Sarai hadn’t been out on her terrace since the attack on the silk sleigh. She’d kept to her alcove since then, trying to preserve some privacy while under heavy guard, but she couldn’t take it anymore. She needed air, and she needed to move. She was always restless when her moths were out, and now her confusion was compounding it.
What was this about?
She paced. Ghosts were all around her, but she was barely aware of them. She could still make no sense of Lazlo’s exchange with the faranji, though it clearly had something to do with mesarthium. Lazlo was tense, that much she understood. He handed back the piece of metal. The other man left—finally—and she expected Lazlo to go back to sleep. To come back to her.
Instead, he put on his boots. Dismay sparked through her. She wasn’t thinking now of exquisite paths of sensation or the heat of his lips on her shoulder. That had all been driven out by a thrum of unease. Where was he going at this time of night? He was distracted, a million miles away. She watched him pull on a vest over his loose linen nightshirt. The impulse to reach for him was so strong, but she couldn’t, and her mouth was alive with questions that she had no way to ask. A moth fluttered around his head, its path a scribble.
He saw it and blinked back into focus. “I’m sorry,” he said, uncertain whether she could hear him, and put out his hand.
Sarai hesitated before perching on it. It had been a long time since she’d tried contact with a waking person, but she knew what to expect. She did not expect to slip into a dreamspace where she could see and talk to him, and indeed she didn’t.
The unconscious mind is open terrain—no walls or barriers, for better or worse. Thoughts and feelings are free to wander, like characters leaving their books to taste life in other stories. Terrors roam, and so do yearnings. Secrets are turned out like pockets, and old memories meet new. They dance and leave their scents on each other, like perfume transferred between lovers. Thus is meaning made. The mind builds itself like a sirrah’s nest with whatever is at hand: silk threads and stolen hair and the feathers of dead kin. The only rule is that there are no rules. In that space, Sarai went where she wanted and did as she pleased. Nothing was closed to her.
The conscious mind was a different story. There was no mingling, no roaming. Secrets melted into the dark, and all the doors slammed shut. Into this guarded world, she could not enter. As long as Lazlo was awake, she was locked out on the doorstep of his mind. She knew this already, but he didn’t. When the moth made contact, he expected her to manifest in his mind, but she didn’t. He spoke her name—first aloud in the room and then louder in his mind. “Sarai?”
Sarai?
No response, only a vague sense that she was near—locked on the far side of a door he didn’t know how to open. He gathered that he’d have to fall asleep if he wanted to talk to her, but that was impossible right now. His mind was buzzing with Thyon’s question.
Who are you?
He imagined that other people had a place in the center of themselves—right in the center of themselves—where the answer to that question resided. Himself, he had only an empty space. “You know I don’t know,” he had told Thyon, uncomfortable. “What are you suggesting?”
“I am suggesting,” the golden godson had replied, “that you are no orphan peasant from Zosma.”
Then who?
Then what?
Azoth of this world. That was what Thyon had said. Azoth of this world did not affect mesarthium. Azoth distilled from the alchemist’s own spirit had no effect on it at all. And yet he had cut a shard off the anchor, and that was proof enough: Something had affected mesarthium, and that something, according to Thyon, was Lazlo.
He told himself Nero was mocking him, that it was all a prank. Maybe Drave was hiding just out of sight, chuckling like a schoolboy.
But what sort of prank? An elaborate ruse to make him think there was something special about him? He couldn’t believe that Nero would go to the trouble, particularly not now, when he was so obsessed with the challenge at hand. Thyon Nero was many things, but frivolous just wasn’t one of them.
But then, maybe Lazlo just wanted it to be true. For there to be something special about him.
He didn’t know what to think. Mesarthium was at the center of this mystery, so that was where he was going—to the anchor, as though Mouzaive’s invisible magnetic fields were pulling him there. He left the house, Sarai’s moth still perched on his hand. He didn’t know what to tell her, if she could even hear him. His mind was awhirl with thoughts and memories, and, at the center of everything: the mystery of himself.
“So you could be anyone,” Sarai had said when he told her about the cartload of orphans and not knowing his name.
He thought of the abbey, the monks, the rows of cribs, the wailing babies, and himself, silent in their midst.
“Unnatural,” Brother Argos had called him. The word echoed through Lazlo’s thoughts. Unnatural. He’d only meant Lazlo’s silence, hadn’t he? “Thought sure you’d die,” the monk had said, too. “Gray as rain, you were.”
A fizz of shivers radiated out over Lazlo’s scalp and down his neck and spine.
Gray as rain, you were, but your color came normal in time.
In the silent street of the sleeping city, Lazlo’s feet slowed to a stop. He lifted the hand that had, moments ago, been holding the piece of mesarthium. The moth’s wings rose and fell, but he wasn’t looking at the moth. The discoloration was back—a grime-gray streak across his palm where he’d clutched the slender shard. He knew that it would fade, so long as he wasn’t touching mesarthium, and return as soon as he did. And all those years ago, his skin had been gray and had faded to normal.
The sound of his heartbeats seemed to fill his head.
What if he hadn’t been ill at all? What if he was . . . something much stranger than the name Strange was ever intended to signify?
Another wave of shivers swept over him. He’d thought it was some property of the metal that it was reactive with skin, but he was the only one who had reacted to it.
And now, according to Thyon, it had reacted to him.
What did it mean? What did any of it mean? He started walking again, faster now, wishing Sarai were by his side. He wanted her hand clasped in his, not her moth perched on it. After the wonder and ease of flying in so real-seeming a dream, he felt heavy and trudging and trapped down here on the surface of the world. That was the curse of dreaming: One woke to pallid reality, with neither wings on one’s shoulders nor goddess in one’s arms.
Well, he might never have wings in his waking life, but he would hold Sarai—not her phantom and not her moth, but her, flesh and blood and spirit. Somehow or other, he vowed, that much of his dream would come true.
As Lazlo quickened his pace, so did Sarai. Her bare feet moved swiftly over the cool metal of the angel’s palm, as though she were trying to keep up. It was unconscious. As Ruby and Sparrow had said, she wasn’t really here, but had left just enough awareness in her body so that she knew when to turn in her pacing and not walk up the slope that edged the seraph’s hand and right over the edge.