The memory kicked up a desperate fizz of . . . panic? Thrill? Whatever it was, it contradicted the very feeling of safety that had conjured the thought of him to start with. Yes, the dream had been sweet. But . . . he had seen her.
The look on his face! The wonder in it, the witchlight. Her hearts raced at the thought, and her palms went clammy. It was no small thing to shed a lifetime of nonbeing and suddenly be seen.
Who was he, anyway? Of all the faranji’s dreams, only his had given her no hint of why Eril-Fane might have brought him here.
Exhausted, fearful, Sarai drank down her lull and laid herself on her bed. Please, she thought, fervent—a kind of prayer to the bitter brew itself. Please work.
Please keep the nightmares away.
Out in her garden, Sparrow kept her eyes down. As long as she fixed on leaves and blossoms, stems and seeds, she could pretend it was a normal day, and there weren’t ghosts standing guard under the arches of the arcade.
She was making a birthday present for Ruby, who would be sixteen in a few months . . . if they were still alive by then.
Considering Minya’s army, Sparrow thought their chances were good, but she didn’t want to consider Minya’s army. They made her feel safe and wretched at the same time, so she kept her eyes down and hummed, and tried to forget they were there.
Another birthday to celebrate without cake. The options for presents were slim, too. Usually they unmade some hideous gown from their dressing rooms and turned it into something else. A scarf maybe. One year Sparrow had made a doll with real rubies for eyes. Her room had been Korako’s, so she had all her gowns and jewels to make use of, while Ruby had Letha’s. The goddesses weren’t their mothers, as Isagol was Sarai’s. They were both of them daughters of Ikirok, god of revelry, who had also served as executioner in his spare time. So they were half sisters, and the only ones of the five related by blood. Feral was the son of Vanth, god of storms—whose gift he had more or less inherited—and Minya was daughter of Skathis. Sarai was the only one whose Mesarthim blood came from the maternal side. Goddess births, according to Great Ellen, had been rare. A woman, of course, could make but one baby at a time, occasionally two. But a man could make as many as there were women to seed them in.
By far, most of the babies in the nursery had been sired on human girls by the trinity of gods.
Which meant that, somewhere down in Weep, Sparrow had a mother.
When she was little, she’d been slow to understand or believe that her mother wouldn’t want her. “I could help her in the garden,” she’d told Great Ellen. “I could be a really big help, I know I could.”
“I know you could, too, love,” Great Ellen had said. “But we need you here, pet. How could we live without you?”
She had tried to be gentle, but Minya had suffered no such compunction. “If they found you in their garden, they’d bash your head in with the shovel and throw you out with the garbage. You’re godspawn, Sparrow. They’ll never want you.”
“But I’m human, too,” she’d insisted. “Can they have forgotten that? That we’re their children, too?”
“Don’t you see? They hate us more because we’re theirs.”
And Sparrow hadn’t seen, not then, but eventually she learned—from a crude and unbelievable assertion of Minya’s, followed by a gentle and eye-opening explanation of Great Ellen’s—the . . . mechanics of begetting, and that changed everything. She knew now what the nature of her own begetting must have been, and even though the knowing was a blurry, shadowed thing, she felt the horror of it like the weight of an uninvited body and it made her gorge rise. Of course no mother could want her, not after such a beginning.
She wondered how many of the ghosts in Minya’s army had been used that way by the gods. Plenty of them were women, most of them old. How many had borne half-caste babies they neither remembered nor wished to remember?
Sparrow kept her eyes on her hands and worked on her present, humming softly to herself. She tried not to think about whether they’d all still be alive by Ruby’s birthday, or what kind of life it would be if they were. She just focused on her hands, and the soothing sensation of growth flowing out from them. She was making a cake out of flowers. Oh, it was nothing they could eat, but it was beautiful, and it reminded her of their early years when there had still been sugar in the citadel and some measure of innocence, too, before she understood her own atrocity.
It even had torch ginger buds for little candles: sixteen of them. She’d give it to Ruby at dinner, she thought. She could light them with her own fire, make a wish, and blow them out.
Feral was in his room, looking at his book. He turned the metal pages and traced the harsh, angular symbols with his fingertip.
If he had to, he could replicate the whole book from memory—that was how well he knew it. Little good that did, since he couldn’t wring any meaning from it. Sometimes, when he stared at it long enough, his eyes sliding out of focus, he thought he could see into the metal and sense a pulsing, dormant potential. Like a wind vane waiting for a gust to come along and spin it round. Waiting, and also wanting it to come.
The book wanted to be read, Feral thought. But what nature of “gust” could move these symbols? He didn’t know. He only knew—or at least strongly suspected—that, if he could read this cryptic alphabet, he could unlock the secrets of the citadel. He could protect the girls, instead of merely . . . well, keeping them hydrated.
He knew that water was no small matter, and that they’d all have died without his gift, so he didn’t tend to waste much regret over not having Skathis’s power. That particular bitterness was Minya’s, but sometimes he fell prey to wistfulness, too. Of course, if they could control mesarthium, they would be free, and safe, not to mention a force to be reckoned with. But they couldn’t, so there was no use wasting time wishing for it.
If he could unlock his book, though, Feral felt certain he could do . . . something.
“What are you up to in here?” came Ruby’s voice from the doorway.
He looked up and scowled when he saw that she’d already poked her head inside. “Respect the curtain,” he intoned, and looked back down at his book.
But Ruby did not respect the curtain. She just waltzed in on her expressive, blue, highly arched bare feet. Her toenails were painted red, and she was wearing red, and she was also wearing an expression of intent that would have alarmed him had he looked up—which he didn’t. He tensed a little. That was all.
She scowled at the top of his bowed head, as he had scowled at her in the doorway. It was an unpromising beginning. Stupid book, she thought. Stupid boy.
But he was the only boy. He had warmer lips than the ghosts. Warmer everything, she supposed. More important, Feral wasn’t afraid of her, which would have to be more fun than draping herself over a half-paralyzed ghost and telling him what to do every few seconds. Put your hand here. Now here.
So boring.
“What do you want, Ruby?” Feral asked.
She was close beside him now. “The thing about experiments,” she said, “is that they have to be repeated or else they’re worthless.”
“What? What experiment?” He turned round to her. His brow was furrowed: half confusion, half irritation.
“Kissing,” she said. She’d told him before, “That’s an experiment I won’t be repeating.” Well. In light of their acceleration toward doom, she had reconsidered.
He hadn’t. “No,” he said, flat, and turned away again.
“It’s possible I was wrong,” she said, with an air of great magnanimity. “I’ve decided to give you another chance.”
Thick with sarcasm: “Thank you for your generosity, but I’ll pass.”
Ruby’s hand came down on his book. “Hear me out.” She pushed it away and perched herself on the edge of his table. Her slip hiked up her thighs, her skin as smooth and frictionless as mesarthium, or nearly.
Much softer, though.
She rested her feet on the edge of his chair. “We’re probably going to die,” she said matter-of-factly. “And anyway, even if we don’t, we’re here. We’re alive. We have bodies. Mouths.” She paused and added teasingly, flicking hers over her teeth, “Tongues.”
A blush crept up Feral’s neck. “Ruby—” he began in a tone of dismissal.
She cut him off. “There’s not a lot to do up here. There’s nothing to read.” She gestured to his book. “The food’s boring. There’s no music. We’ve invented eight thousand games and outgrown them all, some of them literally. Why not grow into something?” Her voice was getting husky. “We’re not children anymore, and we have lips. Isn’t that reason enough?”
A voice in Feral’s head assured him that it was not reason enough. That he did not wish to partake of any more of Ruby’s saliva. That he did not, in fact, wish to spend any more time with her than he did already. There might even have been a voice in there somewhere pointing out that if he were to . . . spend more time . . . with any of the girls, it wouldn’t be her. When he’d joked with Sarai about marrying them all, he’d pretended it wasn’t something he gave actual thought to, but he did. How could he not? He was a boy trapped with girls, and they might have been like sisters, but they weren’t sisters, and they were . . . well, they were pretty. Sarai first, then Sparrow, if he were choosing. Ruby would be last.
But that voice seemed to be coming from some way off, and Sarai and Sparrow weren’t here right now, whereas Ruby was very near, and smelled very nice.
And, as she said, they were probably going to die.
The hem of her slip was fascinating. Red silk and blue flesh sang against each other, the colors seeming to vibrate. And the way her knees were slung together, one overlapping the other just a little, and the feel of her foot nudging under his knee. He couldn’t help but find her arguments . . . compelling.
She leaned forward, just a little. All thoughts of Sarai and Sparrow vanished.