A wave of her hand, and Sarai’s shape was returned to the air. What started as a silhouette slowly filled in to reveal her, eyes rolled back to whites, lips parted in a silent scream. For minutes she had wavered on the edge of unmaking, and felt the cold all through her. Now she collapsed. Lazlo rushed to her. They all did, save Minya. She stood right where she was, a tiny, dirty goddess, and no one noticed the way her hands moved, fingers rubbing over her palms as though they were slick with sweat and little hands kept slipping from her grasp.
As though she might lose everything, all that she had left.
And then Ruby was there with a tray. It clattered as she carried it. Cups sloshed when she set it down on the table. Her voice was neutral, the desperation so slight that only Sparrow perceived it. She asked, “Would anyone like tea?”
Tea.
It was absurd. What was it she had thought out in the garden earlier? That waiting for Minya’s wrath to descend was like a tea break from the end of the world? Well, here was literal tea. No one else could have gotten away with so totally tone-deaf a gesture, but Ruby was always blurting things out, heedless of what was going on around her. Still, Feral stared at her as though she’d grown another head. Lazlo didn’t even hear. He was holding a shivering Sarai, and murmuring to her, “I’ve got you.”
As for Minya, she saw the proffered cup from the corner of her eye. She took it without question. Her thoughts had come unstrung. She was at the edge of unmaking, where she’d almost sent Sarai. They were all I could carry ran through her mind, no matter how fierce she looked. “Bring me the Godslayer,” she said, to drown out the words in her head.
Lazlo’s jaw clenched. He faced Minya.
She held up her teacup in a toast. “To revenge,” she said in a voice like glass, and then she tipped up her cup and drank.
Ruby watched her. Sparrow watched her. Both girls held their breath. They couldn’t be sure. It was all hope and what if, but one didn’t inhabit the chamber of the goddess of oblivion without, at least once, sampling the potion in the little green glass bottle she’d kept on her bedside table.
Minya took a deep chug. She was thirsty. The tea wasn’t hot. The tea wasn’t tea. Their tea never was. They’d run out of leaves years ago. They drank brewed herbs and called it tea, but this wasn’t even that. It was just water at room temperature with a sour aftertaste.
She looked at Ruby, critical but unsuspicious, and said, “That’s the worst tea I’ve ever had.”
And then her eyes lost focus. Her knees lost strength. She staggered, looked bewildered, dropped her teacup with a smash.
And then she fell.
Time seemed to slow as Minya, monster and savior, sister and tormentor, lost consciousness and collapsed on the long mesarthium table.
Part II
astral (as·truhl)
adjective: Of, or relating to, or coming from, the stars.
noun: A rare category of Mesarthim gift; one whose soul or consciousness can leave the body and travel independently of it.
Chapter 16
Of the Stars
The punishment for unauthorized contact with godsmetal was death. Everyone knew that. The village children, sidling closer to the wasp ship, knew it. They would never dream of touching it, but were only daring one another nearer, at least to touch its shadow, bold now that the Servants had disappeared inside with Kora and Nova.
Some in the village thought it right that Nyoka’s girls should be tested first. Others grumbled. The men who’d been eyeing them of late—including old Shergesh, though the sisters did not know it— burned with the injustice of it, that outsiders could come down from the sky and carry off their girls. It would be a tremendous honor, of course, if another Rievan were made Servant, but better it be a young man. There were too many of them in the village, beginning to sniff after wives of their own, and the older men wouldn’t have minded a culling of that herd. The loss of one girl, though, let alone two, would be deeply felt. Life on Rieva was hard, especially for the women. Wives were often in need of replenishing.
The gathered crowd kept avid eyes on the ship, even as they milled about, gossiping. They knew that testing took time, and so it came as a surprise when, after only a few minutes, the door on the wasp’s thorax opened.
Skoy?, watching through slit eyes, felt a surge of triumph that her stepdaughters should be rejected so swiftly. It could only be rejection. A strong gift would take time to gauge. But the girls did not emerge. It was the Servant with the ropes of white hair. Stiff-armed, he was holding out two uul-hide anoraks, his face curdled with revulsion. He pitched them out like garbage, then followed them with fur chamets and breeches, balled-up woolen longskins, and, finally, the girls’ hide boots.
The door closed again and the villagers were left eyeing the pile. What were Kora and Nova wearing, if their clothes were all lying there?
“There’s a woman in there with them,” said their father, Zyak, lest the specter of indecency bring their bride prices down.
Shergesh spat and crossed his arms. Zyak’s price was uncomfortable; he smelled an opportunity. “And that matters how? They’re from Aqa. You’ve heard the stories.”
The stories of depravity, yes. The fishing boats brought them, and they were as salt to the islanders’ bland fare: Rievan gossip could not compare to what went on—allegedly—in the capital.
“They’re good girls,” said Zyak, and Kora and Nova would have been surprised to hear him say so, at least until he followed it up with, “They have all their teeth and toes. You should be so lucky, old man.”
And the old man in question harrumphed but said no more. He had to be careful, he knew. Zyak was proud, and not above taking some other man’s offer, though it be lower, simply to spite him.
“Anyway,” said Zyak. “If the Mesarthim want them, it’s as well for me. They don’t haggle.” He should know. He had bought a new sledge and oven with what they paid him for his wife, and two skins of spirit besides.
…
“Names,” said the female Servant, Solvay, who hailed from a desert continent as desolate in its own way as Rieva. She had been found on a search much like this one, and plucked from the middle of nowhere.
Kora and Nova stood mute, covering themselves with their arms. They were wearing only their smallclothes and socks, the rest all stripped away. The reek of uul was less easy to be rid of; it was an entity in the enclosed space of the ship, and disgust showed on all the Servants’ faces. Nova answered first. “Novali,” she said, and paused. Her full name was Novali Zyak-vasa, or Novali Zyak—daughter. Upon marriage, a Rievan girl would exchange -vasa for -ikai, wife, and take her husband’s name. Nova wanted none of it. “Nyoka-vasa,” she said instead. She wished to be nothing more than her mother’s daughter, especially today.
Solvay wrote it down and looked at Kora.
“Korako…Nyoka-vasa,” said Kora with a sideward glance at her sister. She liked the feeling of the small act of defiance that would keep her father’s name from being written down and made permanent on an imperial document.
“Nyoka,” said Solvay. “That was your mother’s name, who was a Servant?”
The girls nodded. “Do you know her?” Nova blurted. Solvay shook her head, and Nova swallowed her disappointment. She and Kora were trying to act calm, but their hearts were racing. They were more dazzled, even, than the children outside, prancing around in the wasp ship’s shadow. No one had dreamed of this moment more than they, and no one else truly believed, as they did, that it was their destiny come at last to retrieve them. With their eyes they traced the thin bands of godsmetal the Mesarthim wore at their brows—the Servants’ diadem, as it was called. It was what kept them in contact with the godsmetal that activated their gifts, and simple though it was, it was the most potent symbol of power in the world of Mesaret. All their lives, Kora and Nova had dreamed of wearing them themselves.