Not long ago, Suheyla had prepared a welcome meal for a young faranji who was to be a guest in her home. It had been such a pleasure to have a young person to cook for again, and Lazlo had deepened every delight with his astonished appreciation of the bounty she set before him. Anyone coming out of the Elmuthaleth would be sick to death of journey food, but it was more than that: He was an orphan, and had never been cared for properly, or eaten food made specially for him. For the short time he’d been in her home, Suheyla had relished making up at least a small part of that lack.
Now she found herself with five orphans to feed—five orphans kept alive for years on “purgatory soup” and kimril loaf with carefully rationed salt—and she was in her element.
So, indeed, were they.
When Suheyla produced a platter of pastries glistening with honey and nuts, Ruby actually swooned at her feet. She fell to the floor and lay on her back, her arms outstretched, pleading theatrically for reassurance that it wasn’t all a dream.
Feral, with a polite “May I?” plucked a pastry off the platter, knelt beside her, and held it just shy of her mouth. “Not unless we’re in the same dream,” he said. Brow furrowing, he looked to Sarai. “We’re not, are we?”
Sarai shook her head, smiling, and it was a sweet smile but incomplete. There was much to be relieved about—being saved at the absolute last second from evanescence, Minya having stopped trying to murder everyone (at least for now), and everybody being miraculously alive—but until they could rescue Lazlo, she would be incomplete, and so would her smile.
Ruby raised her head up off the ground to take a bite of the pastry. Feral, predictably, pulled it away and crammed the whole thing in his mouth. There followed a ravening outrage and a loud rip as Feral’s shirt gave way to clawing, and Ruby was on her feet again, pushing wild dark coils of hair out of her face to stand, demure and passingly penitent, in front of Suheyla. “I’m sorry,” she said, and explained, “It’s hard to be calm. We ran out of sugar ten years ago.”
“You poor things,” Suheyla commiserated, proffering the platter, and Ruby took a pastry and took a bite and was lost to bliss, eyes closed, cheeks flushed, unable to speak or even chew for a long dreamy minute. She just let the flavor permeate her being.
It was the most rewarding reaction to her baking that Suheyla had ever had.
She would have liked to take these children home and pamper them properly, but they were at the Merchants’ Guildhall instead, for a number of reasons: It was nearer to the amphitheater; the silk sleighs were in one of its pavilions; and Suheyla’s house had fallen into the river along with a broad swath of the city, and was…gone.
“Oh,” she’d said, bringing her hand to her mouth, when Eril-Fane returned from assessing the extent of the destruction and broke the news. “Well, it’s a good thing no one was home,” she’d declared, and set about seeing Sparrow installed in a bed at the guildhall instead.
That was still early in the night, not long after Thyon Nero surprised them by saving Sarai. He seemed to have surprised himself as much as anybody, and when Minya seized the shard from him and clenched it hard in both her hands, and Sarai’s silhouette shaded back to opacity and she shuddered and wept with relief, he started to shake, besieged by the enormity of life and death, made real to him for the very first time.
There is a humility that comes with this understanding, and it was a good look for him, knocking the hauteur away and leaving a pleasing vulnerability in its place—as though the world needed Thyon Nero to be any better-looking.
Ruza had remarked, inanely, the other day that Thyon was like a new linen napkin you’d be afraid to wipe your mouth on. Well, when he went over to him and led him to a place where he could sit down and remember how to breathe, Ruza found the alchemist much altered—more… lived in, somehow. Less untouchable.
But he still kept his mouth to himself.
The amphitheater had emptied. Sparrow had regained consciousness, and she’d regained blueness as well. The Tizerkane medics had removed the arrow, stanched the bleeding, and cleaned out her wound, but beyond that, she had undertaken her healing herself—once Minya could be prevailed upon to share the shard of mesarthium, that is.
“Since when can you heal?” Ruby had asked with a scowl.
Sparrow was taken aback by her sister’s accusatory tone. “Well, if I’d known you’d be so happy about it,” she’d said, sarcastic, “I’d have told you right away.”
“I am happy about it,” Ruby had said unhappily. Then: “I’d have told you.”
Sparrow softened. “I’d have told you, too, goose. I was just figuring it out.”
First it had been the flowers. She’d reattached the plucked blossoms to their stems and they’d lived and kept on blooming. After that, she’d tried it on Lazlo’s lip. They’d been interrupted almost right away, but she could tell the bite had begun to mend. When it came to Eril-Fane and Azareen, she’d just rushed over, put her hands on them, and hoped for the best. Mending two mortal wounds at the same time had been quite the learning curve, but it didn’t require skill so much as a steady lavishing of magic. “It’s not exactly that I can heal,” she told Ruby, sitting in bed with hardly a mark on her skin to show where the arrow had been. “I mean, I couldn’t help someone who was sick. It’s part of being able to make things grow. It works on bodies, too.”
A devilish light came into Ruby’s eyes. She put her hands on her breasts. “Does that mean you can make these bigger?” “No.”
It was morning now. They hadn’t slept—Soulzeren had been teaching them how to fly the silk sleighs—and Ruby had not given up on the notion. “You know I’ll give you no peace,” she said with equanimity. “You might as well just do it and save yourself a lot of pestering.”
“Ruby. I am not touching your breasts.”
“What?” This was from Feral, who had overheard.
Sparrow appealed to him. “Would you please tell her that her breasts are perfect as they are?”
He sputtered, going violet. Ruby also appealed to him. “But they could be more perfect, couldn’t they?”
Poor Feral didn’t know the right answer. He sensed danger in all directions. “Um.”
The girls weren’t listening to him anyway. “Something can’t be more perfect,” Sparrow scoffed. “It’s literally impossible.”
Ruby made her favorite disgusted gargling sound in the back of her throat and drawled, “Don’t start with the literally or I will literally die of boredom,” before, with a lightning movement, grabbing Sparrow’s hand.
“If you force me to touch your breasts, I swear to Thakra I’ll make them smaller.”
Ruby let go. “Fine. But the next time you need bathwater heated, don’t come to me.”
“Oh, is that how it is? In that case, I expect you’ll stop eating the food from our garden.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “We don’t even have our garden, and anyway, if I never see another kimril or plum in my entire life it will be too soon.”