“There.” Sparrow pointed, her hand trembling. She still held the flowers she’d been weaving into Sarai’s hair—torch ginger blossoms, like the ones she’d put on Ruby’s cake—“for wishing”—except that these weren’t buds. They were open blooms, as gorgeous as fireworks. She’d already done Ruby’s hair, and Ruby had done hers. All three of them wore wishes in their hair today.
Now Sarai’s hearts lurched. They seemed to slam together. She leaned forward, resting against the slope of the angel’s hand to peer over the edge and follow the line of Sparrow’s finger down to the rooftops. No no no, she said inside her head, but she saw it: a flicker of red, rising from the pavilion of the guildhall.
They were coming. Disengaging from the city, leaving rooftops and spires and domes behind. The shape grew larger, steadily more distinct, and soon Sarai could make out four figures. Her hearts went on slamming.
Her father. Of course he was one of the four. He was easy to discern at a distance for the size of him. Sarai swallowed hard. She had never seen him with her own eyes. A wave of emotion surged through her, and it wasn’t wrath, and it wasn’t hate. It was longing. To be someone’s child. Her throat felt thick. She bit her lip.
And all too soon they were risen close enough that she could make out the other passengers. She recognized Azareen, and would have expected no less from the woman who had loved Eril-Fane for so long. The pilot was the older faranji woman, and the fourth passenger…
The fourth passenger was Lazlo.
His face was upturned. He was still too distant to make out clearly, but she knew it was him.
Why hadn’t he listened to her? Why hadn’t he believed her?
Well, he would believe soon enough. Waves of hot and cold flushed through her, chased by despair. Minya’s army was waiting just inside the open door in Sarai’s room, ready to ambush the humans the moment they landed. They would swarm over them with their knives and cleavers and meat hooks. The humans wouldn’t stand a chance. Minya stood there like the small general she was, intent and ready. “All right,” she said, fixing Sarai and Feral, Ruby and Sparrow with her cool, bright gaze. “Everyone get out of sight,” she ordered, and Sarai watched as the others obeyed.
“Minya—” she began.
“Now,” snapped Minya.
Sarai didn’t know what to do. The humans were coming. Carnage was at hand. Numbly, she followed the others, wishing it were a nightmare from which she could awaken.
It wasn’t like soaring. There was nothing of the bird in this steady ascension. They floated upward, rather, like a very large ulola blossom, with a bit more control than the wind-borne flowers had.
Aside from the pontoons, which were sewn of specially treated red silk and contained ulola gas, there was another bladder, this one under the craft, filled with air by means of a foot-pedal bellows. It wasn’t for lift, but propulsion. By means of a number of outflow valves, Soulzeren could control thrust in different directions—forward, backward, side to side. There was a mast and sail, too, that worked just like a sailing ship if the winds were favorable. Lazlo had witnessed test flights in Thanagost, and the sight of the sleighs scudding across the skies under full sail had been magical.
Looking down, he saw people in the streets and on terraces, growing steadily smaller until the sleigh had drifted so far above the city that it spread out like a map. They came even with the lowermost part of the citadel—the feet. Up and up, past the knees, the long, smooth thighs up to the torso, seeming draped in robes of gossamer—all mesarthium and solid but so cunningly shaped you could see the jut of hip bones as though through diaphanous cloth.
Whatever else he had been, Skathis had also been an artist.
In order to cast the greatest shadow, the wings were fanned out in an immense circle, with the scapular feathers touching in the back, the secondaries forming the middle of the ring, and the long, sleek primaries reaching all the way around to come parallel to the seraph’s outstretched arms. The silk sleigh rose up through the gap between the arms, coming even with the chest. As he squinted up at the underside of the chin, color caught Lazlo’s eyes. Green. Swaths of green below the collarbones, stretching from one shoulder to the other.
They were the trees that dropped their plums on the district called Windfall, Lazlo thought. It occurred to him to wonder how, with so little rainfall, they were still alive.
“Feral,” Sarai implored. “Please.”
Feral’s jaw clenched. He didn’t look at her. If she were asking him not to do something, he wondered if it would be easier than to do something. He glanced at Minya.
“This doesn’t have to happen,” Sarai went on. “If you call clouds right now, you can still force them back.”
“Close your mouth,” said Minya, her voice like ice, and Sarai saw that it infuriated her that she couldn’t compel the living to obey her as easily as she did the dead.
“Minya,” she pleaded, “so long as no one’s died, there’s hope of finding some other way.”
“So long as no one’s died?” repeated Minya. She gave a high laugh. “Then I’d say it’s fifteen years too late for hope.”
Sarai closed her eyes and opened them again. “I mean now. So long as no one’s died now.”
“If it’s not today, then it’s tomorrow, or the next day. When there’s an unpleasant job to do, it’s best to get it over with. Putting it off won’t help.”
“It might,” said Sarai.
“How?”
“I don’t know!”
“Keep your voice down,” Minya hissed. “You do understand that a necessary condition for ambush is surprise?”
Sarai stared at her face, so hard and uncompromising, and again saw Skathis in the set of her features, even the shape of them. If Minya had gotten Skathis’s power, she wondered, would she be any different from him, or would she willingly subjugate a whole population, and justify it all within the rigid parameters of justice. How had this small, damaged… child… ruled them for so long? It struck her now as ridiculous. Might there have been another way, from the very start? What if Sarai had never given a single nightmare? What if, from the beginning, she had soothed the fears of Weep instead of stoking them? Might she have defused all this hatred?
No. Even she couldn’t believe that. For two hundred years it had been building. What could she have hoped to accomplish in fifteen?
She would never know. She had never been given a choice, and now it was too late. These humans were going to die.
And then?
When the silk sleigh and its passengers failed to return? Would they send the other up after it, so more could die?
And then?
Who knows how much time it would buy them, how many more months or years they would have of this purgatorial existence before a bigger, bolder attack came—more crafts, Tizerkane leaping from ships like pirates boarding a vessel. Or the clever outsiders would come up with some grand plan to scuttle the citadel.