Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but wasn’t that the best kind?

  He found himself talking too much, drawing the introductions out, because everyone was so silent.

  Eril-Fane had meant to speak first. He had words all lined up in his head, but the sight of Sarai sent them scattering. In color and figure she was so like her mother. At first it was all he could see, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. But her features, so similar to Isagol’s, were wholly recast by what was in her hearts: compassion, mercy, love. These changed everything. He had been braced for her rightful anger and blame, but in her face he saw only her hesitant hope.

  There was a signal beacon on the Cusp and another atop the garrison in Weep. When one flared alight, the other was lit in immediate response. That was what it was like in Eril-Fane’s chest when he saw Sarai’s hope. His own flared in answer. It hurt. It swelled inside him. It was the same species of hope as hers: fragile, and sullied by shame and fear.

  Their shames were different, but their fear was the same: of seeing rejection in the other’s eyes.

  Instead, each saw hope, a mirror of their own, and brightened like new-polished glavestones that had been muted under dust. Eril-Fane groped for words, but only one came to him:

  “Daughter,” he said.

  The word filled a space in Sarai’s chest that had always been empty. She wondered if he had a space like that, too. “Father,” she answered, and he did have a space, but it wasn’t empty. It had long been filled with small bones and self-loathing. Now the word dissolved them and took their place, and it was so much lighter than what had been there before that Eril-Fane felt as though he could stand up straight for the first time in years.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. The words scraped up from some pit within him, and shreds of his soul seemed to cling to them like flesh to the barbs of a scourge.

  “I know,” said Sarai. “I’m sorry, too.”

  He winced and shook his head. He couldn’t bear for her to apologize to him. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “That’s not true. I’ve haunted you. I’ve given you nightmares.”

  “I deserved nightmares. I don’t expect forgiveness, Thakra knows. I just want you to know how sorry I am. I don’t...” He looked down at his big, scarred hands. “I don’t know how I could ever do such a thing.”

  But Sarai understood: A person could be driven mad by hate. It was a force as destructive as any Mesarthim gift, and harder to end than a god. The gods had been dead for fifteen years, after all, but their hate had lingered, and ruled in their stead.

  And yet...these three were standing here and Sarai saw no hate in them. What made it possible? Lazlo?

  He was at her side, and Sarai felt that as long as he was there, she could do anything: See the world, make a home, help Minya. Help Minya, so that she could stand here, too, with hope in the place of her hate. Why not? Right now, with her father in front of her and Lazlo beside her, Sarai felt as though anything was possible. “Can we leave the past behind us?” she asked.

  Could they? The question was everything.

  “That’s an excellent place for the past,” said Suheyla. “If you don’t leave it there, it clutters everything up and you just keep tripping over it.” Holding her granddaughter’s gaze, she smiled, and Sarai smiled back.

  And the last link in Eril-Fane’s mind between Isagol and Sarai was broken. Yes, Sarai looked a lot like her mother. But Isagol’s smiles had been taunting twists that never reached her eyes. Sarai’s was radiance and sweetness, and there was something in it....He himself saw only light, but Suheyla and Azareen saw an echo of him, of the way he used to smile before Isagol broke him.

  Suheyla reached for Azareen’s hand, and they clung to each other and to the memory, and to the hope that they would yet see that smile resurrected on his face.

  There was so much emotion rushing under the skin of the moment—not like blood, but spirit, lighter and clearer, Lazlo thought. He was elated. Sarai was overcome. Sparrow and Feral were moved, though they held themselves back, shy and awkward. Ruby was inside with Minya, and didn’t even know what was going on. (And when she found out that they had visitors and hadn’t even come to get her, she wouldn’t be wrathful for all eternity, but half at the very most.)

  As for Minya, she was lost in a lull fog, unaware that the enemy had come, and that her family was smiling at them in the garden, forming another “us” without her—an unthinkable “us” that spat on everything she’d done to keep them alive.

  At least, that was how she’d see it, if she were to wake up.

  Chapter 33

  The Unmourned

  It was Feral who broke the ice, asking about the bundle Suheyla carried, from which emanated a glorious warm fragrance that could only be bread—not saltless, oilless kimril loaf that tasted of purgatory, but real bread. Suheyla peeled back the cloth right then and there and watched with satisfaction as the young people reached for it with trembling hands and nearly wept for pleasure at the taste of it—except for Sarai, that is, who had to be content with the fragrance.

  “I’ll save some for Ruby,” said Feral with a pang of guilt that this tremendous occasion was passing in her absence.

  Suheyla complimented the garden. “It takes my breath away,” she said, surveying its wild lushness.

  “It wasn’t like this before,” said Eril-Fane, trying to match it to his memories, and failing. It had been formal back then, clipped and snipped within an inch of its life, no leaf or shoot daring to sprout out of place.

  “It’s all Sparrow’s doing,” Sarai told them proudly. “And it’s not only beautiful. It’s also all our food. We couldn’t have survived without her gift.”

  Feral’s jaw clenched with the effort it took him not to chime in and say, Or mine.

  “Or Feral’s,” Sarai added, and that was so much better than having to say it himself. “We call Sparrow Orchid Witch,” she told them. “She can make things grow. And Feral’s Cloud Thief. He can summon clouds from anywhere in the world. Any kind, snow or rain or just big, fluffy ones that look like you should be able to walk on them, but you can’t.” She grimaced a little. “We tried.”

  “You tried to walk on clouds,” said Azareen.

  “Of course,” said Feral, as though it were a given. “We piled pillows under them first.”

  “Magical gardens and walking on clouds,” said Suheyla, trying to reconcile their abilities with the ones that had terrorized Weep. She bent to examine a flower that looked like a ruffle of lace an empress might wear at her throat. “What’s this? I’ve never seen it before.”

  “It’s one of my own,” said Sparrow, blushing. “I call it ‘blood in the snow.’ Look.” And she parted the pure white petals to show brilliant crimson stamens that did indeed look like droplets of blood on fresh snow.

  With that, the two were in a world of their own, going flower bed to flower bed, while the others faced the reason for this visit, and what was to come next: moving the citadel, leaving Weep. “I’m sorry to ask you to go away.” Eril-Fane swallowed. “None of the blame for any of this is yours. You shouldn’t have to be the ones to—”

  “It’s all right,” Sarai said. “We’re ready to leave. We couldn’t before, and now we can.”

  “Where will you go?”

  Sarai, Lazlo, and Feral all looked at one another. They had no idea. “Sparrow would like to walk in a forest,” Sarai said, starting small. “And I’d like to swim in the sea.” She shared a secret look with Lazlo. Last night, at one point in their long, delirious dream, they had done just that, in a warm sea glazed with moonlight. They’d found a floating bottle with a message inside it, and they’d swum with knives between their teeth to slash a leviathan’s harness and free it from its enslavement.

  Maybe they would do it for real. Why not? And what else might they find to set free, if they were to go looking?

  The thought made her fingertips tingle and chills run up her arms.

  B
y chance her gaze lit on Azareen’s face, and she had an answer to her question that sent a jolt right down her spine. They didn’t have to look very far if they wanted to set slaves free. Azareen was staring through the arcade into the gallery, where Minya’s ghost army was frozen in its ranks. There were plenty of slaves right here.

  Sarai told Azareen, “I’ll do everything I can to free them. I swear.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  Sarai didn’t know how to answer that. If she couldn’t, it would mean that Minya was beyond all reach of reason or healing, and if that was true, what then?

  Lazlo put his hand to the small of her back and said, “She will. But she needs time, and she’ll have it.”

  He was kind but firm, and Sarai knew he would protect her— and all of them, Minya too, in the life ahead with its unguessable horizons.

  Sparrow offered tea. “It’s not real tea, just herbs,” she said, apologetic.

  “We’ll make sure you have real tea for your travels,” said Suheyla, and a pang of sadness caught her by surprise when she thought about them leaving. All her life she’d wished the citadel away, and now it was to go, and she was sorry? Oh, not sorry to have the sky free, the shadow gone, a new era for her city, but to lose the chance of knowing these children, who were strong and bright and shy and hungry, who had no home but this and no people but one another. She could see such longing in them, all bound up in hesitancy, as though they yearned for connection but didn’t believe they deserved it, and it squeezed her hearts and also made her ashamed that she had never even mourned them when she believed them all dead.

  Godspawn. Who had first come up with the word?

  Suheyla didn’t know, but she knew this: She had birthed one herself, and so had nearly every woman she knew. And all those lost babies...all unmourned. Because they had no memory of them, the babies had never felt real. It was easier to pretend they’d never existed—until the Liberation, anyway, when Azareen and others had come home with their bellies round with the terrible proof of it all.

  No one ever mentioned those babies, either, though they had certainly been real, and had been born in the world only to be shown right out of it, all under a pall of silence.

  An unexpected grief blossomed in Suheyla’s breast, so strong that for a moment she almost couldn’t breathe. These four young people with their shy smiles and azure skin made all the others real, too, and not as monsters or even gods, but as orphan boys and girls.

  “Are you all right?” asked Sarai, seeing her...her grandmother... bend over and struggle for breath. Then Lazlo was on Suheyla’s other side, taking her elbow to help support her. There was no chair nearby but he made one. It grew right out of the floor like a metal flower on

  a stem. He helped her to sit and they all gathered around her.

  “I’ll get her some water,” said Feral, running for the kitchen.

  “What is it? Are you unwell?” asked Eril-Fane, crouching before her. He looked so worried.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t fret over me.”

  “Can you breathe?” he asked. “Is it your hearts?”

  “I suppose it is my hearts, but not like that. I’m fine. I’m fine.” She grew stern to make them believe her. “It’s grief, not a heart attack. And I think all of us know by now that grief won’t kill us.”

  They fussed over her anyway. Feral returned with water. It was sweeter than the water in Weep and she wondered, as she drank it, where in the world it came from, this rainwater procured by a cloud-stealing boy. And she wondered, too, where in the world they’d end up, these cast-off children claimed by no one.

  “We should get you home,” said Azareen, though Suheyla was only an excuse. She was eager to be gone from here. Her mind kept turning indoors, to the sinister arm with its row of little rooms, and the sound of crying babies and weeping women at all hours.

  But Suheyla shook her head. “Not just yet. I want to ask...”

  Maybe it was better not knowing, but she couldn’t stand it any longer. This could be her last chance to find out. Could she live with wondering all the rest of her days? She wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore that those babies—her baby—had been neither real nor people. “Do you know what they did with them all?” she asked, looking from face to face. “What they did with all the babies?”

  There was a silence. Sarai, for her part, was seeing the row of cradles and the row of cribs, Kiska with her one green eye, and Minya trying to protect her while Korako waited in the doorway.

  “No,” she said. “We don’t.”

  “We only know that Korako took them away once their gifts manifested,” added Feral.

  “Took them where?” Suheyla asked, afraid to hear the answer.

  “We don’t know,” said Sarai. “We wondered whether they could have taken them all out of Weep? Like Lazlo?”

  “I don’t see how,” mused Suheyla. “The gods never left the city. Oh, Skathis might have flown downriver to track runaways, or to Fort Misrach to execute faranji who’d been fool enough to come across the desert. But besides that, they didn’t go anywhere.”

  “They didn’t take them out of the citadel,” said Eril-Fane.

  “We certainly would have noticed,” Suheyla agreed.

  “No,” said Eril-Fane. “I mean: They didn’t take them out of the citadel.”

  They all turned to him, unable at first to understand the distinction between what his mother was saying and what he was. They were in agreement, weren’t they? But Sarai saw that he was disturbed, his eyes not quite meeting hers, and she realized: Suheyla was speculating. He wasn’t. He was telling them.

  “What do you know?” she asked at once.

  “Only that,” he said. “After you were born, I...Sometimes I went by the nursery, to see if I could see you. Isagol didn’t like it. She didn’t see why I should care.” Emotions moved over his face, and Sarai felt them all in her own chest, the same as he had felt her hope in his. “She made me stop,” he said. “But before that, I saw Korako. Several times. Walking, with a child. Different children, I mean. I don’t know what she did with them. But I know they went in together, and...she came out alone.”

  “Went in where?” Sarai asked, breathless. They were all riveted on him.

  “There’s a room,” he said. “I never went in it, but I saw it once from the end of the corridor. It’s big. It’s...” With his hands, he formed the shape of a sphere. “Circular. That’s where Korako took the children.”

  He was describing the heart of the citadel.

  Chapter 34

  Bacon Destiny

  Ruby woke, and wondered what had woken her. She lolled for a second or two...and then sat bolt upright in bed—in Minya’s bed— remembering where she was, and why. She spun, braced for the sight of the little girl awake and maniacal or, worse, simply gone, and then slumped with relief. Minya was still laid out on the floor, eyes closed, face peaceful in sleep as it never was in waking.

  How furious the others would be if they knew Ruby had fallen asleep on watch.

  But it was fine. Minya was drugged. It was obvious that the potion in the green glass bottle was working. It was ridiculous that they had to watch her sleep. That was probably a sport in purgatory, Ruby thought: sleep-watching. Well, she was bad at it. It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t skilled at being bored like the others were. If they expected her to stay awake on watch, then someone would have to keep her company.

  “That defeats the whole purpose of taking turns,” Sparrow had said when Ruby pleaded with her to stay.

  “Stay with me, and I’ll stay with you,” she’d tried bargaining.

  “No, you won’t,” Sparrow had replied. “You’ll skip off free the instant your turn is over.”

  “Well, can you blame me?”

  “No. And that’s why I’m skipping off free now.” And she had, and so had Feral, claiming he had to refill the tub in the rain room, and so Ruby had taken a nap, more out of spite than fatigue. But now she was awake,
and as her flash of panic receded, she heard voices out in the corridor.

  And...were those footsteps?

  You never heard footsteps in the citadel, because they all went barefoot all the time. But Ruby heard them now and came instantly alive. She was off the bed and sprinting down the stairs from Minya’s bedroom, through the domed antechamber to the door. Lazlo had left it open when he brought the doors back to life, since they were all coming and going so often, and it was a good thing, or else Ruby wouldn’t have heard anything, or woken up, or poked her head out into the corridor to the incredible sight of people crossing the passage up ahead. Fully human, fully alive, boot-wearing people.

  Ruby ducked back inside, breathing fast. What were people doing in the citadel? She peeked out again. They were headed into the passage that led to the heart of the citadel, and she registered what she hadn’t before: that Lazlo, Sarai, Sparrow, and Feral were walking with them. Calmly.

  No one was holding anyone hostage, as far as she could tell. And...was that the scent of bread?

  Well. If they thought she was going to stay here and watch Minya sleep at a time like this, they were sorely mistaken. Indignantly, she followed them.

  . . .

  Every soul left in Weep was watching the citadel. After so many years living in dread of the sight of it, it was hard to make themselves look at it now. But their own had gone up there and none would be easy until their return, so they watched.

  Into this curious waiting, Soulzeren and Ozwin returned. They’d been sent for by Azareen, and had made the trip back from Enet-Sarra only to learn that she and Eril-Fane had flown with Lazlo up to the citadel.

  “I suppose that means they don’t need our services after all,” remarked Ozwin.

  They were the husband-and-wife botanist and mechanist who’d conceived the silk sleigh, a clever flying machine lifted by the gas given off by decaying ulola flowers. They were part of the Godslayer’s delegation, and had vacated the city the other morning along with nearly everyone else.

  “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry to be back,” said Soulzeren.