“Sarai,” he repeated, as though he were tasting it. Sarai. It tasted, he thought—but did not say—like tea—complex and fine and not too sweet. He looked at her, really looked. He wouldn’t, in the world, ever look at a young woman with such directness and intensity, but it was somehow all right here, as though they had met with the tacit intent to know each other. “Will you tell me?” he asked. “About yourself?”
Sarai held her cup in both hands. She breathed the hot steam while cold water swirled around her feet. “What did Eril-Fane tell you?” she asked, wary. Through another moth’s eyes, she observed that her father was no longer sitting against the wall, but had moved to the open window of Azareen’s sitting room and was leaning out, staring up at the citadel. Was he imagining her up there? And, if so, what was he thinking? If he would sleep, she might be able to tell. She couldn’t see it on his face, which was like a death mask: grim and lifeless with hollows for eyes.
“He only said that you aren’t Isagol,” Lazlo relayed. He paused. “Are you . . . her daughter?”
Sarai lifted her gaze to him. “Did he say that?”
Lazlo shook his head. “I guessed,” he said. “Your hair.” He had guessed something else, too. Hesitant, he said, “Suheyla told me that Eril-Fane was Isagol’s consort.”
Sarai said nothing, but truth was in her silence, and in her proud effort to show no pain.
“Didn’t he know about you?” Lazlo asked, sitting forward. “If he’d known he had a child—”
“He knew,” Sarai said shortly. A half mile away, the man in question rubbed his eyes with infinite weariness, yet still he didn’t close them. “And now he knows I’m still alive. Did he say what he intends to do?”
Lazlo shook his head. “He didn’t say very much. He asked that we not tell anyone what happened up there. About you or any of it.”
Sarai had assumed as much. What she wanted to know was why, and what next, but Lazlo couldn’t tell her that and Eril-Fane was still awake. Azareen had drifted off, finally, and Sarai landed a soft sentinel on the curve of her tearstained cheek.
She found no answers, though. Instead, she was plunged into the violence of the morning. She heard her own echoing cry of “Go!” and felt the terror bearing down, cleavers and meat hooks and the face of her own grandmother—Azareen’s grandmother—twisted in unfamiliar hatred. It replayed itself over and over, relentless, and with one terrible difference: In the dream, Azareen’s blades were as heavy as anchors, weighing down her arms as she strove to defend against the onslaught pouring from the angel’s hand. She was too slow. It was all frantic, sluggish panic and roiling, invincible foes, and the outcome was not so lucky as it had been that morning.
In Azareen’s dream, they all died, just as Sarai had told Lazlo they would.
She grew quiet at the riverside, her attention drawn away. Lazlo, observing that the cerulean hue of her face had gone a little ashen, asked, “Are you all right?”
She nodded, too quickly. I just watched you die, she did not say, but she had a hard time pushing the image from her mind. The warmth of his brow beneath her moth reassured her, and the sight of him across the table. Real Lazlo, dream Lazlo, alive because of her. It sank in that she was seeing a vision of the murders she had averted, and whatever shame she might have felt at Minya’s tirade earlier, she didn’t feel it anymore.
Deftly, she took control of Azareen’s nightmare. She lightened the warrior’s weapons and slowed the onslaught while the silk sleigh drifted out of range. Finally, she evanesced the ghosts, starting with Azareen’s grandmother, infusing the dream with their sighs of release. The dead were free and the living were safe, and there was an end to the dream.
Sarai had finished her tea. The pot refilled her cup. She thanked it as though it were alive, and then her gaze lingered on the covered dishes. “So,” she inquired, flashing a glance Lazlo’s way. “What’s under there?”
42
God or Monster, Monster or God Lazlo had only marginally more experience with cake than Sarai did, so this was one of the things they made up between them “however they liked.” It was a bit of a game. One would imagine the contents of a dish, and the other would uncover it with a small, dramatic flourish. They discovered that they could conjure splendid—looking confections, but were somewhat less successful when it came to flavor. Oh, the cakes weren’t bad. They were sweet at least—that much was easy. But it was a bland sweetness dreamed up by orphans who’d pressed their faces to sweetshop windows (metaphorically, at least), and never had a taste.
“They’re all alike,” lamented Sarai, after sampling a small forkful of her latest creation. It was a marvel to behold: three tall tiers glazed in pink with sugared petals, far too tall to have fit beneath the cover it was under. “A magic trick,” Lazlo had said, when it had seemed to grow with the lifting of the lid.
“Everything here is a magic trick,” Sarai had replied.
But their recipes could use a bit less magic and more reality. The imagination, as Lazlo had previously noted, is tethered in some measure to the known, and they were both sadly ignorant in matters of cake. “These should be good at least,” said Lazlo, trying again. “Suheyla made them for me, and I think I remember the flavor pretty well.”
It was better: a honeyed pastry filled with pale-green nuts and rose petal jelly. It wasn’t as good as the real thing, but at least it had a specificity the others lacked, and though they could easily have willed their fingers clean, that seemed a sad waste of imaginary honey, and both were inclined to lick them instead.
“I don’t think we’d better attempt any dream banquets,” said Lazlo, when the next attempt proved once more uninspiring.
“If we did, I could provide kimril soup,” said Sarai.
“Kimril?” asked Lazlo. “What’s that?”
“A virtuous vegetable,” she said. “It has no flavor to tempt one to overindulgence, but it will keep you alive.”
There was a little pause as Lazlo considered the practicalities of life in the citadel. He was reluctant to abandon this sweet diversion and the lightness it had brought to his guest, but he couldn’t sit here with this vision of her and not wonder about the real her, whom he’d glimpsed so briefly and under such terrible circumstances. “Has it kept you alive?” he inquired.
“It has,” she said. “You might say it’s a staple. The citadel gardens lack variety.”
“I saw fruit trees,” Lazlo said.
“Yes. We have plums, thank gardener.” Sarai smiled. In the citadel, when it came to food, they had been known to praise “gardener” as others might praise god. They owed an even greater debt to Wraith for that bundle of kimril tubers that had made all the difference. Such were their deities in the citadel of dead gods: an obscure human gardener and an antisocial bird. And, of course, none of it would have mattered without Sparrow’s and Feral’s gifts to nurture and water what little they had. How unassailable the citadel looked from below, she thought, and yet how tenuous their life was in it.
Lazlo had not missed her plural pronoun. “We?” he asked casually, as though it weren’t a monumental question. Are you alone up there? Are there others like you?
Evasive, Sarai turned her attention to the river. Right where she looked, a fish leapt up, rainbow iridescence shimmering on its scales. It splashed back down and sank out of sight. Did it make any difference, she wondered, if Lazlo and Eril-Fane found out there were more godspawn alive in the citadel? The Rule was broken. There was “evidence of life.” Did it matter how much life? It seemed to her that it did, and anyway, it felt like betrayal to give the others away, so she said, “The ghosts.”
“Ghosts eat plums?”
Having determined to lie, she did so baldly. “Voraciously.”
Lazlo let it pass. He wanted to know about the ghosts, of course, and why they were armed with kitchen tools, viciously attacking their own kin, but he started with a slightly easier question, and asked simply how they came to be there.
“I suppose everyone has to be somewhere,” Sarai said evasively.