Dreamstrider (23 page)

“But what about the priest?” He reaches toward me but only succeeds in overturning his cot. He spills across the floor with a horrendous clatter.

“Hexers!” Jorn shrieks, leaping to his feet. He crouches into a fighting stance with flat palms raised before him.

“Great work. You’ve frightened the nasty Hexers off,” I tell Jorn. “Go back to sleep.”

Brandt narrows his eyes at me as Jorn crawls back into his cot. “That awful … wave. It was like a cloud of fear. I can’t even describe it properly. Liv, if that’s what I think it is…”

Nightmare. I want desperately for him to be wrong—for both of us to be. But I feel the grim slam of terror hitting me, just like that oppressive wall, just like the pounding wings, just like the maddening chants. I can’t wish it or dream it away. I only hope the Shapers can find a way to contain it while we seek answers in Birnau.

“Lady Twyne’s death is only the beginning, I fear.” I swallow hard. “Something evil has been unleashed in Oneiros. We have to reach Birnau in time to stop whatever comes next.”

Chapter Eighteen

By the time we enter the River of Bronze Sunsets, the clipper has been thoroughly transformed to a Land of the Iron Winds fishing vessel, complete with a hold stuffed with the anemic fish we managed to scoop up a few hours before dawn. We wear simple, loose tunics and trousers in drab blues and grays, and we’ve lightened our skin by rubbing talcum powder into it, like Brandt and I did last time in our carriage drivers’ costumes. It won’t hold up to close scrutiny, but we’ll hail the dock patrols outside Birnau from a distance. Entering the City of Sacred Secrets, Birnau, will be another matter entirely.

“Just smile and wave,” Brandt coaches us through gritted teeth, as we sail under the high-spanning bridges of the fringe town. “Smile like it’s a damned honor to toil away for the Commandant’s pleasure.”

We dock between two shabby fishing boats, paint long ago peeled from their hulls, and the dock officials busy themselves with confiscating our entire haul for later distribution, as the official line goes. Jorn would stick out for his towering height, but he adjusts, adopting the same stooping hunch of the rest of the villagers. We shuffle through the streets with heads down and ears alert.

In Barstadt, even the tunnelers do not live in poverty such as this. The Land of the Iron Winds’ citizens may catch a glimpse of the sun here and there, but there is nowhere else for them to aspire toward. When I was a tunneler, the dream of citizenship papers kept everyone warm at night—someone always had a cousin who knew someone else who’d toiled and saved and bought their way into daylight. We could see somewhere higher than where we were, and dreamed of climbing toward it someday—enough sunlight trickled into the tunnels to fuel our dreams. Here, the Commandant and his generals tower over each town in profiles carved from onyx monoliths, high above everyone else. There is nowhere for them to aspire toward. There is the Commandant, and everyone else, toiling to keep him afloat.

The iron and black glass temple of Birnau glitters on the horizon. It’s styled similar to the Citadel, only slightly less ostentatious. Where the Citadel is meant for the Commandant alone, this city is where his favored (though not entirely trusted) councilors, generals, and concubines can be stashed away and called upon when he wishes their company or guidance. It seems no matter what street we follow through the village, we wind up facing that sealed city. While I can’t take my eyes off the strange spectacle, the villagers around us take great pains not to look its way. I force myself to follow suit.

Though this village looks designed to support the fishing industry, we pass no markets, no fishmongers. The buildings are little more than shacks formed from scavenged sheets of lumber nailed together in odd shapes. No one loiters in the streets; they shuffle past in battered boots, big toes sticking out, or no shoes at all.

No, I am mistaken—a pair of eyes glitters in the gap between two huts. I don’t dare look for long, but I see a man’s silhouette propped against the unsteady wall, watching our group intently from inside a stiff woolen coat. My throat tightens. Have we been marked as outsiders? The reward for information in the Land of the Iron Winds is high, far more valuable to the suffering people than the cost of five strangers’ lives.

“Here we are,” Edina utters under her breath, “our contact.” She leads us down a dirt path between two shacks. An old woman greets her by throwing back the tattered curtain draped over the front of her hut.

“Five’s too many,” the old woman says. She slips the words into the gaps between the sobs and moans around us, lets them ride the breeze like we aren’t even there. Her mouth is mostly pink with swollen gums. What teeth she’s kept stand like stubborn gravestones, refusing to surrender to nature’s course.

“Well, it’s how many we have. So you’ll have to get all five of us inside.” Brandt matches her cadence flawlessly, like he’s throwing the words from a carriage window when he thinks no one’s looking. No one can remember our presence here.

She makes a fuss of digging through her scant belongings, all of them some shade of gray or tan or filth. Knitting needles, unevenly spun wool, something that might have once been an apple smuggled in from Dreamer knows where. “Space for two in the fish cart. No more.”

“That wasn’t our arrangement. What about the guards? Can we replace some of them with our own?” Edina asks. Jorn reaches for the dagger hilts tucked just under his sagging tunic.

“Nah.” The word whistles through two crooked teeth. “Use General Sly Fox, maybe. Always too big of an entourage. Easy to slip into their group.”

Edina starts to protest, but Brandt nods once, decisively. “We can work with that—promise,” he adds, the last to Edina. He turns back to the old woman. “General Sly Fox. When is he due to reach Birnau?”

“She,” the woman corrects. “Noon, at the latest. She’s got her own chef, concubines. Men, women both. Good for you to disguise as.”

“You’re changing the plans at the last minute?” Edina asks. “You assured me you’d made arrangements—”

The woman meets her gaze, sharp as a lance. “Only if you want inside Birnau.”

“All right,” Brandt says. “We’ll do it.”

“It might not be safe,” Edina whispers to him.

Brandt laughs. “Nothing about this is safe. But we have to try, don’t we?”

And so we find ourselves in the carriage house on the outskirts of town, the tavern cleaned out in advance of General Sly Fox’s arrival, with an air bladder full of mothwood smoke. Once they arrive to shake the road dust from their cloaks and primp for Birnau, Jorn will flood their rooms with smoke. Edina paid the old woman in grain and gold both, but she just shrugged at her, as if neither is of any use to her. She has a point. Gold can’t be easily spent in a place like this—where could she have come across it, and what would she buy, anyway? And the soil in the fields is cakey and shattered across the top like a broken mirror as far as the eye can see. No grain is stubborn enough to sprout through that.

Hooves tear through the hard crust out front; the main door beneath us opens and finally slams. Dozens of feet pound up the staircase outside our cramped room.

Brandt’s hand taps me on the knee; I meet his gaze.
Ready?
he mouths. I think of the darkness we encountered back in Oneiros, and I’m sure he’s remembering the same. I force myself to nod back. His smile makes it worth it to try.

Jorn positions the bladder’s mouth at the base of the adjoining door and, at Brandt’s nod, begins to pump.

Thump, thump, thump.
Multiple bodies hit the floor in the other room.

We tie scarves over our mouths and open the door.

“How long do you think you can stay in her skin?” Brandt asks me as we survey our options: the general herself, her sleek black hair twisted in an elaborate braid that meanders across her scalp like a scar. Three courtesans—one man, two women—in perilously revealing garb. A valet, whom I immediately mark as Brandt’s likely stand-in. Two bodyguards. One is sure to suit Jorn.

“Three hours at the most. Any longer than that and she’s sure to slip out of Oneiros.” I swallow. Three hours will barely get us inside Birnau and to the assembly. “If you can keep dosing her with the mothwood, though, I may be able to stretch it.”

Vera looks like she could chew through iron. “Have you ever tried it before?”

I give a tiny shake, unable to force myself to say no aloud. Vera rolls her eyes; Jorn grunts to himself. “Haven’t you cost us enough?” Vera asks. “Don’t risk our lives with an experiment.”

My face stings as if slapped. She’s right, and I know it, but there has to be a way to do this. “Hesse always said it could be done. According to his calculations—”

“But no one’s ever done it,” Edina says.

“We’re short on time,” Jorn tells us. He’s already donned one inert bodyguard’s costume and tied up both bodyguards—one stripped, one not—and is setting to work on the courtesans with Vera.

I look Edina hard in the eye, trying to summon up some of Marez’s steel. “I can do it—I have to at least try. If we re-administer the mothwood to Sly Fox’s body every three hours, and if you can add a few more drops of the dreamwort solution to my body’s tongue at the same time, there’s no reason we can’t make it work.”

Edina nods after a heartbeat’s hesitation. “We’ll bring your body with us, then. Get to work.”

“No. Absolutely not,” Vera says. “I know you’re all right at organizing our missions from afar—”

“You really think I’m all right?” Edina asks, a faint smirk on her lips.

Vera’s face turns brilliant red; she folds her arms with a huff. “—But it’s different in the field. You haven’t seen what Livia’s like, the poor decisions she makes.”

“First-hand? No. I haven’t. But I’ve read every single one of the reports.” Edina grips a fistful of her skirts. “I know that every one of you bares some of the blame for what transpired with the Stargazers. And I
also
know that every one of you, Livia included, has shown remarkable skill at making the best of bad circumstances. I trust you—every one of you. Perhaps you should try doing the same.”

I’m dumbstruck by Edina’s outburst; I shrink back, desperate to get everyone’s attention off me. Brandt’s eyebrows are lodged high behind his bangs as he looks from Edina to me—I can’t tell if he’s impressed or intimidated.

Vera just nudges her toe against the floor, but manages a sharp nod. “Very well,” she says icily. “Let’s be on our way.”

Marez would agree with Edina, I think. He would urge me not to stay shackled to my past. I have to prove myself.

No sooner does the vial touch my lips than I’m plunged into Oneiros, on a mountaintop this time. Snow speckles my hands as I stretch them out before me, but the cold doesn’t reach me. The only cold I fear is the cold of the Nightmare Wastes. But I don’t have time to fear them. I can’t let down my team. Even if Lady Twyne or whomever she worked with has unlocked some horrible way to reawaken Nightmare, surely the Dreamer would put an end to it. He has to.

I cannot spare a thought for it. There’s too much to be done now.

The mountains slope downward into the wool of fog. Am I meant to find the general’s consciousness down there, somewhere? She should be right here beside me, but all I can see is the meager outline of the mountain range, as if I’m peering through thin vellum. I stagger forward, and the snow crunches beneath me like an avalanche. There’ll be no sneaking up on the general’s consciousness in these conditions.

I raise one bare foot, willing away my boots, then wiggle my toes into the snow. It parts softly; the snow is soft and powdery around me. Gradually, painstakingly, I make my way perpendicular to the mountain slope.

Then I catch sight of a little burrow, a whisper of a shade darker than the surrounding snow. Two ears peek out of the darkness, tipped in downy coal, on an otherwise snow-colored body. A fox. The wind quiets around me as I concentrate on the fox’s breathing, which comes in tiny, fitful breaths, characteristic of exciting dreams filled with giving chase to rabbits across an empty tundra.

My hand trembles as I stretch it out before me and lower it into the den. I must use the gentlest touch imaginable. Can’t wake the little kit. My fingertips come to rest on the soft patch between its ears. The fox quivers, as if startled; I hold my breath and pray to the Dreamer it won’t awaken. But then it settles against me, welcoming my warmth into its rest.

We open our eyes.

Back in the hotel room, Brandt staggers back from me with a weighty breath. “Bloody dreams, Livia, what took so long? Is everything all right?”

“Sorry. She was a sneaky thing,” I tell him, though I’m sure the words sound mushy as porridge. I can’t tell, myself. My left ear is nothing but a hollow echo, like the distant chatter of insects outside my window at night. “Oh. She’s deaf in one ear.”

“Which ear?” Brandt asks, and I motion to the left. “All right. Jorn, always guard her left side. We’ll manage, as long as we don’t have to orchestrate a terrifying escape route.”

The fox twitches in Oneiros, as if recoiling from a bad dream—or memory. I stroke the crest of the fox’s head to calm her.
Sleep, sly fox, sleep.
“I’ll play it carefully—let’s be on our way.”

My limp body gets stuffed unceremoniously into the carriage; someone has already dressed it in a courtesan’s gown, with a deep slash of exposed skin from my collarbone down between my breasts to my navel, another slit running up one thigh. Vera’s dressed in a matching costume, gauze artfully wrapped around her scarred arm, while Edina wears a subtle servant’s uniform.

The horses gallop toward the sealed city’s gates. None of us dares to speak, or even breathe too deeply, lest we break whatever spell has molded us into the shape of a credible Iron Winds entourage. As the saying in this strange land goes, the winds will surely scatter us like dust for our falseness, our heresy. We will bend and break.

Brandt deals directly with the sealed city’s guards, producing papers that he’s dug up from Dreamer knows where. I hear something of a scuffle outside the carriage, but finally the guardsman peeks his head inside to find Vera coiled around General Sly Fox like a viper, hands on either of my thighs as she coos nonsense words at me. I offer the guard a stern look as I scratch the fox’s ears inside Oneiros.