And she threw up one hand, not forming in her mind a precise attack, but—as with the mahalath—letting some deeper voice within herself decide.
It decided, apparently, that Skathis was already dead.
Before Sarai’s and Lazlo’s eyes, the god jerked, eyes widening in shock as a hreshtek suddenly burst out through his chest. His blood was red—as red as the paint in the mural, in which, it occurred to Lazlo, Skathis was depicted just like this: stabbed from behind, the sword slitting out right between his hearts. A red bubble appeared at his lips, and very quickly he was dead. Very quickly. This was no natural depiction of his death, but a clear reminder of it. You’re dead, stay dead, leave us alone. Rasalas the beast froze in place—all mesarthium dying with its master—while on its back the lord of the Mesarthim collapsed in on himself, withering, deflating, until nothing remained but a bloodless, spiritless husk of blue flesh to be carried off, with a terrific screech, in a flash of melting white, by the great bird, Wraith, appearing from nowhere and vanishing the same way.
The room was quiet, but for quick breathing. The nightmare was over, and Lazlo and Sarai clung together, staring into the face of Rasalas, frozen in a snarl. Its great feet were still up on the window ledge, claws sunk into the stone. Lazlo reached out a shaking arm and yanked the curtain closed. The other arm he left in Sarai’s possession. She was still clinging to it, both of her own arms wrapped around it as though she meant to dig in her heels and wrestle Skathis for him. She’d done better than that. She had vanquished the god of beasts. Lazlo was sure he had done none of it.
“Thank you,” he said, turning to her. They were so very near already, her body pressed against his arm. His turning brought them nearer, face-to-face, his tilted down, hers up, so that the space between them was hardly more than the wisp of tea steam that, earlier in the night, had drifted up between them at the riverbank tea table.
It was new to both of them—this nearness that mingles breath and warmth—and they shared the sensation that they were absorbing each other, melting together in an exquisite crucible. It was an intimacy both had imagined, but never—they now knew—successfully. The truth was so much better than the fantasy. The wild, soft wings were in a frenzy. Sarai couldn’t think. She wanted only to keep on melting.
But there was something in the way. She was still blinking away the afterimage of Rasalas’s gleaming teeth, and the knowledge that it was all her fault. “Don’t thank me,” she said, letting go of Lazlo’s arm and looking down, breaking the gaze. “I brought that here. You should throw me out. You don’t want me in your mind, Lazlo. I’ll just ruin it.”
“You ruin nothing,” he said, and his woodsmoke voice had never been sweeter. “I might be asleep, but this has still been the best night of my life.” Marveling, he gazed at her eyes, her cinnamon brows, the perfect curve of her blue cheek, and that luscious lip with the crease in the center, sweet as a slice of ripe fruit. He dragged his eyes up from it, back to hers. “Sarai,” he said, and if ravids purred it might sound something like the way he said her name. “You must see. I want you in my mind.”
And he wanted her in his arms. He wanted her in his life. He wanted her not trapped in the sky, not hunted by humans, not hopeless, and not besieged by nightmares whenever she closed her eyes. He wanted to bring her to a real riverbank and let her sink her toes into the mud. He wanted to curl up with her in a real library, and smell the books and open them and read them to each other. He wanted to buy them both wings from the wingsmiths so that they could fly away, with a stash of blood candy in a little treasure chest, so that they could live forever. He’d learned, the moment he glimpsed what lay beyond the Cusp, that the realm of the unknowable was so much bigger than he’d guessed. He wanted to discover how much bigger. With her.
But first . . . first he just really, really, really wanted to kiss her.
He searched her eyes for acquiescence and found it. Freely she gave it. It was like a thread of light passing from one to the other, and it was more than acquiescence. It was complicity, and desire. Her breathing shallowed. She stepped in, closing that little space. There was a limit to their melting, and they found it, and defied it. His chest was hard against hers. Hers was soft against his. His hands closed on her waist. Her arms came round his neck. The walls gave forth a shimmer like sunrise on fierce water. Countless tiny stars spent themselves in radiance, and neither Sarai nor Lazlo knew which of them was making it. Perhaps they both were, and there was such brilliance in the endless careless diamonds of light, but there was awareness, too, and urgency. Under the skin of dreaming, they both knew that dawn was near, and that their embrace could not survive it.
So Sarai rose to her toes, erasing the last little gap between their flushed faces. Their lashes fluttered shut, honey red and rivercat, and their mouths, soft and hungry, found each other and had just time to touch, and press, and sweetly, sweetly open before the first wan morning light seeped in at the window, touched the dusky wing of the moth on Lazlo’s brow, and—in a puff of indigo smoke—annihilated it.
48
No Place in the World
Sarai vanished from Lazlo’s arms, and Lazlo vanished from Sarai’s. The shared dream ripped right down the middle and spilled them both out. Sarai woke in her bed in the citadel with the warmth of his lips still on hers, and Lazlo woke in the city, a moth-shaped puff of smoke diffusing on his brow. They sat up at the same moment, and for both, the sudden absence was the powerful inverse of the presence they’d felt just an instant before. Not mere physical presence—the heat of a body against one’s own (though that, too)—but something more profound.
This was not the frustration one feels at waking from a sweet dream. It was the desolation of having found the place that fits, the one true place, and experiencing the first heady sigh of rightness before being torn away and cast back into random, lonely scatter.
The place was each other, and the irony was sharp, since they couldn’t be in the same place, and had come no closer to each other in physical reality than her screaming at him across her terrace while ghosts clawed and tore at her.
But even knowing that was true—that they hadn’t been in the same place all this long night through, but practically on different planes of existence, him on the ground, her in the sky—Sarai could not accept that they hadn’t been together. She collapsed back on her bed, and her fingers reached wonderingly to trace her own lips, where a moment before his had been.
Not really, perhaps, but truly. That is to say, they might not have really kissed, but they had truly kissed. Everything about this night was true in a way that transcended their bodies.
But that didn’t mean their bodies wanted to be transcended.
The ache.
Lazlo fell back on his pillows, too, raised fists to his eyes and pressed. Breath hissed out between his clenched teeth. To have been granted so tiny a taste of the nectar of her mouth, and so brief a brush with the velvet of her lips was unspeakable cruelty. He felt set on fire. He had to convince himself that liberating a silk sleigh and flying forthwith to the citadel was not a viable option. That would be like the prince charging up to the maiden’s tower, so mad with desire that he forgets his sword and is slain by the dragon before even getting near her.
Except that the dragon in this case was a battalion of ghosts whom no sword could harm, and he didn’t have a sword anyway. At best he had a padded pole, a true hero’s weapon.