It was him.
This was normal. People manifest in their own dreams more often than they don’t. He was walking away from her, and she willed herself nearer—no sooner wishing it than she was right behind him. This dream might be special, but it was still a dream and, as such, hers to control. She could, if she wished, vanquish all this color. She might turn it all to blood, smash the domes, send the feather-cloaked children tumbling to their deaths. She might drive that tame ravid with its tassels and beads to maul the lovely women with their long black hair. She could turn all this into nightmare. Such was her gift. Her vile, vile gift.
She did none of that. It wasn’t why she’d come, for one thing, but even if it was, it was unthinkable that she should mangle this dream. It wasn’t just the colors and the fairy-tale creatures, the magic. It wasn’t even the cakes. There was such a feeling here of . . . of sweetness, and safety, and Sarai wished . . .
She wished it were real, and she could live in it. If ravids could walk here side by side with men and women and even share their cakes, then maybe godspawn could, too.
Real. Foolish, foolish thought. This was a stranger’s mind. Real was the other four waiting for her in an agony of wondering. Real was the truth she had to tell them, and real was the dawn glow creeping up the horizon. It was time to go. Sarai gathered up her moths. Those perched on the knitted glave cover released it and it eased back down, swallowing the slice of light and returning the dreamer to darkness. They fluttered to the window and waited there, but the one on his brow remained. Sarai was poised, ready to withdraw it, but she hesitated. She was so many places at once. She was on the flat of the seraph’s palm, barefoot, and she was hovering in the window of the Godslayer’s bedroom, and she was perched, light as a petal, on the dreamer’s brow.
And she was inside his dream, standing right behind him. She had an unaccountable urge to see his face, here in this place of his creation, with his eyes open.
He reached out to pluck a fruit from one of the vines.
Sarai’s hand twitched at her side, wanting one, too. Wanting five, one for each of them. She thought of the godspawn girl who could bring things out of dreams, and wished she could return with her arms full of fruit. A cake balanced on her head. And riding the tame ravid that now had icing on its whiskers. As though, with gifts and whimsy, she might soften the blow of her news.
Some children were climbing a trellis, and they paused to toss some more fruit down to the dreamer. He caught the yellow orbs and called back, “Thank you.”
The timbre of his voice sent a thrill through Sarai. It was deep, low, and raw—a voice like woodsmoke, serrated blades, and boots breaking through snow. But for all its roughness, there was the most endearing hint of shyness in it, too. “I believed it when I was a little boy,” he told an old man standing nearby. “About the fruit free for the taking. But later I thought it had to be a fantasy dreamed up for hungry children.”
Belatedly, it struck Sarai that he was speaking the language of Weep. All night long, in all those other strangers’ dreams, she’d heard scarcely a word she could understand, but this one was speaking it without even an accent. She drifted to one side, coming around finally to get a look at him.
She went right up close, studying him—in profile—in the same shameless way that one might study a statue—or, indeed, in which a ghost might study the living. Earlier in the night, she had done the same with the golden faranji, standing right beside him while he did furious work in a laboratory of spurting flames and shattered glass. Everything had been jagged there, hot and full of peril, and it didn’t matter how beautiful he was. She’d been eager to get away.
There was no peril here, or desire for escape. On the contrary, she was drawn in closer. A decade of invisibility had done away with any hesitancy she might once have felt about such flagrant staring. She saw that his eyes were gray, and that his smile wore the same hint of shyness as his voice. And yes, there was the broken line of his nose. And yes, the cut of his cheeks to his jaw was harsh. But, to her surprise, his face, awake and animate, conveyed none of the brutality that had been her first impression. On the contrary.
It was as sweet as the air in his dream.
He turned his head her way, and Sarai was so accustomed to her own acute nonbeing that it didn’t even startle her. She only took it as an opportunity to see him better. She had seen so many closed eyes, and eyelids trembling with dreams, and lashes fluttering on cheeks, that she was transfixed by his open ones. They were so near. She could see, in this indulgence of sunlight, the patterns of his irises. They weren’t solid gray, but filaments of a hundred different grays and blues and pearls, and they looked like reflections of light wavering on water, with the softest sunburst of amber haloing his pupils.
And . . . every bit as avidly as she was looking at him, he was looking at . . . No, not at her. He could only be looking through her. He had an air of one bewitched. There was a light in his eyes of absolute wonder. Witchlight, she thought, and she suffered a deep pang of envy for whoever or whatever it was behind her that enthralled him so completely. For just a moment, she let herself pretend that it was her.
That he was looking at her in that rapt way.
It was only pretend. An instant of self-indulgence—like a phantom that interposes itself between lovers to feel what it is to be alive. All of this happened in a flutter of seconds, three at the very most. She stood quiet inside the remarkable dream and pretended the dreamer was captivated by her. She tracked the movement of his pupils. They seemed to trace the lines of her face and the band of black she’d painted across it. They dropped, only to rise again at once from the sight of her slip-clad form and her immodest blue skin. He blushed, and sometime in those three seconds it had ceased being pretend. Sarai blushed, too. She fell back a step and the dreamer’s eyes followed her.
His eyes followed her.
There was no one behind her. There was no one else at all. The whole dream shrank to a sphere around the pair of them, and there could be no question that the witchlight was for her, or that it was her he meant when he whispered, with vivid and tender enthrallment, “Who are you?”
Reality came slamming down. She was seen. She was seen. Up in the citadel Sarai jerked back. She snapped the tether of consciousness and cut the moth loose, losing the dream in an instant. All the focus she’d poured into the single sentinel was shunted back into her physical body, and she stumbled and fell, gasping, to her knees.
It was impossible. In dreams, she was a phantom. He couldn’t have seen her.
Yet there was no question in her mind that he had.
Down in Weep, Lazlo woke with a start and sat up in bed just in time to witness ninety-nine smithereens of darkness spook from his window ledge and burst into the air, where, with one frantic eddy, they were sucked up and out of sight.
He blinked. All was quiet and still. Dark, too. He might have doubted that he’d seen anything at all if, at that moment, the one-hundredth moth hadn’t tumbled off his brow to fall dead into his lap. Gently he scooped it into his palm. It was a delicate thing, its wings furred in plush the color of twilight.
Half tangled in the remnants of his dream, Lazlo was still seeing the wide blue eyes of the beautiful blue girl, and he was frustrated to have wakened and lost her so abruptly. If he could get back to the dream, he wondered, might he find her again? He laid the dead moth on the bedside table and fell back to sleep.
And he did find the dream, but not the girl. She was gone. In those next moments the sun rose. It seeped a pallid light into the citadel’s gloom and turned the moth to smoke on the table.
When Lazlo woke again, a couple of hours later, he’d forgotten them both.
28
No Way to Live
Sarai fell to her knees. All she was seeing was the pure and potent focus of the dreamer’s eyes—on her—as Feral, Ruby, and Sparrow rushed out to her from the doorway where they’d been watching and waiting.
“Sarai! Are you all right?”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Sarai!”
Minya came behind them, but she didn’t rush to Sarai’s side. She held herself back, watching with keen interest as they took her elbows and helped her up.
Sarai saw their distress and mastered her own, pushing the dreamer from her mind—for now. He had seen her. What could it mean? The others were peppering her with questions—questions she couldn’t answer because her moths hadn’t yet come back to her. They were in the sky now, racing the rising sun. If they didn’t make it back in time, she would be voiceless until dark fell and a new hundred were born in her. She didn’t know why it worked that way, but it did. She clutched her throat so the others would understand, and she tried to wave them inside so they wouldn’t see what happened next. She hated for anyone to see her moths come or go.
But they only drew back, apprehension on their faces, and all she could do when the moths came frothing up over the edge of the terrace was turn away to hide her face as she opened her mouth wide to let them back in.
Ninety-nine.
In her shock, she’d severed the connection and left the moth on the dreamer’s brow. Her hearts gave a lurch. She reached out with her mind, fumbling for the cut tether, as though she might revive the moth and draw it back home, but it was lost to her. First she’d been seen by a human, and then she’d left a moth behind like a calling card. Was she coming undone?
How had he seen her?
She was pacing again, out of habit. The others came beside her, demanding to know what had happened. Minya still stood back, watching. Sarai reached the end of the palm, turned, and stopped. There were no railings on this terrace to prevent one from stepping off the edge. There was, instead, the subtle curve of the cupped hand—the metal flesh sloping gently upward to form a kind of great shallow bowl so that you couldn’t simply walk off the edge. Even at her most distracted, Sarai’s feet kept track of the slope, and knew to stay in the palm’s flat center.
Now the panic of the others brought her back to herself.
“Tell us, Sarai,” said Feral, holding his voice steady to show that he could take it. Ruby was on one side of him, Sparrow on the other. Sarai drank in the sight of their faces. She’d taken so little time over the past years simply to be with them. They lived by day and she by night, and they shared one meal in between. It was no way to live. But . . . it was living, and it was all they had.