“Maybe,” said Sarai, and hope had never felt like such a lie. “Let’s go have dinner,” she said, and together they went inside.
“Good evening, brood,” Less Ellen greeted them, carrying a tureen from the kitchen. Like Great Ellen, Less Ellen had been with them from the beginning. She had worked in the citadel nursery, too, and with two Ellens, a distinction had been needed. The one being greater in both status and size, so it was that Skathis himself, the god of beasts and high lord of the Mesarthim, had dubbed them the greater and lesser Ellens.
Ruby breathed a woeful sigh as her dinner was put before her. “Kimril soup. Again.” She scooped up a spoonful and let it dribble back into her bowl. It was beige, with the consistency of stagnant water. “You know what this is? It’s purgatory soup.” Turning to Sparrow, she asked, “Couldn’t you grow something new for us to eat?”
“Certainly I could,” Sparrow replied, a tartness in her tone that had not been there when she was speaking with Sarai, “if my gift were conjuring seeds from thin air.” She took a dainty sip from her spoon. “Which it isn’t.”
Sparrow might make things grow, but she had to have something to start with. For the most part, the citadel gardens had been ornamental—full of exotic flowers, with little in the way of edibles. It was their good luck that some long-ago gardener had made a small kitchen garden of herbs, fresh greens, and a few vegetables, and their very good luck that their sometime visitor, the great white bird they called Wraith for its habit of vanishing into thin air, had seen fit to drop some kimril tubers into the garden once, else they’d have starved long ago. Kimril was easy to grow, nourishing though nearly flavorless, and was now the staple of their boring diet. Sarai wondered if the bird knew that it had made the difference between life and death for five blue abominations, or if it had simply been a fluke. It had never brought them anything else, so she supposed it must be the latter.
Sparrow grew their food. Feral kept the rain barrels filled. Ruby did her part, too. There was no fuel to burn, so she burned. She made the fires that cooked their meals and heated their baths, and Minya, well, she was responsible for the ghosts, who did most of the work. Sarai was the only one who had no part in the mundane tasks of their days.
Purgatory soup, she thought, stirring hers with her spoon. The simplest possible fare, served on the finest porcelain, and set on an elaborate charger of chased silver. Her goblet was chased silver, too, in a design of twined myrantine branches. Once upon a time, the gods had drunk wine from it. Now there was only rainwater.
Once upon a time, there had been gods. Now there were only children going about in their dead parents’ undergarments.
“I can’t do it anymore,” said Ruby, dropping her spoon into her soup. It splattered the table and the front of her new slip. “I can’t put one more bite of this insipid mush into my mouth.”
“Must you be so dramatic?” Feral asked, bypassing his spoon in favor of tipping back his bowl and drinking from it. “It’s not as though it’s terrible. At least we still have some salt in the pantry. Imagine when that runs out.”
“I didn’t say it was terrible,” said Ruby. “If it was terrible, it wouldn’t be purgatory soup, would it? It would be hell soup. Which would have to be more interesting.”
“Mm-hm,” agreed Sparrow. “In the same way that being eternally tortured by demons is more ‘interesting’ than not being eternally tortured by demons.”
They had an ongoing debate on the merits of “interesting.” Ruby contended that it was always worth it, even if it came with danger and ended in doom. “Purgatory’s more than just not being tortured,” she argued now. “It’s not being anything, ever. You might not be tortured, but you’ll also never be touched.”
“Touched?” Sparrow’s eyebrows went up. “How did we get to touching?”
“Don’t you want to be touched?” Ruby’s eyes glimmered red, and the corners of her lips curled up, feline. There was such longing in her words, such hunger. “Don’t you wish you had someone to sneak off and do things with?”
Sparrow flushed at this, a roseate warmth creeping into the blue of her cheeks and giving them a violet cast. She darted a glance at Feral, who didn’t notice. He was looking at Ruby.
“Don’t get any ideas,” he told her, flat. “You’ve debauched me enough for one day.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “Please. That’s an experiment I won’t be repeating. You’re a terrible kisser.”
“Me?” he demanded. “That was all you! I didn’t even do anything—”
“That’s why it was terrible! You’re supposed to do something! It’s not facial paralysis. It’s kissing—”
“More like drowning. I never knew one person could produce so much saliva—”
“My darlings, my vipers,” came the soothing voice of Great Ellen, floating into the room. Her voice floated, and she floated after it. She didn’t touch the floor. She didn’t bother with the illusion of walking. Great Ellen, more than any other ghost, had shed all pretense of mortality.
Ghosts were not bound by the same laws as the living. If they appeared exactly as they had in life, it was because they chose to, either out of believing themselves perfect as is, or from fear of losing their last touchstone to reality in the form of their own familiar face, or—as in the case of Kem the footman—because it just didn’t occur to them to change. That was relatively rare, though. Most of them, given time, made at least small adjustments to their phantom forms. Less Ellen, for example, had, while alive, been in possession of but a single eye (the other having been extracted by a goddess in a foul mood). But in death she restored it, and made both eyes larger and thicker-lashed in the bargain.
But it was Great Ellen who was the true master of the postmortal state. Her imagination was an instrument of wonder, and she fashioned, of the stuff of her ghostliness, an ever-shifting expression of her marvelous self.
This evening she wore a bird’s nest for a crown, and an elegant green bird was perched in it, singing. It was only an illusion, but a perfect illusion. Her face was more or less her own: a matron’s face, cheeks high, red, and round—“happiness cheeks,” Sarai called them—but in place of her wool-white hair were leaves, streaming behind her as though caught in a breeze. She set a basket of biscuits on the table. Kimril-flour biscuits, as bland as the soup. “No more of your sniping and snarling,” she said. “What’s this about kissing?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Feral. “Ruby tried to drown me in saliva, that’s all. Come to think of it, has anyone seen Kem lately? He’s not dead in a puddle of drool somewhere, is he?”
“Well, he’s definitely dead,” remarked Sarai. “I couldn’t say about the drool.”
“He’s probably hiding,” said Sparrow. “Or maybe pleading with Minya to release him from his torment.”