Dreamstrider

by Lindsay Smith

  His fingers trail across my wrist as he hands his empty glass to me, blazing a path of sudden warmth. I catch his gaze for a brief moment—comfortable and playful—but he’s already turning back into the clever spy, the unattainable son of House Strassbourg. I nod to let him know I understand and then scurry back toward the serving tables.

  “There you are, girl.” Vera throws an arm over my shoulder. “My shoes are dreadfully in need of re-lacing. I don’t know what you were thinking earlier. Come, let’s set them right.”

  I accompany her to a low bench set into an alcove and, Dreamer curse, she actually hoists up her skirt for me to re-lace her heels! “I think you and Brandt are enjoying these roles a bit too much,” I mutter as I tug the lacing extra tight.

  She smirks and unearths a fan from her cleavage. “Please. I joined the Ministry to escape these endless balls. But I think I have an opening for you.” Vera tosses her glossy brown curls over her bare shoulder and adjusts the iridescent feather trim of her gown. “The elder Tidwell girl is already half a punch bowl in, and she let slip that the Lady Twyne—the unmarried Lady, might I add—has a daughter hidden away in the upstairs apartments.”

  “And?” I ask, my throat tightening.

  Vera rolls her eyes. “And she sounds like a perfect target for you to get more information from Lady Twyne.”

  “A child?” I squeak, trying to keep my voice down. “I can’t use a little girl.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just feels … wrong, somehow.” But my conversation with Professor Hesse about the whispers of the Nightmare Wastes looms in my mind like a behemoth. Am I really afraid of dreamstriding into a child’s mind? Or is it dreamstriding itself that I now dread?

  “Will you do it or not? I can’t think of a better opportunity to gain access to the Lady or her private rooms.”

  I shove her feet out of my lap and stand up. I can’t keep fearing the Wastes. “Fine. I’ll try it.”

  “Excellent!” Vera flashes me a false grin. “I’ll go fetch Brandt.”

  We return to the main hall. Some of the alchemical starlight globes have winked out, and strange shadows play across the masked dancers’ faces, lending them a ghoulish quality. I look for Kriza’s phoenix costume, but Vera’s is the only fiery dress I can see.

  The wolf-headed tumbler circles around me again, on the prowl. I lower my head—I can’t look too alert. I’m meant to be invisible here.

  Vera spots Brandt and bustles through the sea of silk, out of sync with the slow, plodding gavotte. “Follow my lead,” she whispers. Apparently she’s not one for drawn-out seductions: she throws both arms around Brandt’s neck and latches her lips onto his. I shudder, my knees locking underneath me. The gavotte is far too syrupy to keep time with my pounding heart.

  But who am I to feel envy? Brandt is my dearest friend, but I’ll never be more to him than some weapon in the armory he must guard. He’s aristocracy through and through, born to continue its bloodline.

  “I said to follow me,” Vera hisses at me. I open my eyes in time to see her bob past, Brandt in a vise grip beside her. I count to three as they start up the curling marble staircase, then trail after them.

  “Tumblers! They have tumblers!” Vera laughs at a nonexistent joke between them; Brandt weaves from side to side of the upstairs hall as if intoxicated. We reach the top of the stairs and cross the threshold into the northern wing of the house.

  “My deepest apologies.” A butler charges toward them. “Guests are not permitted in this hallway. If you wish a private room, we have made several available on the third floor—”

  “Nonsense, my good man. We won’t be but a minute.” Brandt stands up straight, blocking the butler while Vera uncurls from around him and starts rattling doorknobs along the hall. Brandt keeps himself wedged between the butler and Vera, arguing vehemently, until Vera finally settles on a room and stumbles inside.

  “My lady!” The butler edges around Brandt. “You are forbidden from these rooms!”

  Vera catches my eye, and the drunken façade vanishes long enough for her to glower at me. Bloody dreams, she wants me to follow her, but I don’t know her cues like I know Brandt’s … I scurry to catch up.

  The intoxicated slurry returns to her face, and she laughs, high and piercing. “Of course we can. You’re just an old fuddy-duddy! Did you dream of … of watching a pot boil? That sounds like the Dreamer’s idea of folks like you!”

  Somehow, Brandt manages to lure the butler into the room, hemming him in with Vera. I trail them inside and slam the door shut.

  The butler lurches for Vera. She takes a swing at him, all pretense of aristocracy gone. He staggers backward into Brandt, who’s ready and waiting with a kerchief soaked with the smoke from burning mothwood. The butler thrashes against him for only a few seconds before falling limp.

  “Dreams of death,” Vera mutters to me. “You don’t have the slightest clue how to be a spy. It’d be easier to just drag you in here already unconscious.”

  “No, it’d be easier if you told me your plan in advance,” I retort.

  But Vera and Brandt are already stripping away the excessive components of their costumes as they stride to the opposite side of the sitting room. Vera throws open the next set of doors to the little girl’s bedroom. Shrieks flood from the room as Brandt and I peer through the doorway, masked by shadows.

  A nurse, wild-eyed and shaking, coils around a tiny figure on the mattress. “What do you want? Please don’t hurt her! She’s done nothing wrong!”

  “Shh, shh. Everything will be just fine.” Vera opens up her handbag, lights a censer of mothwood, rolls it on the floor and slinks back out, closing the door behind her.

  “They’ll remember seeing us,” Brandt chides her. “You should have pumped it under the door.”

  “They were already panicked by the disturbance. Let’s just get on with it.” She rolls her eyes in my general direction.

  After a few seconds more, we tie scarves around our faces and open the bedroom door. Brandt and I move as we always do into a new room—him sweeping to the left and me to the right, though Vera traipses right down the middle. Both the girl and her maid slump against one another in the center of the bed. Without the maid coiled around her like a constrictor, I can see the girl’s face now. It blazes through me like a shock.

  “Cursed dreams.” I swallow hard. “I think we’ve found our traitor, all right.”

  A native Barstadter is always easy to pick out of a crowd—our skin ranges from light to deep brown, and our hair, from dark blond like Brandt’s, through redder shades, up to the dark brown of sunbaked earth like Vera’s. Coal-black hair and skin the color of birch trees—those are the signs of someone from the Land of the Iron Winds. But despite the solitary sapphire set into the girl’s forehead, a mark of Barstadt nobility, the girl’s dark hair and creamy skin mark her as just that.

  Chapter Seven

  “Nightmare’s bones,” Brandt swears. “Looks like Twyne is doing far more than just working with the Commandant.”

  We stare at the little girl, eyes screwed tightly shut in deep, engrossing sleep. Even at five years of age, she bears the harsh countenance of her father’s lineage, only somewhat softened by youthful chub. “And for several years,” Vera says. She rolls her eyes skyward. “Dreamer, might’ve been nice if you could’ve given us a warning.”

  “The Dreamer guides us as he feels necessary.” I pull the pendant vial of dreamwort out from between my breasts and flip open the lid. “Let’s hope he guides us toward more clues of what Lady Twyne’s involved in.”

  Vera fiddles with the lacing on her ball gown, exposing the lacework of scars along her right shoulder and arm. “I’ll pose as the maid. Brandt, get the butler’s outfit.”

  I brace myself for the foul rotten-apple taste of the dreamwort elixir and gulp it down. Dimly, I feel the mattress soften my fall before I lose all sensation.

  I stand on the beach of Oneiros, chilly waves lapping at my ankl
es. I charge along the coast and approach elaborate seaside villas that part through the ocean mist, eerie in their seeming emptiness. I have a limited amount of time to slip my leash and claim a new body before the Nightmare Wastes catch my scent. After my brush with them in the Land of the Iron Winds, I’m not about to underestimate their strength.

  I stumble past another experimental Shaper’s creation—the beached husk of a ship, its exposed side torn through, as if it were a great insect’s molted shell burst open. I try not to wonder why it looks like something broke free as I circle around the bow and plunge into the forests beyond. The little girl’s soul has to be close by, given our proximity in the real world, and I’m reaching the end of my tether … A stretch, like fibers fraying, and then—snap. My soul tears free from my body.

  Stop running from your fears. You can surrender, find eternal rest …

  My breath falters. They’ve already found me.

  The Nightmare Wastes’ call threads through the trees like a delicate wind. Delicate, but insistent—my soul flutters on the breeze. They’re blowing me off course, pulling a snare around me with those velvet words.

  They will never forgive you. Isn’t it better to let go? Why suffer their disappointment a moment more? Surrender now, and never feel their hatred again.

  Dreamer, but it’s hard to fight. Before, the Nightmare Wastes were only a gnat buzzing around me as I sought my host—irritating but escapable. Now I feel a great undertow gripping me, pulling me toward surrender. But I can’t, I can’t, I have to fight. Brandt needs me. The Empire of Barstadt needs me.

  But they would rather it be anyone else.

  Professor Hesse taught me to cleave to my purpose when the Wastes called my name, but they’ve never been so strong. I grab at a nearby branch and brace myself against it.

  Surrender, foolish girl. There is nothing more you can do. Why fight?

  Tears needle at my eyes. The sting of the Wastes’ cold hardens around my skin. I don’t know how much longer I can resist them.

  But then I catch sight of it: the little girl’s consciousness, dangling gossamer-thin between two sapling branches—a spiderweb. It seems a fitting representation for her here, brought into Oneiros by the mothwood smoke. Her thoughts are more delicate than the adults I usually seek; I must brush against them tenderly to keep from tearing them to shreds. I take hold of the little girl’s tether and slip into her body.

  Why bother, Livia? the Wastes cry out. You’ll only fail them once more—

  We open our eyes.

  Weak, watery shapes in cream and shadowy blue. It takes a moment to bring the world into focus. Brandt’s already donned the butler’s uniform and is busy wedging an arm into an armoire. Blearily, I recognize it as my own.

  “Ah, there you are.” He shoves the armoire door shut with his back. I hope my fingers were out of the way. “Might want to figure out your name before we get any further.”

  “Good point.” The girl’s voice is fluid; I can’t seem to hold it down. I lean back into her spiderweb thoughts, her fleeting dreams. “Martine.”

  “All right, Martine. Ready to make a scene?” Brandt asks.

  I don’t feel at all ready, but with Brandt supporting me, I’m far better off. “Let’s.”

  We charge out into the sitting room. As soon as Brandt’s checked the restraints on the unconscious butler, I run from the bedroom suite. “Mommy! Mommy!” I shriek, tearing down the hallway and onto the grand staircase. Martine’s instincts tweak at me and I correct myself. “Maman! Maman!”

  Brandt and Vera, in guise, chase after me and silence me halfway down the twisting stairs. Few party revelers look up, unable to hear us over the waltz, but we’ve achieved our desired effect. Lady Sindra Twyne rears up from her chair, glaring icicles at Vera and Brandt. She excuses herself from the ruby-flecked aristocrat with whom she’d been chatting and cuts a murderous path through the dance floor.

  “Bring her to my rooms,” Lady Twyne hisses at Vera without turning to look at her, and keeps climbing the stairs past us, as if to deny all relations. Is this how poor Martine lives her entire life? Locked away with a nursemaid, forbidden from ever being seen on her mother’s arm? My heart aches for this little girl, even as I tangle up her spidersilk thoughts for my own nefarious purposes.

  Lady Twyne ushers me into her grand suites on the mansion’s top floor and closes Vera and Brandt out in the hallway. Her sitting room is lined in the same exposed alabaster as the exterior, emitting a sun-kissed, pale glow. Ferns soften the harsh cut-stone edges, and gauzes in a variety of dyes crest the slender floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “Come, darling. Sit in Mummy’s lap.” She nestles on a divan and billows her skirt around her. I toddle forward, still unsteady on such tiny legs, but the uncertainty feels appropriate for this delicate child. Lady Twyne throws her arms wide and hoists me into her lap.

  “Maman, I had bad dreams.” I burrow my face into her bosom, trying to recall how I behaved with my own mother in the tunnels. But my mother was more like a ghost or a shadow to me than any solid figure.

  Lady Twyne ruffles Martine’s thick bird’s nest of black hair. “Nonsense, dearie. Remember what we always say? The Dreamer is just a fairy tale; we can control our own dreams. Our destiny. Nightmare gives us the power to make it so.”

  I suppress the shudder that wriggles into Martine’s delicate bones. Words of a traitor, indeed. How can she say such heresy? “But, Maman, this dream was different. It was about … Daddy.” I’m flailing here, completely fabricating this tale, not looking into Martine’s thoughts at all. I’m afraid of pushing too hard against her delicate young mind. Better to make a mistake. As little time as I suspect the lady spends with her daughter, she surely won’t know the difference.

  Lady Twyne’s face hardens, like a great iron portcullis has been lowered between us. “Now, my little dove. I’ve asked you never to speak of him.”

  I’ve struck a nerve. Perfect. “But Daddy talks to me in my dreams. He says he’s the ocean and he’s going to flood Barstadt.” The tremble in Martine’s voice isn’t faked. “It’s scary, Maman. I don’t want Daddy to drown us.”

  Lady Twyne’s gaze pierces me for a moment, then she glances toward the door.

  “Maman?” I ask. “Is it real?” I’m pressing her hard, I know, but if I remember my half siblings correctly, one can never overestimate the persistence of children.

  Her expression is difficult to read. When she furrows her brow, the furrows only change the whorls of gemstones nestled in her skin; their twinkling masks her true intent. In her eyes, though, something dark smolders. Like she’s seeing straight through the disguise I’ve donned of her daughter to who I really am: small, clueless, and terrified.

  “Soon, you won’t have to worry about what happens to Barstadt,” is all she says. She hoists me out of her lap and pushes me toward the door.

  I cringe. No. We can’t have put in all this effort for nothing more than that cryptic hint. I must push harder. I cannot be afraid.

  The spiderweb thoughts of Martine glisten in the moonlight. The tidbit I need to trip up Lady Twyne clings to them somewhere—it must. But where? How can I skim it off the surface?

  And then it hits me—every spiderweb has a spider.

  I flutter against the web like the tiniest gnat, too small to tear apart the strands. Martine’s thoughts and dreams drip past me like dewdrops: her mother’s face; playing in her room with only her nursemaid to keep her company. She dreams of soaring, arms spread high above the Barstadt harbor, weaving through the towers of Banhopf University and the Dreamer’s temple spires. She dreams of a true family.

  And this dream lures out just the thought I need—the tempestuous, unmeditated, unfiltered reaction that only children can call forth. Martine blurts it out with no need for my help:

  “You’re a liar! A filthy liar, and I wish you were dead!”

  Lady Twyne rears back as if stung. Success. My consciousness warms with a twinge of pride for little Mar
tine. Some of us spend our whole lives without standing up to our bullies, after all. I wish I had such gall.

  “How dare you speak to me in such a way,” Lady Twyne says, with a voice slick as frost. But her hands shake; she tucks them into the folds of her skirt.

  “You promised me that after my fifth birthday I could see Daddy,” I continue, Martine’s thoughts flowing effortlessly through me. “Are you going to keep your promise, or break it like all the others? I don’t want to stay locked up forever.”

  Lady Twyne lurches toward me, dropping into a crouch. Her face, jagged as the cliffs, loses all calm, all beauty as she speaks. “Listen to me, darling. Life is about to become very dangerous for us.” Her tone could curdle the freshest cream. “I promise, your father’s people are coming for us very soon. I’ll be Empress, and we won’t have to hide anymore. The nightmares will be ours to command.”

  I fight down my surging panic. We’ve gotten our confirmation that Twyne is working with the Commandant, but I need to know if there’s anything Twyne can tell me about the Land of the Iron Winds’ battle plans. “How soon?” I ask.

  “Another month, perhaps, and then we’ll all be together. You’ll have a lovely new throne all your own, and you’ll never have to hide again.” She pinches the bridge of her nose and takes a deep breath. “You must keep that a secret, though, love. Can you do that for me? You can’t even tell your nurse, else I won’t let you meet Father, I swear it.”

  I hang my head in what I hope is an appropriately sullen fashion. “I promise, Maman.”

  “Good. See that you keep your word.” A sneer mars her painted lips. “The nightmares are not kind to those who betray them.”

  Chapter Eight

  “No.” Minister Durst shakes his head with the desperation of a condemned man. “It’s simply not possible. You—surely you misheard.”

  I clench my hands into tight little fists, wishing for something solid to hold on to. “Lady Twyne’s threat was perfectly clear. Whether or not she’s capable of doing what she claims, she seems intent on seeing Barstadt destroyed, and thinks that she can use Nightmare to do it.”