They live in a supernatural world rife with familiar issues of patriarchal overreach and family separation.
Here, in the very first excerpt from the novel, we meet the players ofThe Lost Dreamer.
Healers held his body afloat, chanting and Singing.
‘The Lost Dreamer,’ by Lizz Huerta.Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Council members sat on stone benches at the edge of the pool.
I saw my mother and aunts.
My mother was holding a skin drum, beating out a slow rhythm.
My aunts were talking to Naru of the Ilkan.
Nahi, Naru’s acolyte at the time, had eyes swollen and rimmed red from weeping.
King Anz lifted his head from the water.
The healers supported him as he stood in the waist-deep waters.
I cringed at how thin his body had become.
I could see the ladders of bones on either side of his chest.
The serpent biteshaped birthmark at the center of his chest barely stood out.
“Then Dream for me.”
King Anz’s voice was strained.
I slipped into the water and went to him.
Even frail and thin, his body retained the lines of his previous strength.
The healers brought him to the edge of the pool and propped him up.
I sat beside him, holding his hand.
He was a good king, flawed like all of us and aware of it.
“What would you like me to seek in Dreaming?”
He looked at the council members, his eyes softened and filled with tears.
“Leave us.”
His voice was weak, but everyone rose and left.
My mother stayed, her eyes flicking back and forth between us.
Anz raised his eyebrows at her, and she left, glancing back at us.
“Indir, Truth Dreamer, tell me, does my son bear the Twin Serpents' mark?”
Alcan had been living away from Alcanzeh for years.
I held his question in my mind.
I was pulled through a tunnel of vibrating light and sound.
Shapes and shadows surged around me, the hum of the eternal pulsating.
I looked for the entry point sacred to Dreamers, the place we could enter, be offered visions.
But I couldn’t find a safe way to enter the Dream.
Instead, I saw the tree again.
A terror rose in me.
Before I could react, forms rose before me.
I had recognized Alcan immediately, nebulous as he was.
He was shadowed, turning this way and that.
I saw another shape beneath him.
He was standing on the back of another man, wisps of smoke rising from both of them.
Alcan held a burning branch.
I smelled flesh burning and tried to turn away.
A new shape rose up from the miasma and floated toward me, a sphere of water.
At its center pulsed the Twin Serpents' bite mark, in a bloom of dappled red.
Alcan flew past me, beating at the sphere with his burning branch.
The shape he had been standing on rose and stepped between Alcan and the sphere.
An ache started deep in my abdomen.
A new shape appeared before me.
I tried to cry out.
The other me stared back, her surprise mirroring mine.
I felt myself dying and tried to scream.
I rose up sputtering from the water I’d swallowed.
King Anz was breathing hard.
I made my way to him.
His eyes were all questions.
They were wide, pupils dilated.
He was full of fear.
No one should die in fear.
I cradled his head, feeling his skin going cold despite the heat of the pool.
I concentrated on my breathing, inhaling deeply, reminding myself I was safe.
I hummed myself a Song of return, of safety, but it did little to soothe me.
“The Twin Serpents' mark?”
He was struggling to keep his eyes open.
Alcan burned the center of his own chest."
The king’s eyes went wide, his fear punctuated by a groan of regret.
I touched his face.
“I saw the mark of the Twin Serpents, floating in a sphere of water.
Alcan tried to destroy it but couldn’t; the man he was standing on was between them.
I swallowed myself, the entire Dream,” I told him.
I didn’t tell him I had seen Alcan killing me.
Dreaming was an imperfect gift, like all gifts, but we did what we could.
The Dream showed us only what She wanted us to see.
King Anz closed his eyes and pulled me close so that my ear was close to his mouth.
“Tell no one, Indir, promise me.
Never speak of this Dream, not even to the other Dreamers.
But keep it in your memory, until it is needed.”
His breath smelled of sweet rot.
Inside him, his blood was already dying.
“I promise.”
King Anz closed his eyes, his chest barely rising and falling.
He began to slip off the steps; I heard the death rattle in his breath.
“Come back!”
I cried, wrapping my arms around him just as he slipped beneath the water.
I was barely aware of the others that splashed into the pool around me, pushing me aside.
A woman began Singing, a keening that other voices took up.
Arms went around me, pulling me out of the water.
My mother and aunts were beside me, their voices rising and falling in Death Song.
Naru and Nahi added their voices, gasping growls that reverberated through my bones.
Our king had returned to the Dream.
I sat on the steps, trembling at the secret he had left me to carry alone.
Courtesy of Macmillan Publishers
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