He did as she commanded, his weight balancing the tilt of the craft as she slapped a patch onto the hissing hole the meat hook had made. The weapon still lay on the floor, dull and deadly, and the knife that had fallen there, too. Azareen and Eril-Fane were gasping for breath, their hreshteks still drawn, shoulders heaving. They checked each other frantically for injuries. Both were bleeding from cuts to their hands and arms, but that was all. Amazingly, no one had sustained a serious injury.
Drawing a deep breath, Azareen turned to Lazlo. “You saved my life, faranji.”
Lazlo almost said, “You’re welcome,” but she hadn’t actually thanked him, so he held it back and only nodded. He hoped it was a dignified nod, maybe even a little tough. He doubted it, though. His hands were shaking.
His everything was shaking.
The sleigh had stopped its spinning, but was still listing. They’d lost just enough gas for a slow descent. Soulzeren raised the sail and sheeted it, bringing the bow around and aiming for the meadows outside the city walls.
That was good. It would give them time to catch their breath before the others could reach them. The thought of the others, and all the questions they would ask, jolted Lazlo out of his survival euphoria and back into reality. Questions. Questions required answers. What were the answers? He looked to Eril-Fane. “What just happened?” he asked.
The Godslayer stood a good while with his hands on the rail, leaning heavily, looking away. Lazlo couldn’t see his face, but he could read his shoulders. Something very heavy was pressing there. Very heavy indeed. He thought of the girl on the terrace, the girl from the dream, and asked, “Was that Isagol?”
“No,” said Eril-Fane, sharp. “Isagol is dead.”
Then . . . who? Lazlo might have asked more, but Azareen caught his eye and warned him off with a look. She was badly shaken.
They were silent for the rest of the descent. The landing was soft as a whisper, the craft skimming over the tall grass until Soulzeren dropped the sail and they came at last to a halt. Lazlo helped her secure it, and they climbed back onto the surface of the world. They were out from under the citadel here. The sun was bright, and the crisp line of shadow, downhill, made a visible border.
Against that harsh line where darkness began, Lazlo caught a glimpse of the white bird, wheeling and tilting. It was always there, he thought. Always watching.
“They’ll get here soon, I reckon,” said Soulzeren. She pulled off her goggles and wiped her brow with her arm. “Ozwin won’t tarry.”
The Godslayer nodded. He was silent another moment, collecting himself, before he picked up the dropped knife and meat hook from the floor of the silk sleigh and hurled them away. He drew a hard breath and spoke. “I won’t order you to lie,” he said slowly. “But I’m asking you to. I’m asking that we keep this to ourselves. Until I can think what to do about it.”
It? The ghosts? The girl? This utter upending of what the citizens of Weep thought they knew about the citadel they already feared with such cold, debilitating dread? What manner of dread would this new truth inspire? Lazlo shuddered to think of it.
“We can’t . . . we can’t simply do nothing,” said Azareen.
“I know,” said Eril-Fane, ravaged. “But if we tell, there will be panic. And if we try to attack . . .” He swallowed. “Azareen, did you see?”
“Of course I did,” she whispered. Her words were so raw. She hugged her arms around herself. Lazlo thought they should have been Eril-Fane’s arms. Even he could see that. But Eril-Fane was trapped in his own shock and grief, and kept his great arms to himself.
“Who were they?” Soulzeren asked. “What were they?”
Slowly, like a dancer dropping into a curtsy that keeps going all the way to the ground, Azareen sank down onto the grass. “All our dead,” she said. “Turned against us.” Her eyes were hard and bright.
Lazlo turned to Eril-Fane. “Did you know?” he asked him. “When we were taking off, I asked if you were certain it was empty, and you said ‘Empty of the living.’ ”
Eril-Fane closed his eyes. He rubbed them. “I didn’t mean . . . ghosts,” he said, stumbling on the word. “I meant bodies.” He seemed almost to be hiding his face in his hands, and Lazlo knew there were still secrets.
“But the girl,” he said, tentative. “She was neither.”
Eril-Fane dropped his hands from his eyes. “No.” With anguish and a stark glimmer of . . . something—redemption?—he whispered, “She’s alive.”
Part IV
sathaz (sah·thahz) noun
The desire to possess that which can never be yours.
Archaic; from the Tale of Sathaz, who fell in love with the moon.
40
Mercy
What had Sarai just done?
After it was over and they had watched, all five of them, over the edge of the terrace as the silk sleigh escaped down to a far green meadow, Minya turned to her, unspeaking—unable to speak—and her silence was worse than screaming could have been. The little girl shook with ill-contained fury, and when the silence stretched on, Sarai forced herself to really look at Minya. What she saw wasn’t just fury. It was a wilderness of disbelief and betrayal.
“That man killed us, Sarai,” she hissed when she finally found her voice. “You might forget that, but I never can.”
“We aren’t dead.” At that moment, Sarai truly wasn’t sure that Minya knew that. Maybe all she knew was ghosts, and could make no distinction. “Minya,” she said, pleading, “we’re still alive.”
“Because I saved us from him!” She was shrill. Her chest heaved. She was so thin inside her ragged garment. “So that you could save him from me? Is that how you thank me?”
“No!” Sarai burst out. “I thanked you by doing everything you ever told me to do! I thanked you by being your wrath for you, every night for years, no matter what it did to me. But it was never enough. It will never be enough!”
Minya looked incredulous. “Are you mad you had to keep us safe? I’m so sorry if it was hard for you. Perhaps we should have waited on you, and never made you use your nasty gift.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. You twist everything.” Sarai was shaking. “There might have been another way. You made the choice. You chose nightmares. I was too young to know better. You used me like one of your ghosts.” She was choking on her own words, astonished at herself for speaking so. She saw Feral, stricken dumb, his mouth actually agape.
“So in turn you betrayed me. You betrayed us all. I might have chosen for you once, Sarai, but today the choice was all yours.” Her chest rose and fell with animal breathing. Her shoulders were frail as bird bones. “And you. Chose. Them!” She shrieked the last part. Her face went red. Tears burst from her eyes. Sarai had never seen her cry before. Not ever. Even her tears were fierce and angry. No gentle, tragic trails like the ones that painted Ruby’s and Sparrow’s cheeks. Minya’s tears raged, practically leaping from her eyes in full, fat drops, like rain.
Everyone was frozen. Sparrow, Ruby, Feral. They were stunned. They looked from Sarai to Minya, Minya to Sarai, and seemed to be holding their breath. And when Minya wheeled on them, pointed at the door, and commanded, “You three. Get out!” they hesitated, torn, but not for long. It was Minya they feared, her icy tantrums, her scalding disappointment, and her they were used to obeying. If Sarai had, in that moment, presented them with a choice, if she had stood proud and defended her actions, she might have won them to her. She didn’t, though. Her uncertainty was written all over her: in her too-wide eyes and trembling lip and the way she held her bloody arm limp against her middle.
Ruby clung to Feral and turned away when he did. Sparrow was last to go. She cast a frightened glance back from the doorway and mouthed the words I’m sorry. Sarai watched her leave. Minya stood there a moment longer, looking at Sarai as though she were a stranger. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its shrillness, its fury. It was flat, and old. She said, “Whatever happens now, Sarai, it will be your fault.”
And she spun on her heel and stalked through the door, leaving Sarai alone with the ghosts.
All the anger was sucked away in her wake, and it left a void. What else was there, when you took away the anger, the hate? The ghosts stood frozen—those who remained, the ones Minya had yanked back from the brink of freedom while others crossed out of her reach and escaped her—and they couldn’t turn their heads to look at Sarai, but their eyes strained toward her, and she thought that she saw grace there, and gratitude.
For her mercy.
Mercy.
Was it mercy or betrayal? Salvation or doom? Maybe it was all of those things flashing like a flipped coin, end over end—mercy betrayal salvation doom. And how would it come down? How would it all end? Heads, and the humans live. Tails, the godspawn die. The outcome had been rigged from the day they were born.
A coldness seeped into Sarai’s hearts. Minya’s army appalled her, but what would have happened today if it hadn’t been here? If Eril-Fane had come, expecting to find skeletons, and found them instead?
She was left with the desolate certainty that her father would have done again what he did fifteen years ago. His face was fixed in her mind: haunted to start with, just to be returning to this place of his torment. Then startled. Then stricken by the sight of her. She’d witnessed the precise moment when he understood. It was so very fast: the first blanch of shock, when he thought she was Isagol, and the second, when he realized she wasn’t.
When he grasped who she was.
Horror. That was what she had seen on his face, and nothing short of it. She had believed she had hardened herself to any further pain he could cause her, but she’d been wrong. This was the first time in her life that she had seen him with her own eyes—not filtered through moths’ senses or conjured in his own unconscious or Suheyla’s or Azareen’s, but him, the man whose blood was half her own, her father—and his horror at the sight of her had opened a new blossom of shame in her.