Hades considered it, her agate gaze steady but not scornful. It held the same surprise that came with summer storms, a little wild and a little delighted and a little afraid.

The silence that followed should have made her nervous. But Parvani had danced through enough summer storms to know what would come next.

“This is what my queen desires?”

My queen. Parvani drew herself up to her full height.

“It is.”

After a moment, Hades put a hand to her chest and bowed. “Then it shall be done.”

They began with small things. The knee-jerk fear of a spider on his hand, the breath-constricting choke of a snake around his neck. Parvani stood and watched as Hades wove the dreams into being, a maid at a loom, mixing nightmares as if mixing colors, creating patterns out of fears.

The first few times, it was disconcerting to watch Hajan jerk out of the dreams, breathing hard and shaking his hands as if to dislodge the spiders, scratching his throat as if to throw off the snakes. He was a large man with a graying mustache and the beginnings of a potbelly, an ex-soldier gone to seed and corruption.

“It’s not enough,” Parvani said after a while.

Hades lifted a sleek black brow but suitably altered her creations. After that came more terrifying landscapes: the city sinking under the earth, the palace invaded by foreign raiders, a plague descending upon the kingdom.

Eventually, the dreams began to take their toll. Hajan was irritable and twitchy. His eyes were rimmed with the bruises of the sleepless. He backhanded his eldest son, the one he was grooming to be his heir. The one Ranya had tried to take her vengeance on, and who had laughed as she was dragged away screaming by the palace guard.

Hajan was miserable. It wasn’t quite the retribution Parvani had intended, but it was something, and she felt cruelly better for it.

When they weren’t at the Dreamers’ Gate, they were at the palace or exploring the Netherworld. Hades showed her sights more wondrous than the rivers: caves of amber and emerald, a forest of bone trees, a field with tall stag-looking creatures that allowed her to pet them between their wildly twisted antlers.

The more time she spent in the god’s company, the more she came to anticipate their next walk, their next meal together, the tiny smiles she managed to coax on her carmine lips.

One day—night? It was hard to tell—they were sitting on the balcony overlooking the asphodel, sharing a pot of tea. It was the kind that imitated her mother’s, and Parvani wondered, not for the first time, if Hades had somehow teased this from her dreams.

“It’s quite good,” the god said, peering down at her clay cup. They sat side by side on the chaise. “I can see why you miss it often.”