Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  At first she couldn’t even find words. She stared at Minya, lying on her pillows, and knew that on just the other side of a barrier only she could cross, Minya was lying on a cold metal floor with no pillows and no one to help her.

  No one was ever going to help her. Everything she would do, she would do alone and with blood on her hands. Sarai swallowed the bile that wanted to rise up her throat. “Get the others,” she told Lazlo. “Please. Tell Sparrow...” She swallowed again, fighting not to retch. It helped to remember it wasn’t real—not the bile or her throat, anyway. Her horror absolutely was. “Tell Sparrow to bring the lull.”

  . . .

  Out in the garden, Sparrow knelt beside a cluster of flowers. They were torch ginger, perfect red. She’d always thought they looked like little fireworks exploding.

  In Weep, every year on the anniversary of the Carnage, they set off fireworks. There were, apparently, all manner of festivities, but the fireworks were the only ones that they could see from up here. And though the godspawn knew what was being celebrated, it was hard not to want to watch the fire blossoms lighting up the night.

  The humans didn’t call it the Carnage, but the Liberation. Sarai had brought back that fact from her visits to Weep. Through her moths she’d witnessed many things, and carried back stories for the rest of them, much like a girl who’d attended a ball and smuggled sweets home for her younger sisters.

  And now she’d smuggled back more than stories, and more even than sweets. She’d brought a man.

  Sparrow liked Lazlo very much. Based on him, she thought she would trust Sarai to go fishing for more humans and bring them back, too.

  It was a dizzying idea—strangers, here—but less terrifying than the thought of going down to Weep. Sparrow longed to leave the citadel, but the city itself terrified her. When she was younger, she’d daydreamed about her unknown human mother, and of going down to live with her, certain that, given a chance, her mother would love her back. Great Ellen had been gentle with her, saying how they needed her here, while Minya had been more blunt. “They’d bash your head in with a shovel and throw you out like garbage,” was how she’d put it, and Sparrow knew it was true.

  She couldn’t help wondering: What if she weren’t blue? Would it make a difference to her unknown mother if she were human, with brown skin and no magic?

  But she wasn’t a starry-eyed child anymore. She knew there was not now and never would be a place for her in Weep, or a mother waiting to claim her. Now when she thought of leaving the citadel, it was forests and meadows she dreamed of. Plants wouldn’t reject her. She was wild to go find some ferns, but the thought of people, crowds, cobbled streets, wrong turns, dead ends, staring eyes, gasps of shock...

  It was just too much.

  She reached out to the torch ginger and picked a flower. As she had yesterday with the anadne blossom, she held it while its life expired, feeling it ebb to a reedy pulse. There was something she’d been wondering.

  The five of them hadn’t had anyone to show them how to use their gifts. It was all just intuition, and who knew what they might have missed. Sparrow had never known, for example, that her gift could work in reverse. But when Sarai died, it had. Her sorrow had leeched life out of the soil, and wilted plants around her. It was an unpleasant discovery. She didn’t want to be able to do that. She was Orchid Witch. She made things grow. Mostly plants, but not only. She had made Sarai’s hair grow longer, glossier. She had also made her own eyelashes longer in a burst of foolish vanity whose intended target, Feral the Oblivious, had certainly not noticed, not that it mattered now.

  Sparrow wondered if there wasn’t anything more that she could do. She waited until the torch ginger flower was nearly empty of the fizz of life. Then she carefully touched its severed stem back to the stalk she’d plucked it from, lavished it with magic, and watched to see if anything would happen.

  And maybe something did, or maybe something didn’t, but then Lazlo was in the arcade, calling out to her to come, and that put an end to the experiment, for the time being at least.

  . . .

  Lull was the drink Great Ellen had brewed to keep Sarai from dreaming. She’d taken it for years at bedtime, to block the nightmares that would turn against her the minute she fell asleep. Under the influence of lull, there were no dreams of any kind, but only a calm gray nothing.

  Now Sarai faced a dilemma.

  “If we give her lull,” Sparrow pointed out, “you won’t be able to get into her dreams.”

  This was true. There would be no dreams to get into. Sarai wouldn’t be able to talk to Minya, or see into her memories, either. She would be closing the only door that gave them any hope of reaching her—at least for a time. But to not give it to her seemed unconscionably cruel. “We’re keeping her asleep,” said Sarai, “which means we’re keeping her locked in a loop of nightmares. We can’t let her wake up. It’s too dangerous. But at least this way she can have some peace.” Though she knew that lull’s gray “peace” was a far cry from anything like healing.

  They wanted to know about the nightmares. They could see that Sarai was badly shaken. She hardly knew what to tell them. In the minutes that Lazlo had been gone to get them, the implications had unspooled around her, and where they led...

  Trying to understand it, to believe it, it was like trying to touch a hot stove. She kept flinching back just short of it. “There are things that...may not be what they seem,” she said.

  “What things?” asked Feral. “Just tell us, Sarai.”

  “It has to do with the Ellens.”

  “You mean why they’re like that?” Ruby waved a hand back in the direction of the gallery, where the nurses stood blank-eyed in the kitchen doorway.

  Sarai nodded. “That’s part of it, I think.” This was only a surmise. How could she know? What did she know, really? “I saw some things in Minya’s dreams. And dreams aren’t reality, of course, but there’s something there that’s real, that’s shaping it all. The Ellens...when they were alive, I...”

  It was so hard to say it out loud. It felt like cruelty to force her suspicions on them. Even if it were true, she thought, did they really need to know? Wouldn’t it be kinder to let them keep the lie?

  No. They weren’t children for her to shelter, and she needed them. They had to try to figure this out together.

  She let it out in a rush. “I don’t think they loved us.” Already, she was thinking of two distinct sets of Ellens: the living and the ghosts, as though they weren’t the same people. “And I don’t think they tried to protect us. I think it’s all a lie.”

  The others stared at her, nearly as blank in their incomprehension as the Ellens themselves were blank in...whatever state they were stuck in.

  Sarai told what she’d seen. She laid out each piece of the puzzle, not trying to make them into a picture, but just laying them out. She hoped, truth be told, that someone would form them into a different picture and disprove her dark suspicions. But the pieces seemed to assemble themselves:

  There was the revulsion in the Ellens’ eyes. Sarai couldn’t unsee it, or the backhand, either. And there was the red hand—Minya’s red, slippery hand—and climbing over the bodies, and the timing of it all, and Minya’s words, “Do you want to die, too?”

  There was the matter of the blur where Minya’s own mind was hiding the Ellens from her. Why would it do that?

  But for Sarai, the most compelling puzzle piece was the Ellens themselves, frozen in the kitchen doorway as they had been from the exact moment Minya lost consciousness. The more she thought about them, the more they seemed like...discarded costumes hanging in a dressing room.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Feral. “You’re saying that the Ellens aren’t...” He couldn’t finish. “What are you saying?” He sounded angry, and Sarai understood. It felt like losing someone— two someones—whom they loved and who loved them. Worse than that, it felt like losing the belief that they could be loved.

  “That maybe th
ey hated us like all the other humans did,” Sarai said. “And that maybe they weren’t kind and caring, and didn’t try to save us. That maybe it wasn’t Eril-Fane who killed them. I think...I think Minya did.” It was the only thing that made sense: the chronology, the red hand.

  It also made no sense at all.

  “If they didn’t love us when they were alive,” asked Ruby, fighting the conclusion, “why would they after they died?”

  “They wouldn’t,” Sarai said. It was so stark, so simple.

  There was one more puzzle piece, after all, and it was the one that completed the picture. “We always thought that Minya couldn’t master her slaves’ eyes,” she said. “That her possession was imperfect.” Turning to Lazlo, she asked, “Yesterday, when I...when I begged you to save me, when I said I’d changed my mind...could you tell it wasn’t really me?”

  Slowly, he shook his head, and that was it: proof of nothing except that it was possible.

  It was possible that the Ellens weren’t really the Ellens. That the ghost women who had raised five godspawn, who made them laugh and cared for them, and taught them and fed them and soothed their hurts, who settled their squabbles and sang them to sleep, were really nothing but puppets.

  Which would mean, if it were true, that they were Minya.

  And that maybe, just maybe, the ragged little girl with the beetle shell eyes, malefic, hate-ravaged, and bent on vengeance, was only a piece of who she was.

  A little, broken piece.

  Part III

  kåzheyul (kah·zhay·ul) noun

  The helpless feeling that one can

  not escape one’s fate.

  Archaic; contraction of ka (eyes) + zhe (god) + yul (back), meaning “gods’ eyes on your back.”

  Chapter 28

  Buried Gifts

  The villagers kept a vigil around the wasp ship, waiting for the door to open again, but it did not. Night was falling. Kora and Nova had been inside for four hours, which was...too long. Their father was tense, sensing a slow diminution of their value the longer they were sequestered with strange men and without their clothes. Skoyë was tense, because if her stepdaughters’ gifts had been weak, they would never have been kept so long, and she loathed the prospect of their gloating faces, should they turn out to be chosen. Shergesh was tense; he already viewed the girls as his, even if he could only have one of them. Many others were anxious, too, awaiting theirs or their children’s turns to vie for the only chance they would ever have at glory and a different life.

  Inside the ship, the atmosphere was even more fraught.

  It was Nova who now wore a godsmetal glove. She had felt the hum overcome her, and sink into her core. She was Servant-blue, like in her dreams, but that was as far as it went. Ren the telepath had gone into her mind, as he had gone into Kora’s. He had coached and coaxed her.

  Don’t think, just feel.

  Go deeper.

  Our gifts are buried within us.

  But if anything was buried in Nova, she had found no hint of it, and was on the verge of panic. Was it possible she had no gift at all? She had never heard of that. Weak gifts abounded, but no gift? Never.

  “It’s all right,” Solvay, the lone woman on the crew, had assured her early on, when Ren’s initial probing had failed to turn up any bright spot of difference, as it had with the burgeoning in Kora’s chest. “Some gifts take more time to reveal themselves than others. It’s an art more than a science, but we’re trained at it. We’ll find it.”

  She’d been so kind, but that was several hours ago, and even she looked dubious now. They had performed every test they had, including the simplest of all: A smith’s gift was never coy. You had only to touch the metal to know. A smith would leave fingerprints, even as a baby. Nova had not. And though she thought she’d immured herself to the hope of it, still it was a blow. They had tried out water, fire, earth, to test for elemental magic. They had even administered little shocks intended to stimulate different nerve paths. It hadn’t hurt very much, but Nova was exhausted now. The Servants were speaking amongst themselves, and she and Kora could hear every word. “It’s unusual but not unheard of,” Antal of the white hair was saying. “I’ve heard of gifts that took weeks to manifest.”

  “We don’t have weeks,” Ren reminded him. “Unless you’d like to stay here and enjoy the fascinating smells.”

  “We could always bring her,” suggested Solvay, “and let them test her at the training house in Aqa.”

  “And if she’s useless, what then? Are you going to bring her back here?”

  Solvay glanced at Nova. “I imagine . . .” she said hesitantly, “she’d prefer not to return. She could find work in Aqa if it came to it. Why not? We’ve space aboard, and too few prospects to fill it.”

  Antal gave a deep sigh. “It is not our job to transport girls away from their dreary lives, Solvay.”

  “It is our job to find the strong, of whom there are fewer all the time. And with a mother and a sister like hers, what are the chances that she’s weak?”

  They all paused, glancing to Skathis, who had yet to express an opinion. Through everything, he had simply watched, his gaze crawling over Nova—like the flies on the beach, she thought, inwardly cringing. They seemed to be waiting for him to weigh in. They also seemed...on edge.

  “Skathis?” Ren prompted, and Nova couldn’t breathe, so afraid he’d say just to leave her, that she wasn’t worth the trouble. She was holding Kora’s hand with her own ungloved one, and she clenched it hard.

  The smith straightened up from his slouch against the wall. “There’s another option you haven’t mentioned.”

  “No,” said Solvay at once.

  Skathis raised his eyebrows. “Pardon me?”

  She looked conflicted to be arguing with her superior officer. “It’s against protocol.”

  “This is my ship. I set the protocol.”

  “You do not set imperial protocol,” persisted Solvay, breathless and flushed. “You are subject to it like everyone else.”

  “I am not like everyone else,” said Skathis in a voice like the smoldering of embers.

  A brief silence fell before Antal, clearing his throat, suggested, “Why don’t we try again in the morning before we consider...other options.”

  “I think the girl would like to find her gift now.” Skathis turned to Nova. “Wouldn’t you.”

  It wasn’t a question, and Nova didn’t know how to respond. She was desperate to find her gift, but why did the others look so troubled? “I don’t...” she began. “What...?”

  “Good,” said Skathis, “it’s settled,” though she had agreed to nothing. “Wait.” Kora stepped in front of her sister. “What are you going to do to her?”

  “To her?” asked Skathis with a smile. “Nothing at all.”

  And the first hint Nova had of what he intended was when her sister’s hands flew to the godsmetal collar around her neck.

  Kora gave a gasp. She felt it constricting and tried to fit her fingers under it to stop it—as if she could, as if the godsmetal were not impervious to everything but the smith’s will. It was beginning to bite in. Her gasp shallowed, turning into a choke as her windpipe flattened under the collar’s pressure. She didn’t even have time to draw a last breath before it closed her throat and cut off all air. A tortured sound dragged out of her. Her eyes went wide with panic.

  “No!” Nova cried, lunging to her sister, to claw at the necklace, too. It was futile. She already knew she wasn’t a smith. She spun toward Skathis. He was watching them with unnerving unconcern. “Let her go!” Nova cried. “You’ll kill her!”

  “I hope not,” said Skathis. “Astrals really are very rare. It’ll be a shame if she dies. It’s up to you to save her life. Do you have power, or don’t you? Show me.”

  Nova rushed at him. She wasn’t thinking. To try to strike a Servant of the empire—a smith, no less! It was grounds for immediate execution. She didn’t reach him anyway. He took a neat step back, and the f
loor beneath her feet warped and turned liquid, drawing her down all the way to her knees before turning solid again and trapping her. She struggled, looking wildly between Kora’s face— gasping mouth and panicked eyes—and Skathis’s placid one. The other three Mesarthim stood rigid, such expressions on their faces that it was clear in an instant that they feared their captain, and were powerless to stop him.

  Only he could end this, and Nova saw plainly—from all their faces—that he would not, that he would take it to its bitter end, even if it cost Kora’s life.

  It was up to Nova, then. If there was a gift in her, she had to find it. She had given up looking. Now, frantic, she tried again to...to feel, as Ren had instructed, but all she could feel was her pounding heart. Kora was on the floor now, her struggles growing feebler. Nova saw that she was dying. She stopped plundering through herself, pawing for a gift as she might paw at beach sand in hopes of finding a shell. This wasn’t about hope anymore. It was about desperation—

  —which was just what Skathis was after. In a matter of life or death, the body and mind will flood with chemicals and trigger even the most stubborn gifts. This was his method, cruel, violent, effective. It was like blowing up a door when you couldn’t find the key. It worked, in its way.

  Rage pulsed up from Nova’s core like the shock wave of a blast, ripping through her fear, her worry, even through her conscious thought, so that she stopped feeling for her gift, stopped wondering what it was, and just... became it.

  A lot of things happened at once.

  Kora took a drag of breath.

  Nova climbed out of the floor that had trapped her, as easily as though it were water.

  Shock registered in Skathis’s eyes in the split second before the godsmetal under his feet lurched like a yanked rug and sent him flying. His head hit with a crack. The other Mesarthim stared, agog, at Skathis on the floor, Kora breathing, Nova free.

  “She’s a smith after all,” breathed Solvay.

  But Ren went where the others couldn’t, into Nova’s mind, and when he felt what was there, he said, horrorstruck, “No, she isn’t.”