“Where will you go?”
Sarai, Lazlo, and Feral all looked at one another. They had no idea. “Sparrow would like to walk in a forest,” Sarai said, starting small. “And I’d like to swim in the sea.” She shared a secret look with Lazlo. Last night, at one point in their long, delirious dream, they had done just that, in a warm sea glazed with moonlight. They’d found a floating bottle with a message inside it, and they’d swum with knives between their teeth to slash a leviathan’s harness and free it from its enslavement.
Maybe they would do it for real. Why not? And what else might they find to set free, if they were to go looking?
The thought made her fingertips tingle and chills run up her arms.
By chance her gaze lit on Azareen’s face, and she had an answer to her question that sent a jolt right down her spine. They didn’t have to look very far if they wanted to set slaves free. Azareen was staring through the arcade into the gallery, where Minya’s ghost army was frozen in its ranks. There were plenty of slaves right here.
Sarai told Azareen, “I’ll do everything I can to free them. I swear.”
“And if you can’t?”
Sarai didn’t know how to answer that. If she couldn’t, it would mean that Minya was beyond all reach of reason or healing, and if that was true, what then?
Lazlo put his hand to the small of her back and said, “She will. But she needs time, and she’ll have it.”
He was kind but firm, and Sarai knew he would protect her— and all of them, Minya too, in the life ahead with its unguessable horizons.
Sparrow offered tea. “It’s not real tea, just herbs,” she said, apologetic.
“We’ll make sure you have real tea for your travels,” said Suheyla, and a pang of sadness caught her by surprise when she thought about them leaving. All her life she’d wished the citadel away, and now it was to go, and she was sorry? Oh, not sorry to have the sky free, the shadow gone, a new era for her city, but to lose the chance of knowing these children, who were strong and bright and shy and hungry, who had no home but this and no people but one another. She could see such longing in them, all bound up in hesitancy, as though they yearned for connection but didn’t believe they deserved it, and it squeezed her hearts and also made her ashamed that she had never even mourned them when she believed them all dead.
Godspawn. Who had first come up with the word?
Suheyla didn’t know, but she knew this: She had birthed one herself, and so had nearly every woman she knew. And all those lost babies…all unmourned. Because they had no memory of them, the babies had never felt real. It was easier to pretend they’d never existed—until the Liberation, anyway, when Azareen and others had come home with their bellies round with the terrible proof of it all.
No one ever mentioned those babies, either, though they had certainly been real, and had been born in the world only to be shown right out of it, all under a pall of silence.
An unexpected grief blossomed in Suheyla’s breast, so strong that for a moment she almost couldn’t breathe. These four young people with their shy smiles and azure skin made all the others real, too, and not as monsters or even gods, but as orphan boys and girls.
“Are you all right?” asked Sarai, seeing her…her grandmother… bend over and struggle for breath. Then Lazlo was on Suheyla’s other side, taking her elbow to help support her. There was no chair nearby but he made one. It grew right out of the floor like a metal flower on
a stem. He helped her to sit and they all gathered around her.
“I’ll get her some water,” said Feral, running for the kitchen.
“What is it? Are you unwell?” asked Eril-Fane, crouching before her. He looked so worried.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t fret over me.”
“Can you breathe?” he asked. “Is it your hearts?”
“I suppose it is my hearts, but not like that. I’m fine. I’m fine.” She grew stern to make them believe her. “It’s grief, not a heart attack. And I think all of us know by now that grief won’t kill us.”
They fussed over her anyway. Feral returned with water. It was sweeter than the water in Weep and she wondered, as she drank it, where in the world it came from, this rainwater procured by a cloud-stealing boy. And she wondered, too, where in the world they’d end up, these cast-off children claimed by no one.
“We should get you home,” said Azareen, though Suheyla was only an excuse. She was eager to be gone from here. Her mind kept turning indoors, to the sinister arm with its row of little rooms, and the sound of crying babies and weeping women at all hours.
But Suheyla shook her head. “Not just yet. I want to ask…”
Maybe it was better not knowing, but she couldn’t stand it any longer. This could be her last chance to find out. Could she live with wondering all the rest of her days? She wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore that those babies—her baby—had been neither real nor people. “Do you know what they did with them all?” she asked, looking from face to face. “What they did with all the babies?”
There was a silence. Sarai, for her part, was seeing the row of cradles and the row of cribs, Kiska with her one green eye, and Minya trying to protect her while Korako waited in the doorway.
“No,” she said. “We don’t.”
“We only know that Korako took them away once their gifts manifested,” added Feral.
“Took them where?” Suheyla asked, afraid to hear the answer.
“We don’t know,” said Sarai. “We wondered whether they could have taken them all out of Weep? Like Lazlo?”
“I don’t see how,” mused Suheyla. “The gods never left the city. Oh, Skathis might have flown downriver to track runaways, or to Fort Misrach to execute faranji who’d been fool enough to come across the desert. But besides that, they didn’t go anywhere.”
“They didn’t take them out of the citadel,” said Eril-Fane.
“We certainly would have noticed,” Suheyla agreed.
“No,” said Eril-Fane. “I mean: They didn’t take them out of the citadel.”
They all turned to him, unable at first to understand the distinction between what his mother was saying and what he was. They were in agreement, weren’t they? But Sarai saw that he was disturbed, his eyes not quite meeting hers, and she realized: Suheyla was speculating. He wasn’t. He was telling them.
“What do you know?” she asked at once.
“Only that,” he said. “After you were born, I…Sometimes I went by the nursery, to see if I could see you. Isagol didn’t like it. She didn’t see why I should care.” Emotions moved over his face, and Sarai felt them all in her own chest, the same as he had felt her hope in his. “She made me stop,” he said. “But before that, I saw Korako. Several times. Walking, with a child. Different children, I mean. I don’t know what she did with them. But I know they went in together, and…she came out alone.”
“Went in where?” Sarai asked, breathless. They were all riveted on him.
“There’s a room,” he said. “I never went in it, but I saw it once from the end of the corridor. It’s big. It’s…” With his hands, he formed the shape of a sphere. “Circular. That’s where Korako took the children.”
He was describing the heart of the citadel.
Chapter 34
Bacon Destiny
Ruby woke, and wondered what had woken her. She lolled for a second or two…and then sat bolt upright in bed—in Minya’s bed— remembering where she was, and why. She spun, braced for the sight of the little girl awake and maniacal or, worse, simply gone, and then slumped with relief. Minya was still laid out on the floor, eyes closed, face peaceful in sleep as it never was in waking.