Sarai was able to move then, finally. She rolled to her knees and backed away from the ghosts. Her heartbeats churned within her, sending trills of panic coursing through her body, even though she knew she was safe. The ghosts couldn’t hurt her. It was the first imperative of Minya’s binding: that the dead not harm the living. These ghosts didn’t know that, though. The one who had come forth was distraught. Sarai knew her, and hadn’t known she’d died. Her name was Yaselith, and her story was that of most of the women of her generation—and all the generations born and raised under Mesarthim rule, when Skathis went riding Rasalas, his great metal beast, and plucked girls and boys from their homes.
What happened up in the citadel, none ever told. Before they were returned, Letha saw to them. Letha: goddess of oblivion, mistress of forgetting. She could blank a mind with a blink of her eye, and did, stealing whole years from the girls and boys of the city, so that when Skathis brought them back they had no recollection of their time with the gods. Their bodies, however, bore traces that could not so easily be erased, for more had been stolen from them than their memories.
Yaselith’s eyes now were wet and red, her hair as white and weightless as a puff of smoke. She was shaking violently, her breath coming in little snatches, and when she spoke, her voice was as rough as the strike of a match. “Why?” she demanded. “Why can’t I kill you?”
And Sarai, confronted with a would-be murderer in the person of an old dead woman, didn’t feel anger. Not at her, anyway. Minya was another story. What were new ghosts doing wandering the citadel?
“It’s not your fault,” she said, almost gently. “But you can’t hurt me.”
“Then you should hurt yourself,” hissed Yaselith, pointing to the knife. “Put Weep out of its misery. Kill yourself, girl. Have mercy on us all. Do it. Do it.”
And then they were all hissing it, crowding in, pushing back the curtains of Isagol’s big bed to encircle Sarai on all sides. “Do it,” they urged her. “Have some decency. Do it.” There was savage glee in their eyes, and she knew them all, and she didn’t understand how they could be here because none of them were dead, and her panic surged and swelled as she watched her own hand reach out for the knife. Her first thought was that she was dead and Minya was making her do it, because she couldn’t stop herself. Her hand closed around the hilt and pulled it free from the bedding. Where the blade had been, up from the small slash in the fabric, blood pulsed in arterial spurts.
And even that mad unreality failed to bring her to her senses. Beds might bleed. She was too steeped in the landscape of nightmare even to question it. Her hand turned itself, positioning the dagger point against her breast, and she searched the jeering faces of the old women of Weep, finding no end to them. Where there had been five or six now there were dozens, their faces thrust up against the gauzy bed-curtains so that their mouths and eye sockets looked like black pits, and even then, the thing that struck her wasn’t their faces but the curtains.
What was she doing in her mother’s bed?
That was her last thought before she plunged the knife into her own hearts and sat upright with a great raw gasp to find herself in her proper bed. Alone. No ghosts, no knife, no blood. No breath, either. There seemed no end to the gasp. She was choking on it and couldn’t exhale. Her hands were claws, every muscle rigid, a scream caught in her skull, scouring out all thought. On and on it all went until she thought she’d die of the simple failure to breathe, and then at last the gasp let her go and she doubled over, coughing out air as her body remembered what to do. She was long minutes curled around herself just breathing, her throat raw, eyes squeezed shut, before she could even face the truth.
She’d had a dream.
She started to tremble uncontrollably. A dream had gotten through. “Oh no,” she whispered, and curled up tighter as she grappled with what this meant. “Oh no.”
The lull was supposed to keep her from dreaming. Had she forgotten to drink it? No, she could still taste its bitterness on the back of her tongue.
Then how had she dreamed?
She thought back to the time before lull, and the onslaught of nightmares that had prompted Great Ellen to start brewing it for her. It had felt, then, like being hunted by all the terrors she had collected over the years—her entire arsenal, turned against her. That was what the creeping gray nothing protected her from—or was supposed to.
Eventually she got out of bed. She’d have liked a bath, but that would mean going to the rain room and filling the tub, then calling for Ruby to heat it, and that was more trouble than she could face. So she poured out cold water from her pitcher and washed with that. She brushed and braided her hair, and changed into a fresh slip all before emerging into the main chamber, where her mother’s big bed stood untouched, its hangings free of ghost women and their haggard faces. Still, she shuddered and hurried past it, out through her door-curtain and down the corridor, where she met Less Ellen bringing her afternoon tray. This held tea—not true tea, which they’d run out of long ago, but an herbal infusion to help shake off the lull—and biscuits, since Sarai always slept through lunch.
“You’re up early,” said the ghost, surprised, and Sarai strove to conceal her distress.
“I don’t know that I’d call afternoon early,” she said with a frail smile.
“Well, early for you. Did something wake you?”
“Is that my tea?” Sarai asked, evading the question, and she took her cup from the tray in Less Ellen’s hands and filled it from the little teapot. The scent of mint filled the air. “Thank you, Ellen,” she said, and carried the cup with her on her way, leaving the ghost, bewildered, behind her.
She bypassed the gallery and headed instead to the kitchen to talk to Great Ellen, whom she asked, in strict confidence, if it were possible to strengthen her lull.
“Strengthen it?” repeated the woman, eyes going wide, then narrow. “What’s happened?” she demanded.
“Nothing’s happened,” Sarai lied. “I just worry that it might become less effective, over time.” And she had worried about that, but . . . it hadn’t become less effective over time. It had stopped working overnight, and that wasn’t something she was prepared to deal with.
“Well, has it? Don’t fib to me. You know I can tell.” Her voice was stern, and as Sarai looked into her eyes, Great Ellen morphed her face into a hawk’s, eyes yellow and severe beneath the sharp slant of feathered brow ridges, a deadly hooked beak where her nose should have been.
“Don’t,” Sarai protested, laughing in spite of herself. “You know I can’t withstand the hawk.”
“Look into my eyes and just try lying.”
It was a game from when they were younger. Great Ellen had never tried forcing or commanding them to behave or obey. That would have gone ill, especially when their gifts were still volatile and not fully under their control. She’d used craftier methods, like this, and gotten better results. It was, in fact, quite difficult to lie to a hawk. “That’s not fair,” said Sarai, covering her eyes. “Can’t you just trust me, and help me?”
“Of course I can, but I ought to know how urgent it is. I’ve wondered when you’d build up a tolerance.” When, not if. “Is it happening?”
Sarai uncovered her eyes and found Great Ellen restored to human form, the excoriating hawk gaze replaced by a piercing but compassionate human one. In answer, she gave her the tiniest of nods, and was grateful when she didn’t probe deeper. “All right, then,” Great Ellen said, all competence, no fuss. “An extra half dose in the morning, and I’ll tinker with the next batch and see what can be done.”
“Thank you,” said Sarai.
Her relief must have been audible, because Great Ellen gave her a look that was hawk even without the transformation. She said, with caution, “It won’t work forever, you know. No matter what we do.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Sarai with feigned carelessness, but as she went out to the gallery she added, in an undertone only she could hear, “I don’t think we have to worry about forever.”