“Broken?” supplied Sarai. “I did see him after. I’m looking at him right now. He’s on the floor of Azareen’s sitting room.”
“Oh,” said Lazlo. It was something to wrap his head around, how she could have so many eyes in the world at once. And Eril-Fane on Azareen’s floor, that took some getting used to, too. Did they live together? Suheyla had said that it wasn’t a marriage anymore, whatever it was between them. As far as he knew, Eril-Fane still lived here.
“He should come home,” he said. “I can sleep on the floor. This is his room, after all.”
“It isn’t a good place for him,” she said, staring unseeing out the window. Her jaw clenched. Lazlo saw the muscle work. “He’s had a lot of nightmares in this room. Many of them were his own, but . . . I had a hand in plenty.”
Lazlo shook his head in wonder. “You know, I thought it was foolish, that he was hiding from his nightmares. But he was right.”
“He was hiding from me, even if he didn’t know it.” A great wave of weariness broke over Sarai. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and leaned against the window frame. She was as light-headed as she was heavy-limbed. What would she do once the sun rose and she couldn’t stay here, in the safety of this dream?
She opened her eyes and studied Lazlo.
In the real room, her moth took stock of real Lazlo, the relaxation of his face, and his long, easy limbs, loose in slumber. What she wouldn’t give for restful sleep like that, not to mention the degree of control he had within his dreams. She wondered at it. “How did you do that earlier?” she asked him. “The mahalath, the tea, all of it. How do you shape your dreams with such purpose?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s new to me. I mean, I had some lucidity in dreams before, but not predictably, and never like this. Only since you came.”
“Really?” Sarai was surprised. “I wonder why.”
“Isn’t it like this with other dreamers?”
She let out a soft laugh. “Lazlo,” she said. “It isn’t anything like this with other dreamers. To start with, they can’t even see me.”
“What do you mean, they can’t see you?”
“Just that. It’s why I came right up and looked at you that first time, so shamelessly.” She wrinkled her nose, embarrassed. “Because I never imagined you’d be able to see me. With other dreamers I can scream right in their face and they’d never know it. Believe me, I’ve tried. I can do anything at all in a dream except exist.”
“But . . . why would that be? What a bizarre sort of condition to your gift.”
“A bizarre condition to a bizarre gift, then. Great Ellen—she’s our nurse, she’s a ghost—she never saw a gift like mine in all her years in the nursery.”
The crease between Lazlo’s brows—the new one the Elmuthaleth sun had made for him—deepened. When Sarai spoke of the nursery, and the babies, and the gifts—years of them—questions lined up in his mind. More mysteries of Weep; how endless was the supply of them? But there was a more personal mystery confronting him now. “But why should I be able to see you if no one else can?”
Sarai shrugged, as baffled as he was. “You said they call you Strange the dreamer. Clearly you’re better at dreams than other people.”
“Oh, clearly,” he agreed, self-mocking and more than a little pleased. Much more than a little, as the idea sank in. All this while, from the moment Sarai appeared at the riverbank and squished her toes into the mud, the entire night had been so extraordinary he’d felt . . . effervescent. But how much more extraordinary was it, now that he knew it was extraordinary for her, too?
She wasn’t quite looking effervescent, though, if he had to be honest with himself. She looked . . . tired.
“You’re awake now?” he asked, still trying to grasp how it worked. “Up in the citadel, I mean.”
She nodded. Her body was in her alcove. Even in that confined space, it was pacing—like a menagerie ravid, she thought—with just a whisper of her awareness left behind to guide it. She felt a stab of sympathy for it, abandoned not only by her kin, but by herself, left empty and alone while she was here, weeping her tears onto a stranger’s chest.
No, not a stranger. The only one who saw her.
“So, when I wake up,” he went on, “and the city wakes up, you’ll just be going to sleep?”
Sarai experienced a thrum of fear at the thought of falling asleep. “That’s the usual practice,” she said. “But ‘usual’ is dead and gone.” She took a deep breath and let it out. She told him about lull, and how it didn’t work anymore, and how, as soon as her consciousness relaxed, it was as though the doors of all her captive terrors’ cages slid wide open.
And, while most people might have a few terrors rattling their cages, she had . . . all of them.
“I did it to myself,” she said. “I was so young when I began, and no one ever told me to consider the consequences. Of course, it seems so obvious now.”
“But you can’t just banish them?” he asked her. “Or transform them?”
She shook her head. “In other people’s dreams I have control, but when I’m asleep,” she said, “I’m powerless, just like any other dreamer.” She regarded him evenly. “Except you. You’re like no other dreamer.”
“Sarai,” said Lazlo. He saw how she sagged against the window frame, and put out his arm to support her. “How long has it been since you’ve slept?”
She hardly knew. “Four days? I’m not sure.” At his look of alarm, she forced a smile. “I sleep a little,” she said, “in between nightmares.”
“But that’s mad. You know you can actually die of sleep deprivation.”
Her answering laugh was grim. “I didn’t know that, no. You don’t happen to know how long it takes, do you? So I can plan my day?” She meant it as a joke, but there was an edge of desperation to the question.
“No,” said Lazlo, feeling spectacularly helpless. What an impossible situation. She was up there alone, he was down here alone, and yet somehow they were together. She was inside his dream, sharing it with him. If he had her gift, he wondered, could he go into her dreams and help her to endure them? What would that mean? What terrors did she face? Fighting off ravids, witnessing the Carnage again and again? Whatever it was, the notion of her facing them alone gutted him.
A thought came to him. It seemed to land as lightly as a moth. “Sarai,” he asked, speculative. “What would happen if you were to fall asleep right now?”
Her eyes widened a little. “What, you mean here?” She glanced toward the bed.
“No,” he said quickly, his face going hot. In his head it was clear: He wanted to give her a haven from her nightmares—to be a haven from them. “I mean, if you keep the moth where it is, on me, but fall asleep up there, could you . . . do you think that maybe you could stay here? With me?”
When Sarai was silent, he was afraid the suggestion went too far. Was he not, in a way, inviting her to . . . spend the night with him? “I only mean,” he rushed to explain, “if you’re afraid of your own dreams, you’re welcome here in mine.”
A light frisson of shivers went down Sarai’s arms. She wasn’t silent because she was offended or dismayed. Quite the opposite. She was overwhelmed. She was welcome. She was wanted. Lazlo didn’t know about the nights she’d trespassed without his invitation, tucking a little piece of her mind into a corner of his, so that the wonder and delight of it could help her to endure . . . everything else. She needed rest, badly, and though she joked with him about dying of sleep deprivation, she was, in fact, afraid.
The idea that she could stay here, be safe here—with him . . . it was like a window swinging open, light and air rushing in. But fear, too. Fear of hope, because the instant she understood what he was proposing, Sarai wanted so badly for it to work, and when did she ever get what she wanted? “I’ve never tried it before,” she said, striving to keep her voice neutral. She was afraid of betraying her longing, in case it all should come to nothing. “Falling asleep might sever the tether,” she said, “and cut the moth loose.”