This morning, with the pink of sunrise slanting through the window, she’d vanished her clothes and lain down on the bed, and Lazlo had lain down with her. They’d slept, skin to skin, and met in a dream, and there, too, they’d lain skin to skin.
Being a ghost had a lot in common with being in a dream. Neither were “real,” in the strict sense of the word. Dreams drew on memory, experience. As Sarai had discovered with Lazlo, from their efforts at conjuring cake, you couldn’t taste what you didn’t already know.
It was the same with her ghostflesh. Sarai knew that all sensation now was her mind’s best guess based on what she’d experienced before, and she’d experienced almost nothing. Lazlo had never touched her real skin, except to carry her dead body, and she’d only kissed him in dreams. So when his lips brushed her nipple, or his fingertips traced round her navel, she could only imagine the feeling. It felt real. It felt wonderful, but she couldn’t help thinking it was like eating cake in dreams, which is to say: a pale phantom of the true and exquisite vastness of pleasure that is the privilege of the living.
Not that she’d appreciated that privilege while she was alive. She’d never had the chance, and now she never would. It was a sad thought, but there was a saving grace: In dreams, sensation could be shared, just like emotions and the flavor of cake. As long as it was known to one dreamer, it could be imparted to the other through the medium of the dream, so that when Sarai brushed her lips over Lazlo’s nipple, or traced her fingertips round his navel, she could feel what he was feeling, and share in the exquisite vastness by proxy.
That was what she was thinking, flushed, warm, and eager, when she stepped into her room…to find it transformed.
She halted in the doorway and stared around in astonishment. It had always been beautiful, but it had been just a room, and tainted by the fact that Skathis had made it for Isagol—one monster’s gift to another.
Whatever it had been, it was no longer “just a room.” It was a fairyland. It was a forest glade. It was alive.
There were trees, tall and slender, vine-draped and swaying. You couldn’t see the walls beyond them. A row of stepping-stones led between them and out of sight. Bewitched, Sarai stepped over the threshold. Just as she placed her foot on the first stone, a mesarthium snake glided over her toes. With a little gasp, she watched it vanish, sinuous, into the undergrowth. The details! Its little forked tongue. Tangles of ivy cascaded through ferns, and mushrooms no bigger than the end of her thumb grew on the mossy bark of the trees. She spotted a fox, a beetle. Both had wings, and darted out of sight.
It was, all of it, blue metal. But it was night, and everything looks blue at night. Sarai let her mind relax into the fantasy of it, and followed the stepping-stone path. It was like a fairy tale, and she might have been the maiden about to meet some mystical creature—a wish-granting crone or an enormous wise cat—and have her whole life transformed.
She came to a clearing, and it was not a crone or cat she met but Lazlo, leaning against a tree, trying to look casual with a rather large iguana perched on his shoulder. “Oh, good evening,” he said. “Are you lost, miss? Can I help you?”
Sarai bit her lip to repress a smile, and tried to look demure. “I think I am lost,” she said, playing along. She looked around. It was so changed. The ceiling was high, no longer fan-vaulted but drooping with a lacework of leaves and blooms. Moths browsed among drooping bellflowers, and fireflies flitted by, their bellies lit by chips of glavestone. “Can you tell me…I believe there was a bed somewhere around here?”
“A bed, you say?” Lazlo struck a pondering pose. “Can you describe it?”
“Well, yes. It was big and horrible.”
“I know just the one.” He wrinkled his excellent crooked nose. “It belonged to the witch.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“It’s gone.” Confidingly, he said, “There’s a new one, though, made especially for the goddess of dreams.”
The goddess of dreams. The words filtered sweetly into Sarai’s mind, and she imagined a girl with cinnamon hair facing another in the mirror, the one the muse of nightmares, the other the goddess of dreams. Which was real, and which was reflection? “Indeed,” she said. “And do you expect her to pass this way?”
“I hope so.” Lazlo took his first step toward her. The iguana’s tail curled over his shoulder. “I made that path just to lure her here.”
“Do you mean to tell me, good sir, that you’re lurking in the woods in hopes of taking a goddess to bed?”
“I admit I am. I hope she doesn’t mind.”
“I promise you she doesn’t.”
The goddess of dreams, she thought, if there were such a person, would wear gossamer and moonlight. No sooner did she think it than she was it. Her skin let off a subtle glow. Her dress floated like evaporating mist, and a corona of stars and fireflies perched on her red-brown hair. “Show me this bed,” she said, her voice low and liquid, and Lazlo took her by the hand and led her through the trees.
The iguana was not invited.
Chapter 31
A Man Who Loves You Enough to Come Back to You Even When You’re a Biting Ghost
The next morning it was decided that Lazlo would go down to the city to talk to Eril-Fane.
He mounted Rasalas in the garden, and couldn’t help but remember the day at the library when he’d mounted a spectral and ridden out with the Tizerkane. It had been his first time riding anything, and he hadn’t been dressed for it, or in any way prepared. His robes had hiked up to show threadbare slippers and bare, pale calves, and he’d known he looked preposterous. Well, today he was barefoot and wearing a dead god’s underthings, but he didn’t feel preposterous now. It was impossible to feel foolish when the goddess of dreams looks at you with witchlight in her eyes.
“Come back to me,” Sarai told him, anxious. He had assured her he would be safe, and was able to keep himself so if need be, but she couldn’t help worrying. “Promise me.”
“I promise. Do you think anything could keep me away?” A glint came into Lazlo’s eye. “Who would not not kiss me if I didn’t have you?”
Sarai recalled her important job of protecting his lip from kissing. Well, she’d failed spectacularly at that last night. In fact, in the low light and the wonder of it all, she’d forgotten all about it, and there’d been no wincing or taste of blood to remind her. “I don’t care to speculate,” she said, and eyed the lip in question, which was looking much better. The swelling was all but gone, and what had been a livid gash was just a small scab now. It had healed fast, she thought.
“You don’t have to speculate,” Lazlo said. “I only want you. Even if you are a biting ghost.”
Sarai wrinkled her nose at him. “I’ll bite you right now,” she threatened.
He leaned down and let her. Her teeth were light on his lip, and so was the tip of her tongue. “You call that a bite?” he murmured against her mouth.
“It’s a bite that dreams of being a kiss,” she murmured back.
“Let’s teach it later.”
Sarai felt warm all over, and amazed by this new life that was theirs, and all the nights ahead to share in their enchanted glade. “I like that idea,” she said, and Lazlo straightened up. Sarai stroked the side of Rasalas’s neck as though it were a living thing, and then Lazlo was away, and she went to the balustrade and watched him fly, thinking how, of all the things she’d conjured in years of yearning for a different life, it had never occurred to her to wish for a man who’d love her enough to come back to her even when she was a biting ghost.
…