Feral, equally shocked, turned back around, naked girl or not. “Is that really what you think?” he asked her.
“What, you don’t?” Ruby looked genuinely amazed, standing there fire-dried and beautiful, naked, at ease with herself, and blue. Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky. Just like the rest of them.
Blue as five murders waiting to happen.
“You think we’re going to grow old here?” she asked, looking back and forth between them, gesturing to the walls around them. “You must be joking. Is that really a future you can picture?”
Sarai blinked. It wasn’t a question she allowed herself to ask. They did their best. They obeyed The Rule. Sometimes she almost believed it would be enough. “A lot of things could happen,” she said, and heard how half her voice was carved away by uncertainty, and how utterly weak she sounded.
“Like what?” Ruby asked. “Besides dying, I mean.”
And Sarai couldn’t think of a single thing.
13
Purgatory Soup
Sarai stepped out of her clammy, wet slip and let it fall to the floor of her dressing room. Puddled gray silk on the blue metal floor. Blue toes, blue legs, blue self reflected in the blue mirror, which wasn’t glass but only more mesarthium, polished to a high gloss. The only thing that wasn’t blue was her hair—which was the red-brown of cinnamon—and the whites of her eyes. The whites of her teeth, too, if she were smiling, but she very much wasn’t.
“We won’t live long enough to run out of dresses,” Ruby had said.
Sarai regarded the row of slips hanging from the slim mesarthium dowel. There were so many, and all so fine. And yes, they were underclothes, but she and Ruby and Sparrow preferred them to the alternative: the gowns.
The only clothes they had or would ever have—like the only life they had or would ever have—was what the citadel provided, and the citadel provided the garments of dead goddesses.
The dressing room was as large as a lounge. There were dozens of gowns, all of them too grand to wear, and too terrible. Satins and foils and stiff brocades, encrusted with jewels and trimmed in furs with the heads still on, glassy eyes, bared fangs and all. One had a skirt like a cage carved of whalebone, another a long train made of hundreds of doves’ wings all stitched together. There was a bodice of pure molded gold, made to look like a beetle’s carapace, and a fan collar fashioned from the spines of poisonous fish, with tiny teeth sewn in patterns like seed pearls. There were headdresses and veils, corsets with daggers concealed in the stays, elaborate capes, and teetering tall shoes carved of ebony and coral. Everything was gaudy and heavy and cruel. To Sarai, they were clothes a monster might wear if it were trying to pass as human.
Which was near enough to the truth. The monster had been Isagol, goddess of despair.
Her mother, dead now these fifteen years.
Sarai had a thousand memories of Isagol, but none of them were her own. She’d been too young—only two years old when it happened. It. The Carnage. Knifeshine and spreading blood. The end of one world and start of another. Her memories of her mother were all secondhand, borrowed from the humans she visited in the night. In some the goddess was alive, in others dead. She’d been murdered in an iridescent green gown jeweled with jade and beetle wings, and she’d looked enough like Sarai that the visions of her body were like seeing a prophecy of her own death. Except for the black bar Isagol had painted across her eyes, temple to temple, like a slim mask.
Sarai eyed the shelf of her mother’s paints and perfumes. The pot of lampblack was right there, untouched in all this time. Sarai didn’t use it. She had no desire to look more like the goddess of despair than she already did.
She focused on the slips. She had to get dressed. White silk or scarlet, or black trimmed in burgundy. Gold or chartreuse, or pink as the dawn sky. She kept hearing the echo of Ruby’s words—won’t live long enough—and seeing in the row of slips two possible endings:
In one, she was murdered and they went unworn. Humans burned or shredded them, and they burned and shredded her, too. In the other, she lived and spent years working her way through them all. Ghosts laundered them and hung them back up, again and again over years, and she wore them out one by one and eventually grew old in them.
It seemed so far-fetched—the idea of growing old—that she had to admit to herself, finally, that she had no more real hope of the future than Ruby did.
It was a brutal revelation.
She chose black to suit her mood, and returned to the gallery for dinner. Ruby had come back from her own dressing room clad in a slip so sheer she might as well have stayed naked. She was making tiny flames dance off her fingertips, while Feral leaned over his big book of symbols, ignoring her.
“Minya and Sparrow?” Sarai asked them.
“Sparrow’s still in the garden, pouting about something,” said Ruby, her self-absorption apparently admitting no hint as to what that something might be. “Minya hasn’t turned up.”
Sarai wondered at that. Minya was usually waiting to pester her as soon she came out of her room. “Tell me something nasty,” she would say, bright-eyed, eager to hear about her night. “Did you make anyone cry? Did you make anyone scream?” For years, Sarai had been happy to tell her all about it.
Not anymore.
“I’ll fetch Sparrow,” she said.
The garden was a broad terrace that stretched the breadth of the citadel, abutting the high, indomitable body of the structure on one side, and falling away to a sheer drop on the other, edged only by a hip-high balustrade. It had been formal once, but now was wild. Shrubs that had been tidy topiaries had grown into great shaggy trees, and bowers of blooming vines had overspilled their neat beds to riot up the walls and columns and drape over the railing. Nature flourished, but not on its own. It couldn’t, not in this unnatural place. It was Sparrow who made it flourish.
Sarai found her gathering anadne blossoms. Anadne was the sacred flower of Letha, goddess of oblivion. Distilled, it made lull, the draught Sarai drank to keep from dreaming.
“Thank you for doing that,” Sarai said.
Sparrow looked up and smiled at her. “Oh, I don’t mind. Great Ellen said it was time for a new batch.” She dropped a handful of flowers into her bowl and dusted off her palm. “I just wish you didn’t need it, Sarai. I wish you were free to dream.”
So did Sarai, but she wasn’t free, and wishing wouldn’t make her so. “I might not have my own dreams,” she said, as though it scarcely mattered, “but I have everyone else’s.”
“It’s not the same. That’s like reading a thousand diaries instead of writing your own.”
“A thousand?” said Sarai. “More like a hundred thousand,” which was close to the population of Weep.
“So many,” said Sparrow, marveling. “How do you keep them straight?”
Sarai shrugged. “I don’t know that I do, but you can learn a lot in four thousand nights.”
“Four thousand. Have we been alive so long?”
“Longer than that, silly.”
“Where do the days go?” There was such sweetness in Sparrow’s wisp of a smile. She was as sweet as the scent of the garden and as gentle, and Sarai couldn’t help thinking how perfectly her gift suited her. Orchid Witch, they called her. She felt the pulse of life in things and nursed it forth to make them grow. She was, Sarai thought, like springtime distilled into a person.
Ruby’s gift, too, was an extension of her nature: Bonfire, blazing like a beacon, burning like a wildfire out of control. And Minya and Feral, did their gifts suit them? Sarai didn’t like the thought, because if it was so and their abilities spoke some essential truth about their souls, what did that say about her?