Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

Lazlo had to laugh. The delight filled him up. He thought he’d never laughed like this before, from this new place in him where so much delight had been waiting in reserve.

he beheld now the god who had stolen so much—not just sons and daughters, though that was the dark heart of it. Skathis had stolen the sky from the city, and the city from the world. What tremendous, insidious power that took, and here was the god himself.

Just a few minutes earlier he had thought, nonchalant, that he could catch Sarai’s terrors like fireflies in a jar. Now the enormity of them reached out to catch him.

All the fear washed away like dust in a rainstorm.

“Sarai,” he said, and if ravids purred it might sound something like the way he said her name. “You must see. I want you in my mind.”

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.

The shared dream ripped right down the middle and spilled them both out.

her fingers reached wonderingly to trace her own lips, where a moment before his had been. 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.

He had to convince himself that liberating a silk sleigh and flying forthwith to the citadel was not a viable option.

he had more to recommend him than the others did, starting with an open mind. And open hearts. Sarai was up there. Her life was at stake. So Lazlo didn’t ask himself What could I do? that morning as the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon dawned in the city of Weep, but “What will I do?”

Night couldn’t come soon enough, and he was sure she felt the same. And next time he wouldn’t wait until the precise strike of dawn before drawing her close.

Even as he read the stories in Miracles for Breakfast, he was mining it for clues. It was science he was after—traces of science, anyway, like dust shaken from a tapestry of wonder.

In the citadel and in the city, Sarai and Lazlo each felt the tug of the other, like a string fixed between their hearts.

If only they could gather up the strings and wind themselves nearer, nearer, until finally meeting in the middle.

She watched the squares of sunlight that her windows threw on the floor. They ought to have moved with the angle of the sun, but she was sure they were frozen in place. Of course today would be the day the sun got stuck in the sky.

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.

Lazlo felt a… fizz of uneasiness. A bored explosionist was one thing. A bored, disgruntled explosionist was another. But then the conversation took a turn that drove all thoughts of Drave from his head.

dripping with river water and dolor,

To Ruby, thoughts were pointless if there was no one to tell them to the instant you had them.

now he was simply amazed by the turn things could take between two people, and the feelings that could grow while you distracted yourself from the end of the world.

“What a dilemma.” He sat on the edge of the bare bed frame. “Be less amazing, and stay alive. Or be amazing, and get scorched.”

Ruby’s skin was not. It was hot—like a summer day or a really good kiss.

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.

why do you look like that?” “Like what?” Minya studied her, her flat gaze roving up and down so that Sarai felt stripped. Seen, but not in a good way. Minya pronounced, as though diagnosing a disease, “Happy.”

Please. I know you’re angry with me, but please try to open your mind.” “Why? So you can put things in it?

Talking to Minya was like getting slapped in the face.

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

Lazlo deserved to be spoken of with pride.

He understood one thing in the swirl of creatures: Sarai was waiting for him.

“I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.”

I dreamed of you.” “Oh? I hope I was well behaved.” “Not too well behaved.” Coyly, she added, “No better than this morning, when the sun so rudely rose.” She meant the kiss; he understood. “The sun. I still haven’t forgiven it.”

“I want to catch it in a jar and put it away with the fireflies.” “The moon on a bracelet and the sun in a jar,” said Sarai. “We really wreak havoc on the heavens, don’t we?”

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

She touched the tip of her nose to the tip of his. Shaped by fairy tales, she thought, which made it better than every straight nose in the world.

The notes he took were habit and comfort, as though his tidy writing could transform mystery into sense.

The new tests proved what Thyon already knew—not what he understood or believed, but what he knew, in the way that a man who falls on his face knows the ground.

Sarai was standing before him with her hands on her hips. “Moth killer,” she admonished him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really loved that moth, too. That one was my favorite.” “Better keep your voice down. This one will get its feelings hurt and fly away.” “I mean this one’s my favorite,” he revised. “I promise not to smoosh it.” “Be sure that you don’t.”

They were both smiling like fools. They were so full of happiness, and Dreamer’s Weep was colored by it. If only real Weep could be so easily set right.

It felt like the narrowest of escapes, being sent to the library that day so long ago. It felt like the moment the silk sleigh crossed some invisible barrier and the ghosts began to dissolve.

Sarai opened her eyes again, feeling dreamy and obscure, like a sentence half translated into a beautiful new language.

Skathis might have been an artist, but he’d been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.

“Dreamsmith. I like the sound of that. And you’re one, too, of course. We should set up a tent in the marketplace.”

I wanted to come down and bring Sparrow and Ruby and Feral and Minya and live in it, just the way you dreamed it.” “It was all the cake, wasn’t it? Goddess bait.”

“It made me think it was impossible,” he said. He traced her cheek with his finger. “But I’ve thought things were impossible before, and so far, none of them actually were.

The dream had pulled him down so deep that he was underneath thought, submerged in a place of pure feeling—and what feeling.

“No,” he gasped, surfacing fast to be spilled back into reality like someone beached by the crash of a wave. The dream receded and left him there, in his bed, alone—stranded in the merciless intransigence of reality, and it was as bleak a truth to his soul as the nothingness of the Elmuthaleth.

The two spoke in their own language, as meaningless to her as drums or birdsong.

“Azoth distilled from my spirit had no effect on it at all. So I ask you again, Lazlo Strange… who are you?”

“Is that it, then? Have you spent your wrath?” “Yes,” said Sparrow, dusting off her palms. “It was one-plum wrath.” “How sad for Feral. He was only worth one plum. Won’t he mope when we tell him.”

Who are you? He imagined that other people had a place in the center of themselves—right in the center of themselves—where the answer to that question resided. Himself, he had only an empty space.