Dreamstrider (2 page)

Hesse snorted. “Don’t be foolish, child. What you offer is somewhat different.”

Brandt stepped forward. “Anyone can be a spy,” he said. “But no one can use the dreamworld like you can. What you’re going to do is something much better than basic spy work.”

“No. I’m afraid you’re all mistaken. I’m just a tunneler. And—and I really need to return.” I looked down, face burning, and found the crumpled paper lily in my hand.

Hesse’s grip eased on my shoulders. “But Livia, you can be so much more. I’m going to teach you how.” Hesse smiled then. “I’m going to teach you to dreamstride.”

Part One

DREAMS

Chapter One

I’ll never get used to those first few moments of dreamstriding, when I open my host’s eyes and look down at my own body crumpled before me. Today, it’s in the hay of a stable hundreds of fathoms from home: fear tightens my jaw even in sleep, honey curls spill over my ruddy, freckled shoulders, and my chest flutters with shallow breaths I no longer control. I want nothing more than to burrow back into my shed skin.

But before I can return to myself, Brandt and I have a mission to complete. Everything depends on me and my skill.

While the Ministry employs dozens of spies like Brandt, each better trained and with sharper reflexes than me, when the mission is this critical, I’m the one person they can’t afford not to use. I’ve endangered lives with my clumsiness, blown informants’ covers with my slow wits, but this cursed gift forever guarantees me a spot on the team. Yet I wish anyone else could have been given this skill. It pulled me from the sewage-laced tunnels I was born to and gave me a purpose, the life I’d longed for, but the weight of failure hangs heavy on my soul. I wish I could give this gift to someone more deserving.

But there is no one else. I call myself a dreamstrider because there are no other dreamstriders to protest.

While my body sleeps, I inhabit the body of General Cold Sun, a top military commander in Barstadt’s neighboring kingdom across the southern strait. The Land of the Iron Winds. We’ve had sources report that the Land of the Iron Winds is preparing to attack Barstadt, but we’ve not been about to gather proof or plans. And so this is what all of Hesse’s research into the dreamworld led to: while the general’s consciousness sleeps in Oneiros, I can fill his skin, walking and talking as if I’m him.

At first, Cold Sun’s skin hangs awkwardly around my soul like a wet shift, impossible to shrug into place. His joints move all wrong, like he’s a crude marionette, and I’m not used to seeing the world from his height—the tops of doorframes loom dangerously close, and I have a view of the cowlicked crown of Brandt’s head. But slowly, I adjust. I steal into the gaps between his heartbeats and the rhythm of his breath. I ease into the general’s muscles, his bones, his very marrow. For the next few hours, while the mothwood smoke we piped into his carriage keeps his consciousness dormant in Oneiros, his body is mine.

“Oh! Livia! Why, I can hardly tell a difference.” Brandt grins up at me as he wriggles into the valet’s outfit.

I try to twist General Cold Sun’s face into a scowl, but it quickly breaks into a grin. “A flattering look for me, don’t you think?” My words grate through the general’s vocal cords like coarse sand. I help Brandt scatter hay over my abandoned body, covering up that cold, vacant face, as well as the unconscious general’s valet, whose clothes Brandt’s now wearing. “Let’s find out what the Commandant’s planning.”

Brandt leads us from the stables, and in only a few paces, his confidence melts into the guise of the meek, hunched little manservant we’d drugged inside the general’s carriage. Unlike me, he can become someone else without leaving himself behind. But this is what it means to dreamstride—this is the freedom Hesse promised me. I hold the tether from General Cold Sun’s body. So long as I hold that tether, my soul can control his body in the waking world while his soul slumbers harmlessly in the dreamworld.

As we round the stables, Brandt halts with a sharp inhale. A towering fortress of black metal juts from the earth before us, turrets like claws raking through the rust-hued sky. We’ve reached the Citadel, the seat of power for the Commandant—the supreme commander, general, and for all intents and purposes, god—of the Land of the Iron Winds. It smells sharp like a smith’s furnace, molten and a little bit like blood.

“Now to see if our spies were lying to us or not,” Brandt says. Foreigners are barred from entering the Land, and all subjects are forbidden from leaving. Everything we know about the Citadel and the Commandant was smuggled out of the Land at great cost. Entering it terrifies me, but Brandt is electrified. He was born for this—the chase, the subterfuge, the danger. I can almost see the plans spinning like a weaver’s loom in his mind. I have no such gift. If I were in control of my own stomach, I’d probably be emptying it right now.

The Citadel’s front entrance is cut into the vertical ridges of the fortress, a heavy portcullis raised over it, and guards on either side. They shift their weight as we approach, halberds swinging from hand to hand like great pendulums. The glowing doorway behind them casts their faces in shadow and stretches their horned-helmet silhouettes across the slate path.

“Compatriots,” the first guard barks. “Speak to the winds, so the trees may filter the truth of your words.”

I barely manage to conceal a shudder. We’d studied the reports about the speaking style of the Land of the Iron Winds, but it still gives me chills. “I present General Cold Sun, whose loyalty to the Commandant no winds can erode.” Brandt’s Iron Winds accent is flawless—airy as a loaf of Kruger’s bread and duller than dirt. He keeps his eyes on the ground and his hands clasped before him.

“That is for the Iron Winds to decide,” the guard says. I can’t read his expression—in part because of the failing light, and in part because our Ministry instructors stressed that a general should not make eye contact with a mere guard. “The Commandant is expecting you. Please proceed.”

My racing thoughts echo through the general’s hollow body as we cross the threshold, and I sense it in Brandt as well. In each of our missions, we reach a moment when we’ve bound ourselves to the whims of fate, and the only way out is to survive whatever lies ahead. I used to think Brandt and I functioned best in this moment—our strengths harmonizing, his hand ready to catch mine in our intricate waltz that has foiled gang leaders and corrupt aristocrats. But since the Stargazer Incident, I can only pray that we work so well this evening. I know Brandt can play his part. But the question is, can I play mine?

The portcullis slams down, and an intricate locking system clicks and whirs into place behind us. As we pass through the hall, I glance up at the vaulted ceiling paneled with thousands of mirrors, all throwing back the reflection of General Cold Sun with Brandt beside him. I can see other figures, too, lurking in the corners—the tufted hats of hidden guards, tucked behind the corridor’s ribs.

Focus, Livia.
One misstep and I’ll get Brandt killed, and my soul trapped in Oneiros, far away from my body’s tether—and the Nightmare Wastes are a deadly prospect I’d rather not dwell on. Brandt raises his head, breaking character just long enough to give me an encouraging nod. It’s time.

Now, to figure out where in the nightmares we’re supposed to go.

I cast my thoughts back into the forests of Oneiros. When I am in another’s body, my consciousness straddles two worlds; my subject, however, stays asleep in the dreamworld. General Cold Sun’s consciousness threads through the woods in the form of a calm, cool stream. As long as he stays asleep, his body is vacant enough for me to occupy. But to find the information we need, I’ll have to disturb his slumber. I can’t press too deep into his memories—I have to let them trickle out naturally. I’ve practiced this countless times. I can get away with small ripples—he’ll remember the glimpses of wakefulness as only a hazy memory—but every disturbance will tug at his consciousness, and I risk waking him up.

If the general wakes up, he can cast me out of his body, leaving my soul untethered in Oneiros. And if that happens … I say a quick prayer to the Dreamer to protect me and dangle my fingertips in the stream.

General Cold Sun’s thoughts trickle past me, chaotic, like the illogical knotted yarn of a mind on the edge of sleep. I sink my hand deeper into the stream and spread my fingertips wide. I have to sift through the thoughts and bring them to order.

I channel General Cold Sun’s consciousness and let his deeply ingrained habits take over. His instinct is to charge down the hallway before us, and I follow his lead: he remains oblivious of the guards, paying no mind to the strange bared-teeth sharp corners and polished black stone of the Citadel. With Cold Sun’s guidance, I stride with purpose straight for the compound’s heart, focused only on the Commandant himself.

“Come,’’ I bark. The voice from the general’s mouth startles me, harsher than I’d intended. Brandt falls into step behind me. My feet—General Cold Sun’s feet—know the way, and his thoughts lap at my fingertips to guide me.

Our journey through the Citadel coils on itself like the roots of a tree. I quickly lose my sense of direction, but the general’s instincts seem to be carrying us along the right path. We approach a suite of guards flanking double doors.

I clear my throat, waiting for them to open the door. Brandt fidgets beside me. I glance toward him, about to scowl, until I realize he’s trying to prompt me. Oh, yes—they want the passphrase. I dip deeper into the general’s stream of thoughts within Oneiros to coax the passphrase from him. The water runs faster the deeper I sink into it. “You shelter the Commandant as a roof shelters us from snow,” I say.

“But even roofs can collapse, General. We shall never fall.” The captain of the guard snaps his boots together and stands aside.

The heavy doors creak open.

Thick shadows fill the hall before us, punctured only by wrought-iron chandeliers, their chains twisted around columns like vines. The smell of cold metal washes over us. At the far end of the chamber, on a raised platform, a figure sits bathed in candlelight. We stride toward him in near-darkness. No, not one figure—two, but the second springs away from the first and disappears down the platform in a flurry of sparkling gems. Sapphires, diamonds, flecks of silver.

Brandt and I glance at each other, my suspicion mirrored on his face for only a moment before he resumes his role. Was that a Barstadter who just slipped away? Our aristocrats stud their faces with jewels, cultivating elaborate, swirling designs on their forehead, cheeks, and throat as they accumulate power and wealth. Perhaps we aren’t the only Barstadters in The Land of the Iron Winds after all. The very thought chills me through.

We’re too far away to make out the Commandant’s face, but we know what to expect from our informants’ sketches and smuggled bits of artwork: cut-glass cheekbones and a pointed, gaunt jaw. Yet when we reach the base of the platform, we find a soft-faced man not five years my senior. I flinch, struggling to keep the general calm despite my shock. This young man with the faintest tuft of a goatee on his bone-pale chin can’t possibly be the same Commandant who’s ruled the Land of the Iron Winds since he seized power thirty years ago and enforced the Iron Winds code of strength and victory at all costs. My mind churns over the possibilities—maybe he overthrew the previous Commandant, or maybe he’s the first Commandant’s son.

Whatever the case, we’ve been trained to lure information from the wrong man.

“General,” he says in an uneven tone. “You walk against the wind, but you do not fall.”

General Cold Sun’s pulse starts to canter. Not falling to the wind sounds like a good thing, but the Commandant is looking at me like there’s something I should do. Am I supposed to be kneeling? I glance toward Brandt. He’s not urging me to kneel, so I stand as tall as I can and try to remember our training. I’ve rehearsed for this moment even if the Commandant’s identity has changed.

“I shall never fall with the Iron Winds at my back,” I say. The general’s voice ricochets through the rows of columns, then echoes back toward us in the dead air. The Commandant stands unmoving, unblinking, and panic cinches tight around me. What have I done? Everything in me wants to abandon the mission and flee, but I force myself to hold the general’s breath and wait for a response.

Slowly, the young Commandant smiles, then charges down the stairs to grip my hands in his own. “You are early,” he says, before giving both my hands a hearty shake with his. He’s much shorter than Cold Sun and pudgy in the midsection. No, this is certainly not the old, gaunt Commandant.

“I did not wish to keep my Commandant waiting when victory is so close,” I say. The Commandant lifts his eyebrows for a fraction of a moment—have I misspoken again? We were told the old Commandant demanded complete and utter subservience at every turn, but maybe this Commandant distrusts excessive posturing. My head hurts just considering the possibilities. These personality games are Brandt’s realm. I know his instincts won’t fail us; that boy could talk our way out of the grips of Nightmare himself. But Brandt can’t pose as the general for me.

The Commandant holds one arm out to his side. “Come, then. Let us waste no more time.”

I climb the dais on wobbly legs. The barrel-chested General Cold Sun must weigh three times what my body does, and though walking usually works out the kinks, stairs are another matter entirely. Sweat builds under the general’s armpits; in Oneiros, the stream is flowing faster now. I pray to the Dreamer that Cold Sun’s slumber will hold.

The Commandant escorts me to a low wooden table at one end of the platform, where a scroll painted in shades of brown and black is weighted down across its surface. It takes me a moment to recognize the design as a map of the Itinerant Sea, where it swoops up the western edge of the Land of the Iron Winds and sneaks through the narrow strait that separates the Land from the Barstadt Empire in the north. Black iron figurines in the shapes of horses’ heads, pikemen, war vessels, and cannons line up along the Commandant’s edge of the table.