“You’ll outgrow your cot before long,” Great Ellen observed that morning. Minya woke to find the nurse had been watching her sleep. That wasn’t good. Sometimes godspawn on the cusp of their gift slipped up in their sleep and gave themselves away.
It was true, what Great Ellen said. Minya’s toes were starting to hang out over the end of her little metal bed. “I’ll curl up,” she said. “I don’t need to sleep all stretched out.”
“This isn’t your home,” said the nurse.
Less Ellen chimed in. “Don’t think you can trick us. We’ve seen it all.”
Minya took the words as a challenge. She was good at games. She would trick them. She would not give in to her gift, no matter what it was.
But she did, and only hours later. She still won the game, though, because the Ellens were dead, and when Minya learned what it was she could do, it was them she learned it on.
It all started with strange noises in the corridor: shouts and running feet. And then a man appeared in the doorway, out of breath, with a knife in his hand. He was small and trim, with a pointed beard. He was human, brown-skinned like the Ellens. He skidded to a stop in front of the door, his face all lit up with triumph.
“They’re dead!” he shouted, glorying. “All dead, every one. The monsters are slain and we are free!”
Monsters? Minya wondered with a jolt of fear. What monsters?
The Ellens peppered him with questions, and when Minya grasped what monsters were dead, she was not in the least bit sad. Dread, after all, was a pale-haired goddess, and she didn’t have to fear her anymore. When the Ellens whooped for joy and shouted, “Thakra be praised! We’re free!” she actually thought, for a sweet, thrilling moment, that she might be free with them, and all the rest of the godspawn, too.
The shouting alarmed the babies. Some began to cry. And the Ellens turned and looked at them, and Minya knew then that whatever cause for joy they had, it spelled nothing good for her and hers.
“There’s still the little monsters to deal with,” Great Ellen said to the man.
And the three of them surveyed the rows of cribs and cots with such revulsion.
“I’ll bring Eril-Fane,” said the man with the pointed beard. “I reckon he deserves to do the honors.”
The honors.
“Don’t take too long,” Less Ellen told him. She wore an eye patch. The eye she’d had there had been lazy. Isagol hadn’t cared for it, and so had plucked it out with her fingers. “I can’t stand to stay here for one more minute.”
“Here,” said the man, handing over the knife. “Take this in case you need it.”
He looked right at Minya when he said it, and then he was gone and the Ellens were giddy, laughing and saying, “We’re getting out of here, at last.”
A little boy named Evran, four years old, went up to them, infected by their laughter, and asked, bright and eager, “Where are we going?”
The laughter evaporated. “We’re going home,” Great Ellen said, and Minya understood that she and the other children were going nowhere.
Ever.
The man who had killed the gods was coming to kill them, too.
She grabbed up Evran and darted for the door. It wasn’t a plan. It was panic. Less Ellen grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her right off her feet. Minya kicked out at her, and let go of Evran. Less Ellen dropped the knife. Minya got to it first. The little boy scrambled back to hide behind a cot.
All the rest was a blur.
The knife lay on the ground. The red was spreading—a glistening pool on the shining blue floor. The Ellens were lying still, their eyes open and staring, and…and they were standing there, too, right beside their own bodies. Their ghosts were staring at Minya, aghast. She was the only one who could see them, and she didn’t want to look. None of it felt real—not the bodies, the ghosts, the spreading pool of red or the slickness on her hands. Her fingers moved, smearing it over her palms. And it wasn’t sweat. It had never been sweat. It was red, red and wet, and when she grabbed Sarai and Feral, she got it on them, too. They were stricken, too shocked to cry, emitting hiccuping gasps as though they’d forgotten how to breathe. Their little hands kept slipping out of her grip. They were pulling away. They didn’t want to go with her.
Because of what they had seen her do.
Do you want to die, too? Do you?
They probably thought she was going to kill them next. She dragged them over their slain nurses and out into the corridor. She didn’t know her way around the citadel; she had hardly ever been out of the nursery. It was luck that brought her to the almost-shut door, too narrow for adults to squeeze through. If she’d gone any other way, they would have been caught and killed. She pushed the little ones through the narrow opening and went back for more.
But she was too late. The Godslayer was already there. All she could do was listen, frozen in place, as the screams were cut off one by one.
Chapter 53
A Creature Riddled with Empty Spaces
“Minya, it’s all right. Minya!” Sarai crouched at her side. She saw the sheer, naked panic in the little girl’s eyes.
“They were all I could carry,” Minya told her, shaking.
“I know. You did so well. It’s over now,” Sarai told her. “I promise. It’s all over.”
But Minya saw the Ellens’ ghosts and recoiled. She couldn’t unsee their leering faces, and she couldn’t unknow the truth. She’d killed them once, and she’d kept them. She’d needed them. She could never have cared for four babies on her own!
The rest had been unconscious. It was the first time she ever used her gift. She didn’t even know what it was, and she did it in a haze of trauma. She was six years old and everyone was dead. She took hold of the nurses’ souls and made them into what she needed them to be: someone to love and look after them all—like mothers, as best she could imagine, never having been privileged to know one. And her mind had smeared a blur around it, and the Ellens’ tethers had grown into her, concrescent with her own soul, like the rhizomes of Sparrow’s orchids all tangling together.
She couldn’t just release them. She had to uproot them.
And she did.
She ripped them out of her, and for a brief moment, before the tide of unmaking took hold of them, the Ellens were themselves again. For fifteen years they’d been shoved down deep into the recesses of their own souls while a stronger will guided them, became them. They’d been there, underneath, all along, trapped, and now they surfaced.
Sarai saw them become the women from the dream, eyes like eel flesh, puckered mouths, and menace. Just for an instant, just enough to know. Then the air took them up and pulled them apart, and the Ellens were no more.
…
When Minya let go of her army, a tremendous weight lifted. That was not what happened when she let go of the Ellens.
She hadn’t known she was crushed until she wasn’t, and she didn’t know she was fragmented until she became whole. Fifteen years ago, she’d desperately needed someone to care for four babies, and she’d created those someones. She’d been them, and the whole time, she’d hidden it from herself, because… she’d needed someone, too.
And so the parts of her that nurtured and sang and loved went out of her to animate them, and she was what was left: fear and rage and vengeance.
When the Ellens evanesced, her fragments came back to her. It wasn’t weight, exactly. It was more like…fullness. She had been a creature riddled with empty spaces, a ventriloquist, a puppet master, a little girl in pieces.
Now she was just a person.
…
Eril-Fane beckoned the medics to approach. They did, wide eyes darting from one godspawn to the next, giving Minya a wide berth, and hesitating in front of Sparrow. Ruby held her sister in her arms and glared at the warriors. Feral planted himself beside her and helped her glare. It was a detente. Suheyla went over to mediate.
Eril-Fane told them, “You are all under my protection. I swear it.”