“An excellent choice, my lady,” said Lazlo. “Here, let’s try them on and see if they fit.”
The harness was just like the ones in the silk sleigh. Lazlo buckled it for her, and picked out his own pair. “Dragon wings,” he said, and slipped into them like sleeves.
WHY NOT FLY? the gold letters asked. No reason in the world. Or if there were ample reasons in the world—physics and anatomy and so on—there was at least no reason here.
And so they flew.
Sarai knew flying dreams, and this was better. It had been her wish when she was little, before her gift manifested and stole her last hope of it. Flying was freedom.
But it was also fun—ridiculous, marvelous fun. And if there had been sunlight just moments ago, it suited them now to have stars, so they did. They were low enough to pick like berries from a branch, and string onto the bracelet with her moon.
Everything was extraordinary.
Lazlo caught Sarai’s hand in flight. Remembered the first time he’d caught it and felt the same unmistakable shock of the real. “Come down over here,” he said. “Onto the anchor.”
“Not the anchor,” she demurred. It loomed suddenly below them, jutting up from the city. “Rasalas is there.”
“I know,” said Lazlo. “I think we should go and visit him.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he’s turned over a new leaf,” he said. “He was tired of being a half-rotted monster, you know. He practically begged me for lips and eyeballs.”
Sarai gave a laugh. “He did, did he?”
“I solemnly swear,” said Lazlo, and they hooked their fingers together and descended to the anchor. Sarai alighted before the beast and stared. Lips and eyeballs indeed. It was still recognizably Skathis’s beast, but only just. It was Skathis’s beast as remade in Lazlo’s mind, and so what had been ugly was made beautiful. Gone was the carrion head with its knife-fang grin. The flesh that had been falling from the bones—mesarthium flesh, mesarthium bones—covered the skull now, and not just with flesh but fur, and the face had the delicate grace of a spectral mingled with the power of a ravid. Its horns were a more refined version of what they’d been, fluting out to tight spirals, and the eyes that filled the empty sockets were large and shining. The hump of its great shoulders had shrunk. All its proportions were made finer. Skathis might have been an artist, but he’d been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.
“What do you think?” Lazlo asked her.
“He’s actually lovely,” she marveled. “He would be out of place in a nightmare now.”
“I’m glad you like him.”
“You do good work, dreamsmith.”
“Dreamsmith. I like the sound of that. And you’re one, too, of course. We should set up a tent in the marketplace.”
“Why not dream?” Sarai said, painting a logo onto the air. The letters glimmered gold, then faded, and she imagined a fairy-tale life in which she and Lazlo worked magic out of a striped market tent and kissed when there were no customers. She turned to him, shrugged the broad flare of her fox wings back from her shoulders, and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Have I told you that the moment I first stepped into your dreams I knew there was something special about you?”
“I don’t believe you have, no,” said Lazlo, finding a place for his arms about her shoulders, wild windswept hair and wings and all. “Please go on.”
“Even before you looked at me. Saw me, I mean, the first person who ever did. After that, of course I knew there was something, but even before, just seeing Weep in your mind’s eyes. It was so magical. I wanted it to be real, and I wanted to come down and bring Sparrow and Ruby and Feral and Minya and live in it, just the way you dreamed it.”
“It was all the cake, wasn’t it? Goddess bait.”
“It didn’t hurt,” she admitted, laughing.
Lazlo sobered. “I wish I could make it all real for you.”
Sarai’s laugh trailed away. “I know,” she said.
The hopelessness didn’t come back to either of them, but the reasons for it did. “It was a bad day,” said Lazlo.
“For me, too.”
They told each other all of it, though Lazlo didn’t think it necessary to repeat the warriors’ actual words. “It made me think it was impossible,” he said. He traced her cheek with his finger. “But I’ve thought things were impossible before, and so far, none of them actually were. Besides, I know Eril-Fane doesn’t want any more killing. He wants to come up to the citadel,” he told her. “To meet you.”
“He does?” The fragile hope in her voice broke Lazlo’s hearts.
He nodded. “How could he not?” Tears came to her eyes. “I told him you could ask the others to call a truce. I can come, too. I’d rather like to meet you.”
There had been a soft longing in Sarai’s eyes, but now Lazlo saw it harden. “I’ve already asked,” she said.
“And they said no?”
“Only one of them did, and only her vote matters.”
It was time to tell him about Minya. Sarai had described Ruby and Sparrow and Feral to him already, and even the Ellens, because they all fit in the loveliness here, and the sweetness of this night. Minya didn’t. Even the thought of her infected it.
She told him first how Minya had saved the rest of them from the Carnage, which she had witnessed, and she told him the strange fact of her agelessness. Last, she told him of her gift. “The ghost army. It’s hers. When someone dies, their souls are pulled upward, up toward… I don’t know. The sky. They have no form, no ability to move. They can’t be seen or heard, except by her. She catches them and binds them to her. Gives them form. And makes them her slaves.”
Lazlo shuddered at the thought. It was power over death, and it was every bit as grim a gift as the ones the Mesarthim had had. It cast a dark pall over his optimism.
“She’ll kill anyone who comes,” Sarai said. “You mustn’t let Eril-Fane come. You mustn’t come. Please don’t doubt what she can and will and wants to do.”
“Then what are we to do?” he asked, at a loss.
There was, of course, no answer, not tonight at least. Sarai looked up at the citadel. By the light of the low-hanging stars, it looked like an enormous cage. “I don’t want to go back yet,” she said.
Lazlo drew her closer. “It’s not morning yet,” he said. He waved his hand and the citadel vanished, as easily as that. He waved it again and the anchor vanished, too, right out from under their feet. They were in the sky again, flying. The city shone far below, glavelight and golden domes. The sky glimmered all around, starlight and infinity, and altogether too many seconds had passed since their last kiss. Lazlo thought, All of this is ours, even the infinity, and then he turned it. He turned gravity, because he could.