The Dreamweavers

by G. Z. Schmidt

  She searched the kitchen shelves until she spotted the perfect container. She clutched the porcelain box, then motioned for Yun to follow her. They stepped back into the courtyard and headed toward the quarters where the royal family slept. The twins, still in their servant attire, quietly nodded to the guards on duty along the way, many of whom nodded cheerfully back. Mei and Yun glanced at each other. It was lucky for them that the guards were not as good at recognizing people as Princess Zali was.

  Finally, they slipped past the corner and stopped near the first-floor windows of the royal residences. The sound of soft snoring reverberated on the other side.

  “I don’t know about this—” Yun began, but Mei shushed him reassuringly and carefully pushed open the window.

  The room was as lavish as Princess Zali’s, with rich carpeting and a plush canopy bed. Floating in the middle of the room was a dreamcloud, sunshine yellow like the petals of a chrysanthemum flower. The royal subject, another princess from the looks of it, was deep in sleep and did not hear the twins. It took just a moment after the window was opened for the night breeze to slowly carry the cloud toward Mei and Yun.

  Mei readied herself. She gave the lid of the box to Yun, then carefully leaned forward and held it under the floating cloud. With her other hand, she gingerly waved the air, fanning the dreamcloud inch by inch inside the box, the threads glistening between her fingers like shining silk. Beside her, Yun’s jaw dropped.

  “What—?”

  Mei shook her head and held up a finger, letting him know she’d explain later. They stealthily left the chamber and ran back to the palace kitchen with the box of dreams.

  When they were back inside, Yun exclaimed, “You just collected someone’s dreams!”

  Grinning with anticipation, Mei dug out a large pot from the kitchen cabinets and placed it on the stove. “It’s an idea I had,” she said as she counted out some grains of rice from the enormous barrel in the corner. Then she splashed some water into the pot, along with the rice. “Remember how good Grandpa’s cooking would make everyone feel? So I thought, what if...”

  “It’s a great idea,” said Yun, who now understood with complete clarity what his sister was about to do.

  They waited for the water to boil and the rice to cook. Twenty minutes later, the fragrance of cooked rice filled the kitchen.

  “Ready?” Mei grabbed the porcelain box.

  “Ready,” said Yun, holding the other end of the container.

  Together, they tilted the box and poured the dream inside the boiling pot of rice.

  Some of the dreamcloud escaped out the sides and evaporated. But something remarkable happened with the clouds that did make it inside the pot. There was a sparkle of glowing yellow showers, like mini fireworks. The sparkles sank into the cooked rice and dissolved. A moment later, the rice looked as it normally did, but smelled more fragrant than any rice Mei and Yun had ever cooked.

  “It’s like the chef said,” said Yun. “Anything can be made into a delectable dish.”

  “Let’s try it first, to see if it’s actually delectable.” Mei’s palms were sweaty, and her skin tingled with excitement.

  On the count of three, each sibling ate a spoonful of rice.

  Warmth bubbled up their bodies, filling them with elation and airy happiness. They suddenly felt like leaping into the air and doing somersaults around the kitchen. They wanted to skip and dance and shout at the top of their lungs until the whole city woke up.

  They didn’t do any of that, of course. All they did was stand rock still and look at each other.

  “Whoa,” whispered Yun.

  Mei nodded. “Grandpa’s secret ingredient.”

  Now that they’d tested their very first dream, the twins needed more. Lots more. They needed to test the dreams in batches and know exactly which ones were good and which ones were bad, the same way one tests spices and ripe vegetables. Experimentation, they’d decided, was the logical next step if they were to understand these wisps of dreams and what they signified.

  Once more, the twins stepped outside into the night. “We can’t stop at each and every window,” said Mei, looking at the dark buildings. “It’ll take too long.”

  “Plus people will become suspicious,” added Yun.

  They thought about what to do. In the sky above, clouds drifted one by one across the shining moon.

  “Wait a minute,” said Yun. “Isn’t that the—?”

  Their magic cloud that the Jade Rabbit had granted them was floating above. It hung lower than the other clouds, its delicate puffs grazing the top of the roof.

  “Oh, now it shows up,” groaned Yun with a roll of his eyes. “How ironic.”

  “Maybe it’s attracted to our essence,” Mei suggested. “Now that we’re quite literally working with dreams.”

  “You mean, we smell like clouds?” Yun asked.

  Mei shrugged, but grinned. “Guess we should add it to our endless list of questions for the Jade Rabbit, if we ever actually meet again.”

  She turned to study the cloud, and then suddenly whirled back toward her brother in excitement. “Yun, what if we collect the dreams from the sky?”

  “Like on the cloud?” Yun blinked. “Well, it’s not the craziest thing we’d have done in the last twenty-four hours. It’ll be much faster, that’s for sure. Just one question though: how would we collect the dreams from up there?”

  Mei thought for a few moments. “Hmm. When I got the princess’s dreams into that box, I could almost feel them in my hands. Maybe we can reel them in, like fishing!”

  Yun’s eyes brightened. “I know where they keep the fishing poles in the kitchen.”

  After they gathered the necessary supplies, the twins made their way up the pillar onto the roof again. They climbed onto the soft cloud, which began drifting slowly across the sky.

  “There!” Mei pointed to one of the imperial households. Several of the windows were cracked open; multicolored mists floated from them.

  Yun swung the fishing rod over the edge of the cloud they sat on. The fishing rod dangled near the closest window. Strands of the floating purple mist clung onto the hook as Yun reeled it back up. He held the mist in his hands and grinned. “Here’s to dreamweaving. Or should I say dreamfishing?”

  “Let’s stick with the first name,” said Mei as she placed the dream into the box. “It sounds catchier.”

  “Catchier—like catching fish?”

  “Stop it with the fishing puns, please!”

  For the rest of that night, they gathered more dreams until the box was brimming. Some they took from the servants’ quarters, some from the royal quarters, even some from a pigeon they’d found sleeping on one of the rooftops. They saw dreams in every color: green like the dewy grass in the morning; purple-tinged dreamclouds, the color a deep shade of lilac; sunshine yellow; hues of blue, from the pale blue of the sky to the deep blue of the Pearl River in summertime. They also gathered strands of black dreams. As the night went on, black and green dreams began to outnumber the others by far.

  “There’s a meaning behind the colors,” said Yun as he examined the box. “Remember, the Jade Rabbit said nightmares are bright green and black, which stand for anger and fear.”

  “Like the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival,” agreed Mei, remembering how they saw bright green smoke from the neighbors’ windows. “Why would Grandpa add those to the mooncakes?”

  Yun wrinkled his forehead in thought. “I know when I have nightmares, they take over until I wake up in a panic.”

  Again, Yun had made an astute observation. It is peculiar, the amount of power a nightmare has: it tends to distort all previous dreams, and has the unique ability to scare a sleeping individual awake. Even if you have the best dream ever, one where you’re flying through the infinite skies over lush green meadows, if a nightmare crawls in, it would hurl you toward the earth at eighty miles an hour until you wake up in a cold sweat. Meanwhile, the opposite never happens—no good dream ever seems to
follow a nightmare, and no one has ever been woken up because a dream was too good to be true.

  Yun closed his eyes. “That’s what happened: the original dreams in the jar were good ones, but they got tainted by a nightmare. They changed over time.”

  They thought back to the days leading up to the festival. The rolling clouds, the moody villagers. The spinning events that followed after Grandpa was taken. No doubt, some part had drenched the dreams in the jar, distorting them into nightmares. All by-products of Lotus’s curse.

  “Most of the purple dreamclouds came from the servant’s quarters,” continued Yun. “Perhaps they stand for dreams of status and work. I’m not sure about blue...I remember seeing blue clouds above Smelly Tail often.”

  “Maybe earthly, peaceful pleasures?” suggested Mei.

  “Maybe. We’ll need to test them all, that’s for sure. And that means we might need help from Chef Fan.” Yun yawned. “We can do it first thing in the morning. Sorry, but I’m exhausted. You’d think a perk of being a dreamweaver is to never get tired.”

  “If only,” agreed Mei. “It feels like it’s been forever since we slept peacefully.”

  The twins put away their fishing rod and porcelain box, then lay down on the soft cloud. It was the perfect bed—safely above the rest of the city, away from harm. As they were slowly drifting to sleep, they thought of Lotus again. Lotus, who had trapped the people of the City of Ashes inside a fog—a nightmare fog. A dreamlike state, the Jade Rabbit had said.

  Mei murmured, “No wonder the Jade Rabbit took Lotus’s baby. It was for her son’s own safety.”

  “Yes, I’m sure the Jade Rabbit regrets granting Lotus her powers,” said Yun sleepily. “I understand why she did what she did, though. The Noble General sounds like the biggest jerk to walk the land.” He gave a wide yawn. “It’s interesting. The powers the Rabbit gave her almost remind me of our own dreamweaving abilities. Not exactly, of course, but similar in essence. I wonder if they came from the same source.”

  “Well, we didn’t get our abilities from the Jade Rabbit,” said Mei. “Ours was passed down in the family.”

  “It had to start somewhere though, right?” said Yun. “We know it’d be on Mama’s side, because of her and Grandpa—” He stopped. “Well, we never knew Grandpa’s birth parents, but he didn’t either. Grandpa was adopted, remember? He said he doesn’t know who his birth parents were, and—”

  Yun suddenly sat up.

  “His birth parents,” Mei repeated, who looked as startled as Yun. “He was adopted in our village when he was still a baby. You don’t think...?”

  “It all happened seventy years ago. The timeline fits. Grandpa must be the baby in the story. Which means that Lotus...Lotus was his mother.”

  Mei nodded weakly. “Which means Lotus is our great- grandmother.”

  There was a long silence as the twins processed this shocking discovery. Then Yun grinned.

  “If Fu-Fu thinks the Noble General’s bad, wait till he hears about our ancestor.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  二十三

  Dream Dumplings

  When morning arrived, Mei and Yun went to find Chef Fan to make a deal. The chef was in a crankier mood than usual, as was everyone else at the palace.

  “They’re saying two intruders were found in the Imperial Library,” the chef said as he bludgeoned a large eggplant. “I don’t know what kind of dangerous, cunning criminals they must be, to be able to break into such a secure place. Be on high alert, you hear?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, Chef Fan,” Yun said, wiping eggplant from his cheek. “We would tell you right away if there’s something amiss.”

  “Fine, fine. Now what’s all this—who’s this girl?” Chef Fan demanded, turning to face Mei.

  “My sister,” said Yun. “She’s thinking about joining the kitchen staff. I’d like to teach her some basics, if you could give us a place to work—”

  “What?” Chef Fan roared. “I don’t have time for you to waste on—OW!” The twins watched with interest as the chef tried to subdue Bendan, who’d emerged from under the chef’s hat and begun pecking at his ear.

  “We could watch your bird while we work, of course,” offered Mei.

  Chef Fan brightened at the suggestion. Five minutes later, the twins found themselves, along with Bendan, installed in a small, empty room with a tiny stove where they could practice cooking.

  “You take good care of that bird, you hear?” said the chef as he was leaving.

  “Don’t worry,” Yun reassured him. “Mei practically lived with the birds in the trees back home.”

  Throughout the day, the twins tested batches of dreams. Tasting blue-colored dreams brought calm thoughts—the lighter the shade of blue, the calmer the thought. No problem seemed too big, no hurdle unbeatable. Getting the stolen pages back from Fu-Fu and lifting a seventy-year-old curse? Easy as rice balls.

  Purple-shaded dreams brought mixed feelings of ambition and discontentment. After a sip, Mei suddenly wondered if she’d ever be a sword fighter, and was annoyed she had to grow up in a small village where there were nothing but knobby branches. Yun, frustrated with himself for being hopelessly nearsighted and losing at knobby branch duels, vowed to get a pair of eyeglasses once and for all. Madam Hu had been partially right about ambition. It could easily sway over to bitterness. They found they had to pair purple dreamclouds with a dash of yellow or blue, to bring contentment. It was a tricky balance.

  Finally, green-tinged dreams were exactly as they’d suspected—terrible-tasting, harsh, sour. Their situation seemed to worsen after one bite—harsh reality set in, like broken shards of glass. How could two puny twelve-year-olds save an entire village, and a cursed city to boot? As if the rest of the room felt the bleakness, chaos broke loose. Bendan nearly escaped from the room, squawking madly. One of the pots boiled over and spilled angry hot water everywhere. The room sweltered with heat from their cooking, and the twins felt liked boiled meat.

  “Here, eat this, quick.” Yun grabbed a bowl of leftover rice that had blue dreamclouds added.

  They each ate and instantly felt better. Mei coaxed Bendan back with some sunflower seeds, and Yun cleaned up the spilled water. When everything was settled, they inspected the dreamclouds they had left. They were surprised to find a large portion had been tainted green by the previous one, like how a single moldy pear taints the entire basket of fruits.

  “Once the curse settles here, this will be everyone’s permanent mood,” said Mei, dumping the rest of the green dreamclouds out so they evaporated into the air.

  When Chef Fan came to retrieve the bird a little while later (“That was the most peace I’ve had in the kitchen in months,” he said), they gave him a small spoonful of blue dreamcloud rice and easily convinced him to spend the rest of the afternoon teaching them how to create perfect pork-and-chive dumplings.

  Back at the village, dumplings were one of the foods they saved for special occasions, primarily the Lunar New Year. Multiple families would gather to pound the dough and wrap the dumplings together. Mei and Yun remembered trying to mimic their parents’ deft wrapping skills when they were little. Somehow, Mama and Baba’s dumplings always looked perfect, like satin coin pouches, while the twins’ ended up looking like roadkill.

  The dumplings symbolize good fortune, their father had told them. Eat them and you will be rich.

  Mei and Yun were still awaiting their windfall. Perhaps first they needed to make the perfect dumplings.

  As they prepared the dumplings, Chef Fan told them what was happening out in the rest of the palace.

  “People left and right, babbling like monkeys,” the chef said as he pounded the dough. “Nobody can understand them.”

  “They’re just speaking gibberish?” asked Mei.

  “No, no, the words aren’t actual gibberish. But they might as well be, you hear? The imperial physicians are bewildered, like chickens without their heads.”

  Yun picked up a piece
of dough, then scooped a spoonful of filling onto the center. “If all goes well, everyone should be back to normal,” he said nervously.

  “Let’s hope so, kid. Otherwise, things will never be the same again.”

  The twins, disguised in their servant attire, knocked on Princess Zali’s door. “Come in,” the princess called.

  They walked inside accompanied by Chef Fan and two other servants. “Dinnertime, Your Highness,” the chef said with a bow. The servants set up the small table in the corner where the princess normally ate, and the chef placed a steaming plate of dumplings in the center. “Today’s meal was created with the help of my two special assistants. Greatest pair of assistants I’ve had, you hear?”

  Princess Zali frowned. She shifted her pink dress robe, each layer of the skirt a different shade of rose, and carefully walked over to the table. Her hair was wound in fancy braids through her glistening hair chopsticks. “I hear you,” she replied with a raised eyebrow. “This is certainly a surprise.”

  Recognition slowly registered in her face, and the twins knew she was thinking of last night’s encounter in her dream. For several long moments, she simply stared at the dumplings.

  “It’s part of our plan to convince Fu-Fu,” explained Mei.

  “The dumplings are part of the plan?”

  “You will love it, Your Highness,” promised Yun. He hastily added, “Both the dumplings and the plan.”

  Princess Zali glanced at the other servants, who pretended they hadn’t been listening to their curious conversation. With a calm composure, she gingerly dipped a dumpling in the vinegar sauce. She took a bite. Mei and Yun held their breaths.

  “Hmm.” The princess stopped chewing.

  “What’s wrong?” said Mei with a worried expression.

  Her brother sighed. “I knew we shouldn’t have added that extra spoonful of soy sauce.”

  “This is by far...” Princess Zali looked at the twins with an odd expression as they waited anxiously. “...the best thing I’ve eaten all year.”