Sarai wasn’t expecting it. Her wings were keeping her up, but then up became down and she tumbled, exactly as Lazlo had planned it, right into his arms. She gave a little gasp and then fell silent as he caught her full against him. He wrapped his wings around them and together they fell, not toward the ground but away, into the depths of the sky.
They fell into the stars in a rush of air and ether. They breathed each other’s breath. They had never been this close. It was all velocity and dream physics—no more need to stand or lean or fly, but only fall. They were both already fallen. They would never finish falling. The universe was endless, and love had its own logic. Their bodies curved together, pressed, and found their perfect fit. Hearts, lips, navels, all their strings wound tight. Lazlo’s palm spread open on the small of Sarai’s back. He held her close against him. Her fingers twined through his long dark hair. Their mouths were soft and slow.
Their kisses on the ground had been giddy. This one was different. It was reverent. It was a promise, and they trailed fire like a comet as they made it.
He knew it wasn’t his will that brought them to their landing. Sarai was a dreamsmith, too, and this choice was all her own. Lazlo had given her the moon on her wrist, the stars that bedecked it, the sun in its jar on the shelf with the fireflies. He had even given her wings. But what she wanted most in that moment wasn’t the sky. It was the world and broken things, and hand-carved beams and tangled bedcovers, and a lovely tattoo round her navel, like a girl with the hope of a future. She wanted to know all the things that bodies are for, and all the things that hearts can feel. She wanted to sleep in Lazlo’s arms—and she wanted to not sleep in them.
She wanted. She wanted.
She wanted to wake up holding hands.
Sarai wished and the dream obeyed. Lazlo’s room replaced the universe. Instead of stars: glaves. Instead of the cushion of endless air, there was, beneath her, the soft give of feathers. Her weight settled onto it, and Lazlo’s, onto her, and all with the ease—the rightness—of choreography meeting its music.
Sarai’s robe was gone. Her slip was pink as petals, the straps gossamer-fine against the azure of her skin. Lazlo rose up on his elbow and gazed down at her in wonder. He traced the line of her neck, dizzy with this new topography. Here were her collarbones, as he had seen them that first night. He leaned down and kissed the warm dip between them. His fingertips traced up the length of her arm, and paused to roll the fine silk strap between them.
Holding her gaze, he eased it aside. Her body rose against his, her head falling back to expose her throat. He covered it with his mouth, then kissed a path down to her bare shoulder. Her skin was hot—
And his mouth was hot—
And it was still all only a beginning.
That was not what Thyon Nero saw when he came to peer in Lazlo’s window. Not lovers, and no beautiful blue maiden. Just Lazlo alone, dreaming, and somehow radiant. He was giving off… bliss, Thyon thought, the way a glave gives light.
And… was that a moth perched on his brow? And…
Thyon’s lip curled in disgust. On the wall above the bed, and on the ceiling beams: wings softly stirring. Moths. The room was infested with them. He knelt and picked up some pebbles, and weighed them on his palm. He took careful aim, drew back his hand, and threw.
57
THE SECRET LANGUAGE
Lazlo shot upright, blinking. The moth spooked from his brow and all the others from the wall, to flutter up to the ceiling and beat around the beams. But he wasn’t thinking about the moths. He wasn’t thinking. The dream had pulled him down so deep that he was underneath thought, submerged in a place of pure feeling—and what feeling. Every feeling, and with the sense that they’d been stripped down to their essence, revealed for the first time in all their unspeakable beauty, their unbearable fragility. There was no part of him that knew he was dreaming—or, more to the point, that he was suddenly not dreaming.
He only knew that he was holding Sarai, the flesh of her shoulder hot and smooth against his mouth, and then he wasn’t.
Twice before, the dream had broken and stolen her away, but those other times he’d understood what was happening. Not now. Now he experienced it as though Sarai herself—flesh and breath and hearts and hope—melted to nothing in his arms. He tried to hold on to her, but it was like trying to hold on to smoke or shadow, or—like Sathaz from the folktale—the reflection of the moon. Lazlo felt all of Sathaz’s helplessness. Even as he sat up in his bed in this room where Sarai had never been, the air seemed to cling to the curves of her, warm with traces of her scent and heat—but empty, forsaken. Devoid.
Those other times he’d felt frustration. This was loss, and it tore something open inside him. “No,” he gasped, surfacing fast to be spilled back into reality like someone beached by the crash of a wave. The dream receded and left him there, in his bed, alone—stranded in the merciless intransigence of reality, and it was as bleak a truth to his soul as the nothingness of the Elmuthaleth.
He exhaled with a shudder, his arms giving up on the sweet, lost phantom of Sarai. Even her fragrance was gone. He was awake, and he was alone. Well. He was awake.
He heard a sound—a faint, incredulous chuff—and spun toward it. The shutters were open and the window ought to have been a square of dim cut from the dark, plain and empty against the night. Instead, a silhouette was blocked in it: a head and shoulders, glossed pale gold.
“Now that,” drawled Thyon Nero, “looked like a really good dream.”
Lazlo stared. Thyon Nero was standing at his window. He had been watching Lazlo sleep, watching him dream. Watching him dream that dream.
Outrage coursed through him, and it was disproportionate to the moment—as though Thyon had been peering not just into the room but into the dream itself, witness to those perfect moments with Sarai.
“Sorry to interrupt, whatever it was,” Thyon continued. “Though really you should thank me.” He tossed a spare pebble over his shoulder to skitter across the paving stones. “There are moths everywhere.” They were all still there, settling on the ceiling beams. “There was even one on your face.”
And Lazlo realized that the golden godson hadn’t just spied on him. He had actually awakened him. It wasn’t sunrise or a crushed moth that had broken this dream, but Thyon Nero pitching pebbles. Lazlo’s outrage transformed in an instant to rage—simpler, hotter—and he shot out of bed as fast as he had shot out of sleep.
“What are you doing here?” he growled, looming in the space of the open window so that Thyon, surprised, stumbled back. He regarded Lazlo with narrow-eyed wariness. He’d never seen him angry before, let alone wrathful, and it made him seem bigger somehow, an altogether different and more dangerous species of Strange than the one he had known all these years.
Which shouldn’t surprise him, considering why he’d come.