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. She 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.
And now those ghosts, for reasons unclear, were blank as empty shells, standing in the kitchen doorway with nothing at all in their eyes.
Sarai knew she had to go back there, to the nursery in the dream. She had hoped to reach Minya, to talk to her, and…what? Change her mind? Talk her down? Fundamentally alter her psyche with a minimum of fuss? But the Minya she’d found was in no state for talk, and the dream had the force of a river in flood, and Sarai had not been prepared. Could she prepare? She had told Lazlo that she wanted to get Minya out of there—out of the nursery, out of that day—but was it possible?
Or would she find, no matter what she tried, that some people cannot be saved?
Chapter 24
Blue Stew
For the first time in his life, no one made Thyon Nero breakfast.