On the outheld hand of the colossal seraph, ghosts stood guard with cleavers, and some with meat hooks on chains. The moon shone bright on the edges of their blades, and sharp on the points of their terrible hooks, and luminous on their eyes, which were wide with horror. They were bathed in light, while down below, the city foundered in gloom.
Sarai dispatched her moths to the guildhall, where most of the delegates were sleeping soundly, and to the homes of city leaders, and some of the Tizerkane, too. Tzara’s lover was with her, and they were . . . not sleeping . . . so Sarai whisked her moth immediately away. Over in Windfall, Azareen was alone. Sarai watched her unbraid her hair, put on her ring, and lie down to go to sleep. She didn’t stay for her dreams, though. Azareen’s dreams were . . . difficult. Sarai couldn’t help feeling that she played a part in stealing the life Azareen should have had—as though she existed instead of a beloved child that the couple should have had together. It might not have been her fault, but she couldn’t feel innocent of it.
She saw the golden faranji—looking unwell—still awake and working. And she saw the ill-favored one, whose sun-ravaged skin was healing in the citadel’s shade—though he was no more appealing for it. He was awake, too, out for a stagger with a bottle in his hand. It was as well. She couldn’t abide his mind. All the women he dreamed were bruised, and she hadn’t stayed long enough to find out how they got that way. She hadn’t made herself visit him since the second night.
Every moth, every wingbeat carried the oppressive burden of the ghost army, and of vengeance, and the weight of another Carnage. With the occupation of her terrace, she stayed inside, turning five times oftener in her pacing than she had out on the hand. She craved the moonlight and the wind. She wanted to feel the infinite depth of space above and around her, not this metal cage. She remembered what Sparrow had said, how dreaming was like the garden: You could step out of prison for a little while and feel the sky around you.
And Sarai had argued that the citadel was prison but sanctuary, too. Only a week ago, it had been, and so had lull, and look at her now.
She was so terribly tired.
Lazlo was tired, too. It had been a long day, and giving away his spirit hadn’t helped. He ate with Suheyla—and complimented the food without mention of ruined tongues—and took another bath, and though he soaked this time until the water began to cool, the gray didn’t fade from his hands. In his state of fatigue, his thoughts dipped like hummingbirds from this to that, always coming round to the fear—the fear of the citadel and all that had happened in it. How haunted they all were by the past, Eril-Fane no less than the rest.
With that, two faces found their way into Lazlo’s mind. One from a painting of a dead goddess, the other from a dream: both blue, with red-brown hair and a band of black paint across their eyes. Blue, black, and cinnamon, he saw, and wondered again how he had happened to dream her before ever seeing a likeness of her.
And why, if he’d somehow glimpsed a stray vision of Isagol the Terrible, had she been so . . . unterrible?
He stepped from the bath and dried off, pulled on a pair of laundered linen breeches, and was too tired even to tie the drawstring. Back in his room, he tipped onto the bed, prone atop the quilts, and was asleep halfway through his second breath.
And that was how Sarai found him: lying on his stomach with his head cradled in his arms.
The long, smooth triangle of his back rose and fell with deep, even breathing as her moth fluttered above him, looking for a place to settle. The way he was lying, his brow wasn’t an option. There was the rugged edge of his cheekbone, but even as she watched, he nestled his head deeper into his arms, and that landing spot shrank and vanished. There was his back, though.
He’d fallen asleep with the glave uncovered, and the low angle of the light threw small shadows over every ripple of muscle, and deep ones under the wings of his shoulder blades and down the channel of his spine. It was a lunar landscape to the moth. Sarai floated it softly into the dark valley of his shoulder blades and as soon as it touched skin, she slipped into his dream.
She was wary, as always. A string of nights now she’d come here since the first time, and each time she’d slipped in as silently as a thief. A thief of what, though? She wasn’t stealing his dreams from him, or even altering them in any way. She was just . . . enjoying them, as one might enjoy music freely played.
A sonata drifting over a garden wall.
Inevitably, though, listening to beautiful music night after night, one grows curious about the player. Oh, she knew who he was. She was, after all, perched on his brow all this while—until tonight, and this new experience of his back—and there was a strange intimacy in that. She knew his eyelashes by heart, and the male scent of him, sandalwood and clean musk. She’d even grown used to his crooked, ruffian nose. But inside the dreams, she’d kept her distance.
What if he saw her again? What if he didn’t? Had it been a fluke? She wanted to know, but was afraid. Tonight, though, something had shifted. She was tired of hiding. She would find out if he could see her, and maybe even why. She was braced for it, ready for anything. At least she thought she was ready for anything.
But really, nothing could have prepared her to enter the dream and find herself already there.
Again, the streets of the magical city—Weep but not Weep. It was night, and the citadel was in the sky this time, but the moon shone down regardless, as though the dreamer wanted it both ways. And again there was unbelievable color, and gossamer wings and fruit and creatures out of fairy tales. There was the centaur with his lady. She walked by his side tonight, and Sarai felt almost restless until she saw them kiss. They were a fixture here; she’d have liked to talk to them and hear their story.
Sarai had the idea that every single person and creature she saw here was but the beginning of another fantastical story, and she wanted to follow them all. But mostly, she was curious about the dreamer.
She saw him up ahead, riding on a spectral. And here’s where things became completely surreal, because riding by his side, astride a creature with the body of a ravid and the head and wings of Wraith the white eagle was . . . Sarai.
To be clear, Sarai herself—Sarai actual—was at a distance, where she had entered the dream at a street crossing. She saw them.
Saw herself.
Saw herself riding a mythical creature in the faranji’s dream.
She stared. Her mouth opened and then closed again. How? She looked closer. Willed herself closer to see better, though she was careful to keep out of sight.
The other Sarai, near as she could tell, looked just as she herself had on the night that he had seen her: with wild hair, and Isagol’s painted black mask. In other circumstances, at a glance, she would have thought she was seeing her mother, because the likeness between them was striking, and humans did dream of Isagol, whereas of course they never dreamed of her. But that wasn’t Isagol. Her mother, for all their similarities, had possessed a majesty she didn’t, and a cruelty, too. Isagol didn’t smile. This girl did. This blue girl had Sarai’s face, and she wasn’t wearing some gown of beetle wings and daggers, but the same lace-edged white slip Sarai had worn the first night.
She was part of the dream.
The faranji was dreaming Sarai. He was dreaming her, and . . . it was not a nightmare.
Up in the citadel, her pacing feet faltered. Between the dreamer’s bare shoulder blades, the perched moth trembled. An ache rose in Sarai’s throat, like a sob without the grief. She looked across the street at herself—as seen, remembered, and conjured by the dreamer—and she didn’t see obscenity, or calamity, or godspawn. She saw a proud, smiling girl with beautiful blue skin. Because that was what he saw, and this was his mind.
Of course, he also thought she was Isagol.
“Forgive me for asking,” he was saying to her, “but why despair? Of all things to be goddess of.”