A jolt shot through her. It was the look in Minya’s eyes: cool, assessing, malicious. Just like that, Sarai understood: Minya didn’t just know about her nightmares. She was the cause of them.
Her lull. Great Ellen brewed it. Great Ellen was a ghost, and thus subject to Minya’s control. Sarai felt sick—not just at the idea that Minya might be sabotaging her lull, but to think that she would manipulate Great Ellen, who was almost like a mother to them. It was too horrible.
She swallowed. Minya was watching her closely, perhaps wondering if Sarai had worked it out. Sarai thought she wanted her to guess, so that she would understand her position clearly: If she wanted her gray fog back, she was going to have to earn it.
She was glad, then, when Sparrow came in. She was able to produce a credible smile, and pretend—she hoped—that she was fine, while inside her very spirit hissed with outrage, and with shock that Minya would go so far.
Sparrow kissed her cheek. Her own smile was tremulous and brave. Ruby and Feral came in a moment later. They were bickering about something, which made it easier to pretend that everything was normal.
Dinner was served. A dove had been caught in a trap, and Great Ellen had put it in a stew. Dove stew. It sounded so wrong, like butterfly jam, or spectral steaks. Some creatures were too lovely to devour—not that that opinion was shared around the dining table. Feral and Ruby both ate with a gusto that spared no concern for the loveliness of the meat source, and if Minya had never been a big eater, it certainly had nothing to do with delicacy of feeling. She didn’t finish her stew, but she did fish out a tiny bone to pick her small white teeth with.
Only Sparrow shared Sarai’s hesitation, though they both ate, because meat was rare and their bodies craved it. It didn’t matter if they had no appetite. They lived on bare-bones rations and were always hungry.
As soon as Kem cleared away their bowls, Sparrow got up from the table. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t anyone leave.”
They looked at one another. Ruby raised her eyebrows. Sparrow darted out into the garden and came back a moment later holding . . .
“A cake!” cried Ruby, springing up. “How in the world did you—?”
It was a dream of a cake, and they all stared at it, amazed: three tall, frosted layers, creamy white and patterned with blossoms like falling snow. “Don’t get too excited,” she cautioned them. “It’s not for eating.”
They saw that the creamy white “frosting” was orchid petals scattered with anadne blossoms and the whole thing was made of flowers, right up to the torch ginger buds on top that looked, for all the world, like sixteen lit candles.
Ruby screwed up her face. “Then what’s it for?”
“For wishing on,” Sparrow told them. “It’s an early birthday cake.” She put it down in front of Ruby. “In case.”
They all understood that she meant in case there were no more birthdays. “Well, that’s grim,” said Ruby.
“Go on, make a wish.”
Ruby did. And though the ginger already looked like little flames, she lit them on fire with her fingertips and blew them out properly, all in one go.
“What did you wish for?” Sarai asked her.
“For it to be real cake, of course,” said Ruby. “Did it come true?” She dug into it with her fingers, but of course there was no cake, only more flowers, but she pantomimed eating it without sharing.
Night had fallen. Sarai got up to go. “Sarai,” called Minya, and she stopped but didn’t turn. She knew what was coming. Minya hadn’t given up. She never would. Somehow, by sheer force of will, the girl had frozen herself in time—not just her body but everything. Her fury, her vengeance, undiminished in all these years. You could never win against such a will. Her voice rang out its reminder: “A few minutes of disgust to save us all.”
Sarai kept walking. To save us all. The words seemed to curl up in her belly—not moths now but snakes. She wanted to leave them behind her in the gallery, but as she passed through the gauntlet of ghost soldiers that lined the corridor to her room, their lips parted and they murmured all together, “To save us all, to save us all,” and after that, the words they’d only spoken with their eyes: Help us. Save us. They spoke them aloud. They pleaded at her passing. “Help us, save us,” and it was all Minya, playing to Sarai’s weakness.
To her mercy.
And then in her doorway, she had to pass a child. A child. Bahar, nine years old, who had fallen in the Uzumark three years ago and still wore the sodden clothes of her drowning. It was beyond the pale, even for Minya, to keep a dead child as a pet. The small ghost stood in Sarai’s way and Minya’s words issued from her lips. “If you don’t kill him, Sarai,” she said, mournful, “I’ll have to.”
Sarai pressed her palms to her ears and darted past her. But even in her alcove, back where they couldn’t see her, she could hear them still whispering “Save us, help us,” until she thought she might go mad.
She screamed her moths and curled up in the corner with her eyes tightly closed, wishing more than ever before that she could go with them. In that moment, if she could have poured her whole soul into them and left her body empty—even if she could never return to it—she might have done it, just to be free of the whispered pleas of the dead men and women—and children—of Weep.
The living men and women and children of Weep were safe from her nightmares again tonight. She returned to the faranji in the guildhall, and to the Tizerkane in their barracks, and to Azareen alone in her rooms in Windfall.
She didn’t know what she would do if she found Eril-Fane. The snakes that curled up in her belly had moved into her hearts. There was darkness in her, and treachery, that much she knew. But everything was so tangled up that she couldn’t tell if it was mercy not to kill him, or only cowardice.
But she didn’t find him. The relief was tremendous, but quickly bled into something else: a heightened awareness of the stranger who was in his bed instead. Sarai perched on the pillow beside his sleeping face for a long time, full of fear and longing. Longing for the beauty of his dream. Fear of being seen again—and not with wonder this time, but for the nightmare that she was.
In the end she compromised. She perched on his brow and slipped into his dream. It was Weep again, his own bright Weep that ill-deserved the name, but when she saw him at a distance, she didn’t follow. She only found a little place to curl up—just as her body was curled up in her room—to breathe in the sweet air, and watch the children in their feather cloaks, and feel safe, for at least a little while.
33
We Are All Children in the Dark
Lazlo’s first days in Weep passed in a rush of activity and wonder. There was the city to discover, of course, and all that was sweet and bitter in it.
It wasn’t the perfect place he had imagined as a boy. Of course it wasn’t. If it ever had been, it had gone through far too much to stay that way. There were no high wires or children in feather cloaks; as near as he could find out, there never had been. The women didn’t wear their hair long enough to trail behind them, and for good reason: The streets were as dirty as the streets of any city. There were no cakes set out on window ledges, either, but Lazlo had never really expected that. There was garbage, and vermin, too. Not a lot, but enough to keep a dreamer from idealizing the object of his long fascination. The withered gardens were a blight, and beggars lay as though dead, collecting coins on the hollows of their closed eyes, and there were altogether too many ruins.
And yet there was such color and sound, such life: wren men with their caged birds, dream men blowing colored dust, children with their shoe harps making music just by running. There was light and there was darkness: The temples to the seraphim were more exquisite than all the churches in Zosma, Syriza, Maialen put together, and witnessing the worship there—the ecstatic dance of Thakra—was the most mystical experience of Lazlo’s life. But there were the butcher priests, too, performing divination of animal entrails, and the Doomsayers on their stilts, crying End Times from behind their skeleton masks.
All this was contained in a cityscape of carved honey stone and gilded domes, the streets radiating out from an ancient amphitheater filled with colorful market stalls.
This afternoon he had eaten lunch there with some of the Tizerkane, including Ruza, who taught him the phrase “You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes.” Ruza assured him that it was the highest possible compliment to the chef, but the merriness in everyone’s eyes suggested a more . . . prurient meaning. In the market, Lazlo bought himself a shirt and jacket in the local style, neither of them gray. The jacket was the green of far forests, and needed cuffs to catch the sleeves between biceps and deltoids. These came in every imaginable material. Eril-Fane wore gold. Lazlo chose the more economical and understated leather.
He bought socks, too. He was beginning to understand the appeal of money. He bought four pair—a profligate quantity of socks—and not only were they not gray, no two pair were even the same color. One was pink, and another had stripes.
And speaking of pink, he sampled blood candy in a tiny shop under a bridge. It was real, and it was awful. After fighting back the urge to gag, he told the confectioner, weakly, “You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes,” and saw her eyes flare wide. Her shock was chased by a blush, confirming his suspicions regarding the decency of the compliment.
“Thank you for that,” Lazlo told Ruza as they walked away. “Her husband will probably challenge me to a duel.”
“Probably,” agreed Ruza. “But everyone should fight at least one duel.”
“One sounds just about right for me.”
“Because you’d die,” Ruza clarified unnecessarily. “And not be alive to fight another.”
“Yes,” said Lazlo. “That is what I meant.”
Ruza clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll make a warrior of you yet. You know . . .” He eyed the green brocade purse that had belonged to Calixte’s grandmother. “For starters, you might buy a wallet while we’re here.”