Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

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.”

Lazlo owned nothing, not one single thing, but from the first, the stories felt like his own hoard of gold.

The monks kept a sharp eye on him, determined to keep him free of sin—and of joy, which, if not explicitly a sin, at least clears a path to it.

Lazlo couldn’t have belonged at the library more truly if he were a book himself.

He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant. His nose was broken by a falling volume of fairy tales his first day on the job, and that, they said, told you everything you needed to know about strange Lazlo Strange: head in the clouds, world of his own, fairy tales and fancy.

A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.”

“Bah! Girls are not a hibernal phenomenon.

“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.”

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?”

This was the first: that he would never see further proof of magic. The second: that he would never find out what had happened in Weep. The third: that he would always be as alone as he was now.

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.

Who had ever expended so much passion on a dream, only to stand helpless as it was granted to others? Others, moreover, who had expended no passion on it at all.

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. Or. No story yet told.

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

She confirmed that she had scaled the spire and entered through the oculus, but claimed she hadn’t come to steal. She was only practicing her juggling, she said. Wouldn’t anyone do the same?

“And women,” said Lazlo. “It’s a woeful species that’s all male.” “More like a nonexistent species,” remarked Calixte. “Men lacking both wombs and good sense.”

Lest you forget you are an abomination, here’s an old woman who’ll wail at the sight of you. Here’s a young man who’ll think he’s in hell. It did wonders for her sense of self.

She thought it was like the desert threave, a sand beast that could survive for years eating nothing but its own molted skin. Hate could do that, too—live off nothing but itself—but not forever. Like a threave, it was only sustaining itself until some richer meal came along. It was waiting for prey.

And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can. Sarai suspected that her mother, the goddess of despair, would not have approved.

For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions.

They hated the humans, but they also wanted to be them. They wanted to punish them, and they wanted to be embraced by them. To be accepted, honored, loved, like someone’s child. And since they couldn’t have any of it, it all took the form of spite. Anyone who has ever been excluded can understand what they felt, and no one has ever been quite so excluded as they.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Ruza. “Like what?” “Like I’m a beautiful book you’re about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.”

Suheyla was her name. Her hair was a cap of white, cropped short as a man’s, and her face was a perfect example of how someone can be beautiful without being beautiful.

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.

“Like a baby,” Sarai said breezily—by which of course she meant that she had woken frequently crying, but she didn’t feel the need to clarify the point.

“Well. We are all children in the dark, here in Weep.”

Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.

“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.”

He kissed her hand, then turned aside, nudging Lazlo with his elbow and loud-whispering, “What a perfectly delightful shade of blue,” as he took his leave.

And so Grief and Shame abided in adjoining rooms with the door shut between them, holding their pain in their arms instead of each other.

How had she gone her entire life without noticing the awkwardness of arms, the way they just hang there from your shoulders like links of meat in a shop window? She crossed them—artlessly, she felt, like some arm amateur taking the easy way out.

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.

Sarai stopped walking. “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.” She paused. Her voice grew heavy. “When they slaughter thirty babies in their cradles, they call it necessary.”

“It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented. And it was love,”

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.”

But scientific method was Thyon’s religion, and it dictated the repeat of experiments—even of failures.

He’d learned, the moment he glimpsed what lay beyond the Cusp, that the realm of the unknowable was so much bigger than he’d guessed. He wanted to discover how much bigger. With her. But first… first he just really, really, really wanted to kiss her.

Not really, perhaps, but truly. That is to say, they might not have really kissed, but they had truly kissed. Everything about this night was true in a way that transcended their bodies.

“The hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented.”

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.

“The moon on a bracelet and the sun in a jar,” said Sarai. “We really wreak havoc on the heavens, don’t we?”

They sampled it, and it did, but only for a few seconds. And there were beetles that could chew gemstones better than any jeweler could cut them, and silence trumpets that, when blown, blasted a blanket of quiet loud enough to smother thunder.

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.

How gently he held the dead thing that had been her.

He was a god, and she was a ghost. A page had turned. A new story was beginning. You had only to look at Lazlo to know it would be brilliant. And Sarai could not be in it.

There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.

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