Sarai watched the dreamer fling his arm across his eyes. She heard him laugh. She took note of his unnatural stillness, recognizing it as restrained restlessness, and waited impatiently for it to soften into sleep. Her moth was perched in a shadowed corner of the window casement, and she waited there a long time after he fell still, trying to determine when he had truly crossed over. His arm was still crooked over his face, and without being able to see his eyes, she couldn’t tell if he might be faking. Ambush was on her mind, for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t reconcile the violence of the morning with the quiet of this night.
She had found none of the panic or preparation that she had expected. The damaged silk sleigh had been hauled back to its pavilion, and there it lay forlorn, one pontoon deflated. The mechanist-pilot was asleep in her bed, her head on her husband’s shoulder, and though the earlier chaos flared through her dreams—and his, in smaller measure—the rest of the outsiders were untroubled. Sarai’s determination, from her moths’ gleanings of the night’s first crop of dreams, was that Soulzeren had told her husband but no one else of the . . . encounter . . . at the citadel.
The Zeyyadin were all likewise in the dark. No panic. No awareness, that Sarai could tell, of the threat that lurked over their heads.
Had Eril-Fane kept it secret? Why would he?
If only she could ask him.
In fact, at the same time that her moth was perched in the window casement watching sleep claim Lazlo Strange, Sarai was watching it not claim the Godslayer.
She had found him. She hadn’t even been looking, just assuming he’d be missing as he had been all these nights Sarai had nightly called on Azareen and found her all alone.
Really, she still was alone. She was in her bed, curled in a ball with her hands over her face, not asleep, as Eril-Fane was likewise not asleep in the small sitting room just outside the door, chairs pushed aside and a bedroll laid out on the floor. He wasn’t lying on it, though. His back was to the wall, and his face was in his hands. Two rooms, door closed between them. Two warriors with their faces in their hands. Sarai, watching them, could see that everything would be better if the faces and hands were to simply . . . switch places. That is, if Azareen were to hold Eril-Fane while he held her.
How anguished they both were, and how still and quiet and determined to suffer alone. From Sarai’s vantage point, she beheld two private pools of suffering so close together they were nearly adjacent—like the connecting rooms with the shut door between them. Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did they not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and hers, mingled together, could . . . countervail each other?
At least for a time.
Sarai wanted to feel scorn for them for being such fools, but she knew too much to ever scorn them. For years she’d seen Azareen’s love for Eril-Fane blasted in the bud like Sparrow’s orchids by one of Feral’s blizzards. And why? Because the great Godslayer was incapable of love.
Because of what Isagol had done to him.
And, as Sarai had slowly come to understand—or rather, for years refused to understand until finally there was no denying it—because of what he himself had done. What he had forced himself to do to ensure the future freedom of his people: killing children, and, with them, his own soul.
That was what had finally broken through her blindness. Her father had saved his people and destroyed himself. As strong as he looked, inside he was a ruin, or perhaps a funeral pyre, like the Cusp—only instead of the melted bones of ijji, he was made up of the skeletons of babies and children, including, as he had always believed, his own child: her. This was his remorse. It choked him like weeds and rot and colonies of vermin, clogging and staining him, stagnant and fetid, so that nothing so noble as love, or—gods above—forgiveness, could ever claim space in him.
He was even denied the relief of tears. Here was something else that Sarai knew better than anyone: The Godslayer was incapable of crying. The city’s name was a taunt. In all these years, he had been unable to weep. When Sarai was young and cruel, she had tried to make him, ever without success.
Poor Azareen. To see her curled up like that and skinned of all her armor was like seeing a heart flayed from a body, laid raw on a slab, and labeled Grief.
And Eril-Fane, savior of Weep, three years’ plaything of the goddess of despair? What label for him, but Shame.
And so Grief and Shame abided in adjoining rooms with the door shut between them, holding their pain in their arms instead of each other. Sarai watched them, waiting for her father to fall asleep so that she might send her sentinel to him—if she dared—and know what he was hiding in his hearts as he hid his face in his great hands. She couldn’t forget his look of horror when he had seen her in the doorway, but nor could she understand why he’d kept her secret.
Now that he knew she was alive, what did he plan to do about it?
And so here were the four who had flown to the citadel and lived to tell the tale—though they apparently hadn’t told it. Sarai watched them all, the sleeping and the sleepless. She was many other places, too, but most of her focus was split between her father and the dreamer.
When she was certain that Lazlo had at last subsided into dreams—and he had finally moved his arm so that she could see his face—she detached her moth from the casement and went to him. She couldn’t quite bring herself to touch him, though, and hovered in the air above him. It would be different now. That much she knew. Up in the citadel, pacing, she felt as jumpy as though she were really there in the room with him, ready to spook at his slightest movement.
Through the moth’s senses she smelled his sandalwood and clean musk scent. His breathing was deep and even. She could tell that he was dreaming. His eyes moved under his lids, and his lashes, resting closed—as dense and glossy as the fur of rivercats—fluttered gently. Finally, she couldn’t stay out one moment more. With a feeling of surrender, and anticipation, and apprehension, she crossed the small distance to his brow, settled on his warm skin, and entered his world.
He was waiting for her.
He was right there, standing straight and expectant as though he’d known she would come.
Her breath caught. No, she thought. Not as though he’d known. As though he’d hoped.
Her moth spooked from him and broke contact. He was too near; she wasn’t prepared. But that single strobe of an instant caught the moment that his worry became relief.
Relief. At the sight of her.
It was only then, aflutter in the air above him, her hearts in her own far-off body drumming up a wild cadence, that Sarai realized she’d been braced for the worst, certain that today, finally, he must have learned proper disgust for her. But in that glimpse she had seen no sign of it. She took courage, and returned to his brow.
There he still was, and she beheld again the transformation from worry to relief. “I’m sorry,” he said in his woodsmoke voice. He was farther away now. He hadn’t moved, exactly, but rather shifted the conception of space in the dream so as not to crowd her at its threshold. They weren’t in any version of Weep, she saw, or in the library, either. They were standing on the bank of a river, and it wasn’t the tumultuous Uzumark but a gentler stream. Not Weep nor the Cusp nor the citadel were visible, but a great deal of pale-rose sky, and, beneath it, this broad path of smooth green water plied by birds with long, curved necks. Along the banks, leaning out as though to catch their own reflections, were rows of rough stone houses with their shutters painted blue.
“I frightened you,” said Lazlo. “Please stay.”
It was funny, the notion that he could frighten her. The Muse of Nightmares, tormentor of Weep, spooked from a dream by a sweet librarian?