These were dark days, and it was good to have a challenge to take his mind off ghosts and doom: make Ruby completely lose track of herself, while not ending up a pile of char. Feral applied himself. The learning curve was delicious. He was keenly attuned to Ruby’s pleasure, in part because it could kill him, and in part because… he liked it. He liked her pleasure; he’d never liked her better than when she was soft against him, breathing in surprised little gasps or looking up at him from under her lashes, her eyelids heavy with hedonic contentment.
It was all very, very satisfying, and never so much as when, finally, she made a sound like the sighing of doves and violins, and… set fire to his bed.
The scent of smoke. A flash of heat. Her lips were parted and her eyes glowed like embers. Feral pushed himself away, already summoning a cloud; he had rehearsed emergency plans in his head. The air filled with vapor. The silk sheets, clenched in Ruby’s fists, burst into flame, and an instant later the cloud burst forth rain, severing the dove-and-violin sigh and dousing her before the rest of her bonfire could kindle.
She gave a little shriek and came upright in an instant. Rain lashed down at her whilst Feral stood back safe and smug. To his credit, he kept the cloud no longer than strictly necessary, on top of which, it wasn’t even cold. It was a tropical cloud. He thought this quite a nice gesture, but the romance was lost on Ruby.
“How… how… rude!” she exclaimed, shaking water from her arms. Her blue breasts glistened. Her hair sluiced rivers down her back and shoulders.
“Rude?” Feral repeated. “So the polite thing would be to uncomplainingly burn up?”
She glared at him. “Yes.”
He surveyed the scene. “Look,” he pointed out. “You’ve scorched my sheets.”
She had. There were sodden, black-edged holes where she’d clenched them in her fists. “Do you expect me to apologize?” Ruby asked.
But Feral shook his head, grinning. He didn’t mean to rebuke her. On the contrary, he was gloating. “You lost track of yourself,” he said. “You know what that means, don’t you? It means I’m really good.”
Her eyes narrowed. Still entangled in Feral’s sheets, she went full Bonfire, lighting up like a torch and taking the whole bed with her.
Feral groaned, but could only watch as his sheets, pillows, mattress—everything that was not mesarthium—flamed and were eaten up, leaving nothing behind but hot metal and a smoking naked girl with her eyebrows raised as though to say, How’s that for scorched sheets? She didn’t really look mad, though. A grin tugged at one corner of her mouth. “I suppose you have improved,” she allowed.
It felt like winning at quell, only much better. Feral laughed. He’d known Ruby all his life and been annoyed by her for half of it, but now he was simply amazed by the turn things could take between two people, and the feelings that could grow while you distracted yourself from the end of the world. He walked back over to her. “You’ve destroyed my bed,” he said, congenial. “I’ll have to sleep with you from now on.”
“Oh really. Aren’t you afraid I’ll incinerate you?”
He shrugged. “I’ll just have to be less amazing. To be on the safe side.”
“Do that and I’ll kick you out.”
“What a dilemma.” He sat on the edge of the bare bed frame. “Be less amazing, and stay alive. Or be amazing, and get scorched.” Mesarthium didn’t hold heat; it was already back to normal, but Ruby’s skin was not. It was hot—like a summer day or a really good kiss. Feral leaned toward her, intent upon the latter, and froze.
At the same moment, they became aware of a movement in their peripheral vision. The curtain. It had been pushed aside, and Sparrow was standing there, stricken.
53
TARNISHED HEARTS
Sarai’s dreams that day were not without their terrors, but, for a change, she was not without defenses. “We’ll chase them away,” Lazlo had said, “or else turn them into fireflies and catch them in jars.”
She tried it, and it worked, and at some point in the evening, she found herself striding through a dark wood in a Tizerkane breastplate, carrying a jar full of fireflies that had recently been ravids and Rasalas and even her mother. She held up the jar to light her way, and it lit her smile, too, fierce with triumph.
She didn’t meet Lazlo in the dream, not exactly. Perhaps her unconscious preferred to wait for the real thing. But she did relive the kiss, exactly as it had been—melting sweet and all too brief—and she woke exactly when she had before. She didn’t bolt upright in bed this time, but lay where she was, lazy and liquid with sleep and well-being. At dawn, solitude had greeted her, but not this time. Opening her eyes, she gave a start.
Minya was standing at the foot of her bed.
Now she did bolt upright. “Minya! Whatever happened to respecting the curtains?”
“Oh, the curtains,” said Minya, dismissive. “Why worry about curtains, Sarai, unless you’ve something to hide?” She looked sly. “Ruby and Feral do, you know. But curtains, well, they don’t block out sounds very well.” She made exaggerated smooching noises and it reminded Sarai of how they would giggle and gasp when she told them about the things that humans did in their beds. It was a long time since she’d done that.
Ruby and Feral, though? It didn’t really surprise her. While she’d been wrapped up in her own misery, life in the citadel had gone on. Poor Sparrow, she thought. “Well, I’m not hiding anything,” she lied.
Minya didn’t believe her for a second. “No? Then why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
Minya studied her, her flat gaze roving up and down so that Sarai felt stripped. Seen, but not in a good way. Minya pronounced, as though diagnosing a disease, “Happy.”
Happy. What a notion. “Is that what this feeling is?” she said, not even trying to hide it. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
“What do you have to be happy about?”
“I was just having a good dream,” said Sarai. “That’s all.”
Minya’s nostrils flared. Sarai wasn’t supposed to have good dreams. “How is that possible?”
Sarai shrugged. “I closed my eyes, lay still, and—”
Minya was furious. Her whole body was rigid. Her voice took on the spittle-flying hiss normally reserved for the word vengeance. “Have you no shame? Lying there all silky and wanton, having good dreams while our lives fall apart?”
Sarai had plenty of shame. Minya might as well have demanded Have you no blood? or Have you no spirit? because shame as good as ran in her veins. But… not right now. “I think you’re a fairy tale.” Funny how light she felt without it. “I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite.”
“I’m through with shame, Minya,” she said. “And I’m through with lull, and I’m through with nightmares, and I’m through with vengeance. Weep has suffered enough and so have we. We have to find another way.”
“Don’t be stupid. There is no other way.”
“A lot of things could happen,” Sarai had told Ruby, not believing it herself. That had been days ago. She believed it now. Things had happened. Unbelievable things. But where the citadel was concerned, nothing could happen unless Minya let it.
Sarai had to persuade her to let it.