He leaned back just the same amount. “You said I was terrible,” he reminded her, his own voice as husky as hers.
“And you said I drowned you,” she replied, coming a fraction closer.
“There was a lot of saliva,” he pointed out. Perhaps unwisely.
“And you were about as sensuous as a dead fish,” she shot back, her expression darkening.
It was touch and go for a moment there. “My darlings, my vipers,” Great Ellen had called them. Well, they were darlings and vipers, all of them. Or, perhaps Minya was all viper and Sparrow was all darling, but the rest of them were just . . . they were just flesh and spirit and youth and magic and hunger and yes, saliva, all bottled up with nowhere to go. Carnage behind them, carnage ahead, and ghosts everywhere.
But here all of a sudden was distraction, escape, novelty, sensation. The shift of Ruby’s knees was a kind of blue poetry, and when you’re that close to someone, you don’t see their movements so much as you feel the compression of air between you. The slip of flesh, the glide. Ruby twisted, and with a simple serpentine slink she was in Feral’s lap. Her lips found his. She was unsubtle with her tongue. Their hands joined the party, and there seemed dozens of them instead of four, and there were words, too, because Ruby and Feral hadn’t yet learned that you can’t really talk and kiss at the same time.
So it took a moment to sort that out.
“I guess I’ll give you another chance,” conceded a breathless Feral.
“It’s me giving you another chance,” Ruby corrected, a string of the aforementioned saliva glistening between their lips when she drew back to speak.
“How do I know you won’t burn me?” Feral asked, even as he slid his hand down over her hip.
“Oh,” said Ruby, unconcerned. “That could only happen if I completely lost track of myself.” Tongues darted, collided. “You’d have to be really good.” Teeth clashed. Noses bumped. “I’m not worried.”
Feral almost took offense, as well he might, but by then there were a number of rather agreeable things happening, and so he learned to hold his tongue, or rather, to put it to a more interesting purpose than arguing.
You might think lips and tongues would run out of things to try, but they really don’t.
“Put your hand here,” breathed Ruby, and he obeyed. “Now here,” she commanded, and he did not. To her satisfaction, Feral’s hands had a hundred ideas of their own, and none of them were boring.
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. She could have bound those ghosts—even the gods’ ghosts. Imagine.
Imagine.
She might have bound the gods themselves into her service, Skathis, too. If only she’d known what to do. She could have made an army then, and cut down the Godslayer and all the others before they ever reached the nursery.
Instead, she had saved four, and so she would always be stuck in that hallway, hearing those screams cut away one by one.
And doing nothing.
Her lips were still moving, whispering the same words over and over. “They were all I could carry. They were all I could carry.”
There was no echo, no reverberation. If anything, the room ate sound. It swallowed her voice, her words, and her eternal, inadequate apology. But not her memories.
She would never be rid of those.
“They were all I could carry.
“They were all I could carry. . . .”
32
The Space Between Nightmares
Sarai woke up gagging on the feel of a hundred damp moths cramming themselves down her throat. It was so real, so real. She actually believed it was her moths, that she had to choke them down, cloying and clogging and alive. There was the taste of salt and soot—salt from the tears of dreamers, soot from the chimneys of Weep—and even after she caught her breath and knew the nightmare for what it was, she could still taste them.
Thank you, Minya, for this fresh horror.
It wasn’t the day’s first horror. Not even close. Her prayer to lull had gone unanswered. She’d hardly slept an hour altogether, and what little sleep she’d had was far from restful. She had dreamed her own death a half-dozen different ways, as though her mind were making up a list of choices. A menu, as it were, of ways to die.
Poison.
Drowning.
Falling.
Stabbing.
Mauling.
She was even burned alive by the citizens of Weep. And in between deaths, she was . . . what? She was a girl in a dark wood who has heard a twig snap. The space between nightmares was like the silence after the snap, when you know that whatever made it is holding itself still and watching you in the dark. There was no more seeping gray nothing. The lull fog had thinned to wisps.
All her terrors were free.
She lay on her back, her bedcovers kicked away, and stared up at the ceiling. Her body was limp, her mind numb. How could her lull have simply stopped working? In the pulse of her blood and spirit was a cadence of panic.
What was she supposed to do now?
Thirst and her bladder both urged her to get up, but the prospect of leaving her alcove was grim. She knew what she would find just around the corner, even inside her own room:
Ghosts with knives.
Just like the old women who’d surrounded her bed, despairing of their inability to murder her.
She did get up, finally. She put on a robe and what she hoped passed for dignity, and emerged. There they were, arrayed between the door to the passage and the door out to the terrace: eight of them inside; she couldn’t be sure how many out on the hand itself. She steeled herself for their revulsion and walked across her room.
Minya, it would seem, was holding her army under such tight control that they couldn’t form facial expressions like the disgust or fear Sarai knew so well, but their eyes remained their own, and it was amazing how much they could convey with just those. There was disgust and fear, yes, as Sarai passed them by, but mostly what she saw in them was pleading.
Help us.
Free us.
“I can’t help you,” she wanted to say, but the thickness in her throat was more than just the phantom feel of moths. It was the conflict that tore her in two. These ghosts would kill her in a minute if they were free. She shouldn’t want to help them. What was wrong with her?
She averted her eyes and hurried past, feeling as though she were still trapped in a nightmare. Who, she wondered, is going to help me?
No one was in the gallery except for Minya. Well, Minya and the ranks of ghosts that now filled the arches of the arcade, crushing Sparrow’s vines beneath their dead feet. Ari-Eil stood at attendance behind Minya’s chair, looking like a handsome manservant, but for the set of his features. His face his mistress left free to reflect his feelings, and he did not disappoint. Sarai almost blanched at the vitriol there.
“Hello,” said Minya. There were barbs of spite in her bright, childish voice when she asked, insincerely, “Sleep well?”
“Like a baby,” Sarai said breezily—by which of course she meant that she had woken frequently crying, but she didn’t feel the need to clarify the point.
“No nightmares?” probed Minya.
Sarai’s jaw clenched. She couldn’t bear to show weakness, not now. “You know I don’t dream,” she said, wishing desperately that it were still true.
“Really?” said Minya, with a skeptical lift of her eyebrows, and Sarai wondered, all of a sudden, why she was asking. She’d told no one but Great Ellen about her nightmare yesterday, but in that moment, she was certain that Minya knew.