And when the dance was broken up by Skathis arriving on Rasalas to carry off a girl called Mazal, they stood frozen, powerless and furious, and wept.
That night he walked her home by a towpath underground, and they spoke with the fervor of untested warriors of overthrowing the gods. He went down on his knees before her, and, trembling, kissed her hands. She touched his face with unreality and ease: She’d dreamed of this so much that nothing was more natural, but there were details she hadn’t known to imagine: how rough his jaw, how hot his brow, how soft—how soft—his lips. She brushed her fingers over them, dazed, half dreaming, dizzy. Time skipped, and then it wasn’t her fingers but her lips on his lips, all the better to feel their softness, because her fingers were callused but her lips felt everything, and he was everything she wanted to feel.
Something in them was awakened that night. To see a girl borne off by Skathis when they had just been dancing, and to know, even if they could not bear to think of it, what she must be enduring…It was a harsh awakening, and they drowned it with each other, with their lips and hands and hunger. Mazal was hardly older than Azareen. Few girls in the city escaped the gods’ attentions. Almost all were destined to take that ride up to the citadel and spend a year they would not remember. It was only a matter of time, they knew, and so time took on new meaning.
Azareen scarcely remembered the days that had followed, but the nights. ..oh, the nights. In the river cavern, they sparred with new wildness, so that the others training around them would find themselves stopping to watch. It was a deadly, passionate dance, and they were perfectly matched, her speed a counterpoint to his strength. No one else in the city could have bested them. After sparring, he would walk her home, only they wouldn’t get there till close to sunup. They knew all the shadowed places where they could be alone, to kiss and touch and press and breathe and drown and live and burn.
A few months later, they wed. As Eril-Fane had made her a bracelet, he made her ring, too. On his small apprentice stipend, he rented rooms above a bakery—in Windfall, where the gods’ plums rained down. They made a sickly sweet reminder, always in the air. Even if you never looked up, you couldn’t escape knowing the citadel was there. But the rooms were cheap, and they were young and poor. He carried her up the steps. Azareen was tall and strong, but he lifted her like silk and air. He kicked the door shut behind them and took her straight to the bed. They’d waited. Of course they’d waited, but every night it had been harder. They were match and striker, each to the other. They touched and were set afire.
Two days earlier, with his hot mouth on her neck, she had closed her eyes and told him, “I don’t want to be a maiden when he takes me.”
“I won’t let him take you,” Eril-Fane had said, his arms tightening around her, his whole body going taut.
But they knew what happened to those who tried to thwart Skathis’s plunder: fathers’ throats ripped open by Rasalas, husbands carried skyward and dropped. They knew not to interfere; the women would be returned, and none wanted their men to die. Still, when it came to it, some men just couldn’t bear it, and Azareen worried what Eril-Fane might do. The risk was not only to them. To show any fighting skill would give away their training and betray the Tizerkane, who were not prepared to mount a defense, much less a full-scale revolt. And anyway, it would be for nothing. Whenever Skathis came among them, he wore a second skin of ultrafine mesarthium under his clothes. He could not be hurt. Azareen tried to make Eril-Fane swear not to die for her, but he would not take that oath.
As for her not remaining a maiden, though, there they quite agreed. They said their vows and he carried her home, skipping their own party in favor of their bed. They were young and burning, and they lived under a terrible shadow. There wasn’t a moment to lose.
For five days and five nights, they strung minutes like beads— each one a jewel, shining and precious.
On the sixth day, Skathis came. Rasalas’s landing shook the street. Azareen and Eril-Fane were walking home from the market, holding hands and smiling their lovers’ secret smiles. To the god of beasts, they were irresistible: beautiful, smooth, and sweet. They were like dessert for a monster like him. Eril-Fane pushed Azareen behind him. Terror rose in her. Rasalas leapt. The beast was an atrocity: a winged thing, all misshapen, skull bared by rotting flesh—metal skull, metal flesh, and its eyes just empty sockets aglow with infernal light. It flew at them, plowing into Eril-Fane. The momentum sent Azareen sprawling, so she was lying on her back on the cracked lapis stones when Rasalas’s great claws closed around her husband’s shoulders.
And lifted him.
She watched him grow smaller as he was borne away struggling. It happened so fast. She was the one left behind. She had never prepared herself for that. Sometimes men were taken, but not with the certainty of women, and she could only lie there, gasping, until someone came to help her up, to take her home to her family.
Really, it felt as though she had lain there gasping for the next two years and more. They were such a blur of longing and aching, and when Skathis finally did take her, she was glad—to put an end to the waiting, to find out what had become of her husband, if he was even still alive.
He was. But he was no longer her husband, not then or ever after. He was Isagol’s broken toy. He could not touch or love her. He couldn’t even weep. She never could stop loving him, though in the worst of times she’d tried. Thakra knows, she’d tried.
And here they were now: no longer the same smooth, young creatures they’d been. Eighteen years had gone by since the day Skathis took him, and it felt like an entire lost lifetime. Now, in these past few days, he had both wept and held her hand, and she had sensed, for the first time, a shift taking place within him. She had begun to feel the first fragile unfurling of something she thought might be healing. But was she only seeing what she wanted so desperately to see? As she watched him go, and wondered, a shadow drew a circle around him. She looked up, startled, and saw the white eagle circling. An unaccountable chill gripped her. Azareen was not one for omens, and had no good reason to fear the bird. But for a single, potent moment it felt as though fate had drawn an arrow, pointed it right at her husband, and declared him the next to die.
Chapter 26
Dizzy Little Godspawn
Sarai was as ready as she was going to get. Sitting on the floor beside Minya, preparing to reenter her mind, she couldn’t help thinking of all the nights she’d sent out her moths to invade humans’ dreams and unleash horrors on them. She recalled how Minya would come to her room at sunup and ask, eager, “Did you make anyone cry? Did you make anyone scream?”
For years, the answer had been yes. Sarai knew better than anyone: It’s easy to make people cry. Grief, humiliation, anger—there are countless avenues to tears. It’s easy to make them scream, too. There are so many things to fear.
But how do you stop someone from crying? How do you lead them out of fear?
Can hate be reversed?
Can revenge be defused?
How much more daunting these tasks were. Sarai was overwhelmed. “Trust yourself,” Lazlo told her. “She may be strong, but so are you. I’ve seen what you can do in dreams.”
She raised her eyebrows. She couldn’t help it. “Yes, you have.” She bit her lip in a bashful smile. “But I don’t think that will help me now.”
Lazlo grinned, cheeks warming. “Not that. Though I’d love to do that again later. I meant the time you defeated Skathis. You didn’t think you could do it then, either.”
“That was different. He was my own nightmare. Minya’s real.”