He blushed. Of course it wasn’t like that. He stared at the ceiling, a tension in his limbs, and felt as though he were acting the part of a sleeper in a play. It wouldn’t do. He had to actually fall asleep in order to dream, and it wasn’t coming easily, with his mind racing from the mania of the day. There was a kind of euphoria, he had discovered, in nearly dying and then not. Add to that his anxiousness as to whether she would come. He was all nerves and fascination and bashfulness and a deep, stirring hope.
He remembered, marveling, how he had taken her hand last night and held it in his own, sensing the realness of it, and of her, and the connection that had blazed between them when he had. In reality he would never have dared to do such a bold thing. But he couldn’t quite convince himself that it wasn’t reality, in its way. It hadn’t occurred in the physical realm, that much was true. His hand had not touched her hand. But… his mind had touched her mind, and that seemed to him a deeper reality and even greater intimacy. She had gasped when he touched her, and her eyes had flown wide. It had been real to her, too, he thought. Her lashes, he recalled, were golden red, her eyes pellucid blue. And he remembered how she had looked at him as though transfixed, the first time, nights ago, and again last night. No one had ever looked at him like that before. It made him want to check the mirror again to see what she had seen—if perhaps his face had improved without his knowing it—and the impulse was so vain and unlike him that he flung an arm over his eyes and laughed at himself.
His laughter subsided. He remembered, too, the welling blood and her warning—“Everyone will die”—and the furious way she had grappled in the doorway of the citadel, fighting to warn him yet again.
He would be dead if it weren’t for her.
“Go!” she had screamed as hands caught at her, reeling her back inside. How fierce and desperate she had looked. Was she all right? Had she been hurt? In what conditions did she exist? What was her life? There was so much he wanted to know. Everything. He wanted to know everything, and he wanted to help. Back in Zosma, when Eril-Fane had stood before the scholars and spoken with shadowed countenance of Weep’s “problem,” Lazlo had been overcome by this same deep desire: to help, as though someone like him had any chance of solving a problem like this.
It struck him as he lay here with his arm slung across his eyes, that the girl was tied up in Weep’s problem in ways he could not yet understand. One thing was clear to him, though. She wasn’t safe, and she wasn’t free, and Weep’s problem had just grown much more complicated.
Whom had she defied with that scream, he wondered, and what price might she have paid for it? Worrying about her redoubled his anxiety and pushed sleep even further away, so that he feared it would never come. He was anxious that he might miss her visit, as though his dreams were a door she might even now be knocking on, and finding no one at home. Wait, he thought. Please wait for me. And finally he calmed himself with what he thought of, self-mockingly, as “housekeeping concerns.” He’d never had a guest before, and he didn’t know how to go about it. How to receive her if she came, and where. If there were etiquette guidelines for hosting goddesses in one’s dreams, he had never found that book at the Great Library.
It wasn’t simply a question of parlors and tea trays—though there was that, too. If she were coming in reality he would be limited by reality. But dreams were a different matter. He was Strange the dreamer. This was his realm, and there were no limits here.
Sarai watched the dreamer fling his arm across his eyes. She heard him laugh. She took note of his unnatural stillness, recognizing it as restrained restlessness, and waited impatiently for it to soften into sleep. Her moth was perched in a shadowed corner of the window casement, and she waited there a long time after he fell still, trying to determine when he had truly crossed over. His arm was still crooked over his face, and without being able to see his eyes, she couldn’t tell if he might be faking. Ambush was on her mind, for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t reconcile the violence of the morning with the quiet of this night.
She had found none of the panic or preparation that she had expected. The damaged silk sleigh had been hauled back to its pavilion, and there it lay forlorn, one pontoon deflated. The mechanist-pilot was asleep in her bed, her head on her husband’s shoulder, and though the earlier chaos flared through her dreams—and his, in smaller measure—the rest of the outsiders were untroubled. Sarai’s determination, from her moths’ gleanings of the night’s first crop of dreams, was that Soulzeren had told her husband but no one else of the… encounter… at the citadel.
The Zeyyadin were all likewise in the dark. No panic. No awareness, that Sarai could tell, of the threat that lurked over their heads.
Had Eril-Fane kept it secret? Why would he?
If only she could ask him.
In fact, at the same time that her moth was perched in the window casement watching sleep claim Lazlo Strange, Sarai was watching it not claim the Godslayer.
She had found him. She hadn’t even been looking, just assuming he’d be missing as he had been all these nights Sarai had nightly called on Azareen and found her all alone.
Really, she still was alone. She was in her bed, curled in a ball with her hands over her face, not asleep, as Eril-Fane was likewise not asleep in the small sitting room just outside the door, chairs pushed aside and a bedroll laid out on the floor. He wasn’t lying on it, though. His back was to the wall, and his face was in his hands. Two rooms, door closed between them. Two warriors with their faces in their hands. Sarai, watching them, could see that everything would be better if the faces and hands were to simply… switch places. That is, if Azareen were to hold Eril-Fane while he held her.
How anguished they both were, and how still and quiet and determined to suffer alone. From Sarai’s vantage point, she beheld two private pools of suffering so close together they were nearly adjacent—like the connecting rooms with the shut door between them. Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did they not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and hers, mingled together, could… countervail each other?
At least for a time.
Sarai wanted to feel scorn for them for being such fools, but she knew too much to ever scorn them. For years she’d seen Azareen’s love for Eril-Fane blasted in the bud like Sparrow’s orchids by one of Feral’s blizzards. And why? Because the great Godslayer was incapable of love.
Because of what Isagol had done to him.