“Sometimes these things are beyond our control. Now, what’s this about my granddaughter’s soul?”
Granddaughter. There was claiming in that word, and Lazlo experienced a keen pang of hope on Sarai’s behalf. He knew what it would mean to her to be claimed as family. He answered Suheyla. He couldn’t see, as others could, the way he looked when he spoke of Sarai, or know the effect it had on them—as though the idea of her was translated through his love and wonder, and all their associations with “godspawn” were called into question.
“She’s been going into Minya’s dreams,” he said. “She thinks she’s trapped, somehow, by the past. We hope that she can help her to finally be free of…of what happened that day.”
It struck Azareen and Suheyla perhaps more even than the two men: that the little girl was a counterpoint to Eril-Fane, both of them trapped by the same horrific day, both of them saviors, and both broken. Azareen swallowed hard, and was prey to an echo of yesterday’s omen: the white bird and its shadow, and the sense that fate was hunting, and had already picked out its quarry.
No. It couldn’t have him.
“So take the citadel away,” she blurted, her voice thrumming at the border of passion and desperation. “If you can’t kill her, at least do that, and let us be free, too.”
A silence followed her words as the others took them in. Eril-Fane spoke first. “We need to bring our people home,” he told Lazlo, who saw shame in his face as though it pained him to ask them to leave, as indeed it did. But his first duty had to be to his people, and his city.
Lazlo nodded. This was, after all, why he’d come here: to help Weep solve this very problem, little suspecting, at the time, that he was the only one who could. With Minya unconscious, there was no real impediment. “That’s fair,” he said, and, at the prospect of pulling up anchor and moving the whole citadel, felt both apprehension and excitement. Move it where?
The answer that came to him was… anywhere.
Apprehension fell away. Lazlo let the realization fill him: that he was in possession of a magical metal palace he could shape with his mind—a magical flying metal palace he could shape with his mind—and for the first time in his life, he had a kind of family, and together they had…the world, the whole world, and time. That was crucial. They had time.
“I’ll ask the others,” he said.
“You’re the one who can move it,” Azareen insisted. “It’s your choice.”
Lazlo shook his head. “Just because the power is mine, it doesn’t follow that all the choices are.” But he saw that Azareen’s harshness was stemming not from hate of the godspawn, but worry. Her stern, lovely features were pinched with it, and her hands were clasping and unclasping, unable to be still. “But I think they’ll agree,” he told her. “Sarai already pleaded with Minya to consider it.”
There wasn’t much more to say. Lazlo would return to the citadel and talk to the others, then come back and relay their decision. He was concerned about the anchors, and whether there might be damage to surrounding structures when he lifted them up. At least the city was empty. There would be no risk of injuries, but Eril-Fane said he would send soldiers to make sure the areas were clear.
“We could use supplies for a journey,” Lazlo said. “There’s not much to eat up there.” He gestured to his clothes. “Or to wear.”
“We can do that,” said Eril-Fane.
Azareen almost felt relief—to be so nearly free of the citadel and godspawn. At least, she sensed what it might feel like, but she wasn’t ready to trust it, not until the sky was clear, and maybe not even then. Did she remember how to feel relief? If anything, she was holding her breath, waiting for the words she already knew that Eril-Fane would speak.
“Do you think…Can I meet her?” he asked, hesitant. “Can I come up with you?”
Lazlo already knew how Sarai yearned for her father to want to know her, so he nodded, and didn’t try to speak for fear that emotion would overcome him.
“And I as well,” said Suheyla.
Azareen wanted to scream. Didn’t they feel it, Fate’s bowstring drawing taut? She tried to dissuade them. “Just let them leave,” she pleaded. “Don’t go back up there.”
But the Godslayer’s burden of guilt and shame would not permit him to evict the survivors of his own bloodbath as though they were a nuisance, without at least going himself to face them—face her, his daughter—and take responsibility, and give her a place to put all the blame she had to have been carrying all this time. He owed her that at least. He could stand there and accept the weight of her blame, and hope it left her lightened.
He passed temporary command to a captain named Brishan, and gave orders to his quartermaster to begin drawing up lists to provision the citadel.
The four of them could have fit astride Rasalas if it came to it, but such inelegance was unnecessary. The creature was the beast of the north anchor. There were three more anchors and a beast for each, and Lazlo reached out into the scheme of energies, feeling for them and waking them as he had awakened Rasalas. It was easier now. He didn’t even need to be near them, or see them. He had the feeling that his power was growing all the time. He reached and they responded, each quickening, and, like Rasalas, transforming at the touch of his mind into his creatures, so that what Skathis had made hideous became beautiful.
By the time they landed beside Rasalas, they were no longer the grotesques that had glowered over the city.
Thyon, coming out through the guardhouse with Ruza, Tzara, and Calixte, saw them, and thought they looked like they had flown straight out of the illustrations in Miracles for Breakfast, the fairy-tale book that, once upon a time, Strange had brought him in good faith, and he had kept, in bad. There was a winged horse, a dragon, and a gryphon, all exquisite.
A stir went through the Tizerkane, but their fear couldn’t properly kindle. These were not the beasts of their nightmares.
They mounted: Azareen astride the horse, and Suheyla behind her son on the gryphon, leaving the dragon riderless.
Inside of a second, Thyon’s mind flashed before him an alternate history of his own life, in which he thanked the boy who brought him a fairy-tale book at dawn, instead of scorning him and pushing him down stairs. And later, instead of threatening him and stealing his books, and trying to steal his dream, he might have introduced him to the Godslayer himself, and recommended him for the delegation. If he had done these things, all of which, he had no doubt, Strange would have done in his place, then might he be mounting that metal dragon now, and flying up to the citadel with them?
His brain presented this entire fantasy in roughly the time it took Strange to swing his leg across his creature’s back. As the party took flight, Thyon, earthbound, felt every choice he’d made, every action he’d taken, as a weight he carried with him. He wondered: Was it weight he could shed or throw off, or was it forever a part of him, as much as his bones and his hearts?
Chapter 32
All the Jagged Edges
Sarai knew her father well. Hundreds of times she’d perched moths on his brow, watched him sleep, and plagued him with nightmares. She’d traveled the pathways of his mind, and shuddered at the horrors there. She’d even seen him in the dreams of others—as a boy, a young husband, a hero. But she had never met him.