“No,” she said without looking back at him. “I expect you to look with your own eyes at the result of what was being done to me by the dream walker who had slipped into my mind, here, in the Keep, where we thought we were safe. We are not safe.” She held out the skirt of her dress. “As I fell to my knees, dying, blood running from my ears, blood choking me, I could feel the dream walker break each rib, one at a time.” Some in the crowd gasped. “The pain was beyond endurance, yet there is no way to avoid enduring it.”

She walked slowly across the dais to be sure that everyone out in the crowd, as well as all those behind the desk, could get a good look at the blood all over her. The sound of her shoes on the wooden floor of the rostrum echoed through the room.

“The blood you see all over me,” she said, “is the evidence of the torture he was inflicting. If it is shocking to see, I promise you, you would not have wanted to hear my screams as I lay in a pool of my own blood and on the brink of death.”

“And so I guess that the good spirits swept in and saved you at the last moment?” Councilman Guymer asked, bringing a smattering of laughter.

“No,” she calmly answered as she gazed out at the crown. “Though I prayed they would, the good spirits did not come to my rescue. I saved myself.”

“And how, may I ask, did you do that,” Sadler asked, fingers skyward, “if the dream walkers are in fact such fearsome beings?”

“You’re right. They are fearsome. They are also powerful. But I invoked magic even more powerful and as a result I was protected from the dream walkers.”

“You are not gifted,” Guymer scoffed.

“You don’t have to be gifted to be protected,” she said out to the crowd watching, addressing them rather than the council. “You must choose, though, to accept the solution. At the last moment before I was about to die, I came to understand that, and I chose to do what was needed to save myself.

“That’s why I’m here. I want all of our people to know that there is protection for them, for all of them. Believe me, the dream walkers can steal into the minds of anyone and they will show no mercy. But none of you need fear them. None of you needs to suffer and die.”

“And how do you know that you really are protected?” Guymer asked.

“If I wasn’t protected, the dream walkers would have torn me apart where I stood so they could prevent me from coming here to tell you how to protect yourselves and our people from their abilities.”