Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  He liked it, too. “You could try it on me first,” he said.

  “But you’re awake.”

  “I could fix that.” He strove for lightness, but Sarai could see what it meant to him—what it had meant to him from the first—to open his mind for her, and be her place of safety. Oh, sweet. There was nowhere she would rather go than Dreamer’s Weep with Lazlo Strange.

  “All right,” she said. Her voice was soft. His smile was sweet. They went inside, past Isagol’s bed, to the nook in the back, and he lay down. Sarai sat beside him, on the edge of the bed. It would have been so easy to fall back into their wildfire ways. But she only kissed him once, moth-soft, on the safe side of his swollen mouth, and stroked his hair while he fell asleep.

  And as she felt him relax by degrees, and saw his breathing slow and deepen, she was overcome by a feeling so powerful she thought surely her ghost couldn’t contain it. It wanted to spill out of her in waves of music and silver light. It would, if she’d let it, she thought. Literal music, actual light. But she didn’t want to wake him, so she kept it inside and felt that the whole of her being was just a fragile skin wrapped around tenderness and aching love, and the kind of surprise you feel when...oh, for example, when you wake up after dying, and get another chance. And when she was sure he was asleep, she did as he’d suggested. She willed forth another moth, and, lifting it carefully from her lips, reached it out toward Lazlo’s brow.

  She meant to put her fingers down and maneuver the moth so it was touching them both, to make a bridge for their minds to cross. And...she already knew it wasn’t going to work, even as she reached, because this moth, too, was a mute thing like the ones out on the terrace, not a sentinel for her senses the way it should have been. So a sob was already rising in her throat when her fingers came to rest on his skin.

  It was hot. She felt that first, but only for an instant because then...she wasn’t there.

  She wasn’t in the nook, sitting by Lazlo’s side, and his brow wasn’t under her hand.

  She was...she was in the marketplace of Dreamer’s Weep, encircled by amphitheater walls and colored tents and hawkers’ cries, while, overhead, children in feather cloaks raced over wires strung taut between domes of hammered gold. And Lazlo was standing before her.

  Chapter 20

  Plenty of Feelings

  In her surprise, Sarai jerked her hand back, and the moth, perched on her finger, dislodged and vanished as Lazlo awakened and sat up. “It worked,” he said, sleepy. He was grinning broadly. “Sarai, you did it.”

  She was looking at her fingers. The sob was still stuck in her throat. She swallowed it, bewildered. Had it worked? How? “The moth never touched you,” she said. She was sure.

  But Lazlo knew he’d seen her, if only for an instant. “Then how. .. ?”

  “I touched you,” she said. She was still studying her fingers. She curled them against her palm and looked up to meet his eyes. “I wonder...” she said, and trailed off.

  Everything had changed. She’d lost her physical body. The rules were different in this state. Was it outlandish to think her gift might have different rules now, too? What if her moths were gone? What if...she didn’t need them? If there was no more bridge, but only her?

  “Lazlo,” she said, her thoughts spinning. “Earlier, in the gallery when I couldn’t speak, and you pressed your cheek against mine... did you feel anything?”

  He flushed with shame. He knew the moment she meant. “You were right when you said she’d break me,” he told her, horrified by how close he’d come. “I was ready to do whatever she wanted.”

  “But you didn’t.” She was intense. “Why didn’t you?”

  He searched for an answer. “All of a sudden...I couldn’t.” His gaze sharpened as he understood. “It was you.”

  “What was me? What did you feel?”

  “I felt... no,” he said. How else to put it? He could still feel the way it had carved through his mind, pushing everything out of its way. “All of a sudden, it was all there was.” His eyes were on hers, searching for confirmation that it had come from her. “The word no. It was everything. It stopped me.”

  She nodded. He had felt it. She’d done something like it in the moment before the blast shook the city, sank the anchor, tipped the citadel, and killed her. She’d seen the explosionist light the fuse, watched the flame race toward the charge, and known Lazlo was walking right toward it. Her moth had been perched on his wrist, and through it she’d assailed him with a fry of feeling that stopped him in his tracks. She’d done it through her moth that time. But today, in the gallery, she’d done it skin to skin. And she had, by touching Lazlo, just now slipped into his dream.

  Her gift wasn’t gone. It had changed, as had she. She’d lost her sentinels. She couldn’t fly out into the night anymore and spy on sleepers and creep into their minds. But she could touch someone and slip inside their dreams. “It works directly now,” she said. “Skin to skin.” At those words, both she and Lazlo flushed, imagining how it would be.

  And as much as she wanted to test it with him right now—all of him and all of her, in this bed, dozing and waking, blurring back and forth between dream and real, taking what was best from each and loving every second of it—Sarai knew now wasn’t the time. Urgency pricked her. Down the corridor, a little girl was asleep on the floor, locked in unguessable dreams, while a ghost army stood frozen and a city stood empty, and all their fates teetered on such ephemeral things as a green glass bottle tucked between the knees of a flighty fifteen-year-old girl who’d fallen asleep on watch.

  . . .

  Sarai took the bottle before waking Ruby. She didn’t want her to startle and send it smashing to the floor. And she did startle, and did what anyone does when caught sleeping on watch: She denied it. “I am awake,” she said, instantly argumentative, though no one had suggested otherwise...unless waking someone up automatically constitutes an accusation of sleep.

  “Why don’t you go to bed,” said Sarai.

  Bleary-eyed, Ruby peered at her. “You’re talking,” she said, because for most of her life, Sarai had been mute after dark. “Your gift.” Even mostly asleep, she knew what this meant. If Sarai still had her voice, then her moths had not come. The two were mutually exclusive.

  “It might be different now,” Sarai said, still hesitant to speak with certainty. “You go on. I’ll tell you how it goes.”

  Ruby let herself be ushered off to bed, and Sarai sank down on the floor next to Minya, her back against the bed. Lazlo took the chair and the green glass bottle. Minya lay between them.

  “Look at her,” said Sarai, and maybe it was just the leftover music and silver light that had filled her, but the sight of the little girl pierced her, and it felt something like tenderness. “Can you believe so much depends on this tiny little thing?”

  “Why has she never grown up?” Lazlo asked.

  Sarai shook her head. “Stubbornness?” A smile played at the corners of her mouth. “If anyone could dig in and refuse to grow, it’s her.” The smile faded. “But I think it’s more than that. I think she can’t?” She asked it like a question, as though Lazlo might have an answer. “Is there anything like it in any of your stories?”

  It wasn’t strange to Lazlo that she would ask that. It seemed to him that fairy tales were full of coded answers. “There is one story,” he said, more to amuse her than anything, “about a princess who decreed that it would remain her birthday until she got the present she wanted. Everyone fussed over her, how they always did, and months passed, and then years, and gifts were brought and rejected, and all the while she stayed just the same.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s not helpful, if that’s what you’re hoping. Her parents grew old and died, and nobody cared anymore what she wanted for her birthday, so they put the princess in a cave and left her there and forgot her, and years later, some travelers, seeking refuge from the rain, found an old woman living in the cave, and it was her. She’d grow
n up.”

  “How?”

  “All she’d wanted for her birthday was a little peace and quiet.”

  Sarai shook her head. “You’re right. It isn’t helpful.”

  “I know. But it’s the right answer for somebody’s problem, somewhere in the world.”

  “And does some stranger out there have the answer to ours? Can we meet them at a crossroads and swap?”

  “Do you think,” Lazlo asked, “that the answer is in there?” He nodded to Minya. Her mind, he meant, knowing in a way that few people do that a mind is a place—a landscape, a wilderness, a city, a world. And that Sarai could go there. It filled him with awe and extraordinary pride.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I know she’s there, and I have to talk to her. I have to change her mind.”

  She spoke bravely, but he could see she was afraid. “I wish I could go with you.”

  “I wish you could, too.”

  “Can I do anything? Get you anything? You see, I’m the one who’s useless.”

  “Just be here,” said Sarai.

  “Always.”

  She knew he would be, no matter what. And with that, fingers trembling, Sarai reached for Minya’s hand, and plunged into her mind.

  . . .

  Feral did not like his new mattresses. In all fairness, it wasn’t entirely the mattresses’ fault. They could have been perfectly comfortable and he would still have tossed and turned on them, grumbling about the blistering irrationality of Ruby.

  Ruby.

  Angry he’d never spied on her naked?! And what was all that about “nothing” being the opposite of “something”? Anyway, it wasn’t, if you wanted to be accurate. The opposite of “nothing” was “everything.” And Sparrow! What had she meant by him being bad—spectacularly bad—at noticing feelings? He was not. You didn’t grow up with four girls without noticing plenty of feelings. And embarrassing him in front of Lazlo, that was what really annoyed him. He hoped at least that Lazlo saw how foolish it all was. Sarai wasn’t like that. Lazlo was lucky. Well, Sarai was dead, so maybe not lucky lucky.

  But you’d never know she was a ghost—that was the thing. Unless Minya started in, but Minya was sleeping now, and so Feral assumed Sarai and Lazlo weren’t. Maybe they were getting lucky lucky right at this very moment. Feral grimaced and performed a dramatic flop from his right shoulder over onto his left, only to give an unmanly gasp and skitter backward at the sight of a figure beside his bed.

  Ruby.

  “What do you want?” he asked surly.

  “What do you think I want? Scoot over.”

  And poor Feral still didn’t know. She slid under his sheet (he’d had to drum one up, pillows too; it was scratchy, they were lumpy; he disliked them) and she turned her back and lay still, waiting.

  For what?

  Did she want... that? Now? He considered his options and snaked out a hand in hesitant reconnaissance.

  Ruby made that sound like disgusted gargling that you make in the back of your throat when someone’s totally hopeless (so, no, apparently she didn’t want that) and, grabbing his hand, she pulled it hard so that his whole body came up against hers in...oh. A cuddle. The spoon kind. She tucked his hand under her breasts, and that was all. She fell asleep. He didn’t, not for a long time. The warmth of the back of her and all its curves was pressed against him as he lay awake wondering: Bless Thakra, by all that’s holy—and very, very unholy—what does this mean?

  Chapter 21

  From a Long Line of Indignant Nostrils

  Books.

  Corridors lined with books.

  Thyon and Calixte had indeed uncovered the remains of the ancient library of Weep...or, rather, of the ancient library of whatever the city had been called before the goddess of oblivion ate its name and left “Weep” in its place in a spectacular act of deathbed vengeance.

  There were cave-ins blocking some of the passages, and skeletons that could only be librarians trapped when the anchor came down. “Wisdom keepers.” Thyon remembered that that was what they’d been called. Once upon a time, there would have been some manner of grand edifice above, but it had been pulverized. These were the stacks, the underground levels, and they didn’t extend very deep, because the city was built over a network of branching waterways. Still, there were a lot of books. When they’d gotten the door open, Thyon had wandered in a daze, trailing his fingers over dusty spines and wondering what lost knowledge was here.

  That was hours ago. The world had turned away from the sun. Day had darkened to night. The last of the noise of the exodus had faded along the eastward road, and a weird silence had taken over the city. The moon drifted overhead, peering down into the sinkhole as though curious what they were up to with their ropes and baskets, their midnight labors.

  Thyon’s neck was sore. He went to rub it, and no sooner touched it than he winced. The sweat from his neck got into the open blisters on his palm and stung like the devil. Sweat and blisters! If his father could see him now, toiling like a common laborer, he would burst half the blood vessels in his face from pure outrage. It was almost enough to make Thyon smile. But there was nothing common about this labor. He blew on his palm. It helped a little.

  At his side, the Tizerkane warrior Ruza was giving him a considering look, but he averted his gaze as soon as Thyon turned, and pretended he hadn’t been watching him.

  “Are you two done standing around up there?” called Calixte—in Common Tongue for Thyon’s benefit. She was down in the sinkhole with Tzara, the pair of them framed in the unearthed doorway.

  “Just getting started,” Ruza called back, though in his own language. “Do I need to apply for an idleness permit? Are you granting those tonight?”

  Calixte pitched a rock at him. It was a solid throw, and would have connected with his head had his hand not shot out and caught it. “Ow,” he said, resentful, shaking out the hand. “You could just say, ‘Permit denied.’”

  “Permit denied,” she said. “Keep hauling.”

  Thyon only understood a smattering of words, but detected dry humor in their tones and expressions. It was beginning to grate on him, not being able to understand them. It was like handing someone the ability to mock you right to your face while you just stood there like a fool. Maybe he should have made an effort. Might he not have learned and not let them know it, so at least he could tell what they were saying about him? If Strange and Calixte had managed to learn, then certainly he could have, too.

  Of course, they both had something he didn’t: friends to teach them. Calixte had Tzara, more than a friend. And as for Strange, he had practically become one of them, working right alongside them, not just keeping accounts as the Godslayer’s secretary, but hammering stakes and scrubbing out pots, and even learning to throw a spear, all while trading jests in their thrilling, musical language.

  Most of the jests had come from this warrior, Ruza, the youngest of the Tizerkane. “Pull,” he said to Thyon now, a single curt syllable in Common Tongue, with none of his sly tone or merriment.

  Thyon bristled. He did not take orders. His jaw muscles clenched. His palms stung, his shoulders ached, and he was tired. He felt like a frayed rope that could snap at any moment, but then, he’d felt like that for years and he hadn’t snapped yet. The few remaining fibers holding him together were apparently made of strong stuff. And besides, he reasoned, Ruza’s Common Tongue was rudimentary; perhaps niceties were lost on him. So he bent at the warrior’s side, took hold of his share of rope, clenched his teeth around the pain that immediately screamed from his raw palms, and did as he was bid. Hand over hand, he pulled.

  And up from the sinkhole, on the pulley line they’d rigged from the doorway, another basket loaded with books rose slowly into sight.

  “Why are books so heavy?” groaned Ruza as it reached the top, and they swung it onto solid ground.

  Thyon’s mind produced explanations that had to do with the density of paper, but he offered up only a grunt. He had a new appr
eciation himself for the weight of books. He was accustomed to a small army of librarians carting them around for him. Truth be told, he was accustomed to servants doing everything for him. In his neck, a nerve pinched. He rolled his head from side to side, grimaced, and bent to examine the contents of the basket.

  What a treasure trove he and Calixte had uncovered. At least, the books looked like treasure. He had no way to judge their contents.

  Alongside Ruza, he started lifting them out of the basket and stacking them in crates in the cart they’d backed up to the sinkhole. There was a donkey in harness, drowsily waiting to make the return journey to the Merchants’ Guildhall. For hours they’d been trudging back and forth, stacking the books in the halls, in the dining room, anywhere there was space, just to get them away from here, lest the sinkhole give way and spill what remained of the city’s lost knowledge into the roiling Uzumark. Thyon and Calixte had gone to Eril-Fane as soon as they realized what they’d discovered. They’d found him looking haggard and sorrowful, and their news had brought him a tired smile.

  The Tizerkane had been involved in defensive preparations, but he had lent them Ruza and Tzara to aid in their salvage efforts. Thyon had hardly expected to work all night long, but no one had suggested stopping, so he couldn’t, either, without having to imagine the meaning of the words they’d call him under their breath. They’d eaten bread and cheese a while ago, and drunk gulps from a bottle of something potent that had burned the edges off his fatigue— and perhaps the surface layer off his throat as well, not that he was complaining.