How could he have forgotten her? It was as though she’d slipped behind a curtain in his mind and the moment he saw the mural, the curtain fell and she was there: the girl with skin the color of the sky, who had stood so close, studying him as though he were a painting. Even the collarbones were hers—the little tickle at his memory, from when he’d glanced down in the dream and blushed to see more of female anatomy than he ever had in real life. What did it say about him that he had dreamed a girl in her underclothes?
But that was neither here nor there. Here she was, in the mural. Crude as it was, capturing none of her loveliness, it was an unmistakable likeness, from her hair—the rich dark red of wildflower honey—to the stark black band painted across her eyes like a mask. Unlike the girl in his dream, though, this one was wearing a gown.
Also… her throat was gaping open and gushing red.
He took a step back, feeling nauseated, almost as though he were seeing a real body and not the cartoonish depiction of a murdered girl he’d glimpsed in a dream.
“All right down there?”
Lazlo looked around. It was Eril-Fane at the top of the alley. Two arms, not six. Two swords, and not a personal armory of spears and halberds. This picture, crude and gory, added yet another dimension to Lazlo’s idea of him. The Godslayer had slain gods. Well, of course. But Lazlo had never really formed an image to go along with the idea before, or if he had, it had been vague, and the victims monstrous. Not wide-eyed and barefoot, like the girl in his dream.
“Is this what they looked like?” he asked.
Eril-Fane came to see. His steps slowed as he made out what the mural depicted. He only nodded, never taking his eyes from it.
“They were blue,” said Lazlo.
Again, Eril-Fane nodded.
Lazlo stared at the goddess with the painted black mask, and imagined, interposed over her crudely drawn features, the very fine ones he’d seen last night. “Who is she?”
Eril-Fane was a moment answering, and his voice, when he did, was raw and almost too low to hear. “That is Isagol. Goddess of despair.”
So this was her, the monster who had kept him for three years in the citadel. There was so much feeling in the way he said her name, and it was hard to read because it wasn’t… pure. It was hate, but there was grief and shame mixed up in it, too. Lazlo tried to get a look at his face, but he was already walking away. Lazlo watched him go, and he took one last look at the haunting picture before following him. He stared at the daubs and streaks and runnels of red, and this newest mystery, it wasn’t a pathway of light burning lines through his mind. It was more like bloody footprints leading into the dark.
How was it possible, he wondered, that he had dreamed the slain goddess before he had any way of knowing what she looked like?
31
DARLINGS AND VIPERS
From the heart of the citadel, Sarai returned to her room. Minya’s “soldiers” were everywhere, armed with knives and other kitchen tools. Cleavers, ice picks. They’d even taken the meat hooks from the rain room. Somewhere there was an actual arsenal, but it was closed off behind successions of sealed mesarthium doors, and anyway, Minya thought knives appropriate tools for butchery. They were, after all, what the humans had used in the nursery.
There was no escaping the army, especially not for Sarai, since her room gave onto the sunstruck silver-blue palm of the seraph. The ghosts were thickest there, and it made sense. The terrace was the perfect place for a craft to land, much better than the garden with its trees and vines. When the Godslayer came, he would come here, and Sarai would be the first to die.
Should she be grateful, then, to Minya, for this protection? “Don’t you see?” Minya had said, revealing her army to them. “We’re safe!”
But Sarai had never felt less safe. Her room was violated by captive ghosts, and she feared that what awaited her in sleep was worse. Her tray was at the foot of her bed: lull and plums, just like any morning, though usually by this time she’d be deep asleep and lost in Letha’s oblivion. Would the lull work today? There was an extra half dose, as Great Ellen had promised. Had it only been a fluke yesterday? Sarai wondered. Please, she thought, desperate for the bleak velvet of its nothingness. Terrors stirred within her, and she imagined she could hear a din of helpless screaming in the heads of all the ghosts. She wanted to scream, too. There was no feeling of safety, she thought, hugging a pillow to her chest.
Her mind offered up an unlikely exception.
The faranji’s dream. She had felt safe there.
The memory kicked up a desperate fizz of… panic? Thrill? Whatever it was, it contradicted the very feeling of safety that had conjured the thought of him to start with. Yes, the dream had been sweet. But… he had seen her.
The look on his face! The wonder in it, the witchlight. Her hearts raced at the thought, and her palms went clammy. It was no small thing to shed a lifetime of nonbeing and suddenly be seen.
Who was he, anyway? Of all the faranji’s dreams, only his had given her no hint of why Eril-Fane might have brought him here.
Exhausted, fearful, Sarai drank down her lull and laid herself on her bed. Please, she thought, fervent—a kind of prayer to the bitter brew itself. Please work.
Please keep the nightmares away.
Out in her garden, Sparrow kept her eyes down. As long as she fixed on leaves and blossoms, stems and seeds, she could pretend it was a normal day, and there weren’t ghosts standing guard under the arches of the arcade.
She was making a birthday present for Ruby, who would be sixteen in a few months… if they were still alive by then.
Considering Minya’s army, Sparrow thought their chances were good, but she didn’t want to consider Minya’s army. They made her feel safe and wretched at the same time, so she kept her eyes down and hummed, and tried to forget they were there.
Another birthday to celebrate without cake. The options for presents were slim, too. Usually they unmade some hideous gown from their dressing rooms and turned it into something else. A scarf maybe. One year Sparrow had made a doll with real rubies for eyes. Her room had been Korako’s, so she had all her gowns and jewels to make use of, while Ruby had Letha’s. The goddesses weren’t their mothers, as Isagol was Sarai’s. They were both of them daughters of Ikirok, god of revelry, who had also served as executioner in his spare time. So they were half sisters, and the only ones of the five related by blood. Feral was the son of Vanth, god of storms—whose gift he had more or less inherited—and Minya was daughter of Skathis. Sarai was the only one whose Mesarthim blood came from the maternal side. Goddess births, according to Great Ellen, had been rare. A woman, of course, could make but one baby at a time, occasionally two. But a man could make as many as there were women to seed them in.
By far, most of the babies in the nursery had been sired on human girls by the trinity of gods.
Which meant that, somewhere down in Weep, Sparrow had a mother.
When she was little, she’d been slow to understand or believe that her mother wouldn’t want her. “I could help her in the garden,” she’d told Great Ellen. “I could be a really big help, I know I could.”