“His manage.”
To Thyon’s surprise, Tzara took his side. “Leave him alone. He’s here, isn’t he? He could have fled like the others.” She gave Ruza a shove. “You’re just jealous he’s so much better-looking than you.”
“I am not,” the warrior protested. “And he is not. Look at him! He’s not even a real person.”
“What?” asked Thyon, honestly baffled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
But Ruza didn’t answer him. He only gestured at him, telling the women, “He looks like somebody made him, and delivered him in a velvet-lined box. He probably plucks his eyebrows. I don’t know how you could possibly find that attractive.”
“Us?” asked Calixte, laughing. “He’s hardly my type.”
“Too pretty for me,” said Tzara, bracing herself for the exaggerated punch Calixte landed on her hip.
“Are you saying I’m not pretty?” she demanded with mock umbrage.
“Not that pretty, thank the gods. I’d be afraid to touch you.”
Thyon was speechless. He was well aware of his own perfection— and his eyebrows were natural, thank you very much—but had never heard it discussed so openly, or, of all things, as though it were a fault. A small tingling of relief mingled with his indignation, though, because they’d forgotten about the cuts on his arms.
“Exactly,” said Ruza. “He’s like a new linen napkin that you’re afraid to wipe your mouth on.”
The women both laughed at the absurdity of the comparison. Thyon’s brow crinkled. A napkin? “I’ll thank you to keep your mouth away from me,” he said, causing the women to laugh even harder.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Ruza, looking positively repelled.
But Tzara shut him down, saying with a sly edge, “I think you protest too much, my friend.”
Whatever she meant by it, Ruza’s cheeks flamed, and he looked anywhere but at Thyon. Busying himself with the donkey, he asked, sounding sour, “Are we going to deliver this load or not?” He climbed into the driver’s seat. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use some sleep.”
Finally, thought Thyon, who wasn’t sure he could have managed another cartload without a break.
“Me too,” said Tzara. “But we’ll have to check in at the garrison.”
“Not me,” gloated Calixte. “I have no master. I sleep when I like. Wait—”
The cart had started to pull away. She darted forward and plucked something out. “A book didn’t make it in the crates. Oh, this one. It’s gorgeous.”
It was the one Thyon had set aside. He started to speak, but stopped. What could he say? Words came unbidden into his mind, and he wanted to scour them out.
I thought Strange would like to see it.
Since when did he care what Strange would like? That wasn’t why he’d set it aside.
“Is it about the seraphim?” Calixte wondered.
Tzara looked over her shoulder, and Thyon witnessed the instant her face changed, all her weariness vanishing. “Merciful seraphim,” she said in awe. “It’s the Thakranaxet.”
“What?” Ruza jumped down from the driver’s seat, and then the three of them were shoulder to shoulder, peering at the book with avid eyes. Thyon, opposite, felt a pinch of envy and, preposterously, loss, as though the book had been his discovery, and was being taken away from him.
As he had taken away Strange’s books back in Zosma? No. Of course that had been much worse. A pang of shame twisted his gut at the thought of those scruffy, handmade books, labors of love brimming with years of the librarian’s hard-earned knowledge. They were still back in his pink marble palace, stacked up where he’d left them. It occurred to him now that he might have brought them, and returned them to Strange on the journey. He did have one book that Strange would know. It was Miracles for Breakfast, the volume of tales Strange had brought to his door when they were sixteen. What would he think if he knew Thyon had read it so often he knew it practically by heart?
“What’s the Thakranaxet?” he asked, stumbling over the name.
“It’s the testament of Thakra,” Tzara said. “She was leader of the seraphim who came to Zeru.”
Even after what he’d seen, it still startled Thyon to hear the seraphim spoken of so matter-of-factly, as real historical beings. In Zosma, there was lore of the seraphim, but it was very old and had been churned under by the One God like weeds by a plow. No names survived there that Thyon had ever heard, and certainly no one knew it was fact.
“It’s our holy book,” Tzara said. “All copies were lost or destroyed when the Mesarthim came.”
They went on murmuring, turning pages, but Thyon looked up at the citadel. When the Mesarthim came, Tzara had said, and it struck him what an extraordinary coincidence it was that both seraphim and Mesarthim had come… here. Thousands of years apart, two different races of otherworldly beings, and both came right here, and not anywhere else in all the wide world of Zeru. It was too extraordinary to be a coincidence, really, especially considering that the Mesarthim citadel took the form of a seraph.
Thyon’s gaze glided over the contours of the great metal angel, and he wondered what it all meant. They were pieces of a story, Mesarthim and seraphim, but how did they fit together?
And what place did Lazlo Strange have in it?
“You know who’d love this book?” asked Calixte, flipping pages.
Thyon gritted his teeth, knowing exactly who and still telling himself that wasn’t why he’d put it aside. What did he care what the dreamer would love, or who got to give it to him?
Nothing at all. Not a bit. It was none of his concern.
The golden godson, all blisters and aches, trudged stiffly ahead of the donkey.
Chapter 22
Do You Want to Die, Too?
Sarai opened her eyes in Minya’s dream, and realized she was holding her breath, braced for a clash that didn’t come. She exhaled slowly and looked around, taking stock of her surroundings.
She knew the citadel nursery, but she knew it bare. After what happened there, Minya had ordered everything burned. Nowadays, it was an austere place—a kind of awful memorial, with nothing left but the rows of mesarthium cribs and cots, all shining blue, abstracted by the absence of bedding and babies.
This was the same nursery, but it took a beat to realize it. Sarai was standing in it, and there was bedding and babies—and children and tidy piles of folded diapers, and white blankets worn soft with many washings, and nippled bottles all lined up on a shelf. The babies were in the cribs, lying down, limbs waving, or standing at the bars like tiny prisoners. Some bigger children were playing on woven mats laid out on the floor. They had a few toys: blocks, a doll. Not much. One girl walked up to a crib and lifted one of the babies out and held it on her hip like a little mother.
The girl was Minya. Though in size and shape she hadn’t changed, she was vastly different in presentation: She was clean, for one thing, and her hair was long, not chopped off with a knife. It was dark and shining and fell in waves down her back, and her little nursery smock was white, with nary a rip or stain. She was singing to the baby. It was her same icing-sugar voice, but it sounded different, fuller and more sincere.
It didn’t surprise Sarai to find herself here. The nursery was bound to loom large in the landscape of Minya’s mind. The calm of the scene did surprise her a little. She’d been braced for something ugly—a confrontation, blame. She had thought Minya might be waiting for her at the border of the dream, the way Lazlo did, except unsmiling. But that was foolish. How could Minya know she would come? Sarai didn’t even know if Minya would be able to see her, and even if she could, she couldn’t expect her to be lucid and present in the way Lazlo was.