissolve and stir like a clear sky forming into a stormy overcast. “Kenneth’s experienced a lot of things that messed up his sense of self. Not just his aunt’s torture, but also the accident with his parents, and whatever made him want to run from home. So I’m sure as long as we can get him to understand himself better—”

  “And what would that look like?” Diana interrupted. “Give him a good long talking to, a little hug here, a little pat on the shoulder there?” She said all this in an overly-sweet lilt, then dropped both her smile and her tone. “You might not get it yet, but we’re called here as knights because these things don’t get fixed so easily. We’re here to face conflict, not talk around it.”

  “But what if that conflict is inside yourself? I…I agree that we need to take Kenneth to the queen again. I haven’t been to many Dreams yet, but I know that Dreamers still need to face what’s troubling them,” said Lucy, remembering how she helped Cole stop deflecting his dilemma and instead reach out and seize it. “But I don’t think fighting is the only way. We can take him to her and show him that he’s allowed to feel free from her. If the problem is something he believes in, like he believes himself to be at fault and deserves to be punished for it, then we can convince him to change that belief.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Lucy expected Diana to have a quick retort to dismantle her claims, but instead she remained silently staring at her. Lucy took this to mean she had no response, and so she relaxed her shoulders a little—but only for a moment, as Diana began speaking without a hint of hesitation, as if she had been biding her time for the right moment to strike. “And what if someone else forced that belief onto him? What if they manufactured that internal conflict?”

  Lucy was left dumbfounded and grasping for something to say, her eyes struggling to meet Diana’s glare as the wind picked up and chilled her to the bone despite her Higher Reflection.

  Diana continued: “You’re not a child, princess. You know that other people are very capable of—and very often responsible for—being the problem. So why are you so hung up on the idea that it’s always a person’s own fault? That boy is a prime example of when you take that self-blame too far.”

  She let her spear drop, this time lazily with an air of irritation and disappointment, as she turned around and gave Lucy only her back to speak to. “You lot are a terminal case, you know that? Taking it all on yourselves, wasting time and energy, instead of just telling people they’re flat-out wrong. Why? Is it fear? Some broken brain cell that nags you to please everyone?”

  Diana paused here, and Lucy saw that her grip on her spear had tightened to the point that both her arm and the spear trembled. In a cutting voice, Diana said: “Well, that’s inconsiderate in its own way. To yourselves and the people around you.”

  “Diana…” Frustration had welled up in Lucy at first when Diana decided she wasn’t even worth looking at anymore. But as Diana spoke, and despite only her crimson cape and the back of her helmet being visible, Lucy sensed that Diana’s rant wasn’t driven by enmity. And when she talked about being inconsiderate, her voice had suddenly lost some its edge, taking on a distant tone, as if reaching out to something infinitely far away.

  “Whatever,” Diana said after enough silence had passed that the sun was now almost finished its descent behind the horizon, turning the castle town into a silhouette that appeared a single giant wall. Diana turned slightly, her face still hidden from Lucy, so that she was facing in the direction of Kenneth and the gateway. “We’ve wasted enough time arguing. We both agree on one thing, at least: that kid needs to see the queen again. So let’s do that, and then see which one of us is right.”

  Lucy sighed in frustration, hearing Diana turn this rescue into yet another conflict between the two of them. She had spent this whole time hoping that that small glimmer of hope, of connection, of vulnerability that she had sensed in Diana earlier on the way down the hill would finally give Lucy the chance to recover this soured relationship, much like when she had salvaged Cole from his temper.

  Tears welled in Lucy’s eyes: tears of frustration and self-admittance of her own shortcomings, of having come so close but still falling short. She was sure she had been close to passing through the gate of Diana’s guarded self, if not all the way then at least past the first of many thresholds, to the outermost of outer antechambers that told Lucy she had at least made some progress in building rapport with her. But every time she had tried to get closer, to getting past the spikes and flames of Diana’s being to show that she, Lucy, wasn’t another enemy for Diana to drive away, Lucy was thrown back out again as if blown away by an angry wind that would never let up.

  And where did that uncompromising wind come from? It would be easy to chalk this up to a simple inherent flaw in Diana’s personality, but those short exchanges on the hill had pointed strongly against that. Lucy believed this to be true—she wanted to believe it to be true, lest the very concept of her Primary Axis was for naught. For if she couldn’t reach Diana, a fellow Dream Knight, how would she reach the countless Dreamers she was soon to encounter on the rest of her long journey?

  How would she face Thomas? Her mother? Kathy? Would they turn their backs to Lucy as well, silently declaring that the very quality defining Lucy’s new existence was futile?

  Lucy looked at Diana’s unwavering backside, at her tall figure rising from the grass and cleaving the very sky in two, and sighed. If Diana was so adamant on being hard to deal with, then Lucy decided didn’t have a problem with the chance to prove her wrong and cut her down to size. If nothing else, Diana put a face to the very opposition Lucy wanted to prove herself against.

  “Fine,” Lucy said in response to Diana’s plan. “That works for me. But how are we going to get to the queen? If we just walk into the castle, her guards will get to us first.”

  Diana said nothing at first, and with the direction her gaze was pointed at, Lucy thought she was lost in thought gazing at Kenneth still hiding between the trunks of two trees. But then Diana’s towering figure turned toward Lucy slowly, her lips curled into a wicked grin. “For that, we’ll use a specialty of Rebellion you probably had no idea about.”

  “Specialty?” said Lucy. The clouds appeared to stop their drifting movement over the last sliver of the sun as she waited for Diana’s response.

  Diana gave a deep, quiet laugh and said: “Negotiation.”