She held herself as still as a queen on a quell board, her eyes cut as narrow as the heat pits on a viper, and watched them come.
Lazlo dismounted. He’d seen the others first—their three stricken faces at the garden railing—and he was highly aware of the ghosts, but it was Minya he scanned for and fixed on, and her to whom he went with Sarai clasped to his chest.
They all saw what he held, the unbearable broken form of her, the pink and red and cinnamon so brutally beautiful against the blue of her skin and his. It was Ruby who drew in a low, racking sob. Red glimmered in her hollow eyes. Her fingertips kindled into ten blue tapers and she didn’t even feel it. Sparrow’s sorrow was manifest in the withering of flowers around her feet. Her gift, which they had never even known worked in reverse, was leeching the life out of all the plants she touched. And nor did Feral consciously summon the sheaves of cloud that coalesced around them, blocking out the sky, the horizon, the Cusp, shrinking the world to here—this garden and this garden alone.
Only Minya was purposeful. As Lazlo drew nearer, so did her ghosts.
There were a dozen positioned around the garden and many more inside the gallery, ever ready to repel invasion. And though Lazlo’s gaze didn’t waver from Minya, he felt them behind him. He saw them behind her, through the arcade, and as Weep’s dead answered Minya’s call, moving toward the arches that had for fifteen years stood open between garden and gallery, Lazlo closed them.
Her will summoned the ghosts, and his barred their way. It was the opening exchange of a dialogue in power—no words spoken, only magic. The metal of the arches turned fluid and flowed closed, as they had not done since Skathis’s time, cutting Minya off from the bulk of her army. Her back was to the gallery, and the flow of the mesarthium made no sound, but she felt it in the muting of the souls on the ends of her tethers. Her jaw clenched. The ghosts in the garden glided into position, flanking Lazlo from behind. He didn’t turn to face them, but Rasalas did, a growl of warning rumbling up its metal throat.
Ruby, Sparrow, and Feral watched it all with held breath.
Lazlo and Minya faced each other, and they might have been strangers, but there was more between them than the corpse of Sarai. Minya understood it, even if Lazlo didn’t. This faranji could control mesarthium, which meant that he was Skathis’s son.
And hence, her brother.
Which revelation stirred no feeling of kinship, but only a burn of bitterness—that he should inherit the gift that should have been hers, but with none of the hardship that had made her so desperate for it.
Where had he come from?
He had to be the one Sarai had spoken of, and who had made her so defiant. “I know a human could stand the sight of me,” she had said, blazing with a boldness Minya had never seen. “Because there is one who can see me, and he stands the sight of me quite well.”
Well, she’d been misinformed or lying. This was no human.
Beast faced ghosts, as man faced girl. The seconds between them were fraught with challenge. Power bristled, barely held in check. In Minya, Lazlo saw the merciless child who had tried to kill him, and whose devotion to bloodshed had filled Sarai with despair. He saw an enemy, and so his fury found a focus.
But. She was an enemy who caught ghosts like butterflies in a net, and he was a man with his dead love in his arms.
He fell to his knees before her. Hunched over his burden, he sank down on his heels so that he was just her height. He looked her in the eyes and saw no empathy there, no glint of humanity, and braced himself for a struggle. “Her soul,” he said, and his voice had never been rougher—so raw it was practically bloody. He didn’t know how it worked or what it would mean. He only knew that some part of Sarai might yet be saved, and must be. “You have to catch it.”
Someone else—almost anyone else—might have seen his heartbreak and forgiven his tone of command.
But not Minya.
She’d had every intention of catching Sarai’s soul. That was what she’d been listening for. From the moment she learned Sarai had fallen, she had stretched her senses to their limits, waiting, hardly breathing, alert to the telltale skim of passing ghosts. That was what it was like: straining to hear, but with her whole being. And like with listening, the subtle skim of a soul could be drowned out by a nearer, louder presence.
Like an arrogant, trespassing man astride a winged metal beast.
This stranger dared to come here and break her focus in order to command her to do what she was doing already?
As though, if not for him, she would let Sarai drift away?
“Who do you think you are?” she seethed through clenched teeth.
Who did Lazlo think he was? Orphan, godspawn, librarian, hero? Maybe he was all of those things, but the only answer that came to him, and the only relevant context, was Sarai—what she was to him, and he to her. “I am… I’m Sarai’s…” he began but couldn’t finish. There wasn’t a word for what they were. Neither married nor promised—what time had there been for promises? Not yet lovers, but so much more than friends. So he faltered in his answer, leaving it unfinished, and it was, in its way, simply and perfectly true. He was Sarai’s.
“Sarai’s what?” demanded Minya, her fury mounting. “Her protector? Against me?” It enraged her, the way he held her body—as though Sarai belonged to him, as if she could be more precious to him than to her own family. “Leave her and go,” she snarled, “if you want to live.”
Live? Lazlo felt a laugh rise up his throat. His new power surged in him. It felt like a storm ready to burst through his skin. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, his fury matching hers, and to Minya, it was a challenge to her family and her home—everything she’d spent herself on and poured herself into, every moment of every day, since gods’ blood spurted and she saved who she could carry.