“Sarai.” Sarai. Her name was calligraphy and honey. “What do you mean?” he asked her gently. “What is it you’ve done to them?”
And Sarai, remaining just as she was—tucked into his shoulder, her forehead resting against his jaw—told him. She told him what she was and what she did and even… though her voice went thin as paper… how she did it, moths and all. And when she was finished telling and was tense in the circle of his arms, she waited to see what he would say. Unlike him, she couldn’t forget that this was a dream. She was outside it and inside it at once. And though she didn’t dare look at him while she told him her truth, her moth watched his sleeping face for any flicker of expression that might betray disgust.
There were none.
Lazlo wasn’t thinking about the moths—though he did recollect, now, the one that had fallen dead from his brow on his first morning waking up in Weep. What really seized him was the implication of nightmares. It explained so much. It had seemed to him as though fear were a living thing here, because it was. Sarai kept it alive. She tended it like a fire and made sure it never went out.
If there were such a goddess in a book of olden tales, she would be the villain, tormenting the innocent from her high castle. The people of Weep were innocent—most of them—and she did torment them, but… what choice did she have? She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it. Lazlo felt many things for her in that moment, feeling her tension as he held her, and none of them were disgust.
He was under her spell and on her side. When it came to Sarai, even nightmares seemed like magic. “The Muse of Nightmares,” he said. “It sounds like a poem.”
A poem? Sarai detected nothing mocking in his voice, but she had to see his face to confirm it, which meant sitting up and breaking the embrace. Regretfully, she did. She saw no mockery, but only… witchlight, still witchlight, and she wanted to live in it forever.
She asked in a hesitant whisper, “Do you still think I’m a… a singularly unhorrible demon?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And…” His voice grew bashful. Only in a dream could he be so bold and speak such words. “I hope you’ll let me be in your story.”
44
AN EXTRAORDINARY SUGGESTION
A poem? A fairy tale? Was that really how he saw her? Flustered, Sarai rose and went to the window. It wasn’t just her belly now that felt a flutter like wild soft wings, but her chest where her hearts were, and even her head. Yes, she wanted to say with shy delight. Please be in my story.
But she didn’t. She looked out into the night, up at the citadel in the sky, and asked, “Will there be a story? How can there be?”
Lazlo joined her at the window. “We’ll find a way. I’ll talk to Eril-Fane tomorrow. Whatever he did then, he must want to atone for it. I can’t believe he means to hurt you. After all, he didn’t tell anyone what happened. You didn’t see how he was after, how he was…”
“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.