The ache.
Lazlo fell back on his pillows, too, raised fists to his eyes and pressed. Breath hissed out between his clenched teeth. To have been granted so tiny a taste of the nectar of her mouth, and so brief a brush with the velvet of her lips was unspeakable cruelty. He felt set on fire. He had to convince himself that liberating a silk sleigh and flying forthwith to the citadel was not a viable option. That would be like the prince charging up to the maiden’s tower, so mad with desire that he forgets his sword and is slain by the dragon before even getting near her.
Except that the dragon in this case was a battalion of ghosts whom no sword could harm, and he didn’t have a sword anyway. At best he had a padded pole, a true hero’s weapon.
This problem—by which he meant not the interrupted kiss, but this whole ungodly impasse of city and citadel—would not be solved by slaying. There had been too much of that already. How it would be solved, he didn’t know, but he knew this: The stakes were higher than anyone else realized. And the stakes, for him now, were personal.
From the day the Godslayer rode through the gates in Zosma and issued his extraordinary invitation, throughout the recruitment of experts and all their endless speculation, to finally laying eyes on Weep, Lazlo had felt a certain freedom from expectation. Oh, he wanted to help. Badly. He’d daydreamed about it, but in all of that, no one was looking to him for solutions, and he hadn’t been looking to himself for them, either. He’d merely been wistful. “What could I do?” went the refrain. He was no alchemist, no builder, no expert on metals or magnets.
But now the nature of the problem had changed. It wasn’t just metals and magnets anymore, but ghosts and gods and magic and vengeance, and while he wouldn’t call himself an expert in any of those things, he had more to recommend him than the others did, starting with an open mind.
And open hearts.
Sarai was up there. Her life was at stake. So Lazlo didn’t ask himself What could I do? that morning as the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon dawned in the city of Weep, but “What will I do?”
It was a noble question, and if destiny had seen fit to reveal its staggering answer to him then, he would never have believed it.
Eril-Fane and Azareen came for breakfast, and Lazlo saw them through the lens of everything he’d learned in the night, and his hearts ached for them. Suheyla set out steamed buns and boiled eggs and tea. They sat down, all four of them, on the cushions around the low stone table in the courtyard. Suheyla knew nothing yet but what she sensed: that something had happened, that something had changed. “So,” she asked. “What did you find up there, really? I take it that the story about the pontoon was a lie.”
“Not exactly a lie,” said Lazlo. “The pontoon did spring a leak.” He took a sip of tea. “With some help from a meat hook.”
Suheyla’s cup clattered onto her saucer. “A meat hook?” she repeated, eyes wide, then narrow. “How did the pontoon happen to encounter a meat hook?”
The question was directed at Lazlo, since he seemed more inclined to speak than the other two. He turned to Eril-Fane and Azareen. It seemed their business to do it, not his.
They began with the ghosts. In fact, they named a great many of them, beginning with Azareen’s grandmother. There were more than Lazlo realized. Uncles, neighbors, acquaintances. Suheyla wept in silence. Even a cousin who’d died a few days ago, a young man named Ari-Eil, had been seen. They were all pale and sick with the implications. The citizens of Weep, it would seem, were captive even in death.
“Either we’ve all been damned and the citadel is our hell,” said Suheyla, shaking, “or there’s another explanation.” She fixed her son with a steady gaze. She wasn’t one to give credence to hell, and was braced for the truth.
He cleared his throat and said, with enormous difficulty, “There is a… survivor… up there.”
Suheyla paled. “A survivor?” She swallowed hard. “Godspawn?”
“A girl,” said Eril-Fane. He had to clear his throat again. Every syllable seemed to fight him. “With red hair.” Five simple words—a girl with red hair—and what a torrent of emotion they unleashed. If silence could crash, it did. If it could break like a wave and flood a room with all the force of the ocean, it did. Azareen seemed carved of stone. Suheyla gripped the edge of the table. Lazlo reached out a hand to steady her.
“Alive?” she gasped, and her gaze was pinned to her son. Lazlo could see the ricochet of feeling in her, the tentative surge of hope flinching back toward the firmer ground of dread. Her grandchild was alive. Her grandchild was godspawn. Her grandchild was alive. “Tell me,” she said, desperate to hear more.
“I have nothing more to tell,” said Eril-Fane. “I only saw her for an instant.”
“Did she attack you?” asked Suheyla.
He shook his head, seeming puzzled. It was Azareen who answered. “She warned us,” she said. Her brow was furrowed, her eyes haunted. “I don’t know why. But we would all be dead if it weren’t for her.”
A brittle silence settled. They all traded looks across the table, so stunned and full of questions that Lazlo finally spoke.
“Her name is Sarai,” he said, and their three heads swung to face him. He had been silent, set apart from the violence of their emotion. Those five words—“a girl with red hair”—created such an opposite effect in him. Tenderness, delight, desire. His voice carried all of it when he said her name, in an echo of the ravid’s purr in which he’d said it to her.
“How could you know that?” asked Azareen, the first to recover from her surprise. Her tone was blunt and skeptical.
“She told me,” Lazlo said. “She can go into dreams. It’s her gift. She came into mine.”
They all considered this. “How do you know it was real?” Eril-Fane asked.
“They’re not like any dreams I’ve had before,” Lazlo said. How could he put it into words, what it was like being with Sarai? “I know how it sounds. But I dreamed her before I ever saw her. Before I even saw the mural and knew the Mesarthim were blue. That was why I asked you that day. I thought she must be Isagol, because I didn’t know about the—” He hesitated. This was their secret shame, and it had been kept from him. The godspawn. The word was as terrible as the name Weep. “The children,” he said instead. “But I know now. I… I know all of it.”
Eril-Fane stared at him, but it was the blind, unblinking stare of someone seeing into the past. “Then you know what I did.”