They all saw what he held, the unbearable broken form of her, the pink and red and cinnamon so brutally beautiful against the blue of her skin and his. It was Ruby who drew in a low, racking sob. Red glimmered in her hollow eyes. Her fingertips kindled into ten blue tapers and she didn’t even feel it. Sparrow’s sorrow was manifest in the withering of flowers around her feet. Her gift, which they had never even known worked in reverse, was leeching the life out of all the plants she touched. And nor did Feral consciously summon the sheaves of cloud that coalesced around them, blocking out the sky, the horizon, the Cusp, shrinking the world to here—this garden and this garden alone.
Only Minya was purposeful. As Lazlo drew nearer, so did her ghosts.
There were a dozen positioned around the garden and many more inside the gallery, ever ready to repel invasion. And though Lazlo’s gaze didn’t waver from Minya, he felt them behind him. He saw them behind her, through the arcade, and as Weep’s dead answered Minya’s call, moving toward the arches that had for fifteen years stood open between garden and gallery, Lazlo closed them.
Her will summoned the ghosts, and his barred their way. It was the opening exchange of a dialogue in power—no words spoken, only magic. The metal of the arches turned fluid and flowed closed, as they had not done since Skathis’s time, cutting Minya off from the bulk of her army. Her back was to the gallery, and the flow of the mesarthium made no sound, but she felt it in the muting of the souls on the ends of her tethers. Her jaw clenched. The ghosts in the garden glided into position, flanking Lazlo from behind. He didn’t turn to face them, but Rasalas did, a growl of warning rumbling up its metal throat.
Ruby, Sparrow, and Feral watched it all with held breath.
Lazlo and Minya faced each other, and they might have been strangers, but there was more between them than the corpse of Sarai. Minya understood it, even if Lazlo didn’t. This faranji could control mesarthium, which meant that he was Skathis’s son.
And hence, her brother.
Which revelation stirred no feeling of kinship, but only a burn of bitterness—that he should inherit the gift that should have been hers, but with none of the hardship that had made her so desperate for it.
Where had he come from?
He had to be the one Sarai had spoken of, and who had made her so defiant. “I know a human could stand the sight of me,” she had said, blazing with a boldness Minya had never seen. “Because there is one who can see me, and he stands the sight of me quite well.”
Well, she’d been misinformed or lying. This was no human.
Beast faced ghosts, as man faced girl. The seconds between them were fraught with challenge. Power bristled, barely held in check. In Minya, Lazlo saw the merciless child who had tried to kill him, and whose devotion to bloodshed had filled Sarai with despair. He saw an enemy, and so his fury found a focus.
But. She was an enemy who caught ghosts like butterflies in a net, and he was a man with his dead love in his arms.
He fell to his knees before her. Hunched over his burden, he sank down on his heels so that he was just her height. He looked her in the eyes and saw no empathy there, no glint of humanity, and braced himself for a struggle. “Her soul,” he said, and his voice had never been rougher—so raw it was practically bloody. He didn’t know how it worked or what it would mean. He only knew that some part of Sarai might yet be saved, and must be. “You have to catch it.”
Someone else—almost anyone else—might have seen his heartbreak and forgiven his tone of command.
But not Minya.
She’d had every intention of catching Sarai’s soul. That was what she’d been listening for. From the moment she learned Sarai had fallen, she had stretched her senses to their limits, waiting, hardly breathing, alert to the telltale skim of passing ghosts. That was what it was like: straining to hear, but with her whole being. And like with listening, the subtle skim of a soul could be drowned out by a nearer, louder presence.
Like an arrogant, trespassing man astride a winged metal beast.
This stranger dared to come here and break her focus in order to command her to do what she was doing already?
As though, if not for him, she would let Sarai drift away?
“Who do you think you are?” she seethed through clenched teeth.
Who did Lazlo think he was? Orphan, godspawn, librarian, hero? Maybe he was all of those things, but the only answer that came to him, and the only relevant context, was Sarai—what she was to him, and he to her. “I am . . . I’m Sarai’s . . .” he began but couldn’t finish. There wasn’t a word for what they were. Neither married nor promised—what time had there been for promises? Not yet lovers, but so much more than friends. So he faltered in his answer, leaving it unfinished, and it was, in its way, simply and perfectly true. He was Sarai’s.
“Sarai’s what?” demanded Minya, her fury mounting. “Her protector? Against me?” It enraged her, the way he held her body—as though Sarai belonged to him, as if she could be more precious to him than to her own family. “Leave her and go,” she snarled, “if you want to live.”
Live? Lazlo felt a laugh rise up his throat. His new power surged in him. It felt like a storm ready to burst through his skin. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, his fury matching hers, and to Minya, it was a challenge to her family and her home—everything she’d spent herself on and poured herself into, every moment of every day, since gods’ blood spurted and she saved who she could carry.
But saving them had only been the beginning. She’d had to keep them alive—four babies in her care, inside a crime scene of corpses and ghosts, and herself just a traumatized child. Her mind was formed in the desperate, keep-alive pattern of those early weeks and months as she spent herself out and burned herself up. She didn’t know any other way. There was nothing left over, nothing, not even enough to grow. Through sheer, savage will, Minya poured even her life force into the colossal expenditure of magic necessary to hold on to her ghosts and keep her charges safe—and not just safe but loved. In Great Ellen, she had given them a mother, as best she could. And in the effort of it all, she had stunted herself, blighted herself, whittled herself to a bone of a thing. She wasn’t a child. She was barely a person. She was a purpose, and she hadn’t done it all and given everything just to lose control now.
Power flared from her. Ruby, Feral, and Sparrow cried out as the dozen ghosts who remained in the garden—Great Ellen among them—unfurled and flew at Lazlo with their knives and meat hooks, and Great Ellen with her bare hands shaping themselves into claws as her teeth grew into fangs to shame even Skathis’s Rasalas.
Lazlo didn’t even think. From the towering wall of metal that was backdrop to the garden—and made up the seraph’s shoulders and the column of its neck—a great wave of liquid metal peeled itself away and came pouring down, flashing with the first rays of the rising sun, to freeze into a barrier between himself and the chief onslaught. At the same moment, Rasalas leapt. The creature didn’t bother itself with ghosts but knocked Minya to the ground like a toy to a kitten, and pinned her there, one metal hoof pressing on her chest.
It was so swift—a blur of metal and she was down. The breath was knocked out of her, and . . . the fury was knocked out of Lazlo. Whatever she was, this cruel little girl—his own would-be murderer, not least—the sight of her sprawled out like that at Rasalas’s mercy shamed him. Her legs were so impossibly thin, her clothes as tattered as the beggars in the Grin. She didn’t give up. Still her ghosts came at him, but the metal moved with them, flowing to block them, catching their weapons and freezing around them. They couldn’t get near.
He went and knelt by Minya. She struggled, and Rasalas increased the pressure of its elegant hoof against her chest. Just enough to hold her, not enough to hurt. Her eyes burned black. She hated the pity she saw in Lazlo’s. It was a thousand times worse than the fury had been. She gritted her teeth, ceased her ghosts’ attack, and spat out, “Do you want me to save her or not?”
He did. Rasalas lifted its hoof and Minya slid out from beneath it, rubbing the place on her chest where it had pinned her. How she hated Lazlo then. In compelling her by force to do what she’d been planning anyway, it felt as though he’d won something, and she’d lost.
Lost what?
Control.
The queen was vulnerable on the quell board with no pawns to protect her. This new adversary possessed the gift she’d always craved, and up against it, she was nothing. His power swept hers aside like a hand brushing crumbs from a table. His control of mesarthium gave them their freedom in every way they’d ever daydreamed—but Minya didn’t even know if she would be counted among them, or would be swept aside just like her power and her ghosts. They could leave her behind if they wanted, if they decided they didn’t trust her—or simply didn’t like her—and what could she do? And what of the humans, and the Godslayer, and revenge?
It seemed to her the citadel swayed beneath her, but it was steady. It was her world that swayed, and only she could feel it.
She rose to her feet. Her pulse beat in her temples. She closed her eyes. Lazlo watched her. He felt an ache of tenderness for her, though he couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was simply because with her eyes closed she really looked like a six-year-old child, and it brought home that once upon a time she had been: just a six-year-old child with a crushing burden.
When she settled into a stillness of deep concentration, he let himself hope what he had so far only wondered: that it might be possible Sarai was not lost to him.
That she was, even now, adrift—like an ulola flower borne by the wind. Where was she? The very air felt alive with possibility, charged with souls and magic.
There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.
Sathaz had finally learned that if he climbed into the pool and kept very still, the moon would come to him and let him be near her. Only near, never touching. He couldn’t touch her without shattering her, and so—as Lazlo had told Sarai—he had made peace with the impossible. He took what he could get.