It took conscious effort to unfeel the cold. She’d never experienced anything like it, not in Weep, where there was no real winter. Feral’s stolen snowstorms didn’t even hint at this penetrating ache. Sarai could have willed it warm. She could have changed it to some other landscape altogether, but it was important to learn why she was here—or, rather, why Nova was.
Sarai searched for her. She turned a circle, gazing around at the sweep of vast empty white, and perceived a set of figures on the horizon.
They were three, too distant to make out. She started toward them, thinking Nova must be one of them, but before she’d gone more than a few feet, something caught her eye under the surface of the ice.
A face.
She recoiled from it, then forced herself to look, because in that split-second glimpse, she’d seen who it was.
It was Eril-Fane. He was dead and staring, trapped beneath the ice.
What was he doing in this dream? This world had nothing to do with him. Just beyond him, Sarai saw another face and braced herself. It was Azareen. Her eyes were open and staring and filmed with ice crystals. Her dying scream had frozen as bubbles welling out of her mouth.
It was terrible to see them like this, and Sarai clung to the knowledge that there was no truth to it. The two of them were very much alive and together in Weep. She went on, and almost right away encountered another dead face—a stranger this time. Then another. A trail of them lay under the ice all the way to the figures in the distance, like a path of awful stepping-stones. She stopped looking, stopped counting, and grew numb to them as she went past, rushing to get to the trio of figures as though that would be an end to it.
She reached them. They were garbed heavily in skins and furs, their faces—blue, all three—recessed into fur-lined hoods. The smallest of them was Nova. She looked afraid, determined, exhausted, grim. With her were two men: one old, and one of middle years. There was a sledge and dogs as well, and they were near the end of a long journey, their destination visible as smudges of chimney smoke on the horizon.
At least, it was Nova’s destination. The men would be going no farther. As Sarai watched, Nova spoke to them, her voice flat and her words final, issuing a command they were powerless to refuse. With a start, she realized that she could understand the command, the sense if not the precise words, the dream feeding her meaning on some level below language. It was very simple.
Go into the sea.
With terror in their eyes, the men stepped off the edge of a shelf of ice and sank like stones into the frigid black water. Just like that, they were gone.
Sarai felt sick, as though it were really happening. And she understood that it had really happened, just like this, and that these were the first men Nova had ever killed. These were the first, and Eril-Fane and Azareen the most recent. And that whole trail of faces, those were all the ones in between. Sarai turned to look back the way she’d come, and their sheer quantity numbed her. How many lives had Nova taken, how many souls loosed to their evanescence? After so many, would she even hesitate to add to her terrible tally?
Turning back, Sarai saw with a jolt that Nova was looking at her.
In the rush of her decision to try this, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder whether Nova would be able to see her. Minya was only the second who ever had, after Lazlo. Did this mean that Mesarthim could and humans couldn’t? Or was it one more way Sarai’s gift had changed since her death? It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was Nova’s dark-eyed suspicion, pinning her in place.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and Sarai saw that she recognized her. Hostility flickered in her gaze.
“I followed the path,” she said, indicating the faces under the ice. The two men who’d just died were there now, too. The rift in the ice had refrozen, and their faces were pressed right up against it, as though they’d tried to get free. She wondered if Nova would understand her, as she understood Nova.
She seemed to. “From where?” she wanted to know, squinting out over the ice. She sounded very young. Her face was fuller, her eyes wider, not yet shaped by centuries of horizons.
“From…the end,” said Sarai.
“That’s not the end,” said Nova. “You don’t get to the end until you die.”
Sarai tried to process these words. Did she mean that you weren’t done killing until you were dead, that the life you left behind you was a path of corpses? She didn’t ask. Instead, she ventured, with a gesture at the two nearest faces, “But this is the beginning, isn’t it.” This was where Nova had become a killer, and there was no evidence of remorse in her. “What did they do, these two?”
Nova looked down at them with no more emotion than if they really were stepping-stones. She pointed to one. “He sold me.” The other. “He bought me.” She didn’t say the words father and husband, but the knowledge was imparted to Sarai through the medium of the dream.
Nova’s father had sold her to an old man when she was younger than Sarai was now. “I’m sorry,” said Sarai, her gut knotting with sympathetic misery.
While she watched, Nova pushed back her hood and took off her diadem. Her skin drained immediately of blue—and not to warm brown, like Sparrow’s had, but a paler shade of skin than Sarai had ever seen—a kind of milky ivory that, combined with her fair hair, made her look washed out, like a bit of sun-bleached bone. Even her lips were pale. The only thing that really stood out were her brown eyes, shining like wet river stones.
“Not as sorry as they were,” said Nova with a nod to the ice. “I couldn’t let them live.” She held up the diadem. “I can’t be blue when I get to Targay. I have to fade, but they’d have killed me as soon as my power was gone.”
“Your own father?” asked Sarai, and she was thinking of Eril-Fane, and her own very recent worries of what he’d do when he discovered her.
Nova shrugged. She sounded far away when she said, “No one loves anyone here. They all just scrape against each other, like rocks in a bag.”
Gently, Sarai said, “But you loved Kora.”
Loved. The instant Sarai spoke the word in past tense, the ice beneath her feet gave a deafening crack and opened up like another set of devouring jaws beneath her. She had to leap into the air and stay there. It took far more than the usual effort to believe she could float and not be sucked down. The aura of the dream was like a weight pulling at her feet, and when she chanced a look below, she saw all the staring dead gathered together like jetsam on a tide.
Nova still stood there, impossibly, her feet curled over the very edge of the ice that Sarai could see was as thin as paper. She was staring at Sarai. Her pupils had dilated, and there was menace and madness in them. “I love Kora,” she corrected, harsh. “And I’m going to find her, and if you try to stop me, you’ll end up with the rest of them.” She gestured to the dead.
A chill went up Sarai’s spine that had nothing to do with the ice. This might have been a scene from Nova’s youth, and this place might be her provenance, but when she spoke that threat, her eyes weren’t young at all. Everything was in them: all her years of seeking and failing and believing—believing what? That she would save her sister, when there wasn’t even a wisp of hope to grasp at, let alone a strand to hang on to and follow into the dark. Belief like that, that hasn’t tasted any real hope in centuries, but has been fed and nurtured on darker things—loneliness, desperation—it doesn’t simply subside when faced with its own end. It doesn’t accept or adapt. It exists in spite of reason, and will only ever defy it.
Kora was dead.
The truth would destroy Nova. Somewhere, her mind had built a blur around it, like the one Sarai had encountered in Minya’s mind. But the truth has a way of seeping out. The mind can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone.