Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

The war, of course, did not content itself with soldiers.

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 listened the way a cactus drinks rain.

Forbid a man something and he craves it like his soul’s salvation,

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.

He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story.

He knew that, but the dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.

“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.”

As a boy at the abbey, stories had been Lazlo’s only wealth. He was richer now. Now he had books.

It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming?

war, like fortune, doesn’t touch all folk with the same hand.

“Mm-hm,” agreed Sparrow. “In the same way that being eternally tortured by demons is more ‘interesting’ than not being eternally tortured by demons.”

He had crossed continents and drunk starlight from rivers without names. There was no going back from that.

“Well, no one said not to deface the mountain.”

Lazlo felt as though the top of his head were open and the universe had dropped a lit match in.

The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.

Those words were like . . . they were like seeing a bloody knife. You didn’t need to have witnessed the stabbing to understand what it meant.

Did they not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and hers, mingled together, could . . . countervail each other?

Her father had saved his people and destroyed himself.

As strong as he looked, inside he was a ruin, or perhaps a funeral pyre,

This was his remorse. It choked him like weeds and rot and colonies of vermin, clogging and staining him, stagnant and fetid, so that nothing so noble as love, or—gods above—forgiveness, could ever claim space in him.

To see her curled up like that and skinned of all her armor was like seeing a heart flayed from a body, laid raw on a slab, and labeled Grief.

It was funny, the notion that he could frighten her. The Muse of Nightmares, tormentor of Weep, spooked from a dream by a sweet librarian?

“Well, you’re a singularly unhorrible demon, if I may say so.” “Thank you,” Sarai said with play sincerity, laying a modest hand across her breast. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.” “Well, I have at least a hundred nicer things to say and am only prevented by embarrassment.”

“You think good people can’t hate?” she asked. “You think good people don’t kill?” Her breathing hitched, and she realized she’d crushed Lazlo’s flower in her hand. She dropped the petals into the water. “Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.”

“It’s a violence that can never be forgiven,” she said, her voice husky with emotion. “Some things are too terrible to forgive.

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.”

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.”

“How long has it been since you’ve slept?” She hardly knew. “Four days? I’m not sure.” At his look of alarm, she forced a smile. “I sleep a little,” she said, “in between nightmares.” “But that’s mad. You know you can actually die of sleep deprivation.” Her answering laugh was grim. “I didn’t know that, no. You don’t happen to know how long it takes, do you? So I can plan my day?” She meant it as a joke, but there was an edge of desperation to the question.

“I only mean,” he rushed to explain, “if you’re afraid of your own dreams, you’re welcome here in mine.”

As casual as they strove to seem, they both felt something momentous take shape between them, and—though she didn’t for a minute question his intentions—something intimate, too.

“Do you trust me?” he asked. It wasn’t even a question. She felt safer here than she ever had anywhere.

“Have you no shame? Lying there all silky and wanton, having good dreams while our lives fall apart?” Sarai had plenty of shame. Minya might as well have demanded Have you no blood? or Have you no spirit? because shame as good as ran in her veins. But . . . not right now. “I think you’re a fairy tale.” Funny how light she felt without it. “I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite.”

But just because the past is blood doesn’t mean the future must be, too.

“You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes,”

He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take.

Her soul would go, too. The world would resorb it. Energy was never lost, but she would be lost, and her memories with her, and all her longing, and all her love. Her love.

Here at last were her real arms, and they would never hold him. Her real lips, and they would never kiss him. He curled over her as though he could protect her, but it was far too late for that.

He couldn’t touch her without shattering her, and so—as Lazlo had told Sarai—he had made peace with the impossible. He took what he could get.

Lazlo had loved Sarai as a dream, and he would love her as a ghost as well.