Free Waking in Dreamland by Jody Lynne Nye

stopped until the phenomenon could be studied.
    So, where had they gone from here? Roan stepped around the bush, now settling itself in a new hollow at right angles to its old position. A few more paces, and he found what he had been hoping for: another heavy footprint. Roan dodged among mobile box elders and yew hedges shifting to new places, picking up the trail here and there, sometimes having to wait until the maze hedges shifted again. Roan was satisfied that Brom had come this way, to lose his pursuers. But the trick hadn’t worked. Roan should be able to catch up with them in no time. Therefore, they couldn’t be far ahead. Might they still be in the palace grounds? That would be ironic. The castle stood where it had, wattle and daub or granite and marble, for thousands of years. What if the Sleepers slept right here, beneath it? But, no, Roan thought, the historians would have known that, and Brom wouldn’t have needed to sneak away to set off his infernal device. Which way had he gone?
    A screen of yew five feet high dodged directly into a passage Roan was about to take, and settled down, sinking its roots into the sandy soil with an air of triumph. Roan shrugged, and sidestepped toward a wide gap that led into a range of juniper bushes. The bushes let him get among them, then playfully closed about him in a ring. The grass under his feet began to conform to the new shape of the enclosure.
    “Come, now, this isn’t fair!” Roan said, patting the prickly top of a juniper. “It’s too hot to play games. I must go on.”
    The bushes ignored him and began to take root. Roan sighed. He pointed his hand at the base of one bush, and poured influence into the ground, making it buckle, pushing the juniper backward. It protested, waving its branches, and the other shrubs crowded tighter around him. Roan shook his head ruefully as he broke free. “I am sorry. Some day, when we have time, you can confuse me as much as you like, all right?”
    This promise did not appease them; the maze liked its little measure of power and hated being ignored, but Roan moved faster than any single component of it did. The trouble was that there were so many of them. It was difficult for him to negotiate his way out. If he appeared impatient, the plants would try harder to thwart him, and he was afraid the scientists were getting farther and farther ahead of him.
    Contrarily, the plants figured out that he was trying to follow the trail that lay just inside the high stone wall. The maze closed passages in front of him and opened others, diverting him away from his objective. Lawns altered their shapes in front of him, distorting the footprints into weird configurations. A solid row of holly six feet high stretched itself across the garden from west to east, daring him to force his way between the tight branches full of shiny, scratchy-thorned leaves. He could just see over it, but not walk through. Roan used influence to open a way through that row, and found beyond it a second row, taller and more dense than the first. It loomed over him, threatening to blot out the sun. Roan reached out to push the nearest tree aside, and the leaves raked his skin, drawing blood.
    He snatched back his hands, clutching the stinging gouges. If he’d been an ordinary Dreamlander, he could have stretched his own skin over the scratches, closing them instantly. Instead, he plucked a leaf off a nearby tree and formed it into a bandage and plastered it on. The maze was determined to keep him trapped. It would force him to use influence until he was exhausted. It might never let him free. The scientists would reach the Hall of the Sleepers in the Mystery Mountains, and the party that was supposed to be following him would never know what had become of him until the day they found his pitiful skeleton hidden in the maze, if the Dreamland wasn’t destroyed in the meanwhile by Brom’s heinous experiment. He heard faint voices coming from the direction of the