Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer #1)

by Laini Taylor

On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky. Her skin was blue, her blood was red.

She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and torch ginger buds rained out of her long hair. Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all. They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths came, frantic, and tried to lift her away. That was true. Only that.

shrestha (SHRES·thuh) noun When a dream comes true—but not for the dreamer.

None of us became monks to be nursemaids.” To which the child Lazlo replied, with fire in his soul, “And none of us became children to be orphans.”

He didn’t go in. Lazlo was always finding ways to slip off on his own, and his legs were always striped from the hazel switch that hung from a hook with his name on it. It was worth it. To get away from the monks and the rules and the chores and the life that pinched like tight shoes.

Forbid a man something and he craves it like his soul’s salvation, all the more so when that something is the source of incomparable riches.

These visions of freedom and plenty bewitched him. Certainly, they distracted from spiritual contemplation, but in the same way that the sight of a shooting star distracts from the ache of an empty belly.

Lazlo couldn’t have belonged at the library more truly if he were a book himself. In the days that followed—and then the months and years, as he grew into a man—he was rarely to be seen without one open in front of his face. He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn’t sleep at all. On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream. “Strange the dreamer,” they called him. “That dreamer, Strange.”

“Do as you will,” he said, half doom and half resignation. “Just take care. The books may be immortal, but we are not. You go down to the stacks one morning, and by the time you come up, you’ve a beard down to your belly and have never once composed a poem to a girl you met ice-skating on the Eder.” “Is that how one meets girls?” asked Lazlo, only half in jest. “Well, the river won’t freeze for months. I have time to rally my courage.”

“Life won’t just happen to you, boy,” he said. “You have to happen to it. Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.” “My spirit is fine.”

You’re young. Your spirit shouldn’t be ‘fine.’ It should be effervescent.” The “spirit” in question wasn’t the soul. Nothing so abstract. It was spirit of the body—the clear fluid pumped by the second heart through its own network of vessels, subtler and more mysterious than the primary vascular system. Its function wasn’t properly understood by science. You could live even if your second heart stopped and the spirit hardened in your veins. But it did have some connection to vitality, or “passion,” as Master Hyrrokkin said, and those without it were emotionless, lethargic. Spiritless.

What’s the point of being old if you can’t beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom?” “And what’s the point of being young if you can’t ignore all advice?”

As always, anything touching on the mysteries had a quickening effect on him, like a drumbeat pulling at his pulse—at both his pulses, blood and spirit, the rhythms of his two hearts interwoven like the syncopation of two hands beating at different drums.

All his life, time had been passing in the only way he knew time to pass: unrushed and unrushable, as sands running through an hourglass grain by grain. And if the hourglass had been real, then in the bottom and neck—the past and the present—the sands of Lazlo’s life would be as gray as his robes, as gray as his eyes, but the top—the future—would hold a brilliant storm of color: azure and cinnamon, blinding white and yellow gold and the shell pink of svytagor blood. So he hoped, so he dreamed: that, in the course of time, grain by grain, the gray would give way to the dream and the sands of his life would run bright.

There was a stunning vitality to him, as though he breathed all the world’s air and only left enough for others by sheer benevolence.

Some men are born for great things, and others to help great men do great things. There’s no shame in it.” Lazlo could have laughed. What would Master Hyrrokkin say if he knew the help that Lazlo had already given the great golden godson? What would everyone say, those scholars who’d mocked him, if they knew a fairy tale had held the key to azoth?

It was midsummer, midmorning, in the full light of day. There were no books to hide behind, and no shadows—only Lazlo Strange in his worn gray robes, with his nose that had been broken by fairy tales, looking like the hero of no story ever told.

thakrar (THAH·krahr) noun The precise point on the spectrum of awe at which wonder turns to dread, or dread to wonder.

“Is this hell?” he asked, hoarse. Ruby laughed. “I wish,” she said. “Welcome to purgatory. Care for some soup?”

He was a good language teacher all around, mainly because he talked so much, but he was unreliable—as Lazlo had discovered early on when he’d asked Azareen, Eril-Fane’s second-in-command, what turned out to mean not “Can I help you with that?” but “Would you like to sniff my armpits?” She had declined.

You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.” “Beautiful and full of monsters?” “All the best stories are.”

“Dear girl, your credulity is as vast as this desert. One might get lost in it and never again encounter fact or reason.”

The mysteries of Weep had been music to his blood for as long as he could remember. This time tomorrow, they would be mysteries no longer. The end of wondering, he thought, but not of wonder. That was just beginning. He was certain of it.

And then… not nothing. Not something, either. Not yet, not quite. Just a feeling, growing inside her, and not a good one. At first, it had felt a little like holding in cruel words instead of speaking them—how they sit burning on the back of your tongue like a secret poison, ready to spew into the world. She held it in. She didn’t tell anyone. It grew stronger, heavier.

Fear was her medium, and nightmares her art.

It’s funny, how you can go years seeing only what you choose to see, and picking your outrage like you pick out a slip, leaving all the others hanging on their slim mesarthium dowel. If outrage were a slip, then for years Sarai had worn only the one: the Carnage.

“Hey, Tod, am I really seeing this?” he heard her call. “Or am I lost in my vast credulity?” And, a moment later: “What are you doing here, Tod? Don’t you know it’s rude to wander about in someone else’s credulity?” And then: “Is this fact or reason I’m encountering? Wait, no, it’s more demon bones.”

mahal (muh·HAHL) noun A risk that will yield either tremendous reward or disastrous consequence.

“Some men are born for great things, and others to help great men do great things.” He’d also said there was no shame in it, and Lazlo agreed. Still, was it too much to hope that the “man born for great things” should not turn out to be Thyon Nero? Anyone but him, thought Lazlo, laughing a little at his own pettiness.

“I’m so sorry,” said Lazlo, from the depths of both his hearts. Suheyla snapped out of whatever faraway, hollow place she was lost in. Her eyes sharpened back to smiling squints. “Ha,” she said. “Ten silver please.” And she held out her palm until he put the coin in it.

“What was that?” Lazlo asked him after they left. “That was fear,” Eril-Fane said simply. “But… fear of what?” Lazlo couldn’t comprehend it. “The citadel’s empty. What can there be to harm them?” Eril-Fane let out a slow breath. “Were you afraid of the dark as a child?” A chill snaked up Lazlo’s spine. He thought again of the crypt at the abbey, and the nights locked in with dead monks. “Yes,” he said simply. “Even when you knew, rationally, that there was nothing in it that could harm you.” “Yes.” “Well. We are all children in the dark, here in Weep.”

“For the same reason I helped you before,” said Lazlo. “And why was that?” Nero demanded. “Why did you, Strange?” Lazlo stared at him for a moment. The answer really couldn’t be simpler, but he didn’t think Thyon was equipped to believe it. “Because you needed it,” he said, and his words pulled a silence over them both.

Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it. Even if they hated you for it after, and punished you for it, and stole from you, and lied and mocked you? Even then? Lazlo had hoped that, of all the delegates, Thyon wouldn’t prove to be Weep’s savior, deliverer from shadow. But far greater than that hope was the hope that Weep would be delivered, by someone, even if it was him.

“We can go to the moon shop for another,” the dreamer offered. “If you like.” “Is there a moon shop? All right.” And so the dreamer and the goddess went shopping for a moon. It was like something out of a story. Well, it was like something out of a dream. Sarai followed them in a state of fascination, and they went into a tiny shop tucked under a bridge, leaving their creatures at the door. She stood outside the mullioned window, stroked the gryphon’s sleek feathered head, and suffered a pang of absurd envy. She wished it were she riding a gryphon and sorting through jeweler’s trays for just the right moon. There were crescents and quarters, gibbous and full, and they weren’t charms, they were moons—real miniature moons, cratered and luminous, as though lit by the rays of some distant star. Sarai/Isagol—the imposter, as Sarai was beginning to think of her—couldn’t decide between them, and so she took them all. The dreamer paid for them out of a silly sort of green brocade purse, and in the next instant they were gleaming at her wrist like a charm bracelet. The pair left the shop and remounted their creatures, Isagol holding up her bracelet so the moons tinkled like bells.

The logic that belonged to the real world had remained behind, like luggage on a dock. This world had a logic all its own, and it was fluid, generous, and deep.

“This,” he said, passing it to her, “is the villain that broke my nose.” When he released it into her hands, its weight almost made her drop it in the snow. “This?” she asked. “My first day as apprentice,” he said, rueful. “There was blood everywhere. I won’t disgust you by pointing out the stain on the spine.” “A book of fairy tales broke your nose,” she said, helpless not to smile at how wrong her first impression had been. “I supposed you were in a fight.” “More of an ambush, actually,” he said. “I was on tiptoe, trying to get it.” He touched his nose. “But it got me.” “You’re lucky it didn’t take your head off,” said Sarai, hefting it back to him. “Very lucky. I got enough grief for a broken nose. I’d never have heard the end of a lost head.” A small laugh escaped Sarai. “I don’t think you hear very much, if you lose your head.” Solemnly, he said, “I hope never to know.”

His opinion of her looks was simple. She was purely lovely. She had full cheeks and a sharp little chin and her mouth was damson-lush, lower lip like ripe fruit with a crease in the middle, and soft as apricot down. The corners of her smile, turned up in delight, were as neat as the tips of a crescent moon, and her brows were bright against the blue of her skin, as cinnamon as her hair.

Laini's descriptions are really something else.

What’s the point of being old if you can’t mortify the young?

Maybe it was the directness, or the sense of urgency, or maybe it was the slip of using come instead of go, but something shifted in his look, as though he were seeing her with new eyes. And he was. Dreams have their rhythms, their deeps and shallows, and he was caroming upward into a state of heightened lucidity. The left-behind logic of the real world came slanting down like shafts of sun through the surface of the sea, and he began to grasp that none of this was real. Of course he hadn’t actually ridden Lixxa through the Pavilion of Thought. It was all fugitive, evanescent: a dream. Except for her. She was neither fugitive nor evanescent. Her presence had a weight, depth, and clarity that nothing else did—not even Lixxa, and there were few things Lazlo knew better these days than the physical reality of Lixxa.

sathaz (SAH·thahz) noun The desire to possess that which can never be yours.

But their recipes could use a bit less magic and more reality. The imagination, as Lazlo had previously noted, is tethered in some measure to the known, and they were both sadly ignorant in matters of cake.

“What if it works, but my terrors come, too?” Lazlo shrugged. “We’ll chase them away, or else turn them into fireflies and catch them in jars.”

“I might be asleep, but this has still been the best night of my life.”

It might have been brief, but so much of a kiss—a first kiss, especially—is the moment before your lips touch, and before your eyes close, when you’re filled with the sight of each other, and with the compulsion, the pull, and it’s like… it’s like… finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one—like… spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That’s what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It’s a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane.

“What time is it?” he asked Ruza, glaring at the sky. Where it showed around the citadel’s edges, it was damnably bright and blue. He’d never felt anger at the sky before. Even the interminable days of the Elmuthaleth crossing had passed more quickly than this one. “Do I look like a clock?” inquired the warrior. “Is my face round? Are there numbers on it?” “If your face were a clock,” Lazlo reasoned slowly, “I wouldn’t ask you what time it was. I’d just look at you.” “Fair point,” admitted Ruza.

“Doesn’t involve destruction? That’s like me asking you not to be a mealy-mouthed poltroon.” Lazlo’s eyebrows shot up. “Poltroon?” “Look it up,” snapped Drave. Lazlo turned to Ruza. “Do you think I’m a poltroon?” he asked, the way a young girl might ask whether her dress was unflattering. “I don’t know what that is.” “I think it’s a kind of mushroom,” said Lazlo, who knew very well what poltroon meant. Really, he was surprised that Drave did. “You are absolutely a mushroom,” said Ruza. “It means ‘coward,’” said Drave. “Oh.” Lazlo turned to Ruza. “Do you think I’m a coward?” Ruza considered the matter. “More of a mushroom,” he decided. To Drave: “I think you were closer the first time.” “I never said he was a mushroom.” “Then I’m confused.”

“We’ll chase them away,” Lazlo had said, “or else turn them into fireflies and catch them in jars.” She tried it, and it worked, and at some point in the evening, she found herself striding through a dark wood in a Tizerkane breastplate, carrying a jar full of fireflies that had recently been ravids and Rasalas and even her mother. She held up the jar to light her way, and it lit her smile, too, fierce with triumph.

“The moon on a bracelet and the sun in a jar,” said Sarai. “We really wreak havoc on the heavens, don’t we?” Lazlo’s voice sank deeper in his throat. Smokier. Hungrier. “I expect the heavens will survive,” he said, and then he kissed her.

“Sarai,” he breathed against her cheek. He felt like a glass filled with splendor and luck. His lips curved into a smile. He whispered, “You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes,” and understood finally what that phrase meant.

What does the body know of chastity? Only what the mind insists upon,