He stayed by the window, and she saw him make as though to put his hands in his pockets, only to discover that his breeches didn’t have pockets. He looked awkward for a moment before remembering this was a dream. Then pockets appeared, and his hands went in.
Sarai folded hers once more under her cheek. This bed was more comfortable than her own. The whole room was. She liked the stone walls and wood beams that had been shaped by human hands and tools instead of by the mind of Skathis. It was snug, but that was nice, too. It was cozy. Nothing in the citadel was cozy, not even her alcove behind the dressing room, though that came closest. It struck her with fresh force that this was her father’s bed, as the bed in the alcove had been his before it was hers. How many times had she imagined him lying awake there, plotting murder and revolt? Now, as she lay here, she thought of him as a boy, dreading being stolen and spirited up to the citadel. Had he dreamed of being a hero, she wondered, and if he had, what had he imagined it would be like? Nothing like it was, she was sure. Nothing like a ruined temple that only ghosts could enter.
And then, well… it wasn’t sudden, exactly. Rather, Sarai became aware that something was softly different, and she understood what it was: She was no longer in multiple places, but just one. She had misplaced her awareness of her true body reposed in her true bed, and of the moth on Lazlo’s brow. She was only here, and it felt all the more real for it.
Oh. She sat up, the full realization hitting her. She was here. It had worked. The moth’s tether had not snapped. She was asleep—oh blessed rest—and instead of her own unconscious fraught with prowling terrors, she was safe in Lazlo’s. She laughed—a little incredulous, a little nervous, a little pleased. Okay, a lot pleased. Well, a lot nervous, too. A lot everything. She was asleep in Lazlo’s dream.
He watched her, expectant. The sight of her there—her blue legs, bare to the knees, entangled in his rumpled blankets, and her hair mussed from his pillow—made for an aching-sweet vision. He was highly conscious of his hands, and it wasn’t from the awkwardness of not knowing what to do with them, but from knowing, rather, what he wished to do with them. It tingled along his palms: the aching urge to touch her. His hands felt wide awake. “Well?” he asked, anxious. “Did it work?”
She nodded, breaking into a wide, wondering smile that he could hardly help but mirror back at her. What a long, extraordinary night it had been. How many hours had passed since he had closed his eyes, hoping she would come. And now… in some way he couldn’t entirely wrap his mind around, she was… well… that was it, wasn’t it? He had entirely wrapped his mind around her.
He held a goddess in his mind as one might cup a butterfly in one’s hands. Keeping it safe just long enough to set it free.
Free. Could it be possible? Could she ever be free?
Yes.
Yes. Somehow.
“Well then,” he said, feeling a scope of possibility as immense as oceans. “Now that you’re here, what shall we do?”
It was a good question. With the infinite possibilities of dreaming, it wasn’t easy to narrow it down. “We could go anywhere,” said Lazlo. “The sea? We could sail a leviathan, and set it free. The amphion fields of Thanagost? Warlords and leashed wolves and drifting ulola blossoms like fleets of living bubbles. Or the Cloudspire. We might climb it and steal emeralds from the eyes of the sarcophagi, like Calixte. Do you fancy becoming a jewel thief, my lady?”
Sarai’s eyes sparkled. “It does sound fun,” she said. It all sounded marvelous. “But you’ve only mentioned real places and things so far. Do you know what I’d like?”
She was sitting on her knees on the bed, her shoulders straight and hands clasped in her lap. Her smile was a brilliant specimen and she wore the moon on her wrist. Lazlo was plain dazzled by the sight of her. “What?” he asked. Anything, he thought.
“I’d like for the wingsmiths to come to town.”
“The wingsmiths,” he repeated, and somewhere within him, as though with a whirr of gears and a ping of sprung locks, a previously unsuspected vault of delight spilled open.
“Like you mentioned the other day,” said Sarai, girlish in her demure posture and childlike excitement. “I’d like to buy some wings and test them out, and after that perhaps we might try riding dragons and see which is more fun.”
Lazlo had to laugh. The delight filled him up. He thought he’d never laughed like this before, from this new place in him where so much delight had been waiting in reserve. “You’ve just described my perfect day,” he said, and he held out his hand, and she took it.
She rose to her knees and slid off the side of the bed, but at the moment that her feet touched the floor, a great concussion thoomed in the street. A tremor shook the room. Plaster rained from the ceiling, and all the excitement was stricken from Sarai’s face. “Oh gods,” she said, in a rasp of a whisper. “It’s happening.”
“What is? What’s happening?”
“The terrors, my nightmares. They’re here.”
47
THE TERRORS
“Show me,” said Lazlo, who still wasn’t afraid. As he’d said before, if her terror spilled over, they’d take care of it.
But Sarai shook her head, wild. “No. Not this. Close the shutters. Hurry!”
“But what is it?” he asked. He moved toward the window, not to close the shutters but to look out. But before he could, they slammed before him with a crack and rattle, and the latch fell securely into place. Eyebrows raised, he turned to Sarai. “Well, it seems you’re not powerless here after all.”
When she just looked at him blankly, he pointed to the shutters and said, “You did that, not me.”
“I did?” she asked. He nodded. She stood up a little straighter, but she had no time to gather her courage, because outside the thoom came again, lower now and with subtler tremors, and then again and again in rhythmic repetition.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.
Sarai backed away from the window. “He’s coming,” she said, shaking.
Lazlo followed her. He reached for her shoulders and held them gently. “It’s all right,” he said. “Remember, Sarai, it’s just a dream.”
She couldn’t feel the truth of his words. All she felt was the approach, the closing-in, the dread, the dread that was as pure a distillation of fear as any emotion Isagol had ever made. Sarai’s hearts were wild with it, and with anguish, too. How could she have deployed this, again and again, into the dreams of the helpless sleepers of Weep? What kind of monster was she?
It had been her most powerful weapon, because it was their most potent fear. And now it was stalking her.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.
Great, relentless footsteps, closer, louder.
“Who is it?” Lazlo asked, still holding Sarai’s shoulders. Her panic, he found, was catching. It seemed to pass from her skin to his, moving up from his hands, up his arms in coursing vibrations of fear. “Who’s coming?”
“Shhh,” she said, her eyes so wide they showed a full ring of white, and when she whispered it was breath shaped into words, and made no sound at all. “He’ll hear you.”