Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  “Minya...” Sarai started to say, because she actually still hadn’t thanked her, but she found that her mouth abruptly stopped working, and then she was turning, and her feet, through no effort of her own, were carrying her away. She couldn’t even make a sound of startled protest. The conversation was over, and the clock reset on how long since her last possession.

  . . .

  With the arrival of the Lady Spider, the crew of the Astral was all accounted for—that was the name they’d decided on: the Astral, as “Wraith” sounded menacing, and they all appreciated the layered meanings of star voyagers and souls sent forth, and that it honored Sarai’s gift as well as Korako’s.

  They were eager to go, to cast off from this moorage and begin. It was as easy as wishing. Lazlo had only to will the eagle to fly and it did. It glided above Arev Bael—“the Devourer,” which had devoured Nova—and even navigated between the tezerl stalks with an endowed intelligence that did not require his conscious guidance. They went west, toward Var Elient’s ez-Meliz portal, where, in a few days’ time, they would encounter people—people from another world—and make themselves and their mission known.

  They were fourteen in all: nine godspawn (including one ghost) and five humans, which had necessitated a lengthening of the table in the gallery. They all convened for their first meal of the voyage, and found themselves settling into places that were beginning to feel like their own. The food was so much better now, and they were all learning how to cook, thanks to the tutelage of the fourteenth and most unexpected member of the crew: Suheyla.

  “Are you sure?” Eril-Fane had asked his mother at least a hundred times before their final farewell.

  “Quite,” she had assured him, bright-eyed. “What else am I to do? My house washed away.”

  Eril-Fane was a patient son. “We can build you a new house,” he’d pointed out. There would be quite a lot of that going on in Amezrou.

  “What a bother,” she’d said, “when this one’s already built.” She’d gestured around herself, and how could he argue? Already she’d made her mark on this place, from the rugs and cushions she’d looted shamelessly from the Merchants’ Guildhall to the hooks she’d directed Lazlo to fashion over the table, for the hanging up of discs of hot bread.

  Suheyla had grasped her son’s hand. “I’ll be back, you know, but I do have to go. Our people need you. These children need me.”

  It was true, and it was good to be needed, and to think that she could have a hand in shaping the men and women these powerful young people would become. They needed a grandmother, someone who knew how to do things, who could teach them how to take care of themselves—and, all-importantly, bake cake—and provide a seasoned perspective as they faced their unguessable trials.

  That was her main reason for joining them, and it was reason enough. The other she hadn’t spoken aloud, but her interest in Skathis’s ledger did not go unnoticed. Lazlo, without comment, made sure to find time to read it with her, tracking down the names of babies born in a certain month forty years earlier, and trying to trace when and where they’d been sold.

  Perhaps she would find her lost child, perhaps not. She would certainly find lost children—more lost children, that is. Make no mistake, that’s what these children were, though a little less lost every day. She did what she could. They were remarkably resilient, even Minya, who had been through the most. She didn’t say very much, and Suheyla didn’t press her. She mothered her by stealth, in small doses, and often without direct eye contact, the way one might set a skittish cat at ease.

  The girl had changed her ragged garment, at last, for one Suheyla left where she could find it, and she had a loose tooth, her first ever, which had to mean that whatever had frozen her age at six had unfrozen, and that she would not continue forever a child. That night at dinner, the tooth came out.

  She was biting into bread and gave a little gasp. Her hand flew to her mouth, and out it fell, tiny as a kitten tooth. She stared at it with mingled wonder and horror. “A piece of my body just fell off,” she said darkly.

  Tzara choked a little on the wine she was swallowing.

  “It’s all right,” said Kiska. “There’s a better one where that came from. Just wait.”

  Minya knew how it worked. She’d been through it with Sarai and Feral, Ruby and Sparrow, and had, as Great Ellen, strung their baby teeth onto little necklaces she kept in a wooden box. As for what to do with her own, Suheyla said to put it under her pillow and make a wish. “That’s what we do in Amezrou.”

  “And I suppose all the wishes come true,” Minya said, sarcastic.

  “Of course not, silly girl,” Suheyla retorted. She had not grown up in an era of optimism, but that didn’t mean they’d lived without dreams. “Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.”

  Chapter 64

  A New Generation of Wishes

  Sarai was still thinking about those words later, when she went with Lazlo back to their room. They were sharing one, larger than the others’, but not by double. It preserved some elements of the glade Lazlo had made, notably the bed crafted especially for the goddess of dreams. The iguana was still around, occasionally prowling out from the undergrowth to beg for a treat.

  “Do you remember what Suheyla said about wishes?” Sarai asked, sinking down onto the bed.

  “About the bull’s-eye?” Lazlo asked, following her down. His weight made a divot in the mattress that pulled her toward him. “I liked it.” He nuzzled her, his breath warm on her cheek. “I must be a pretty good archer, because all my wishes have come true.”

  “All of them?” she asked, closing her eyes, smiling as he kissed her neck. “Then you’d better get some new ones. You can’t let yourself run out of wishes.”

  “I could never run out of wishes.” He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at her, serious. “They just might be mostly on other people’s behalf, since I have all I could ever want.”

  So did she. Family, freedom, safety, him. She leaned in and kissed him. She had more than she had ever dared dream, and yet, new dreams sprout up when old ones come true, like seedlings in a forest: a new generation of wishes.

  As sweet as her kiss, Lazlo could tell she had something on her mind. “What about you?” he coaxed.

  “I’ve been thinking about my gift,” she said, “and what I might do with it. And...who I might be.”

  He waited for her to go on.

  “When I was in Minya’s dreams, and Nova’s, I could see, or sense, what was wrong, but I couldn’t fix it.”

  “Fix them, you mean?”

  She nodded. “I keep seeing her fall,” she confessed. “I should have known she would do something like that. I’d just been in her mind.”

  “I think it was just too late for her,” he said gently. “Sometimes it will be. It wasn’t your fault, Sarai. But you saved the rest of us. And if you want to help people—if that’s your wish—then you will.”

  “It is,” she said, and felt it take root within her, this purpose, as though speaking it had given it the light it needed to grow. This was her wish: to help people whose minds were unquiet, who were trapped in their own labyrinths, or stranded on cracking ice. This was what she wanted to paint a target around, to use Suheyla’s metaphor. “But I felt so...useless with Minya and Nova. I think I need to work on my archery.” She tried to make a joke out of it, her worry that it would always be beyond her, that conjuring nightmares was her true calling and she would never be able to do anything else.

  And Lazlo might not have been able to fill her up with certainty, but he could fill her with witchlight, and he did. The way he looked at her, she felt like some kind of miracle, as though his dreamer’s eyes cast her in their glow of wonder. “Sarai,” he said. “It’s stunning, what you can do. And of course you need practice. It’s the mind. It’s the most complex and astonishing thing there is, that there’s a world inside each of
us that no one else can ever know or see or visit— except you. I just tell metal what to do. You meet people inside their minds and make them feel less alone. What’s more extraordinary than that?”

  She let herself start to believe it. She ran her fingers over the rough edges of Lazlo’s face—the line of his jaw, the angle of his broken nose. His lips, which weren’t rough at all. The bite had healed. There wasn’t even a scar.

  She had found herself wishing, several times during all the chaos, for her mother’s gift, so she could just take away all the hate, the fear and fury. But she saw now that Isagol’s gift might be useful in defusing a threat, but it couldn’t help people, even if it was used for good. It was false. To just take away someone’s hate like that, it would be stealing a part of their soul. But maybe Sarai could help them let it go on their own, guide them, show them new landscapes, make new doors, new suns. Maybe.

  She couldn’t yet begin to imagine the lives all the other god-spawn had been living out in whatever worlds had claimed them, but she thought some of them might need that. She even thought that all her years immersed in nightmares might help her to navigate theirs, if only to lead them through and out the other side. If they wanted it. If they invited her. Maybe she could help.

  She stretched like a cat and rolled her neck from side to side. “Isn’t it funny that I don’t have a real body but I still imagine aches as though I did? Why not just leave that part out, self?”

  “You do have a real body,” Lazlo argued. “I can feel it perfectly well,” he said while conscientiously doing so.

  “You know what I mean.” Sarai closed her eyes as Lazlo rubbed the imagined soreness from her imagined muscles.

  “If you left that part out,” he said, “you’d feel less real, wouldn’t you? Being alive includes aches, as well as pleasure.”

  “I wonder...” Sarai mused, dreamy, as waves of imagined pleasure rolled through her.

  “What do you wonder?”

  “Of all the godspawn out there, in all the worlds, with all their gifts, might there be one who. .. I don’t know.” What would even help her? Her body was gone. How could she possibly live again properly? “Someone who...makes new bodies for souls who need them?” She had to laugh at herself. It was a highly specific and unlikely sounding gift. “What are the chances?”

  Lazlo, who had heard from Ruza at dinner all about dragon eggs and Thyon’s theory, said, “Out of hundreds of worlds? It would be stranger if there wasn’t someone like that out there.”

  “Well then,” breathed Sarai, wanting to believe it, “I wish to find them, wherever they are, so that I can feel all the aches and all the pleasure that are the privilege of the living. In the meantime, you’ll just have to keep on sharing yours.”

  She stretched against him, feline, and Lazlo took her in his arms, his ghost girl, goddess, muse of wonder, and assured her that he took his responsibility very seriously. And as the great metal eagle, the Astral, made its way through night and mist, they lost themselves in each other, the very same place they had each been found.

  Epilogue

  Back in Amezrou, too, as it happened, there were those who were thinking about wishes.

  Eril-Fane and Azareen could scarcely believe that their sky was clear and they were alive. They were tired, still recovering from having their hearts regrown, and there was a lot to see to these days, what with organizing the clearing of rubble, and slowly, in a more orderly fashion than they’d left in, bringing their people back from Enet-Sarra.

  Still, a quiet moment found them, and Azareen finally asked the question that had been on her lips since her husband died in her arms. “My love,” she said, trying to read his face, as she had been trying all these years. “You said, ‘I wish...’ What do you wish?”

  Eril-Fane found himself shy—the great Godslayer blushing like the boy who had given his sparring partner a bracelet for her sixteenth birthday and danced with her, his big hands trembling on her waist. For so long, he had been poisoned and poisonous, but now he felt...clean and thirsty and expansive, like a root-bound plant repotted in a new and generous garden.

  “I wish...” he said, his gaze holding hers taut, his eyes wide with sweet, boyish fear. “To marry you,” he finished in a whisper, and he took something out of his pocket. He hadn’t forgotten his own dying wish. He’d thought of it just as much as she had over these past few weeks. You learn what you want when you think you can’t have it, and Eril-Fane wanted his wife. He held a ring in his fingers. It wasn’t the one he’d made her before, that she’d worn in her sleep all these years. It was new, gold and lys, with crystals making the shape of a star.

  “We’re already married,” said Azareen, trembling, because a storm had kicked up in her mind and those were the first words to spill out.

  “I want to start again,” said Eril-Fane. He looked hopeful and worried, as though there was the smallest chance of her saying no. “Will you start all over again? With me?”

  Azareen did not say no.

  The priestess could perform the rites some other day. They consecrated their marriage themselves. Eril-Fane carried Azareen up the stairs of their little Windfall house as though she were made of silk and air. He kicked the door shut behind them, as he had eighteen years ago. Eighteen years. It had been longer since they’d last made love than they’d even been alive before the first time.

  They took their time. They had forgotten so much. Slowly, it all came back.

  Fate must have been feeling sympathetic for all the time they’d lost. They made a son that night, though it would be some weeks before they knew it, and months before they met him and named him Lazlo—and some years after that before he met his namesake, and his grandmother and ghost half sister, as well as a whole lot of others when the Astral came back and visited Amezrou on its way to begin a new journey in the opposite direction, toward Meliz, the seraph home world, and whatever—and whoever—they might find along the way.

  But that’s another story.

  the end (or is it?)

  Acknowledgements

  This marks eight years and six books with the fantastic family at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers! That’s close to three thousand pages of gods and chimaera and moths and wars and young people searching for hope, love, and identity in this world and others. I’m so incredibly grateful to everyone who’s helped turn my words into better words and then magicked them into books, my favorite objects in the world. Thank you!

  To my editor, Alvina Ling, whose graceful insight helps me find the best possible versions of my stories and characters, and whose calm presence eases the panic—mine, anyway. I hope I don’t cause you too much panic!

  Thanks also to Nikki Garcia for multifaceted organization and support; Jessica Shoffel and Siena Koncsol (welcome!) for publicity; Victoria Stapleton and Michelle Campbell for school and library wizardry; Emilie Polster, Jennifer McClelland-Smith, Elena Yip, and the whole marketing team; Sasha Illingworth and Karina Granda for gorgeous design (including the amazing alphabets in this book!); Jen Graham for copyediting; Shawn Foster and the sales team for that all-important selling business; Jackie Engel; and the always amazing boss lady Megan Tingley for everything.

  To Hachette Audio—Megan Fitzpatrick, Michele McGonigle, and narrator Steve West, thank you for bringing Strange and Muse so stunningly to life for the listening crowd. They sound so good.

  I’ve also been blessed with an amazing second publishing family these eight years. Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, you guys are magic. Thank you, Kate Howard, Vero Norton, Sara Kinsella, Melissa Cox, Lily Cooper, Thorne Ryan, Rachel Khoo, Carolyn Mays, Jamie Hodder-Williams, and Ruth Tross. Big thanks also to Joanne Myler for exquisite cover design, Claudette Morris for production, and Catherine Worsley and Megan Schaffer for sales!

  My eternal thanks to my tribe: readers. Thank you for giving my stories a place to live—inside your gorgeous heads. And a special thanks to readers who go the extra mile and give stories life outside their heads, too,
by way of recommendations, fandom, art, cosplay, bookstagramming, booktubing, coming to events, and even tattoos. It’s an inspiration to write books for you, and an immense pleasure to see many of you writing your own books and creating in so many other cool ways. We’re all in this together!

  To librarians, teachers, booksellers, and all other professional book supporters, literacy champions, and reader-makers, thank you for everything you do. To Angela Carstensen, Julie Benolken, Kathy Marie Burnette, Edi Campbell, Megan Fink, Jenna Friebel, Traci Glass, Scot Smith, Audrey Sumser, and Karen Ginman, aka the 2018 Printz committee, thank you so much for the extraordinary gift of a Printz Honor. It is a highlight of my writing life.

  To my agent, Jane Putch: You are family. You’re also, like, the person who attaches the ends of the tightrope from one skyscraper to the next and makes me believe I can make it across, even when I’m barely clinging on by my toes.

  To Mom and Pop, you gave me a childhood of books, adventure, freedom, and unwavering love and support, and you never tried to talk me out of this uncertain path. I love you so much, and I’m so lucky to have you.

  Alexandra, you’re the best of all possible best friends, and a sparkling soul who makes every day, every conversation, every text exchange unique, funny, unpredictable, and good. I wish you ran the world.

  Tone Almhjell, writing kindred spirit, I wish regularly for a teleportation booth (or maybe a teleportation spell, which sounds somehow less risky and terrifying than a machine, because magic never goes wrong…) so that we could write together and hold up sentences like strings of beads to catch the light in café windows in Oslo, Hvar, and wherever else we feel like meeting.

  To Robin LaFevers, another writing kindred spirit, thanks for all your help with the brain situation, and being so available for advice and moral support. You’re incredible.

  To my cats, thanks a lot for allowing me this tiny corner of my desk for working. It’s so generous of you.