“It’s a good idea,” said Sparrow. “Why fight if we can avoid it?”
“Avoid it?” Minya snapped. “Do you think, if they knew we were here, they would be worrying about avoiding a fight?” She turned to Ari-Eil, standing behind her chair. “Well?” she asked him. “What do you think?”
Whether she gave him leave to answer, or produced his answer herself, Sarai didn’t doubt the truth of it. “They’ll slaughter you all,” he hissed, and Minya gave Sparrow an I told you so look.
“I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation,” she said. “When your enemy is coming, you don’t gather clouds. You gather knives.”
Sarai looked to Feral, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. There wasn’t much more to be said after that. She was loath to return to her tiny alcove, which she couldn’t help feeling was stuffed with all the nightmares she’d had in it of late, so she went out into the garden with Sparrow and Ruby. There were ghosts all around, but the vines and billows of flowers made nooks you could almost hide in. In fact, Sparrow, sinking her hand into the soil and concentrating for a moment, grew some spikes of purple liriope tall enough to screen them from sight.
“What will we do?” Sparrow asked in a low voice.
“What can we do?” Ruby asked, resigned.
“You could give Minya a nice warm hug,” suggested Sparrow with an unaccustomed edge to her voice. “What were her words?” she asked. “You might do more with your gift than heat bathwater and burn up your clothes?”
It took both Ruby and Sarai a moment to understand her. They were dumbfounded. “Sparrow!” Ruby cried. “Are you suggesting that I”—she cut herself off, glanced toward the ghosts, and finished in a whisper—“burn up Minya?”
“Of course not,” said Sparrow, though that was exactly what she’d meant. “I’m not her, am I? I don’t want anyone to die. Besides,” she said, proving that she’d actually given the matter some thought, “if Minya died, we’d lose the Ellens, too, and all the other ghosts.”
“And have to do all our own chores,” said Ruby.
Sparrow thwacked her shoulder. “That’s what you worry about?”
“No,” said Ruby, defensive. “Of course I’d miss them, too. But, you know, who would do the cooking?”
Sparrow shook her head and rubbed her face. “I’m not even certain Minya’s wrong,” she said. “Maybe it is the only way. But does she have to be so happy about it? It’s gruesome.”
“She’s gruesome,” said Ruby. “But she’s gruesome for us. Would you ever want to be against her?”
Ruby had been much preoccupied of late, and had not noticed the change in Sarai, let alone guessed its cause. Sparrow was a more empathetic soul. She looked at Sarai, taking in her drawn face and bruised eyes. “No,” she said softly. “I would not.”
“So we let her have her way in everything?” Sarai asked. “Can’t you see where it leads? She’d have us be our parents all over again.”
Ruby’s brow furrowed. “We could never be them.”
“No?” countered Sarai. “And how many humans can we kill before we are? Is there a number? Five? Fifty? Once you start, there’s no stopping. Kill one—harm one—and there is no hope for any kind of life. Ever. You see that, don’t you?”
Sarai knew Ruby didn’t want to harm anyone, either. But she parted the liriope spikes with her hands, revealing the ghosts that edged the garden. “What choice do we have, Sarai?”
One by one the stars came out. Ruby claimed she was tired, though she didn’t look it, and went in early to bed. Sparrow found a feather that could only have been Wraith’s, and tucked it behind Sarai’s ear.
She did Sarai’s hair for her, gently combing it out with her fingers and using her gift to make it lustrous. Sarai could feel it growing, and even sense it brightening, as though Sparrow were infusing it with light. She added inches; she made it full. She fixed her a crown of braids, leaving most of it tumbling long, and wove in vines and sprays of orchids, sprigs of fern, and the one white feather.
And when Sarai saw herself in the mirror again before sending out her moths, she thought that she looked more like a wild forest spirit than the goddess of despair.
36
Shopping for a Moon
Weep slept. Dreamers dreamed. A grand moon drifted, and the wings of the citadel cut the sky in two: light above, dark below.
On the outheld hand of the colossal seraph, ghosts stood guard with cleavers, and some with meat hooks on chains. The moon shone bright on the edges of their blades, and sharp on the points of their terrible hooks, and luminous on their eyes, which were wide with horror. They were bathed in light, while down below, the city foundered in gloom.
Sarai dispatched her moths to the guildhall, where most of the delegates were sleeping soundly, and to the homes of city leaders, and some of the Tizerkane, too. Tzara’s lover was with her, and they were . . . not sleeping . . . so Sarai whisked her moth immediately away. Over in Windfall, Azareen was alone. Sarai watched her unbraid her hair, put on her ring, and lie down to go to sleep. She didn’t stay for her dreams, though. Azareen’s dreams were . . . difficult. Sarai couldn’t help feeling that she played a part in stealing the life Azareen should have had—as though she existed instead of a beloved child that the couple should have had together. It might not have been her fault, but she couldn’t feel innocent of it.
She saw the golden faranji—looking unwell—still awake and working. And she saw the ill-favored one, whose sun-ravaged skin was healing in the citadel’s shade—though he was no more appealing for it. He was awake, too, out for a stagger with a bottle in his hand. It was as well. She couldn’t abide his mind. All the women he dreamed were bruised, and she hadn’t stayed long enough to find out how they got that way. She hadn’t made herself visit him since the second night.
Every moth, every wingbeat carried the oppressive burden of the ghost army, and of vengeance, and the weight of another Carnage. With the occupation of her terrace, she stayed inside, turning five times oftener in her pacing than she had out on the hand. She craved the moonlight and the wind. She wanted to feel the infinite depth of space above and around her, not this metal cage. She remembered what Sparrow had said, how dreaming was like the garden: You could step out of prison for a little while and feel the sky around you.
And Sarai had argued that the citadel was prison but sanctuary, too. Only a week ago, it had been, and so had lull, and look at her now.
She was so terribly tired.
Lazlo was tired, too. It had been a long day, and giving away his spirit hadn’t helped. He ate with Suheyla—and complimented the food without mention of ruined tongues—and took another bath, and though he soaked this time until the water began to cool, the gray didn’t fade from his hands. In his state of fatigue, his thoughts dipped like hummingbirds from this to that, always coming round to the fear—the fear of the citadel and all that had happened in it. How haunted they all were by the past, Eril-Fane no less than the rest.
With that, two faces found their way into Lazlo’s mind. One from a painting of a dead goddess, the other from a dream: both blue, with red-brown hair and a band of black paint across their eyes. Blue, black, and cinnamon, he saw, and wondered again how he had happened to dream her before ever seeing a likeness of her.
And why, if he’d somehow glimpsed a stray vision of Isagol the Terrible, had she been so . . . unterrible?
He stepped from the bath and dried off, pulled on a pair of laundered linen breeches, and was too tired even to tie the drawstring. Back in his room, he tipped onto the bed, prone atop the quilts, and was asleep halfway through his second breath.
And that was how Sarai found him: lying on his stomach with his head cradled in his arms.
The long, smooth triangle of his back rose and fell with deep, even breathing as her moth fluttered above him, looking for a place to settle. The way he was lying, his brow wasn’t an option. There was the rugged edge of his cheekbone, but even as she watched, he nestled his head deeper into his arms, and that landing spot shrank and vanished. There was his back, though.
He’d fallen asleep with the glave uncovered, and the low angle of the light threw small shadows over every ripple of muscle, and deep ones under the wings of his shoulder blades and down the channel of his spine. It was a lunar landscape to the moth. Sarai floated it softly into the dark valley of his shoulder blades and as soon as it touched skin, she slipped into his dream.
She was wary, as always. A string of nights now she’d come here since the first time, and each time she’d slipped in as silently as a thief. A thief of what, though? She wasn’t stealing his dreams from him, or even altering them in any way. She was just . . . enjoying them, as one might enjoy music freely played.
A sonata drifting over a garden wall.
Inevitably, though, listening to beautiful music night after night, one grows curious about the player. Oh, she knew who he was. She was, after all, perched on his brow all this while—until tonight, and this new experience of his back—and there was a strange intimacy in that. She knew his eyelashes by heart, and the male scent of him, sandalwood and clean musk. She’d even grown used to his crooked, ruffian nose. But inside the dreams, she’d kept her distance.
What if he saw her again? What if he didn’t? Had it been a fluke? She wanted to know, but was afraid. Tonight, though, something had shifted. She was tired of hiding. She would find out if he could see her, and maybe even why. She was braced for it, ready for anything. At least she thought she was ready for anything.
But really, nothing could have prepared her to enter the dream and find herself already there.
Again, the streets of the magical city—Weep but not Weep. It was night, and the citadel was in the sky this time, but the moon shone down regardless, as though the dreamer wanted it both ways. And again there was unbelievable color, and gossamer wings and fruit and creatures out of fairy tales. There was the centaur with his lady. She walked by his side tonight, and Sarai felt almost restless until she saw them kiss. They were a fixture here; she’d have liked to talk to them and hear their story.