A wild thought took hold of her.
Abruptly, without leaving the dream, she shifted part of her awareness back to reality. With her moths, it had been seamless, shifting among the hundred of them with the mad choreography of a flock of swifts. She hadn’t tried splitting her attention since she’d lost them. It made for a strange twinning: the real room and the dream room, both at the same time. Nova was still cradling her head on one arm, and Wraith was still there, perched on her chairback, watching Sarai’s every move.
Sarai stared into the bird’s eyes and murmured, thoughtful, “Why are you still here?”
Words came back to her from her own earlier musing: A shred, an echo. Both of those sounded haphazard, but could it really be chance, that the bird remained?
A dying wish, that was more intriguing.
A message in a bottle, she thought, and it lit up her mind like the moment the setting sun touches the sea. Was she mad or brilliant? There was one way to find out. Did she dare? Was it possible? She was a ghost and Wraith was a…a left-behind piece of a soul? Who knew what arcane rules governed the likes of them. Holding the bird’s gaze, Sarai put her hand to her own chest, in the same spot where she had seen it melt into Kora’s, and she tapped her breastbone in invitation.
The bird understood. It didn’t hesitate. Its look sharpened and it dove. Sarai was overwhelmed by a rush of white. It felt like wind blowing into her through an open window—right into the very core of her.
From the archway, Minya, Thyon, and all the rest saw it happen. At first, they thought Wraith had lost patience with Sarai’s trespass. They gasped. Ruza started forward, his hreshtek in his hand, as though he would be able to defend her. Minya convulsively tightened her grip on Sarai’s tether, lest it be tugged from her grasp. Then Wraith flew at the very center of Sarai’s chest and they could do nothing but watch. Its vast wings folded back, and it vanished into her like inhaled smoke. Her back arched. Her head snapped back. Her feet weren’t touching the floor. Before anyone understood what was happening, Wraith had disappeared into Sarai.
“That can’t be good,” breathed Ruby, shocked.
Or, then again, maybe it could.
Chapter 61
Message in a Bottle
Just the other night, Sarai had swum in the sea with Lazlo in a dream, and found a floating bottle with a message inside. She had spotted it bobbing in a patch of phosphorescence, shaken out the rolled page, and read: Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.
That was ink on parchment, preserved in glass, all of it delivered in a dream.
This was memory and emotion, preserved in…Well, if anywhere in the layered worlds there existed scholars of godsmetal and its gifts, perhaps they could explain, beyond merely “Magic.” But “magic” will do.
When Wraith poured into Sarai, Kora appeared in the dream.
She was a phantasm, of course, but not of Sarai’s making. She looked like the woman Sarai had seen in the nursery doorway—she was even wearing the mesarthium collar—but she also didn’t look like her, because that woman had been blank-faced and stiff, and this one was anything but. There was so much in her expression, a lifetime’s worth of feeling—many lifetimes’ worth—concentrated into a moment. Fear was vying with courage, and courage was winning. Danger pulsed all around her. There was a feeling of having raced through a labyrinth and found only dead ends—a labyrinth with no solution. She was striving to face her last moments with grace, and there was sorrow, and regret, and there was longing, and yearning, and love.
So much love. Her eyes shone with it, and it was all for Nova.
As soon as Nova saw her, her hands flew to her mouth, one atop the other, as though to hold her sobbing in, because immediately her tears spilled over and her shoulders were shaking and her eyes were shining. “Kora?” she asked in a sweetly hesitant voice that knocked the centuries of hardship and bitterness off her, so that she seemed more like the girl who had crossed a frozen sea more than two hundred years ago. “Is it really you?”
Kora, or this phantasm of her, said, “My love, my own heart, I don’t have much time.”
She went to her and took her by the shoulders and just looked at her as though to fill herself up with the sight. Nova looked back at her the same way, and here, after all these years, was the face that was truer than a mirror—similar to her own, but not a copy. They weren’t twins, and…
With no mirrors on Rieva, Nova never saw her own face clearly until she left. And when she did, it wasn’t the right face. It was close, but wrong. Always, the sight of her own face had jarred her with its almostness, its not-quiteness. It had never felt as real to her as the one she grew up looking at. Here was her real reflection. This was who she was: what she saw looking back at her when her sister looked at her, and it had been the same for Kora. Apart, each had been like a cry into empty space, no walls to throw an echo back. There had been no way to get back, only decades of hurtling headlong in silence, no reflection, no echo, no self.
Now they drank each other in and filled each other up, and Kora’s phantasm—this little piece of herself she’d managed to leave behind—spoke.
“I don’t have much time,” she said again, and licked her lips, and doom hung on her like a shawl. “I so desperately wanted to be here when you came. I always, always knew you would. I never doubted you for one second in two centuries. I could feel you out there, trying, and it broke my heart every day. From the moment I sent you the diadem and the letter, I knew you wouldn’t give up on me.” She let out a little choked sob. “And not a day of my life has passed that I haven’t been sorry. I’m so sorry, my Novali. Can you ever forgive me? I was so selfish. I knew you could make it to Aqa and save me, and we could kill that monster”—for an instant, her pretty face contorted with savage hatred that Sarai thought could only be for Skathis—“and we could be together and do anything.” Like a stanza of a poem worn soft with repetition, she whispered, “As blue as sapphires and glaciers, and as beautiful as stars.” Tears streaked her face. “But he took me away.”
She was holding Nova’s hands now, clasping them tight. “He took me out of the world, and then I knew that what I’d asked of you was impossible. And I knew that you’d do it anyway, and that I’d ruined your life.”
“You didn’t ruin my life,” said Nova, fierce. “He did, when he took you and left me in the dirt. And our father did. Rieva did. You gave me a life, with the diadem. A purpose. Do you think I could have stayed there and had that old man’s babies? I’d have walked straight into the sea. Kora, it knew my name. It called to me. The only thing that kept me alive was knowing that you were out there, and you needed me.”
Back in the wasp ship all those years ago, when Nova’s gift had erupted and gone wild, it was Kora who’d brought her back to herself, her sister’s voice like a rope thrown into a churning sea. And that was what her purpose had been like, all this time, and what Kora’s phantasm was now: a rope thrown into a sea, saving Nova from drowning.
“And the only thing that kept me alive was knowing you would come,” said Kora. “I couldn’t bear the thought that you’d get all the way here and find me gone.”
There was a half beat of silence, and then Nova asked, in a child’s broken whisper, devastated, unbearable, “Are you gone?”
And Kora, sobbing, her blue face shining like wet lapis, said, “Oh my Nova. I am.”
Sarai, standing back, watching, was overcome by the sisters’ welling grief. She was sobbing, too.