Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  It was the most unnatural thing she’d ever seen.

  The baby lay unmoving, curled as small as it could make itself, peering up at her with a wariness too old for its glossy infant eyes. As though it had been told to keep still, and understood, and was obeying. Sarai reached for another bundle, and another, unwinding babies like so many cocoons. All were alive, motionless and silent as little dolls. And then she opened the bundle that was her, small Sarai with cinnamon curls, and a sob escaped her lips.

  With that sound, the singing stopped. The nursery went deathly quiet. Turning on her knees, Sarai came face-to-face with Minya. The little girl thrummed with a dark fervor, eyes big and glazed, breath fast and shallow, skin seeming to crackle with a barely contained energy. In a baleful singsong that sent chills down Sarai’s spine, she said, “You shouldn’t be in here,” and Sarai didn’t know if she meant in the nursery or in the dream, but the words, the tone, seemed to slide into a dance with the unmoored shadows and the thrum, and it was all getting faster and louder, and the shadows were closing in, and a terrible dread stirred in her.

  She’d been inside countless nightmares, her own and others’, and this could hardly even be considered a nightmare. To describe it, it would seem odd more than scary. The babies were alive. They were just wrapped up. But dreams have auras, a pervasive feeling that seeps through the skin, and the aura of this one was horror.

  “Minya,” said Sarai. “Do you know me?”

  But Minya didn’t answer. She was looking past her at the unwrapped cocoons and the little living dolls all scattered and lying still. “What have you done?” she cried, growing frantic. “They’ll get them now!”

  And Sarai didn’t have to ask who “they” were. She’d seen the Carnage play out dozens of times in Eril-Fane’s dreams, and in the dreams of those who’d been with him and helped him on that bloody day. She knew the awful, gruesome truth of it. But she’d never been here, in the nursery, waiting for it to start.

  Except, of course, she had been. She’d been two years old.

  Were they coming? Was this that day? The dread thickened around her. The shadows wove closer, like figures dancing in a circle, and all the children and babies started to cry—even the silent unwrapped dolls and all the ones still wrapped. The parcels started to writhe and wails poured out of the crack in the wall.

  Minya was beside herself, darting from child to child, fussing and grabbing at them, yanking them to their feet, trying to pick up babies off the floor. They were starting to crawl away from her, coming unwrapped, no longer frozen, and her face was wild with distress. The task was overwhelming. There were nearly thirty of them, and no one to help her.

  Again, Sarai wondered: Where were the Ellens?

  “It’s your fault!” Minya flung at Sarai, darting terrified glances at the open door. “You ruined it! I can’t carry them all.”

  “We’ll save them,” Sarai said. The panic was infecting her, and the helplessness, too. This dream aura was an oppressive force. “We’ll get them all out. I’ll help you.”

  “Do you promise?” Minya asked, her eyes so big, so full of pleading.

  Sarai hesitated. The words were on her lips and they tasted like a lie, but she didn’t know what else to do and so she said them. She promised.

  Minya’s face changed. “You’re lying!” she shrieked, as though she knew very well how this day came out. “It’s always the same! They always die!”

  The children were crying and scattering, trying to hide behind cribs and under cots, and the babies were wailing and bleating and Sarai knew it was true: They were long dead and she couldn’t save a one of them. Despair overwhelmed her—or nearly.

  She reminded herself who she was, what she was, and that she was not helpless here. She could change the dream. They always die!

  Minya had just said. Did she live this, then, over and over? Was she always, always trying to save them, and always, always failing? Sarai couldn’t bring the dead back to life, and she couldn’t go back in time, but couldn’t she let Minya win this, at least once?

  She took over the dream. It was what she did, easy as breathing. She closed the nursery door, the one Minya kept glancing at. She closed it so no one could get in. And then she opened another door, out through the other side where no door had ever been. It led to the sky, and an airship was docked, a version of the silk sleigh, but bigger, with patchwork pontoons, and tassels and pom-pom garlands draped over the rails, and instead of a motor, it had a flock of geese in harness, all formed up in a V and ready to pull them away to safety. They had only to take the children and load them onto it, and Sarai could help with that, too. She could just will them there. They didn’t need to be herded and chased. She told Minya, “We can escape,” and pointed to the doorway.

  But Minya flinched at the sight, and when Sarai looked back, she saw men in it, in the doorway she’d just made, and one of the men was her father, and he had a knife in his hand.

  She willed him gone, but as soon as she did he appeared in the other door, open again as though she’d never closed it. And again, and again, and he came back every time. No sooner would she change the dream than it overcame her change. It was like trying to divert a river using only her bare hands. And always the Godslayer was there, grim-faced, with his knife, and his mission.

  “It won’t work,” said Minya, her face slick with tears. “Do you think I haven’t tried everything?”

  And Sarai knew that the pushback, the dream’s intransigence, was Minya’s pushback, her own intransigence, born of a trauma so profound that she could not dream herself out of it, or even let Sarai do it for her. She was trapped here with the babies she had been unable to save.

  “Come out!” She was crying, trying to pull a little boy out from under a cot. “Come with me! We have to go.” But he was terrified and scrambled away, and she managed, finally, to get a different little boy who Sarai thought must be Feral, and to hoist two swaddled babies in her arm: Ruby and Sparrow. They were crying. Sarai wondered at Minya being able to hold them. She was so small herself. And she had really done it, and carried them all the way down the corridor to the heart of the citadel, where she’d pushed them through another crack and kept them safe. How had she had the strength? And then Minya stunned Sarai. She grabbed her hand, and started to drag her with them. “Hush,” she said to the babies, harsh. Sarai’s hand and Feral’s were crushed together in a grip impossibly strong. Minya’s fingers were slippery; she had to grab so tight to keep hold of them. It hurt. Sarai tried to pull away, but Minya whirled on her and demanded, in a savage snarl of a voice, “Do you want to die, too? Do you?”

  And that was the moment it all became real. Those words were a pry bar slipped into a crack, and twisted to break it all open. Sarai had heard them before, fifteen years ago, right here in this spot. Blinding terror seized her. She felt now what she had then. The words hit her like a threat. Minya dragged her, and Feral, too. Their little feet tangled together. They wanted to stay in the only place they knew. Something bad was outside the door. But Minya wouldn’t let go.

  To reach the door and any hope of escape, they had to scramble over an obstacle sprawled across the floor. Here was the anomaly, the breath-fogged glass, the skip in the dream. Sarai hadn’t been able to see what was here, but now she did. It was the Ellens, and she felt the give of their soft bodies as she clambered over them. They were slippery and her hands got red, and Minya’s hand was all red, too. That’s why it was so slick. She’d thought it was sweat, but it was blood.

  And finally it was just too much. Sarai snatched her hand back. She snatched it back in the dream and also in the room where she sat by Minya’s sleeping self. She did what Minya could not: She escaped from the nightmare. Lazlo was waiting, his arms already around her, his breath and voice soft on her ear. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “It’s just a dream. I’ve got you. It’s all right.”

  But it wasn’t just a dream, and nothing was all right. It was a memory, and Minya was still
in it, trapped, as she had been all these years.

  Chapter 23

  Minya’s Red Hand

  It took Sarai a while to stop shaking, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, so instead she sent Lazlo to the rain room for some water and a cloth, and then she very gently washed Minya’s face and neck, her shoulders and arms, much the way she had washed her own body only hours earlier. She even held Minya’s head in her lap, the way she had held her own. And she smoothed back her hair, and fed tiny spoonfuls of water between her lips, into which she had diluted another drop of Letha’s sleeping draught—because, as much as she hated to keep Minya trapped in that room and in that day, she couldn’t let her out to rule over her and threaten Weep. She had to leave her there, for now.

  She had to find some way to help her.

  The sun rose, and she woke Sparrow to take over the watch. “How did it go?” Sparrow asked, but Sarai just shook her head and said, “Later.”

  She went back up the dexter arm, with Lazlo, to her room. He closed the door behind them, and asked, “What can I do?” It devastated him to see her so shaken and not be able to do anything.

  “You can sleep,” she said.

  “I want to help you.”

  “So help me.” She drew him back toward the tucked-away nook. “You need rest, and I need your dreams. Sleep, and I’ll meet you there.”

  He could do that. He wanted nothing more. It didn’t matter that the sun was up. Sarai’s gift had shaken off those limits. Her moths had been nocturnal, but they were gone, and she suspected she would miss them, but not right now. This was better: skin to skin. So much better. She vanished her slip and her smallclothes and lay down on the bed.

  Lazlo stood there and looked at her. There was a roaring in his ears. Her hair was fanned out in sunset spirals. Her skin was cobalt, her moon and stars silver. Her lips and nipples were rose. His mind danced over the colors of her because it could hardly fathom the whole. Her beauty annihilated him. How could she be for him? Her need called out to him—to him and him alone. Almost, his own skin felt magnetized to hers, like a force pulling him off balance. He stripped off his shirt and pushed down his breeches, and this was something new, to kick them off and stand naked before her, and climb onto the bed and lay down with her, and feel her curve against him, finding out how they best fit together. He was careful with her. This wasn’t a time for wildfires. She wanted his dreams and he wanted to draw her into such safety and splendor as only he could make for her, not in the world, but out of it, in their world. He closed his eyes and lay on his back as she tucked herself against his side and curled her leg through his own, resting her cheek on his hearts. She felt their tempo radiate through her. He let the feel of her skin ripple over his like music, and it was lucky that he was very tired, because she felt so good.

  After a time—a surreal velvet-silk-silver-sky time of soft exhalations and the startling tickle of eyelashes and the smallest movements setting off explosions of sensation—they settled into stillness and sank into sleep, where they met again in the little room down in Weep where Sarai had first found Lazlo sleeping: a stranger with a broken nose. Her moths had perched here, and the two of them had defeated Skathis at this window. This was where they’d landed when they fell out of the stars. Lazlo knew Sarai felt safe here. She’d chosen it herself on the last night of her life.

  “Where would you like to go?” he asked. He knew there was so much she wanted to see, both real things and imagined. Dragons and airships, leviathans and oceans. She’d never seen the sea.

  “Here’s good,” said Sarai, stepping toward him. “Right here. Here’s perfect.”

  His lip wasn’t wounded in the dream. She didn’t have to be careful, and she wasn’t. Careful was not what she was.

  . . .

  Later, she told him about Minya’s dream. They were in a tea stall in the marketplace of Dreamer’s Weep, with hanging rugs for walls, and a fantastical samovar in the shape of an elephant with opals for eyes and carved demonglass tusks. The tea was fragrant, the flavor dark. The glavestones were dark, too—rare carmine stones that cast a deep red glow. They sat together in one chair. It was more like a nest than a chair, formed of two enormous, split agate eggs, one for the seat, the other for the back. Their crystal formations sparkled in the ruby light, and they were filled up with fleeces and cushions. Sarai’s feet were in Lazlo’s lap. His fingers played over her anklebones, traced her arches, trailed up her calves to the warm bends of her knees.

  They were both dressed in the fashion of Weep. They’d helped each other, in the little bedroom, once they were ready to go out. They’d dreamed these costumes right onto each other’s bodies, imagining this shirt or that tunic, this dress, no that one, again and again stripping back to start over, because there was always some detail yet to perfect. At least, that was the excuse. But they did settle on clothes eventually, and they looked well in them and admired each other, and made formal bows and curtsies. Their arm cuffs were matching silver with blue stones, and Sarai wore a fine silver chain at her hairline, with a jewel suspended from it. It was blue, too, and winked in the light, but it was nothing next to her eyes.

  Outside the tent, the city was alive with folk and creatures. They could see them through a gap in the rugs, but in here it was quiet.

  “I’ve never encountered resistance like that,” she was telling him. “Trying to alter Minya’s dream. Whatever I did just melted away and it came surging back with a vengeance. It was terrible.” She could talk about it now, here, with Lazlo’s knuckle tracing circles round her ankle, and a teacup warm in her hand. “And that’s her mind. She lives there. It’s no wonder she can’t hear me talk about mercy without wanting to gouge out my eyes. It’s like it just happened. Like it’s still happening, over and over, all the time.”

  “What do you want to do?” Lazlo asked.

  “I want to get her out of there.”

  Her answer was immediate and heartfelt, as though she could. As though she could extract Minya from the prison of her own mind. “But that’s impossible.”

  “Impossible?” Lazlo gave a soft laugh and shake of his head. “There must be things that are impossible. But I don’t believe we’ve gotten there yet. Look at us. We’ve barely begun. Sarai, we’re magic.” He said this with all the wonder of a lifelong dreamer who’s found out he’s half god. “You don’t know yet what you’re capable of, but I’m willing to bet it’s extraordinary.”

  She felt warm and new, here with him, and his belief in her buoyed her spirits. She felt a little guilty, too, to be drinking tea in the city while music drifted past. They could even have cake if they wanted it, but that seemed too unfair to the others, who were stuck in the sky with kimril and plums. Sarai supposed she could go into their dreams, and bring them all here one by one. They’d like that, she didn’t doubt, but what they needed was a real life, not a dream one, a city that would accept them, and food that would fill their bellies as well as their minds.

  They’d have to get supplies. She made a mental note. But mostly she was thinking about the dream. The carefully wrapped babies, Minya’s sweet voice—even if the song was sinister—and the way she’d held them on her hip like a little mother, while the Ellens were nowhere to be seen.

  Well, no. That wasn’t right. The Ellens were dead on the floor.

  The horror of it was still in Sarai’s throat. She already knew how they’d died, of course. Minya had told them lots of times how they’d tried to stop the Godslayer and been cut down at the threshold. She’d even seen them in Eril-Fane’s dreams. He’d stepped over their bodies, as she had had to climb. She shuddered at the memory of their inert flesh, slippery with fresh blood, and of Minya’s red hand, and how it had crushed hers.

  Minya’s red, slippery hand.

  Lazlo, watching Sarai, saw her brow twitch into a furrow. “What is it?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The timing,” she said. Sh
e cradled her hand like a wounded bird.

  The bones ached from Minya’s terrible grip, and she could still feel the slick slide of little fingers and blood.

  Do you want to die, too?

  Too. What did it mean, that Minya had said “too”? She must have meant the Ellens: Do you want to die like them?

  But...it didn’t line up. The Godslayer hadn’t gotten there yet, or else how could they have escaped?

  She explained it to Lazlo. “It’s the bodies I don’t understand. How could we have climbed over them? We had to have gotten out before the Ellens were killed. If we’d still been there when Eril-Fane came, we would have died with all the rest.”

  “It doesn’t mean it really happened like that,” he said. “Dreams aren’t truth. Memory is malleable. She was only a little girl. It’s probably just all out of sequence.”

  Sarai wanted to think that was what it was, but Minya’s question had brought her back to that room, in that moment: “Do you want to die, too?” She couldn’t remember anything else: just the terror and those words, like a splinter in her mind with a haze of pain around them. It had happened. She was sure.

  Puzzle pieces were moving around. There were the dead nurses, their poor dear Ellens, and the question that had sounded like a threat. And there was the place in the nursery Sarai couldn’t see— the breath-fogged glass, the skip—as though the dream was keeping a secret, maybe even from the dreamer. And there was the matter of Minya’s red hand.

  And. ..

  It came to Sarai that she had never, in all the dreams of the Carnage, actually seen Eril-Fane kill the nurses. She had only seen him step over them. Her mind had filled in the rest, based on Minya’s tellings. But Minya couldn’t have seen it. She had to have been gone by then, shoving the four babies she’d managed to save through the crack into the heart of the citadel.

  What had really happened that day? The puzzle pieces did present one possible answer, but it was incomprehensible.

  “They loved us,” said Sarai, as though to ward off a terrible truth that was trying to make itself known. “We loved them.” But the words felt hollow somehow. The Ellens she loved were ghosts. She had no memory of them alive.