Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  “No,” said Sparrow, pushing up with a cry of pain. The arrow had hit high, off-center, burrowing under her right shoulder blade. There was a lot of blood. It was vivid carmine. Against it her skin looked sickly pale. Sarai didn’t think the wound was mortal—at least, not if it could be tended, and if it wasn’t followed by another, and another.

  If this battle didn’t end in all their deaths.

  An inner ring of ghosts rose like seraphim into the air, their fire wings outspread and overlapping. Minya used them to shield the godspawn. While they still couldn’t block all the arrows, they could keep the archers from taking aim. But Sparrow was still right in the center of the circle, where there was least protection.

  “Over here,” said Sarai, putting an arm around her and urging her—gently—away from the bodies, to where Ruby, Feral, and Suheyla were huddled under cover of wings.

  But Sparrow resisted. Again, she said, “No.”

  In frustration, Sarai looked at her, prepared to be less gentle, if that’s what it took to get her to cover. “Sparrow, it’s not safe...” she began, and trailed off, but she saw her clearly and ran out of words. She had thought Sparrow was pale. But Sparrow wasn’t pale. She was gray.

  Sarai knew what that meant, but before she could make sense of it, a voice surged above the chaos.

  “HOLD YOUR FIRE!” it boomed.

  It was deep and rich. Sarai heard it, and knew it, and couldn’t believe it for the obvious reason that it was impossible.

  It was Eril-Fane’s voice. But Eril-Fane was dead. He’d been pierced through the hearts. His body was right...

  . . . here?

  Sarai turned to where Eril-Fane’s body was sprawled out on Sparrow’s other side. Only it wasn’t sprawled out anymore. It was—he was getting to his feet.

  But how? The stinger had cut clean through his body. Sarai was no expert on wounds, but even she knew that one was mortal, and she’d seen how it ended the first time, before the time loop began. Their eyes had been lifeless. There had been no mistaking it. And yet her father was picking himself up off the ground. She stared, disbelieving, wanting it to be true, but unable to trust it. Was it the same magic as up in the citadel that had brought him back only to kill him again?

  But that didn’t make sense. The citadel was almost gone. Their enemies were far away.

  And then the sickening realization struck her: Eril-Fane had an enemy right here. Of course. This was Minya’s doing. It had to be. She’d captured his soul. He wasn’t alive at all. This was just his ghost, under Minya’s control.

  But...if that was true, then where was his body?

  Sarai felt dizzy. All the possibilities of life, death, and magic spun in her head. If Eril-Fane was a ghost, there would be two of him, as there had been two Sarais in the garden: ghost and corpse, side by side. But there was no corpse. There was only him—weak, in pain, covered in blood, but alive, and rising shakily to his feet.

  “I said, HOLD YOUR FIRE!” he boomed again, and the rain of arrows stuttered to a stop. “Tizerkane, stand down!” he commanded. “These children are under my protection!”

  A stark silence fell. Even the ghosts fell still as Minya stared at her foe, hate and confusion at war in her expression. All eyes were on the Godslayer.

  All but Sparrow’s. Hers were closed. Her breathing was shallow. The arrow jutted from her shoulder, and blood drizzled, brilliant, from her wound. All these things told a story—of a girl caught in crossfire—but there was more to the story, and Sarai was just seeing it.

  Up in the citadel, when the time loop broke open, it was Sparrow who had pelted down the walkway to the warriors. When the hand reached in and grabbed them, when it dropped them here on the ground, she’d stayed with them, and now she was bent over Azareen. Her hand was thrust under the warrior’s breastplate. Sarai could see her fingers through the hole the wasp stinger had punched through the bronze.

  Sparrow’s hand was on Azareen’s wound. That was the story.

  Eril-Fane was alive. That was the story.

  Sparrow’s eyes were closed in deep concentration, and her skin was gray, and that was the story. She was gray, but as Sarai looked on, this ceased to be true. Sparrow’s color was fugitive, changing fast enough to watch. The gray hue took on a new richness as the last hint of blue left her flesh, giving way to beautiful, silken, chestnut brown. Except for the blood, the arrow, and her clothes—a slip from the closet of the goddess of secrets—she could have been a girl of Weep. Sparrow looked human.

  “Oh,” breathed Sarai, trying to understand.

  Sparrow—Orchid Witch—could make things grow, and not just flowers and kimril. But could she really have done this, regrown what was sundered inside Eril-Fane?

  What other explanation? And she was trying to heal Azareen, too. But...if all the blue was gone from Sparrow’s skin, did she have any magic left to do it?

  Sparrow was still bent over her, eyes closed, but if Azareen wasn’t healed already, she wasn’t going to be.

  Sarai swallowed hard. By now everyone was watching. Eril-Fane had no sooner risen and stopped the battle than he dropped back to his knees beside his wife. His face was strained, his jaw clenched. He focused on Azareen with an almost savage intensity. He gathered up her hand and curled it in both his own. “Live,” he whispered to her. “Azareen, live.” A choked sob escaped from his throat, and he added, like a prayer: “Thakra, please.”

  Azareen opened her eyes.

  For a moment, the pair gazed at each other with all the hope and wonder of their younger selves, as though their lost lifetime—these past eighteen years—hadn’t happened, and all was before them. When Azareen spoke, it was to ask, her voice faint, the question that death had repeatedly interrupted. She’d thought she’d never get to hear her husband’s answer, or know what he’d wanted to tell her at the end. “My love,” she whispered. “What do you wish?”

  But she would have to keep waiting for the answer.

  Sparrow collapsed. Eril-Fane caught her, noticing the arrow and blood for the first time. “Medics!” he hollered, and barked out several names.

  Outside the protective circle of ghosts, the Tizerkane who belonged to the names were caught between obedience and a wall of souls with wings and spears.

  “Stop!”

  The shriek came from Minya. It was shrill. In one fluid motion, a score of ghosts turned to the center of the circle and trained their spears on Eril-Fane. When Minya looked at him, she saw slaughter. He was the Carnage, and now he had Sparrow. “Get your hands off her, child-killer!” she snarled.

  “Minya!” Sarai turned to her, heartbeats spiking. Would she undo Sparrow’s miracle, and kill what she had saved? Was Minya so far gone, so broken that she would throw away this last chance to set aside their hate and live?

  But everything Sarai might have said died at the sight of Minya, and so did all that might have been. For her, anyway.

  Because Minya was gray, too.

  Chapter 51

  Happy Evanescence

  Lazlo roared his voice to a rasp, but Nova seemed not to even hear him. An unsettling, serene vagueness had come over her like a trance—as though she were elsewhere, and her body was just holding her place in the world.

  Lazlo was still trapped, his legs held fast in the metal, as the citadel poured itself through the portal, and any hope of saving Sarai grew more and more remote.

  When he’d begged Nova to leave the last anchor, he’d been thinking of Weep—its bedrock and buildings, its river raging underground. It was only after she ignored him, and all the mesarthium was sucked from the cracks, that the other implication struck him. In that instant, when he realized what it meant and what would happen, he had felt like he was back in the street, bereft at the sight of Sarai’s broken body arched over the gate. He had vowed never to fail her again. “Do you think anything could keep me away?” he’d asked her just that morning.

  Now something—someone—was keeping him away, and he was losing his mind. N
ova wouldn’t listen, and didn’t understand him anyway. He’d tried appealing to the others. “They have no mesarthium. They’ll fade. Do you understand what that means?”

  Rook, Kiska, and Werran were uneasy with the way things had gone. Lazlo could tell by their tight expressions and the quick, dark glances they were giving Nova and one another, but they were clearly afraid to defy her. “At least leave them some metal,” he pleaded. He saw that they wore medallions at their throats, as Nova wore her diadem. They all wore mesarthium against their skin. “Like that,” he said, pointing at Werran’s medallion. “Just enough to keep them from fading.”

  Werran lost patience, his conflicted guilt making him snap. “Being human isn’t a fate worse than death. They’ll learn to live with it.”

  Learn to live with it. Hysteria welled up in Lazlo. “You think I’m losing my mind because they’ll become human?” His scream-ravaged voice thundered, feverish and rough. Never in his life had he raged like this. He looked like a man possessed. “Listen to me! That little girl you grew up with? Don’t you know what her gift is? She catches souls. She keeps them from evanescing. If she fades, yes, she’ll become human. Maybe she’ll learn to live with it.” He shoved his fingers into his hair and clutched his skull, digging in, trying to dull the roar of despair. “But Sarai won’t. She won’t live with it, because she’s not alive. You’ve got to help me! If Minya loses her power, Sarai will evanesce.”

  . . .

  Minya didn’t understand what was happening. She stared at Sparrow, whom Eril-Fane had passed into Ruby’s arms. She was unconscious, and no medics had been bold enough to breach the barrier of ghosts. “What did you do to her?” she demanded. She wasn’t referring to the arrow or the blood, but Sparrow’s color—as though humanity were a disease and Eril-Fane and Azareen had infected her with it.

  “They didn’t do anything,” Sarai told her. Azareen was sitting up now, too, with help from Suheyla. Like Eril-Fane, she looked weak and drawn, but she was alive. “Sparrow did it herself,” Sarai said. “She healed them, and it used up all her magic.”

  Minya had never looked so scornful. “Don’t be stupid. Our magic can’t get used up.”

  “It can,” Sarai said, cold with the terrible truth of it, and what it meant for her. “It does. If we’re not in contact with mesarthium.”

  “It’s the source of our power,” Feral explained. “We never knew until we put you on your bed and you started to turn gray. We thought you were dying, but Lazlo knew what to do. He put you on the floor.”

  He kept talking, but Sarai stopped hearing. At the sound of Lazlo’s name, she nearly doubled over. It felt like being punched, and unable to draw breath, because she understood right then and there that she would never see him again.

  By the hue of Minya’s skin, Sarai knew she didn’t have much longer.

  She recalled Lazlo’s surprise at Minya’s fading so quickly. The rest of them slept in their beds every night—or in Sarai’s case every day. They were out of contact with the metal for hours at a time and showed no sign of fading. But then, they weren’t using their gifts in their sleep; Minya was. She had no respite from hers. All those ghosts, she had to be bleeding power every second, but it had never mattered before, because she was always in contact with the metal. The citadel had constantly been feeding her power. And now it wasn’t.

  Sarai threw back her head and looked up at the sky, just in time to see the last glint of the seraph vanish from sight. It was gone from Zeru. In desperation, she turned to her father. “Is there any mesarthium in the city?”

  “The anchors...” he said, uncertain. He’d been unconscious when the citadel reclaimed them.

  Sarai shook her head. “They took them. They’re gone. Was there any somewhere else, even a little bit?” There was urgency and fear in her voice.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Eril-Fane asked.

  But Feral understood, and so did Ruby. Tears sprang to her eyes. Her hand flew to cover her mouth. “Oh. Oh no. Sarai.”

  The Ellens understood, too. Stricken, they both looked at Minya. Her brows knit together with ferocity, confusion, and something like dread. She looked down at her hands, which were the color of ash, then sharply back up.

  Sarai couldn’t have said how she expected her to react. Minya had threatened her with this very fate, and been willing to see it through. She’d called Sarai a traitor, used her as a puppet, held her soul as a bargaining chip. It wouldn’t altogether have surprised her if Minya shrugged and bid her happy evanescence, as coolly as saying happy birthday.

  But she didn’t. The ghosts with their spears trained on Eril-Fane closed in, tightening around him, their weapons raised. “There must be mesarthium somewhere,” Minya said. “Get it!”

  Eril-Fane shook his head, helpless. “There was only ever the anchors.”

  “You’re lying!” she accused, and the ghosts thrust their spears right up against his throat. His life pulsed there, and the lightest thrust could end it.

  “No!” gasped Sarai. Azareen and Suheyla cried out in horror. “There isn’t any more,” Azareen insisted. “I swear it. We would give it to you if there was!”

  “My darling, my viper,” said Great Ellen to Minya, with rueful, velvet tenderness. “You’re only hastening it, sweet girl. Don’t you see? The more you use your gift, the faster you’ll use it up.”

  Minya froze as the truth of this struck her. Everything was rushing—like wind in her ears, though there was no wind; like racing toward a cliff, though there was no cliff. Suddenly, as though an axis tilted, she experienced her tethers in a new way. Always before, she had been conscious of the emotions pulsing up them, the hate-fear-despair never not assailing her. Now, though, she felt what went out of her and down them: her own strength, her gift, ebbing away by the second—a reservoir that would not refill. She could feel herself emptying. She’d come to think of her ghosts as her strength, the thing that could protect her, and with which she could protect her family. Now that presumption was dead.

  She looked at her hands and they were gray. And she looked at Sarai, then around at her ghosts, and what she did next stunned them all.

  She let go.

  She had always imagined her gift as a fist clenching a tangle of threads. Now she opened it. The threads slipped free. A tremendous weight lifted as she released every soul she’d collected since the Carnage, save three. Sarai’s tether was like a filament of spidersilk, fine and fragile and shining like starlight. Minya clutched it, tight but gentle, as though she could keep it, hold it.

  The Ellens’ tethers were different. When all the rest fell away, they remained. They were the first souls she’d ever caught, and she’d done it gasping in the bloody aftermath of the Carnage, when all the screaming and dying was over and she was alive and alone with the four babies she’d saved.

  The Ellens’ tethers weren’t fine and fragile. They were tough as leather, and they didn’t rest in her keeping like gossamers that could slip away. They sank into her very self, like taproots. They were part of her, and the Ellens stayed right beside her as the rest of the ghosts—the whole encircling ring of them—simply melted away.

  Their faces flushed with freedom. Sarai saw little Bahar among them, and Guldan, the old tattoo artist who had done the most exquisite eliliths. Kem the footman was there, fading. And she saw Ari-Eil, her father’s young cousin and hence her own, and felt a pang of remorse for his evanescence, all the more so when it seemed that a flicker of rue crossed his face, as though he wasn’t ready to go. But then he was gone, they all were, and it was as though a great sigh breathed itself out of the amphitheater, sweeping like a sweet wind past all the Tizerkane, to ebb away in a skyward tide that drew all loose souls with it.

  In the aftermath, it was utterly quiet. Minya knew, once more, the silence and lightness she’d felt when Nova took her gift. The crushing weight lifted, and the thrum of hate ceased, but she didn’t feel relief. She felt pure terror.

  There was no more barrier be
tween godspawn and Tizerkane. They could all see one another clearly. Minya was overwhelmed by their numbers, their size, their hate. It was the look she knew so well, the one that said: abomination.

  She had never felt so exposed, so vulnerable.

  At least...not for fifteen years.

  Her hearts started to stutter just like they had in the nursery when a stranger appeared in the doorway with a knife, and in the blink of an eye she was right back there, powerless and surrounded by adults who wished her dead. Terror hammered at her. Panic tore at her. Flashes of that day besieged her.

  The Ellens, standing on either side of her, both reached out to try to soothe her, but she shrank from them, seeing a strobe vision of faces that were theirs but not theirs, and that scared her worse than anything else. She closed her eyes but the faces followed her into the dark. They were triumphant and vicious, and it was the Carnage all over again, only now it was worse because she didn’t have a knife, and there was nowhere to hide, and the Ellens would stop her from saving the others. Just like they’d tried to before.

  The mind is good at hiding things, but it can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone.

  Minya’s memory had a trick spot in it, like a drawer with a secret compartment—or a floating orb with a portal inside it, leading to a whole nightmare world. Now it all blew open, and the truth spilled out like blood.

  Chapter 52

  Dread Was a Pale-Haired Goddess

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who thought she understood what dread was.

  Dread, she thought, was a pale-haired goddess who came to take you away. Away where? No one knew, but if it were nice, surely she’d smile when she came for you.

  Korako didn’t smile. Nor was she cruel. She was barely there. Her voice was low and her touch was light. Her eyebrows looked white but weren’t. She was the goddess of secrets, and on the day that Minya learned what real dread was, she was keeping a secret of her own.