Lazlo breathed out a small, incredulous laugh. “You’re not my idea of a nightmare,” he said, blushing a little. “I’m glad you’re real,” he added, blushing a lot. And they stood there for a moment, facing each other—though they weren’t looking at each other, but down at the pebbled stretch of riverbank between their two pairs of feet.
Lazlo saw that hers were bare and that she was curling her toes into the pebbles and the soft mud beneath them. He had been thinking about her all day, and he had little enough to go on, but she’d clearly been a surprise to Eril-Fane and Azareen, which led him to suppose that her entire life had been lived up in the citadel. Had she ever set foot on the world? With this is mind, the sight of her bare blue toes curling into the river mud struck him with a deep poignancy.
After which the sight of her bare blue ankles and slender calves struck him with a deep allure, so that he blushed and looked away. And he thought that after all, in the midst of everything, it might be ridiculous to offer refreshment, but he didn’t know what else to do, so he ventured, “Would you . . . would you care for some tea?”
Tea?
Sarai noticed, for the first time, the table at the riverside. It was actually in the shallows, its feet lost in little foaming eddies that curled against the bank. There was a linen cloth on it and some covered dishes, along with a teapot and a pair of cups. A wisp of steam escaped the pot’s spout, and she found that she could smell it, spicy and floral amid the earthier scents of the river. What they called tea in the citadel was only herbs like mint and lemon balm. She had a distant memory of the taste of real tea, buried with her recollections of sugar and birthday cake. She fantasized about it sometimes—the drink itself, but this, too. The ritual of it, the setting up and sitting down that seemed to her, from outside of it, the simple heart of culture. Sharing tea and conversation (and, it was always to be hoped, cake). She looked from the incongruous setup to the landscape around it and then back to Lazlo, who’d caught a bit of his lower lip between his teeth and was watching her, anxious.
And Sarai noticed, outside the dream, that his real lip was likewise caught between his real teeth. His nervousness was palpable, and it disarmed her. She saw that he wanted to please her. “This is for me?” she asked with half a voice.
“I’m sorry if I’ve gotten anything wrong,” he said, abashed. “I’ve never had a guest before, and I’m not sure how to do it.”
“A guest,” Sarai said faintly. That word. When she went into dreams, she went as a trespasser, a marauder. She had never been invited before. She had never been welcome. The feeling that came over her was all new—and extravagantly nice. “And I’ve never been a guest before,” she confessed. “So I know no more about it than you do.”
“That’s a relief,” said Lazlo. “We can make it up between us, however we like.”
He pulled out a chair for her. She moved to sit. Neither had ever performed this simple maneuver, on land let alone in water, and it struck them at the same moment that there was room for error. Push the chair in too quickly or too slowly, or else sit too soon or too heavily, and misadventure ensues, perhaps even an unintended baptism of the hindquarters. But they managed it all right, and Lazlo took the chair opposite, and just like that they were two people sitting at a table regarding each other shyly through a wisp of tea steam.
Inside a dream.
Within a lost city.
In the shadow of an angel.
At the brink of calamity.
But all of that—city and angel and calamity—seemed worlds away right now. Swans swam past like elegant ships, and the village was all pastel with patches of blue shadow. The sky was the color of the blush on peaches, and insect language whirred in the sweet meadow grass.
Lazlo considered the teapot. It seemed a lot to ask of his hands to steadily pour into such dainty cups as he’d conjured, so he had the tea pour itself, which task was accomplished admirably, as though by an invisible steward. Only one drop went astray, discoloring the linen cloth, which he promptly willed clean again.
Imagine, he thought, having such power in life. And then it struck him as funny that it was the cleaning of a tablecloth that had given rise to this thought, and not the creation of an entire village and a river with birds on it, the hills in the distance, or the surprise they held in store.
He had dreamed lucidly before, but never so lucidly as this. Ever since he came to Weep, his dreams had been exceptionally vivid. He wondered: Was it her influence that made this clarity possible? Or had his own attention and expectancy shifted him into this state of higher awareness?
They picked up their cups. It was a relief to both of them to have something to do with their hands. Sarai tried her first sip, and couldn’t tell whether the flavor—smoke and flowers—was her own memory of tea, or if Lazlo was shaping the sensory experience within his dream. Did it work like that?
“I don’t know your name,” he said to her.
Sarai had never, in all her life, been asked her name or told it. She had never met anyone before. Everyone she knew, she had always known—except for captured ghosts, who weren’t exactly keen on pleasantries. “It’s Sarai,” she said.
“Sarai,” he repeated, as though he were tasting it. Sarai. It tasted, he thought—but did not say—like tea—complex and fine and not too sweet. He looked at her, really looked. He wouldn’t, in the world, ever look at a young woman with such directness and intensity, but it was somehow all right here, as though they had met with the tacit intent to know each other. “Will you tell me?” he asked. “About yourself?”
Sarai held her cup in both hands. She breathed the hot steam while cold water swirled around her feet. “What did Eril-Fane tell you?” she asked, wary. Through another moth’s eyes, she observed that her father was no longer sitting against the wall, but had moved to the open window of Azareen’s sitting room and was leaning out, staring up at the citadel. Was he imagining her up there? And, if so, what was he thinking? If he would sleep, she might be able to tell. She couldn’t see it on his face, which was like a death mask: grim and lifeless with hollows for eyes.
“He only said that you aren’t Isagol,” Lazlo relayed. He paused. “Are you . . . her daughter?”
Sarai lifted her gaze to him. “Did he say that?”
Lazlo shook his head. “I guessed,” he said. “Your hair.” He had guessed something else, too. Hesitant, he said, “Suheyla told me that Eril-Fane was Isagol’s consort.”
Sarai said nothing, but truth was in her silence, and in her proud effort to show no pain.
“Didn’t he know about you?” Lazlo asked, sitting forward. “If he’d known he had a child—”
“He knew,” Sarai said shortly. A half mile away, the man in question rubbed his eyes with infinite weariness, yet still he didn’t close them. “And now he knows I’m still alive. Did he say what he intends to do?”
Lazlo shook his head. “He didn’t say very much. He asked that we not tell anyone what happened up there. About you or any of it.”
Sarai had assumed as much. What she wanted to know was why, and what next, but Lazlo couldn’t tell her that and Eril-Fane was still awake. Azareen had drifted off, finally, and Sarai landed a soft sentinel on the curve of her tearstained cheek.
She found no answers, though. Instead, she was plunged into the violence of the morning. She heard her own echoing cry of “Go!” and felt the terror bearing down, cleavers and meat hooks and the face of her own grandmother—Azareen’s grandmother—twisted in unfamiliar hatred. It replayed itself over and over, relentless, and with one terrible difference: In the dream, Azareen’s blades were as heavy as anchors, weighing down her arms as she strove to defend against the onslaught pouring from the angel’s hand. She was too slow. It was all frantic, sluggish panic and roiling, invincible foes, and the outcome was not so lucky as it had been that morning.
In Azareen’s dream, they all died, just as Sarai had told Lazlo they would.
She grew quiet at the riverside, her attention drawn away. Lazlo, observing that the cerulean hue of her face had gone a little ashen, asked, “Are you all right?”
She nodded, too quickly. I just watched you die, she did not say, but she had a hard time pushing the image from her mind. The warmth of his brow beneath her moth reassured her, and the sight of him across the table. Real Lazlo, dream Lazlo, alive because of her. It sank in that she was seeing a vision of the murders she had averted, and whatever shame she might have felt at Minya’s tirade earlier, she didn’t feel it anymore.
Deftly, she took control of Azareen’s nightmare. She lightened the warrior’s weapons and slowed the onslaught while the silk sleigh drifted out of range. Finally, she evanesced the ghosts, starting with Azareen’s grandmother, infusing the dream with their sighs of release. The dead were free and the living were safe, and there was an end to the dream.
Sarai had finished her tea. The pot refilled her cup. She thanked it as though it were alive, and then her gaze lingered on the covered dishes. “So,” she inquired, flashing a glance Lazlo’s way. “What’s under there?”
42
God or Monster, Monster or God
Lazlo had only marginally more experience with cake than Sarai did, so this was one of the things they made up between them “however they liked.” It was a bit of a game. One would imagine the contents of a dish, and the other would uncover it with a small, dramatic flourish. They discovered that they could conjure splendid-looking confections, but were somewhat less successful when it came to flavor. Oh, the cakes weren’t bad. They were sweet at least—that much was easy. But it was a bland sweetness dreamed up by orphans who’d pressed their faces to sweetshop windows (metaphorically, at least), and never had a taste.
“They’re all alike,” lamented Sarai, after sampling a small forkful of her latest creation. It was a marvel to behold: three tall tiers glazed in pink with sugared petals, far too tall to have fit beneath the cover it was under. “A magic trick,” Lazlo had said, when it had seemed to grow with the lifting of the lid.