“You only startled me,” she said, self-conscious. “I’m not used to being greeted.” She didn’t explain that she wasn’t used to being seen, that all this was new to her, or that her heartbeats were tangling together, falling in and out of rhythm like children learning how to dance.
“I didn’t want to miss you, if you came,” said Lazlo. “I hoped you would.” There it was, the witchlight in his eyes, sparkling like sun on water. It does something to a person to be looked at like that—especially someone so accustomed to disgust. Sarai had a new, disconcerting awareness of herself, as though she’d never realized how many moving parts she had, all to be coordinated with some semblance of grace. It worked itself out so long as you didn’t think about it. Start worrying, though, and it all goes wrong. How had she gone her entire life without noticing the awkwardness of arms, the way they just hang there from your shoulders like links of meat in a shop window? She crossed them—artlessly, she felt, like some arm amateur taking the easy way out.
“Why?” she asked him. “What do you want?”
“I . . . I don’t want anything,” he rushed to say. Of course, it was an unfair question. After all, it was she trespassing in his dream, not the other way around. He had more right to ask what she wanted here. Instead, he said, “Well, I do want to know if you’re all right. What happened to you up there? Were you hurt?”
Sarai blinked. Was she hurt? After what he had seen and survived, he was asking if she was all right? “I’m fine,” she said, a bit gruff due to an unaccountable ache in her throat. Up in her room she cradled her injured arm. No one in the citadel even cared that she was hurt. “You should have listened to me. I tried to warn you.”
“Yes, well. I thought you were a dream. But apparently you’re not.” He paused, uncertain. “You’re not, are you? Though of course if you were, and told me you weren’t, how would I know?”
“I’m not a dream,” said Sarai. There was bitterness in her voice. “I’m a nightmare.”
Lazlo breathed out a small, incredulous laugh. “You’re not my idea of a nightmare,” he said, blushing a little. “I’m glad you’re real,” he added, blushing a lot. And they stood there for a moment, facing each other—though they weren’t looking at each other, but down at the pebbled stretch of riverbank between their two pairs of feet.
Lazlo saw that hers were bare and that she was curling her toes into the pebbles and the soft mud beneath them. He had been thinking about her all day, and he had little enough to go on, but she’d clearly been a surprise to Eril-Fane and Azareen, which led him to suppose that her entire life had been lived up in the citadel. Had she ever set foot on the world? With this is mind, the sight of her bare blue toes curling into the river mud struck him with a deep poignancy.
After which the sight of her bare blue ankles and slender calves struck him with a deep allure, so that he blushed and looked away. And he thought that after all, in the midst of everything, it might be ridiculous to offer refreshment, but he didn’t know what else to do, so he ventured, “Would you . . . would you care for some tea?”
Tea?
Sarai noticed, for the first time, the table at the riverside. It was actually in the shallows, its feet lost in little foaming eddies that curled against the bank. There was a linen cloth on it and some covered dishes, along with a teapot and a pair of cups. A wisp of steam escaped the pot’s spout, and she found that she could smell it, spicy and floral amid the earthier scents of the river. What they called tea in the citadel was only herbs like mint and lemon balm. She had a distant memory of the taste of real tea, buried with her recollections of sugar and birthday cake. She fantasized about it sometimes—the drink itself, but this, too. The ritual of it, the setting up and sitting down that seemed to her, from outside of it, the simple heart of culture. Sharing tea and conversation (and, it was always to be hoped, cake). She looked from the incongruous setup to the landscape around it and then back to Lazlo, who’d caught a bit of his lower lip between his teeth and was watching her, anxious.
And Sarai noticed, outside the dream, that his real lip was likewise caught between his real teeth. His nervousness was palpable, and it disarmed her. She saw that he wanted to please her. “This is for me?” she asked with half a voice.
“I’m sorry if I’ve gotten anything wrong,” he said, abashed. “I’ve never had a guest before, and I’m not sure how to do it.”
“A guest,” Sarai said faintly. That word. When she went into dreams, she went as a trespasser, a marauder. She had never been invited before. She had never been welcome. The feeling that came over her was all new—and extravagantly nice. “And I’ve never been a guest before,” she confessed. “So I know no more about it than you do.”
“That’s a relief,” said Lazlo. “We can make it up between us, however we like.”
He pulled out a chair for her. She moved to sit. Neither had ever performed this simple maneuver, on land let alone in water, and it struck them at the same moment that there was room for error. Push the chair in too quickly or too slowly, or else sit too soon or too heavily, and misadventure ensues, perhaps even an unintended baptism of the hindquarters. But they managed it all right, and Lazlo took the chair opposite, and just like that they were two people sitting at a table regarding each other shyly through a wisp of tea steam.
Inside a dream.
Within a lost city.
In the shadow of an angel.
At the brink of calamity.
But all of that—city and angel and calamity—seemed worlds away right now. Swans swam past like elegant ships, and the village was all pastel with patches of blue shadow. The sky was the color of the blush on peaches, and insect language whirred in the sweet meadow grass.
Lazlo considered the teapot. It seemed a lot to ask of his hands to steadily pour into such dainty cups as he’d conjured, so he had the tea pour itself, which task was accomplished admirably, as though by an invisible steward. Only one drop went astray, discoloring the linen cloth, which he promptly willed clean again.
Imagine, he thought, having such power in life. And then it struck him as funny that it was the cleaning of a tablecloth that had given rise to this thought, and not the creation of an entire village and a river with birds on it, the hills in the distance, or the surprise they held in store.
He had dreamed lucidly before, but never so lucidly as this. Ever since he came to Weep, his dreams had been exceptionally vivid. He wondered: Was it her influence that made this clarity possible? Or had his own attention and expectancy shifted him into this state of higher awareness?
They picked up their cups. It was a relief to both of them to have something to do with their hands. Sarai tried her first sip, and couldn’t tell whether the flavor—smoke and flowers—was her own memory of tea, or if Lazlo was shaping the sensory experience within his dream. Did it work like that?
“I don’t know your name,” he said to her.
Sarai had never, in all her life, been asked her name or told it. She had never met anyone before. Everyone she knew, she had always known—except for captured ghosts, who weren’t exactly keen on pleasantries. “It’s Sarai,” she said.