(eng) Laini Taylor - Strange the Dreamer 01 by Strange the Dreamer

Author:Strange the Dreamer [Dreamer, Strange the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The heart of the citadel was empty of ghosts. For the first time in a decade, Minya had it to herself. She sat on the walkway that wound round the circumference of the big spherical room, her legs dangling over the edge—her very thin, very short legs. They weren’t swinging. There was nothing childlike or carefree in the pose. There was a very scarcity of life in the pose, except for a subtle rocking back and forth. She was rigid. Her eyes were open, her face blank. Her back was straight, and her dirty hands made fists so tight her knuckles looked ready to split.

Her lips were moving. Barely. There was something she was whispering, over and over. She was back in time fifteen years, seeing this room on a different day.

The day. The day to which she was eternally skewered, like a moth stuck through the thorax by a long, shining pin.

That day, she had scooped two babies up and held them both with one arm. They hadn’t liked that, and neither had her arm, but she’d needed the other to drag the toddlers: their two little hands gripped in her one, slick and slippery with sweat. Two babies in one arm, two toddlers stumbling beside her.

She’d brought them here, shoved them through the gap in the nearly closed door and turned to race back for more. But there weren’t to be any more. She was halfway to the nursery when the screaming started.

It felt, sometimes, as though she were frozen inside the moment that she’d skidded to a halt at the sound of those screams.

She was the oldest child in the nursery by then. Kiska, who could read minds, had been the last led away by Korako, never to return. Before her it was Werran, whose scream sowed panic in the minds of all who heard it. As for Minya, she knew what her gift was. She’d known for months, but she wasn’t letting on. Once they found out, they took you away, so she kept a secret from the goddess of secrets, and stayed in the nursery as long as she could. And so she was still there the day the humans rose up and murdered their masters, and that would have been fine with her—she had no love for the gods—if they’d only stopped there.

She was still in that hallway, hearing those screams and their terrible, bloody dwindle. She would always be there, and her arms would always be too small, just as they had been that day.

In one vital way, though, she was different. She would never again allow weakness or softness, fear or ineptitude to hold her frozen. She hadn’t known yet what she was capable of. Her gift had been untested. Of course it had been. If she’d tested it, Korako would have found her out and taken her away. And so she hadn’t known the fullness of her power.

She could have saved them all, if only she’d known.

There was so much death in the citadel that day.

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