They looked, and looked, and looked at each other, and they looked at their joined hands, the brown-and-blue pattern of their fingers reversed, and they looked at the surface of the water, which hadn’t been a mirror before but was now because they willed it so. And they gazed at themselves in it, side by side and hand in hand, and they beheld neither gods nor monsters. They were so nearly unchanged, and yet that one thing—the color of their skin—would, in the real world, change everything.
Sarai looked at the rich earthen color of her arms, and she knew, though it was hidden, that she bore an elilith on her belly like a human girl. She wondered what the pattern was, and wished that she could take a peek. The other hand, the one joined with Lazlo’s, she gently withdrew. There seemed no further pretext for holding it, though it had been rather nice while it lasted.
She looked at him. Blue. “Did you choose this?” she asked.
Lazlo shook his head. “I left it to the mahalath,” he said.
“And it did this.” She wondered why. Her own change was easier to understand. Here was her humanity externalized, and all her longing—for freedom, from disgust, from the confines of her metal cage. But why should he come to this? Maybe, she thought, it wasn’t longing but fear, and this was his idea of a monster. “Well, I wonder what gift it has given you,” she said.
“Gift? You mean magic? Do you think I have one?”
“All godspawn have gifts.”
“Godspawn?”
“That’s what they call us.”
Us. Another collective pronoun. It glimmered between them, briefly, but Lazlo didn’t call attention this time. “Spawn, though,” he said, grimacing. “It doesn’t suit. That’s the offspring of fish or demons.”
“The intent, I believe, is the latter.”
“Well, you’re a singularly unhorrible demon, if I may say so.”
“Thank you,” Sarai said with play sincerity, laying a modest hand across her breast. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Well, I have at least a hundred nicer things to say and am only prevented by embarrassment.”
His mention of embarrassment magically conjured embarrassment. In her reflection, Sarai saw the way her brown cheeks went crimson instead of lavender, while Lazlo beheld the reverse in his own. “So, gifts,” he said, recovering, though Sarai wouldn’t have minded dwelling for a moment on his hundred nicer things. “And yours is . . . going into dreams?”
She nodded. She saw no need to explain the mechanics of it. Ruby’s long-ago commiseration flashed through her mind. “Who would ever want to kiss a girl who eats moths?” The thought of kissing stirred a fluttering in her belly that was something like it might feel if her moths really did live inside of her. Wings, delicate and tickling.
“So how do I know what it is, this gift?” Lazlo asked. “How does one find out?”
“It’s always different,” she told him. “Sometimes it’s spontaneous and obvious, and other times it has to be teased out. When the Mesarthim were alive, it was Korako, the goddess of secrets, who did the teasing out. Or so I’m told. I must have known her, but I can’t remember.”
The question “Told by whom?” was so palpable between them that, though Lazlo didn’t ask it—except, perhaps, with his eyebrows—Sarai nevertheless answered. “By the ghosts,” she said. Which happened, in this case, to be the truth.
“Korako,” said Lazlo. He thought back on the mural, but he’d been so fixed on Isagol that the other goddesses were a blur. Suheyla had mentioned Letha, but not the other one. “I haven’t heard anything about her.”
“No. You wouldn’t. She was the goddess of secrets, and her best-kept secret was herself. No one ever knew what her gift even was.”
“Another mystery,” said Lazlo, and they talked of gods and gifts, walking by the river. Sarai kicked at the surface and watched the flying droplets shiver ephemeral rainbows. They pointed to the swans, which had been identical before but now were strange—one fanged and made of agates and moss, another seeming dipped in gold. One had even become a svytagor. It submerged and vanished beneath the opaque green water. Sarai told Lazlo some of the better gifts she knew from Great Ellen, and slipped in among them a girl who could make things grow and a boy who could bring rain. His own gift, if the mahalath had given him one, remained a mystery.
“But what about you?” he asked her, pausing to pluck a flower that he had just willed to grow. It was an exotic bloom he’d seen in a shop window, and he would have been abashed to know it was called a passion flower. He offered it to Sarai. “If you were human, you would have to give up your gift, wouldn’t you?”
He couldn’t know the curse that her gift was, or what the use of it had done to her and to Weep. “I suppose so,” she said, sniffing the flower, which smelled of rain.
“But then you couldn’t be here with me.”
It was true. If she were human, Sarai couldn’t be in Lazlo’s dream with him. But . . . she could be in his room with him. A heat flared through her, and it wasn’t shame or even embarrassment. It was a kind of longing, but not hearts’ longing. It was skin’s longing. To be touched. It was limbs’ longing. To entwine. It was centered in her belly where her new elilith was, and she brushed her fingers over it again and shivered. Up in the citadel, pacing, her true body shivered in kind. “It’s a sacrifice I would be willing to make,” she said.
Lazlo couldn’t fathom it, that a goddess would be willing to give up her magic. It wasn’t just the magic, either. He thought she would be beautiful in any color, but found he missed the true exquisite hue of her. “You wouldn’t really want to change, though, would you?” he persisted. “If this were real, and you had the choice?”
Wouldn’t she? Why else had her unconscious—her inner mahalath—chosen this transformation? “If it meant having a life? Yes, I would.”
He was puzzled. “But you’re alive already.” He felt a sudden stab of fear. “You are, aren’t you? You’re not a ghost like the ones—”
“I’m not a ghost,” said Sarai, to his great relief. “But I am godspawn, and you must see that there’s a difference between being alive and having a life.”
Lazlo did see that. At least, he thought he saw. He thought that what she meant was in some way comparable to being a foundling at Zemonan Abbey: alive, but not living a life. And because he had found his way from one to the other and had even seen his dream come true, he felt a certain qualification on the subject. But he was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. A crucial, bloody piece of the puzzle. Reasonably, and warmly, he sympathized. “It can’t be much of a life trapped up there. But now that we know about you, we can get you out.”
“Get me out? What, down to Weep?” There was a twist of incredulous amusement in Sarai’s voice, and while she spoke, she reverted to her true color, her skin flushing back to blue. So much for human, she thought. The hard truth would brook no make-believe. As though her reversion had triggered an end to the fantasy, Lazlo reverted, too, and was himself again. Sarai was almost sorry. When he had looked like that, she could almost have believed a connection between them. Had she really wondered, wistfully, a short time earlier, if this dreamer could help her? Could save her? He had no clue. “You do understand, don’t you,” she said with undue harshness, “that they would kill me on sight.”
“Who would?”
“Anyone would.”
“No.” He shook his head, unwilling to believe it. “They’re good people. It will be a surprise, yes, but they couldn’t hate you just because of what your parents were.”
Sarai stopped walking. “You think good people can’t hate?” she asked. “You think good people don’t kill?” Her breathing hitched, and she realized she’d crushed Lazlo’s flower in her hand. She dropped the petals into the water. “Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.” She paused. Her voice grew heavy. “When they slaughter thirty babies in their cradles, they call it necessary.”
Lazlo stared at her. He shook his head in disbelief.
“That shock you saw on Eril-Fane’s face?” she went on. “It wasn’t because he didn’t know he had a child.” She took a breath. “It was because he thought he killed me fifteen years ago.” Her voice broke at the end. She swallowed hard. She felt, suddenly, as though her entire head were filled with tears and if she didn’t shed some of them it would explode. “When he killed all the godspawn, Lazlo,” she added, and wept.
Not in the dream, not where Lazlo could see, but up in her room, hidden away. Tears sheeted down her cheeks the way the monsoon rains sheeted down the smooth contours of the citadel in summer, flooding in through all the open doors, a rolling deluge of rain across the slick floors and nothing to do but wait for it to stop.
Eril-Fane had known that one of the babies in the nursery was his, but he didn’t know which one. He had seen Isagol’s belly swell with his child, of course, but after she was delivered of it, she had never mentioned it again. He’d asked. She’d shrugged. She’d done her duty; it was the nursery’s problem now. She hadn’t even known if it was a boy or a girl; it was nothing to her. And when he had walked, drenched in godsblood, into the nursery and looked about him at the squalling blue infants and toddlers, he had feared that he would see, and know: There. That one is mine.
If he had seen Sarai, cinnamon-haired like her mother, he would have known her in an instant, but he hadn’t, because she wasn’t there. But he hadn’t known that; for all he knew her hair was dark like his own, like all the rest of the babies. They made a blur of blue and blood and screams.
All innocent. All anathema.
All dead.