We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Never the Roses, an epic and deeply emotional romantic fantasy debut by Jennifer K. Lambert, out from Bramble on July 8th.
The Dread Sorceress Oneira has retired. She’s exhausted from fighting the endless wars of kings and queens, and has long accepted that her death is near. Alone at last but for a few uninvited companions—a near-mythical wolf, a goddess’s avatar, and a feline that embodies magic itself—Oneira realizes that she’s bored. On a whim, or perhaps at the behest of fate, she makes an unlikely trip to the most extensive library in existence: the home of her most powerful rival, the sorcerer Stearanos.
By recklessly stealing a book from him, Oneira inadvertently initiates a forbidden correspondence. Taunting notes and clever retorts reveal a connection neither has found—nor could ever find—in any other.
But Oneira soon learns that Stearanos, bound to a vile king, is tasked with waging war on the queen she once served. A relationship with him is far too dangerous to pursue despite their mutual desire—and yet, Oneira can’t seem to stay away.
A bond with Stearanos could alight the long-extinct flame of life within her… or it could destroy her entirely.
If anyone had asked Oneira what manner of creature she anticipated would be the first to break the solitude of her self-imposed and vigorously enforced isolation, she would not have picked a near-mythical wolf designed by an ancient mage to wage brutal war. Though, given the life she’d led, it really just figured.
The scáthcú sat on his haunches, eyeing her with riveted attention. Dirty ice matted his coat, turning him brown instead of his native white. Filth coated his belly, encased his great paws, and hung off the feathery underside of his long tail, which now curved around in front of him, the tip lifted in question. The unnatural magic that created his ilk shimmered about him, radiating a shade of purple not found in nature, an implicit warning to anyone with the wit to see it.
He must have come down from the forever-frozen peaks looming above. The ancient tales spoke of the packs of scáthcú who’d gone feral following the demise of their creator, roaming the cave-riddled wilderness of those altitudes too extreme for ordinary lungs to draw breath. Oneira had heard rumors from time to time of some ambitious young mage, burdened by oppressive debt and made brave by the desperation to rid themselves of it, attempting to ascend to the thin air and desolation of those peaks. They thought to obtain a scáthcú and make their fortune.
They died. Or disappeared. Or returned crushed in body and spirit, realizing their own insignificant skills could never allow them to survive the extremes a created being so thoroughly permeated with magic could.
If those mages had bothered to read the books Oneira had, those hubris-laden and impetuous fools would have known that even if they could manage to ascend to such heights, they would return unrewarded. Scáthcú chose their own sorcerers. The fabricated dread wolves had been embedded with a craving for magic. The more powerful the sorcerer, the more attractive to them. If they befriended a mage, their loyalty was unbreakable, and they formed a symbiotic relationship with their sorcerer of choice. As an enemy, however, the scáthcú fed their hunger another way, devouring the sorcerer they found wanting.
Oneira knew herself to be wanting in many ways—but were they the ones that mattered to a scáthcú? She waited with distant curiosity to discover the outcome of the test. Perhaps death had finally sought her out, impatient with her dithering. Truly, it would be a relief to have the decision taken out of her hands.
The scáthcú’s massive jaws opened, revealing ivory fangs. A black, forked tongue flicked out to taste the air between them. Jaws widening beyond what would be physically possible for a natural wolf, he revealed his pink maw and his native magic coiled out like that black tongue, visible only to her sorcerous senses. Braced, she held her magic in a still, folded cloak, allowing him to taste it… and he settled into a canine grin, giving her a yip of greeting.
Oneira sighed. There would be no getting rid of him now.
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Never the Roses
“There’s no meat in my house,” she told him, her voice an odd, rusty sound after such long disuse. “You feed yourself.”
She turned and walked away. Whatever would she do with such a creature? Undaunted by her lack of welcome, the scáthcú followed at her side, establishing a pattern that would endure.
“Don’t make me sorry,” she added, and laid a hand in the ruff of coarser hair around his neck and shoulders. Such was his height that her hand rested there easily, her elbow at a relaxed and comfortable bend. As if they’d been sized for each other. “Perhaps you can address the rabbits savaging my garden,” she suggested.
He emitted a growl of pure delight. It didn’t count, Oneira decided, if her scáthcú committed bunny murder. After all, the rabbits were far from innocent, determinedly avoiding her non-lethal deterrents with arcane cleverness. She’d spent an undue amount of time—not to mention magic, though she had plenty to spare these days—on devising wards that wouldn’t injure the fuzzy pests, but her humane solutions left loopholes for them to get in and savage her greens.
Many of her former cohort in the world of the ruthless employment of magic would construe a lesson from that, along the lines of kill or be killed. She willfully refused that premise. Or, rather, she’d done enough of the former that she’d resigned herself to the latter. Eventually, anyway. In the meanwhile, it could be frustrating that the immensely powerful magic she possessed all lay in the realm of the Dream. And that she excelled in destruction above all else.
Well, now she apparently had a pet scáthcú to kill for her. How scandalized her former handlers would be to know she planned to use such a lethal weapon for gardening.
* * *
Oneira decided to call the scáthcú “Bunny,” in honor of his labors on behalf of her greens. She’d gotten him to bathe himself in the deep, freshwater pond she’d added to the walled garden. It was easy enough to coax him into it as Bunny gleefully took to water. She then spent several nights by the fire—she lit a fire every evening, regardless of the weather, for its quiet comfort— meticulously combing the snarls from his matted coat. His fur turned out to be as soft as a rabbit’s and as pristine white as their winter coats.
She ended up with a pile of extracted fur that she regarded with considerable bemusement, recalling excursions to various outlying fiefdoms where the women—it was almost always the women—would gather to spin piles of fluff like it into threads or yarns or some such. Oneira had always regarded their chattering circles, busy hands, and clacking instruments with a similar sense of befuddlement. Their lives had so little resemblance to her own that they seemed like a foreign tribe, a people who existed in spaces that weren’t battlefields or council chambers crowded with greedy or frightened men. It didn’t matter which emotion motivated the men, as they behaved in the exact same ways.
The women, though, they’d appeared content enough from a distance, as unmoved by the scheming of their men as the sheep in the meadows. It had seemed an enviable sort of peaceful ignorance and a kind of magic Oneira lacked, one made of nimble fingers and keen attention. As if by focusing on the simple tasks, they elevated the importance of small creations, putting the epic sweep of wars and kingdoms into the far distance, a tumult of landscape irrelevant to them.
So, remembering their ability to retire violence to the background of their lives, and confronted with a pile of white fur, Oneira attempted spinning.
She located a book in her library with instructions on the techniques, and which included several illustrations of the necessary tools. Selecting the spindle as something that looked as easy to use as a child’s toy, she entered the Dream to find one.
Oneira was powerful and skilled enough to travel physically through the Dream that connected all living beings and emerge in a location where she could purchase—or steal, depending on the provenance of the item—anything she needed. But to create something as simple as a spindle, she needed only to reach mentally into the dream, which was much easier, though by no means easy. Stilling herself, allowing her folded cloak of magic to unfurl just a small amount, she walked her thoughts along the familiar pathway into the Dream.
A place as fantastic and unreal as the dreams that made up its fabric, the Dream was wildly confusing to magic-workers not experienced in that ever-changing, undulating landscape. Even naturally talented oneiromancers could become lost in bubbles of dreams that popped or spontaneously sealed themselves off. For Oneira, who’d traveled this mutable land intuitively since she was a small child, then with more skill as she learned from the best, skipping through dreaming minds to find a spindle took only moments.
She located one that looked like a simple version, similar to the book’s illustration, from the dream of a woman surrounded by endless piles of wool and spindles that ever eluded her grasp. Extracting it from the Dream, Oneira pulled herself back to the waking world, the spindle in her hand. As always happened with items from the Dream, it wasn’t exactly right. Though it looked like wood, the substance of the thing was flimsy, too soft for real-world work. There came in the true craft and skill of this sort of oneiromancy.
Using her magic with finely honed precision, Oneira recast the substance into something much more like the wood it was supposed to be. It would never be exactly like the real-world version, but it would more than suffice for her purposes. Especially with no one but herself to see and hold it. Other people tended to be unsettled by the vaguely foreign aspects of items built from the Dream, something of no concern in her exile. Another bonus.
Amused at herself that her self-imposed rules allowed her to obtain a spindle from the Dream, but not cheat any more than that, Oneira bent herself to the new task.
Within an hour, she wished she’d simply thrown the whole pile of fur on the fire. This was why she’d become a sorceress and not a weaver or spinner or maker of things.
Well, this and that she’d never had a choice. As a child of power, the recipient of magic that flew to her like birds to seed in winter, Oneira had begun to study sorcery so young that she had barely understood that people led any other kind of life. It had never once occurred to her to stop and chat with those women she’d observed, to ask to be shown how the tools they used worked to transform one thing into another.
Faced with a mountain of fluff, sore fingers that bumbled every movement, and a scáthcú who watched her as if he suspected she’d lost her mind, Oneira regretted that she hadn’t ever taken the time to linger by those chattering groups, to observe, or possibly even ask. The book could only give her words; she lacked the translation that would make her hands do the thing.
Still, giving up had never been in her nature. She possessed an innate stubbornness that had frustrated her teachers and handlers alike, but her obdurate nature had also seen her through knottier problems than fur that flew up her nose and made her sneeze or fingers that reddened and ached in every tiny bone. Out of pride, and honestly a lack of much else to do, she persevered, working the strands of soft fur into, if not actual thread or yarn, then at least a lumpy tube with aspirations.
Hours later, the windows open to the warm summer evening and the languid chorus of crickets singing in counterpoint to the bass beats of the surf below, Oneira dubiously confronted the coil of dirty white ropelike stuff. Nothing remained of the prodigious pile of fur but for a few wisps tumbling idly over the stone floor, dancing with the night breezes. Beside her, Bunny gave her creation much the same look that she did. In retrospect, she should have spent time removing the various inclusions, all the thorns, bits of rubble, and other unidentifiable detritus Bunny had collected in his fur like an avaricious minor lord wearing his wealth on his costume.
At that point, she very nearly did pitch the ugly product of her work into the fire. Probably she should have—it served no useful purpose—but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. She’d made it, however useless and unlovely, and that meant something. Probably not much, but something. Even if she didn’t know what that was. For someone who’d never created anything without a purpose, that she’d made this useless, artless thing felt like a step toward an unknown destination.
So, she coiled it carefully, though the uneven lumps and occasional extrusions meant it would never look neat—neatness counts, her teacher Zoltan had endlessly exhorted—and she set it on the mantel, which had been otherwise bare. She couldn’t have said why she had one to begin with, except that mantels went with fireplaces in the visions of most dreamers, and so it had emerged from the Dream that way. She hadn’t cared enough either way to pare it off.
She paused, studying the soiled, brownish, and lopsided column precisely centered on the pristine white shelf, surrounded by equally pristine white walls, then went to bed. Bunny followed along, so he could lay himself in his accustomed spot across the threshold, where he’d remain until she awoke. As was her habit, she rested a hand between his shoulders as they walked, the newly combed fur soft as down. That was an accomplishment: not the making of the object she turned her back on, but the creation of the absence of filth.
As the sorceress and wolf walked away, the coiled rope remained on the mantel, a dubious occupant of the lone place of honor in an otherwise empty house.
* * *
The next creature to find Oneira arrived like a literal bolt from the blue. She was out in the garden picking the last of the tomatoes, the as-yet unripe green ones, as the cold wind blasting off the ocean shouted of a hard frost to come that night. She’d learned to listen for those sounds, too: the land, water, and sky speaking of their immediate plans, of the weather traveling from far beyond her fastness, bringing with it the imagined scents of exotic lands she’d once visited, occupied, or overthrown. The lash of the wind against her bare neck—for she’d braided her long, crimson hair and coiled it around the back of her head, so it wouldn’t snarl—felt like a well-deserved punishment from those faraway places.
You abandoned me.
You laid waste to me.
You made me bow to your might and left me broken.
You made me into a nightmare landscape of nothing, nothing, nothing…
Pressing her lips together, she didn’t reply, even in her mind. She didn’t have anything to say back to them. The voices on the wind told her nothing she didn’t already know, nothing she didn’t already regret to the depths of her pitiless soul, nothing she hadn’t already considered how to redress, except that nothing could.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
So she accepted their castigation as her due, plucking each hard, round, brightly green fruit with care—neatness counts—as if each tomato saved from the frost might compensate for some small portion of the land she’d destroyed.
The sound hit her barely before her aerial wards blazed the warning through her mind, then shredded in the wake of the creature that plummeted from above, shrieking a bloodcurdling cry as it fell. Oneira leapt to her feet, dirt-encrusted hands stretched to the sky in a gesture that had nothing to do with defense, and everything to do with strike-first violence. Without thinking about it, she’d opened a portal to the Dream, iridescence tracing the outline of a doorway, the Dream seething beyond, the night terrors summoned by her instinctive fear throbbing with the need to be released. Struggling against her darker instincts, she caged the restless, potent magic, restraining the terrors, prepared to call something else from the Dream instead. Something less lethally nightmarish.
She would not kill rather than die.
At least, not until she knew what hurled itself toward her.
Acutely cognizant of that irony—that all her noble aspirations fell apart depending on context, and her emotions of the moment, marking her indelibly as a monster, forever and always— she sent a seeking eye upward. Aiming her far-vision at the rent in her wards, she was rather astonished to discover the culprit: a tiny kestrel, brilliantly colored in ruby rust and sapphire gray, diving straight for her. She turned her raised hands in time for the creature to land on her forearm, small, black-tipped talons easily piercing her sleeve to dig into her skin, drawing blood.
Oneira winced, but held steady, regarding the bird—no taller than her hand was long—with considerable bemusement. This small raptor had been able to slice through her wards as if they were nothing. Was that the fault of her less-than-sterling ward-making or its own ability? Would it be able to similarly shatter the wards of a powerful wardmaking sorcerer like Stearanos Stormbreaker? It would be interesting to try, though she’d never meet her nemesis in battle now that she’d retired. Not that they’d ever been likely to collide, always positioned against the other as a threat between the warring nations that held their leashes, a promise of mutually assured destruction.
Apparently uninterested in her musings, the kestrel stared her down, glistening obsidian eyes knowing, hooked beak sharp for killing prey. Another meat eater. She considered asking why it had sought her out, knowing there would be no more answer than to whether she could have defeated Stearanos in battle— she was certain she could have—or to the endlessly cycling, far more pertinent question of how to atone for her past.
She could, however, answer the question of the tiny raptor’s identity. Stilling herself, she queried the Dream, seeking similar images. The vivid coloring, the metallic gold sparkle of the ring around its eyes, its ability to penetrate her wards. The answer bubbled up from countless numinous dreams.
This was Adsila, hunting companion to She Who Eats Bears, goddess of old.
Oneira had not asked for Adsila, nor did she want the attention of She Who Eats Bears. Attracting the notice of a deity always led to trouble, and Oneira’s entire plan at the moment hinged on being so thoroughly forgotten that she’d be left alone. “You should go,” she whispered to Adsila, who cocked her head, an obdurate glint in her bright eyes, a mirror to Oneira’s own stubborn nature. The wind tugged at the knot of Oneira’s hair, pulling it free of the coil and sending it whipping about them, stinging her face bloodless from the cold.
Bunny nipped a green tomato from the basket and ate it, grinning at her.
Excerpted from Never the Roses, copyright © 2025 by Jennifer K. Lambert.
