Dreamstrider

by Lindsay Smith

  “I’m only a tunneler, not meant for anything more. Who would have missed me?” I pick at the slate tiles of the roof.

  “I would have, for one. You’re … you’re you, Livia. You’ve got smarts, and when you let yourself, you have this determination that I—that inspires me, too. How could anyone not see that?”

  I laugh, dry and bitter. “That’s why they’re all scrambling to go on missions with me, right?”

  “Only because Durst doesn’t know how to use your properly. I’ve been doing this for ten years—half my life. And you’ve the added burden of mastering dreamstriding, on top of it all. Even the Incident—that wasn’t your fault. Durst just doesn’t know how to use you. It’s like asking a fork to do a spoon’s duty.” Brandt takes another pull from the wineskin.

  “If I’m a fork, then I’m a badly dented, tarnished one, a fork no one needs.” I wrinkle my nose. “The nicked one you’re always slicing the inside of your mouth on—”

  “Livia.” In an instant, Brandt is looming before me, my cheeks cupped in those strong, broad hands of his. “Don’t talk about yourself that way. I know you—I know your good heart, your determination to see things through.” His mouth softens, all pinkness and spring thaw. “You’re perfect. Nicks and all.”

  My heart is thundering like galloping hooves. I lean forward, forehead resting against his, his warmth as radiant as the cider in my blood. I need Brandt—I need to see him smile, see him unburdened. The real Brandt, not the one who wears the Ministry’s masks or his House’s fancy dress. Brandt believes in me in a way no one but the Dreamer ever has.

  The crowd roars in the square. Brandt jolts away from me, hands sliding to his hair again; he bites down hard on his lower lip. My chest is heaving; my face must be as red as Brandt’s coat right now. But the sight in the square chills me through.

  The iron-barred jail cart rolls slowly through the crowd. Even the horse pulling it proceeds with its head down, bloodlust in its eyes, its nostrils aflare. Those closest to the cart press against it, shouting, taunting, hands darting through the cart’s bars, reaching for the traitor. Inside the cart, Lady Twyne stands tall, chin jutted high. I think she’d stand that way even if she weren’t shackled in place—defiant, looking down her nose at her detractors to the very last.

  I snatch the wineskin back from Brandt and draw another mouthful of cider to ward this awful chill from my heart.

  “Livia…” Brandt twists his head to watch me, but he’s turned inward, shoulders hunched, hands in his lap; whatever we’d been about to share, it’s gone. The space between us aches like a bruise. “I don’t want you to think I—”

  “I don’t think anything.” I let the words fall swift as an ax.

  Someone in the crowd manages to catch hold of Lady Twyne’s black robes and tugs them free, baring her upper body to all of Barstadt. She doesn’t scream or attempt to cover herself, and for a moment I feel embarrassed for her, but then I recall what she meant to do to Barstadt, and my pity stokes into rage.

  “Edina and I are to be married,” Brandt says, staring down at the crowd.

  The world falls out from under me. I lurch forward, and the wineskin tumbles out of my hands, spilling down the slate tiles, and I scrabble for it as I sift through the hundreds of questions in my head all screaming to be heard.

  “Oh, Brandt, that’s … wonderful.” I take a deep breath and sink back down on the roof. “Congratulations on your…”

  My throat closes up around the word. Betrothal. Such a heavy little word, the sort of thing one slams onto the table as a wager for the final round of Stacks. I can’t say it; I won’t. I force myself to grin like a woman possessed, but I can’t wear masks like he can.

  Despite his placid face, Brandt tightens and flexes his left palm, watching it intently, like he expects it to perform a trick. “Our parents signed the agreement just this morning. It’s—it’s the first chance I’ve had to tell you.”

  “And why do you need to tell me?” I hear myself say, from somewhere very far away.

  “I just … thought you’d like to know.”

  I catch him watching me from the corner of my eye, but I keep my gaze straight ahead. Whatever he thought—whatever I dared to hope—it can’t be. I have no right to a son of House Strassbourg. I’ve lived within the strict confines of Barstadt society this long; I can endure this boundary as well.

  I will not acknowledge this fraying in my heart, tearing a little more each day as the distance between Brandt and I grows, stretching its fibers just a little too thin.

  “Lord Alizard. Oh, he’ll make for an interesting father-in-law.” I suppress a snort. “I know you have to quit the Ministry to work for your family, but please tell me you won’t be working for him, too.”

  “Of course I won’t.” Brandt’s mask slips as he grimaces. “Edina and I agree it’s best we distance ourselves from whatever vile deals he brokers with the gangs. Edina will manage our household while I work for my father’s trading concerns.” He shakes his head with a wry half-grin. “Is that why you look so vexed?”

  As if I could tell him any other reason. As if I could admit out loud why my heart is aching so, why my mind is a thousand leagues away from this blunted pain I’m feeling. As if there is any other way but distance to survive. I’m watching myself, like my body is just another temporary vessel for my dreamstriding, and I can let it do the work of emotion and pain and speech for me. “As long as you’re happy, Brandt, then so am I.”

  He doesn’t answer immediately; instead he squeezes that fist as hard as he can. Veins dance along his exposed forearm—such a lovely olive shade. “Edina is kind—nothing like her father. She’s clever, but not in a scheming way. And Edina, well—” Brandt hesitates. “She’d been … involved with someone before. Some of the Houses are still scandalized about that, but she’s done her best to overcome it. I think she truly cares about my happiness. Isn’t that what matters? Her father’s happy, my family’s happy, everyone’s at peace. I’ll miss working with you—with all of the Ministry—but, well, I know you’ll do great things. You don’t need me.”

  I don’t have a chance to respond. The drum corps begins its slow, lumbering beat.

  The executioner has covered Lady Twyne back up; now she’s only a black shadow on the horizon, backlit by a sliver of sun, climbing the platform steps. He stands her before the block and turns her to face the crowd. The Emperor reads her sentence, though he’s too far for us to make out much. I catch “treason,” “conspiring with,” “against the Empire.”

  “What’s going to happen to the little girl?” I ask Brandt. “Martine.”

  Brandt rubs at his chin. “Lady Twyne’s sister is married to the lord of House Kircher. I believe they’re going to take her in.”

  I nod. House Kircher is not the kindest, nor the brightest, but it’s better than the streets. Better than leaving her to crawl into the tunnels, never to find her way back out.

  The Emperor turns to Lady Twyne, and only because I’ve seen more of these than I’d like do I know he’s asking for her final words. She shouts something, but her voice is swallowed up by great gasps that trickle through the crowd, rushing like water down the hill.

  The executioner pulls the hood over her head, snuffing out the dazzle of her facial sapphires, then lays her head onto the block so delicately as if he’s nestling a jewel back into its case. The drumbeats hasten. Brandt reaches for my hand, but I’m sitting on it, frozen in place.

  The drums speed up, dissolving into uneven, thundering chaos.

  The executioner’s blade swings up, then down.

  The crowd roars.

  It is only later that night, as Sora and I play a round of Stacks in the barracks, that the gossip mill reaches us with Twyne’s final words: “Awaken into Nightmare.”

  Part Two

  NIGHTMARES

  Chapter Thirteen

  I dream of citizenship papers, of records, of words blurring together like drops of water into a pond. Once
more, I dream of the archives, hunting for anything that can help us in Birnau. But I walk away more confused than when I began.

  Rather than sink back into dreamless sleep, I find myself awake within my dream. The Dreamer must be hearing my prayers after all, because even without the vile dreamwort tonic I usually use for dreamstriding, I’ve wound up in the city at the center of Oneiros. My feet are bare, and I’m dressed in the same ruffly nightgown I’m wearing back in my bed in the barracks, but the night is just the right temperature, and the cobblestones are soft under my soles. I twist through the labyrinthine streets, between buildings towering over me that rise like tidal waves of metal, or erupt like bouquets of glass flowers, or sink into the earth, opening to deep subterranean lands.

  Yet the streets are strangely empty this night. I don’t pass a single soul as I wander—usually I see at least one or two priests wandering about. Perhaps it’s the hum in the air, like the frantic quiver of insects before a storm, that keeps them away. I’m grateful to avoid the priests’ suspicious stares—I need the space to think and dream—but their absence itches all the same.

  The night sky greets me with millions of winking stars, and the two golden posts of the spire at the center of the city rise up in greeting. They represent the Dreamer’s Embrace, holding a golden disc high in the air. I take a deep breath and launch into the sky, and then rush up the height of the spire and land on the disc’s upper edge. The dreamworld unfolds in every direction; the city fades into the patchwork pastoral fiefdoms of Shapers’ homes. But nothing moves. No birds, no animals, no humans. The night air turns stale and heavy around me.

  Something flickers in the forest, a structure with walls that glow amber like a candle’s flame. I’ve seen stone like that before, drinking up the sunlight and leaking it back out. It looks just like Twyne Manor. But it must be coincidence; what dreamshaper wouldn’t want a shimmering alabaster castle? Still, the sight of it tugs at me. I ought to surge across the city and into the forest for a closer look, just to put my mind at ease. I ought.

  I look away, to the streets beneath me, to gather my resolve.

  Now I see others in the streets. At first, they’re only shadows, rippling from side to side. The figures swell, rising from the cobblestones like tar oozing up. The sticky black shapes congeal into figures: hunched-over half humans with vile, sightless holes for eyes.

  Wings sprout from their disfigured backs. The night sky fades under a rotten cloud of thick, putrid smoke. The ragged creatures circle the spire’s base, looping around it like a hungering pack.

  A massive shadow falls across me from above.

  The creatures take flight, wings fully formed, still circling the spire. The stink of rot floods my nose. I try to will myself airborne but remain pinned to the disc’s edge. I try to cry out, but my screams crumble in my mouth. No sound leaves me, and I can’t move.

  The mob becomes a buzzing black wall of death that cinches closed around me. My chest heaves with agony, as if the weight of all my failures has crashed into me at once. Professor Hesse’s empty eye, piercing despite its cloudiness, his fist clenched around some terrible secret that I couldn’t be bothered to pry free. My mother’s hand reaching for me as I turned away, my bag full of everything I owned. The beasts are closer now, rank breaths heating my face. I reach up to claw them away—

  I sit up. I’m back in my barracks bed. My throat burns, as though I’ve screamed it raw. I claw at my arms, trying to rip off the feeling of beating wings. Is that blood under my nails? Tar? I leap out of bed, and my legs nearly collapse beneath me. Come on, come on, wake up. I shake one leg, then the other. Finally, I hobble over to the desk on fuzzy, uncooperative feet, and I crank on the kerosene lamp.

  Nothing under my nails, nothing on my arms. I’m all in one piece, though decidedly sweaty and ragged. I click off the lamp and let the moonlight guide me back to bed.

  Dreamer, protect us all. I pray for some time and regulate my breathing, but sleep remains cold and distant, watching me from the far corner of my room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Thank you for meeting me on such short notice.” Marez settles onto the lip of the marble fountain at the center of Dreamer’s Square. He’s gnawing absently on a meat pastry from a market cart and watching a gaggle of bejeweled aristocrats stumble out of the High Temple. “I thought you might benefit from joining me on this questioning. If my source is correct, something far more sinister than we anticipated is afoot.”

  “How do you mean?” I try tucking one leg under me on the fountain lip, but can’t keep my balance that way, so I swap to the other. I’m trying to act calm—Marez has no idea we’re undertaking a mission to the Land of the Iron Winds tomorrow morning—but my pulse is galloping.

  Marez gulps down the last bite of his roll. “My source claims to know something about the late Lady Twyne. Something to do with those nightmares you all fear so much.”

  I narrow my eyes; suddenly the cool mist from the fountain at our backs turns chilly on my skin. I still haven’t shaken the dread I’d felt in Oneiros last night; that coupled with Lady Twyne’s eerie final words about Nightmare makes the hairs on my arms stand on end. “You don’t mean to mock us again, do you?”

  “Of course not, my dear.” His eyes sparkle as he looks right at me. “In fact, I was hoping you could help me make sense of it.”

  “Then what do you want to know?” I ask, still on my guard.

  “Well, all this business about nightmares—how Nightmare has been vanquished, and all that. Clearly people still have bad dreams, or they wouldn’t turn to Lullaby.”

  I cringe inwardly, recalling Hesse, but take care to keep my feelings from my face. “A true believer can fend off a nightmare easily. They’re nothing more than our doubts and regrets haunting us. If you can keep the faith, the Dreamer’s guidance will shine through.” But the Nightmare Wastes are growing in Oneiros, I think. “The Lullaby users shouldn’t give up on their hopes—if they keep their good dreams close to them, then their bad dreams are powerless.”

  “Ah, so it’s their own fault.” He nods, his eyes dark now. “What about the Dreamer? Isn’t it his duty to protect them?”

  The Dreamer’s duty—what do I really know of that? He never answers my calls. But then, I am not as devout as I should be. If the priests are to be believed, I disgrace the Dreamer every time I dreamstride. I don’t know if they’re right. I’m trying to do right for the Dreamer and for his people—honestly, I am. But the only way I know how is through dreamstriding. If the Dreamer would only let me know that what I’m doing is right, that I’m following the path he’s set for me … I clench my teeth together and try to force that thought away.

  “Maybe they don’t trust in him like they should,” is all I say.

  Marez drums his long, slender fingers against the fountain lip. “Interesting.”

  A few weeks ago, I’d have been certain this conversation was another game of his; that he was a predator, hunting for my weaknesses. But now I see it’s just his nature—to be curious, to seek deeper knowledge of things. He may not trust in the Dreamer like I do, but he seems more respectful. More understanding. He saw me for what I really am, after all—a tunneler—and didn’t so much as flinch.

  “And what about the dreamworld?” he asks.

  “Oneiros?” I say before I think to stop myself. The dreamworld’s existence isn’t a secret, per se, but no one but the priests are supposed to be able to visit it. It’s where they do their work Shaping and soothing others’ dreams. A sacred place, meant only for the Dreamer’s chosen servants, who understand it in a way the average Barstadter can’t.

  He nods. If my mention surprises him, he doesn’t show it. “I hear common folk occasionally slip into it from their private dreams.”

  “Rarely,” I say. “And it’s very dangerous—the priests have to usher them safely back.”

  “Most curious. Can they have nightmares there, as well?”

  A rivulet of sweat rolls down my b
ack, despite the autumn breeze. “Not that I’m aware of,” I say. “Nightmare is dead, so his minions are powerless. The Dreamer’s priests protect us.” Except for whatever vile threat is festering even now inside Oneiros.

  “So it’s forbidden to dream badly. But even though your Dreamer slew Nightmare, there are plenty of souls who experience bad dreams.”

  Yes, bad dreams persist. In the tunnels. The Dreamless dens. They hang over the luckless like a cloud of misery. I say nothing and stand up, straightening my skirts. “Shouldn’t we be meeting with your informant now?”

  But he plows onward. “I can’t help but think that if you bottle those bad feelings up, eventually they have to break free. Like steam from a kettle, you know?” Marez seizes my hand in his. “In Farthing, we believe in balance. Give in to all emotions in turn; accept your baser instincts, lest they tear you up inside.” He flips my hand over in his and studies the thick calluses at the base of my fingers from years of scrubbing stone.

  I snatch my hand back from him. “Are you saying it’s our own fault?”

  “I’m only playing the devil’s advocate again. I like finding a way to argue for or against whatever suits my needs in the role I’m playing. It’s something every successful operative should be able to do.” His lips curl into a closed smile. “Let go of your convictions and sink into whatever role you must play.”

  “Maybe I’m not interested in playing a role,” I say.

  He arches one brow. “Don’t you remember your dream, trying to choose which costume you should don? You’re in the wrong country to get away with not playing a role.” He stands and shakes the crumbs from his trousers—dark, well-oiled leather. “Today our role is to tolerate all sorts of despicable creatures to find out what we need.”

  Marez swaggers against the throng of aristocrats pouring from the temple, leaving me to scamper along in his wake. I risk a glance around the square, seeking out Jorn, who trails us from a distance. He gives me a slow nod; I harden my expression and stay close to Marez. At first, I didn’t like the way Marez keeps poking and prodding me like I’m an experiment, but now I can see the value in his tips on conducting myself in the field, and his hints of Farthing life. Is he really trying to train me as an operative? Somehow that feels far too altruistic a possibility for their sort of people. He said himself that Farthing is about balance, about give and get.