“Poor dear. But then she probably has priestesses to groom her.”
“That’s true.”
Suheyla forked the cooked fish into a dish, which she handed to him, gesturing toward the table. He carried it over and found a spot for it. Her words were stuck in his head, though: “I almost think they did me a favor.” Who was they? “Forgive me, but—”
“Ten silver.”
“What?”
“You apologized again. I warned you.”
“I didn’t,” Lazlo argued, laughing. “ ‘Forgive me’ is a command. I command that you forgive me. It’s not an apology at all.”
“Fine,” allowed Suheyla. “But next time, no qualifiers. Just ask.”
“All right,” said Lazlo. “But . . . never mind. It’s none of my business.”
“Just ask.”
“You said they did you a favor. I was just wondering who you meant.”
“Ah. Well, that would be the gods.”
For all the floating citadel overhead, Lazlo had as yet no clear context for what life had been under the gods. “They . . . cut off your hand?”
“I assume so,” she said. “Of course I don’t remember. They may have made me do it myself. All I know is I had two hands before they took me, and one after.”
All of this was spoken like ordinary morning conversation. “Took you,” Lazlo repeated. “Up there?”
Suheyla’s brow furrowed, as though she were perplexed by his ignorance. “Hasn’t he told you anything?”
He gathered that she meant Eril-Fane. “Until we stood on the Cusp yesterday, we didn’t even know why we’d come.”
She chuffed with surprise. “Well, aren’t you the trusting things, to come all this way for a mystery.”
“Nothing could have kept me from coming,” Lazlo confessed. “I’ve been obsessed with the mystery of Weep all my life.”
“Really? I had no idea the world even remembered us.”
Lazlo’s mouth skewed to one side. “The world doesn’t really. Just me.”
“Well, that shows character,” said Suheyla. “And what do you think, now that you’re here?” All the while she’d been chopping fruit, and she made a broad gesture with her knife. “Are you satisfied with the resolution of your mystery?”
“Resolution?” he repeated with a helpless laugh, and looked up at the citadel. “I have a hundred times more questions than I did yesterday.”
Suheyla followed his glance, but no sooner did she lift her eyes than she lowered them again and shuddered. Like the Tizerkane on the Cusp, she couldn’t bear the sight of it. “That’s to be expected,” she said, “if my son hasn’t prepared you.” She laid down her knife and swept the chopped fruit into a bowl, which she passed to Lazlo. “He never could talk about it.” He’d started to turn away to carry the bowl to the table when she added, quietly, “They took him longer than anyone, you know.”
He turned back to her. No, he really did not know. He wasn’t sure how to form his thoughts into a question, and before he could, Suheyla, busying herself wiping up the cutting board, went on in the same quiet way.
“Mostly they took girls,” she said. “Raising a daughter in Weep—and, well, being a daughter in Weep—was . . . very hard in those years. Every time the ground shook, you knew it was Skathis, coming to your door.” Skathis. Ruza had said that name. “But sometimes they took our sons, too.” She scooped tea into a strainer.
“They took children?”
“One’s child is always one’s child, of course, but technically—or, physically, at least—he waited until they were . . . of age.”
Of age.
Those words. Lazlo swallowed a rising sensation of nausea. Those words were like . . . they were like seeing a bloody knife. You didn’t need to have witnessed the stabbing to understand what it meant.
“I worried for Azareen more than for Eril-Fane. For her, it was only a matter of time. They knew it, of course. That’s why they married so young. She . . . she said she wanted to be his before she was theirs. And she was. For five days. But it wasn’t her they took. It was him. Well. They got her later.”
This was . . . it was unspeakable, all of it. Azareen. Eril-Fane. The routine nature of atrocity. But . . . “They’re married?” was what Lazlo asked.
“Oh.” Suheyla looked rueful. “You didn’t know. Well, no secret’s safe with me, is it?”
“But why should it be a secret?”
“It’s not that it’s a secret,” she said carefully. “It’s more that it’s . . . not a marriage anymore. Not after . . .” She tipped her head up toward the citadel without looking at it.
Lazlo didn’t ask any more questions. Everything he’d wondered about Eril-Fane and Azareen had taken on a much darker cast than he could ever have imagined, and so had the mysteries of Weep.
“We were taken up to ‘serve,’ ” Suheyla went on, her pronoun shift reminding him that she had herself been one of these taken girls. “That’s what Skathis called it. He would come to the door, or the window.” Her hand trembled, and she clasped it tight over her stump. “They hadn’t brought any servants with them, so there was that. Serving at table, or in the kitchens. And there were chambermaids, gardeners, laundresses.”
In this litany, it was somehow very clear that these jobs, they were the exceptions, and that “service” had mostly been of another kind.
“Of course, we didn’t know any of this until later. When they brought us back—and they didn’t always, but usually, and usually within a year—we wouldn’t remember a thing. Gone for a year, a year gone from us.” She dropped her stump, and her hand fluttered briefly to her belly. “It was as though no time had passed. Letha would eat our memories, you see.” She looked up at Lazlo then. “She was the goddess of oblivion.”
It made sense now—horrible sense—why Suheyla didn’t know what had become of her own hand.
“And . . . Eril-Fane?” he asked, steeling himself.
Suheyla looked back down at the teapot she was filling with steaming water from the kettle. “Oblivion was a mercy, it turns out. He remembers everything. Because he slew them, and there was no one left to take his memories away.”
Lazlo understood what she was telling him, what she was saying without saying it, but it didn’t seem possible. Not Eril-Fane, who was power incarnate. He was a liberator, not a slave.
“Three years,” said Suheyla. “That’s how long she had him. Isagol. Goddess of despair.” Her eyes lost focus. She seemed to slip into some great hollow place within her, and her voice sank to a whisper. “But then, if they’d never taken him, we would all of us still be slaves.”
For that brief moment, Lazlo felt a tremor of the quaking grief within her: that she had not been able to keep her child safe. That was a simple and profound grief, but under it was a deeper, stranger one: that in some way she had to be glad of it, because if she had kept him safe, he couldn’t have saved his people. It mixed up gladness, grief, and guilt into an intolerable brew.
“I’m so sorry,” said Lazlo, from the depths of both his hearts.
Suheyla snapped out of whatever faraway, hollow place she was lost in. Her eyes sharpened back to smiling squints. “Ha,” she said. “Ten silver please.” And she held out her palm until he put the coin in it.
29
The Other Babies
Minya led Sarai and the others back inside, through Sarai’s chambers, and back up the corridor. All of their rooms were on the dexter side of the citadel. Sarai’s suite was at the extremity of the seraph’s right arm, and the others’ were along that same passage, except for Minya’s. What had been Skathis’s palace occupied the entire right shoulder. They passed it, and the entrance to the gallery, too, and Sarai and Feral exchanged a glance.