“Minya. Drag ghosts in here. Bring their hate into our home.” Sarai heard herself. How petty she sounded, complaining about the inconvenience to herself. She couldn’t say what she was really feeling, though. It was unspeakable that she should pity a human, ghost or living.
“Well,” said Feral, distractedly. “At least we have you to bring our hate into their homes.”
Sarai blinked a series of rapid blinks and looked down at her hands. There was no malice in Feral’s words, but they stung like a pinch. Maybe she was sensitive in the wake of Ruby’s certainty of doom, and the revelation that she herself shared it. And maybe it was her envy that Feral conjured snow and Sparrow grew flowers and Ruby made warmth and fireworks, while she… did what she did. “Is that what I do?” she asked, her voice coming out brittle. “It’s a wonder you don’t call me Hate Bringer.”
Feral looked up from his book. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” he said.
Sarai laughed without mirth. “Feral, how could hate ever not be bad?”
“If it’s deserved. If it’s vengeance.”
Vengeance. Sarai heard the way he said it, and she understood something. Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one’s soul so entangled in it that you can’t let it go, even if you try. If you feel it—if you really feel it—then you speak it like it’s a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there’s blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can’t let go. Feral didn’t speak it like that at all. It might have been any word. Dust or teacup or plum. There was no heat in it, no still-beating heart, no blood. Vengeance was just a word to him.
The realization emboldened her. “What if it isn’t?” she asked, hesitant.
“What if what isn’t what?”
Sarai wasn’t even sure what she meant. If it wasn’t vengeance? If it wasn’t deserved? Or, still more primary: What if it wasn’t even hate she felt for humans, not anymore? What if everything had changed, so slowly she hadn’t even felt it while it was happening? “It’s not vengeance,” she said, rubbing her temples. “I spent that years ago.” She looked at him, trying to read him. “You don’t still feel it, do you? Not really? I’m sure Ruby and Sparrow don’t.”
Feral looked uneasy. Sarai’s words were simple enough, but they challenged the basic tenet of their lives: that they had an enemy. That they were an enemy. She could tell there was no great hate left in him, but he wouldn’t admit it. It would be a kind of blasphemy. “Even if we didn’t,” he hedged, “Minya’s got enough for all of us.”
He wasn’t wrong about that. Minya’s animus burned brighter than Ruby’s fire, and for good reason: She was the only one of them who actually remembered the Carnage. It had been fifteen years. Sarai and Feral were seventeen now; Sparrow was sixteen, and Ruby not quite. And Minya? Well. She might look like a six-year-old child, but she wasn’t one. In truth, she was the eldest of the five of them, and the one who had saved them fifteen years back when she really was six years old, and the rest of them only babies. None of them understood why, or how, but she hadn’t aged since that bloody day when the humans had celebrated their victory over the gods by executing the children they’d left behind.
Only the five of them had survived, and only because of Minya. Sarai knew the Carnage from stolen dreams and memories, but Minya remembered. She had burning coals for hearts, and her hate was as hot now as it had ever been.
“I think that’s why she does it,” said Sarai. “Why she brings the ghosts, I mean. So we have to see how they look at us, and we can’t ever forget what we are.”
“That’s good, though, isn’t it?” countered Feral. “If we did forget, we might slip up. Break The Rule. Give ourselves away.”
“I suppose,” Sarai allowed. It was true that fear kept them careful. But what purpose did hate serve?
She thought it was like the desert threave, a sand beast that could survive for years eating nothing but its own molted skin. Hate could do that, too—live off nothing but itself—but not forever. Like a threave, it was only sustaining itself until some richer meal came along. It was waiting for prey.
What were they waiting for?
Sarai could see that Feral wouldn’t share her conflict, and how could he? The only humans he ever saw were ghosts, still reeling with the first shock of death to find themselves here, in the theater of their nightmares, enslaved to a pitiless little girl as blue as their worst memories. It didn’t exactly bring out the best in them. But after four thousand nights among them—in their homes, on their skin—Sarai knew humans in a way the others couldn’t, and she’d lost that easy ability to hate. She let the matter drop.
“What Ruby said earlier,” she ventured. “Do you feel that way, too?”
“Which part?” he asked. “About the soup being insipid, or hell being interesting?”
Sarai shook her head, smiling. “You know which part I mean.”
“Ah yes. How it’s all right to burn our clothes when the mood strikes us because we’re going to die young?”
“That’s the one.” Sarai grew hesitant. “Feral, can you imagine us growing old?”
“Of course I can,” he said without hesitation. “I’ll be a distinguished elderly gentleman with great long whiskers, three doting wives, a dozen children—”
“Three wives?” Sarai cut in. “Who, us? You’re going to marry all of us, are you?”
“Well, naturally. I wouldn’t want anyone to feel left out. Except Minya, and I don’t think she’ll mind.”
“No, I think you’re right about that,” said Sarai, amused. “She’s not exactly wifely.”
“Whereas you…”
“Oh yes. So wifely. But how will it work? Will you rotate between us on a schedule, or choose as the mood strikes you?”
“A schedule does seem more fair,” he said, solemn. “I know it won’t be easy, you all having to share me, but we must make the best of an imperfect situation.” He was fighting to keep his mouth composed in its line of earnest gravity, but he couldn’t keep the humor from his eyes.
“An imperfect situation,” Sarai repeated. “Is that what we have here?” She gestured all around. The gallery. The citadel. Their precarious, doomed existence.
“A bit on the imperfect side, yes,” said Feral with regret, and they just couldn’t maintain their seriousness in the face of such an understatement. Sarai cracked first, tipping into helpless laughter, and Feral followed, and mirth worked its mundane magic, leaching the tension from Sarai’s spine and relieving the cold dread that had been pressing on her all evening.
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can. Sarai suspected that her mother, the goddess of despair, would not have approved.
She would have loved her daughter’s gift, though.