He was here.
“There’s only one way to celebrate the end of such a journey,” his hostess had told him when she greeted him at the Merchants’ Guildhall and whisked him away home with her. “And that is with food, a bath, and a bed, in the order of your preference.”
Suheyla was her name. Her hair was a cap of white, cropped short as a man’s, and her face was a perfect example of how someone can be beautiful without being beautiful. She shone with good nature and the same vitality that Eril-Fane radiated, but without the shadow that had grown over him as they drew nearer to Weep. There was gravity in her, but nothing grim or bleak. Her eyes were the same deep-set smiles as her son’s, with more extensive deltas of creases at the corners. She was short and vigorous, colorfully dressed in an embroidered tunic adorned with tassels and gathered in by a wide, patterned belt. Discs of hammered gold at her temples were connected by spans of fine chain across her brow. “You are most welcome here, young man,” she’d said with such heartfelt sincerity that Lazlo almost felt as if he’d come home.
Home—about which he knew as little as he did about mothers. Before today, he had never set foot in a home. As to having a preference, that was new, too. You take what you’re given and you’re grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one’s own likes and dislikes could matter to other people. “Whatever order makes the most sense,” he had replied, almost like a question.
“Sense be damned! You can eat in the bath if that’s what you wish. You’ve earned it.”
And Lazlo had never had a bath he’d had any desire to linger in, bathing in the monastery having been characterized by shivering in buckets of well water, and at the library by quick, lukewarm pull showers. Still, feeling deeply that his filth was an unforgivable imposition, he’d chosen to bathe first, and thus had he discovered, at the age of twenty, the incomparable pleasure of submergence in hot water.
Who knew?
He had not elected to eat in the bath, however—or even to linger beyond the not inconsiderable time it took to get clean—being far too eager to continue talking with Suheyla. She had, on the walk from the guildhall, joined his admittedly short list of favorite people, along with Eril-Fane, Calixte, Ruza, and old Master Hyrrokkin. When he saw the quantity of food she’d laid out for him, though, his ingrained abnegation rose to the surface. There were small roast birds and pastries glistening with honey, cubes of meat in fragrant sauce, and curled crustaceans impaled on sticks. There was a salad of grains and another of greens, and a platter of fruit and a half-dozen small bowls of pastes and another half-dozen of salts, and the bread was a disc too big for the table, hanging instead from a hook that existed for this purpose, so that you might just reach up and tear some off. And there were sweets and peppers and tea and wine and… and it was all too much for him.
“I’m so sorry to put you to such trouble,” he’d said, earning himself a sharp look.
“Guests aren’t trouble,” Suheyla had replied. “They’re a blessing. Having no one to cook for, now, that’s a sadness. But a young man gaunt from the Elmuthaleth and in need of fattening? That’s a pleasure.”
And what could he do but say thank you and eat his fill?
Oh glory, he’d never had a better meal. And he’d never felt so full, or lingered at a table so long, or talked so much or been so comfortable with someone he’d only just met. And so his introduction to the world of homes and mothers was powerfully good, and though he had felt, on his first walk through the city of his dreams, that he would never be tired again, he was in fact very, very tired, which Suheyla couldn’t help but notice. “Come along,” she said. “I’ve kept you up too late.”
Earlier, he had left his travel bag near the door. “Let me,” he said as she bent to pick it up.
“Nonsense,” she replied, and in a flash of a glimpse he perceived that she had no right hand, only a smooth, tapering wrist, though it didn’t hinder her in the slightest as she hooked the strap of his bag with it and slung it over her shoulder. He wondered that he hadn’t noticed it earlier.
She showed him to one of the green painted doors that opened off the courtyard. “This was my son’s room,” she said, gesturing for him to enter.
“Oh. But won’t he be wanting it?”
“I don’t think so,” she said with a tinge of sadness in her voice. “Tell me, how does he sleep… out there?” She made a vague gesture to the west, indicating, Lazlo supposed, the whole rest of the world.
“I don’t know,” he answered, surprised. “Well enough.” How inadequate an offering to a worried mother. Well enough. And how would Lazlo know? It had never crossed his mind that Eril-Fane might have vulnerabilities. He realized that all this time he’d been looking to the Godslayer as a hero, not a man, but that heroes, whatever else they are, are also men—and women—and prey to human troubles just like anybody else.
“That’s good,” said Suheyla. “Perhaps it’s gotten better, with his being away from here.”
“It?” asked Lazlo, remembering the way Eril-Fane had averted his eyes and said he didn’t sleep well in Weep.
“Oh, nightmares.” Suheyla waved away the subject and laid her hand to Lazlo’s cheek. “It’s very good to have you here, young man. Do sleep well.”
Moths effused from the chimneys of the Merchants’ Guildhall.
It was the hour before dawn. Some in the city were waking. The bakers were already at work, and carts rolled quietly toward the market square, bringing their daily burdens of produce from the valley farms. Sarai hadn’t meant to stay so long in the outsiders’ dreams, but she’d found in them such an alien world, so full of visions she had no context for, that she had barely felt time passing.
The ocean: a vastness unspeakable. Leviathans as big as palaces, harnessed to pontoons to keep them from submerging to their freedom. Glave mines like buried sunlight. Towers like tusks. Men with leashed wolves patrolling dazzling blue fields. Such images spoke of a world beyond her ken, and, scattered throughout them—strange among strange and as difficult to separate from the wild vagaries of dreams as snowflakes from a basket of lace—were the answers she had been seeking.
Who were these strangers and what nature of threat did they pose?
As to the first, they were men and women driven by ideas and powered by intelligence and rare skills. Some had families, some did not. Some were kind, some were not. She couldn’t possibly know them in one night of trespass. She’d formed impressions; that was all. But as to the second question…