“This is excellent,” Lazlo assured him. “Until I came to Weep I never had a proper bath in my life. In winter, when I was a boy, we had to chip the ice off the bucket before we could wash.” He gave Ruby a smile. “You’d have been very welcome there. Well,” he reconsidered, “except that the monks would have thought you were a demon.”
“Maybe I am,” she said, locating her sauciness, her eyes glimmering with flame.
“Anyway,” said Feral, a touch more loudly than necessary. “The soap’s just there. We’ll leave you to it.”
They went out. Feral drew the curtain behind them, and Lazlo considered it. He wondered if it would be rude to close the door. He decided it would be, since they’d lived all their lives without doors, and it would give the impression that he didn’t trust them to give him privacy.
In fact, it was a near thing. Feral and Ruby had reached the gallery when Ruby said, “I’ll be back in a minute. I just have to go to the kitchen.”
Feral raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “Oh? What for?”
She was evasive. “I want to tell Less Ellen something.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“No need to trouble yourself.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“Well, it’s trouble to me,” she declared, beginning to scowl. “It’s private.”
“Funny you should use that word, ‘private,’ ” said Feral, who knew perfectly what she was about. “It’s almost as though you know what it means.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said, giving up the mission. “I was just going to peep a little.”
“Ruby. Peeping’s not okay. Surely you know that.”
He sounded so condescending. She shrugged. “I’ve peeped on you often enough, and you never minded.”
“You’ve what?” Feral demanded. “How could I mind if I didn’t know?”
“It didn’t hurt you, did it?”
He covered his face with his hands. “Ruby,” he groaned, censorious, though secretly a little pleased. He’d have been jealous if she’d tried to spy on Lazlo and not ever on him.
“I suppose you’ve never peeped on me?” she asked.
“Of course I haven’t. I respect the curtains.”
“Or you just don’t care,” she said, and there was a note of hurt in her voice.
Though he’d grown up in a nest of girls, Feral still didn’t understand them. “What?”
Ruby was remembering what Sparrow had said to her last night, before the citadel’s lurch had tipped them into chaos and grief. To her own assertion that if Sparrow had been the one to go to him, she’d have had Feral instead, Sparrow had replied, “If that’s true, then I really don’t want him. I only want someone who wants only me.” Well, Ruby did, too. In fact, she wanted someone who would look at her the way Lazlo looked at Sarai, and not some passive man-boy who’d go along because you literally put yourself in his hands.
“If I’d respected your curtain,” she told him now, “we’d never have done anything. I came to you, I’m sure you remember. I climbed into your lap. I made you kiss me. It’s obvious you don’t care, and that’s fine.” She lifted her chin. “It was just something to do in case we died, and look, we’re still alive.” She gave him a brittle smile. “You don’t have to worry anymore. I’ll leave you alone now.”
Feral had no idea where this was coming from. It was true that she’d initiated everything, but that didn’t mean he wanted it to stop. “Are you angry that I never spied on you naked?” he asked, incredulous.
“I’m not angry,” Ruby replied. “I’m just through with this. At least it was good practice, for when I meet someone who gives a damn.” And she tossed her wild dark hair so that he had to dodge it or be hit in the face, and then she walked away.
“Fine,” Feral said to her back, but his head was spinning and he hardly knew what had just happened. One thing he was almost certain of, though, was that he wasn’t happy at all.
Chapter 10
Ghosts Don’t Burn
Sarai dipped the sponge in the basin of water Less Ellen had prepared. It smelled of rosemary and nectar, like the soap she’d used all her life. She held the sponge in trembling hands and looked down at herself.
No. She squeezed her eyes shut. That wasn’t her self. It was her body. She was herself. She remained. She opened her eyes again. Her mind reeled. She was there and she was here, undead and unalive, kneeling beside herself in the flowers.
How can you kneel beside yourself? How can you wash your own corpse?
The same way you do anything, she told herself firmly. You just do. She’d been washing her body all her life. She could do it this one last time.
“Let me help you,” said Sparrow, her voice raw as a wound.
“It’s all right,” said Sarai. “I’m all right.”
Great Ellen had cut the slip away with scissors, and the body lay naked now, its familiar terrain made strange by this new perspective.
The jut of hip bones, the pink areolae, the divot of the navel all seemed to belong to some other girl. Reaching out, Sarai squeezed the sponge and let a trickle of water run down her dead chest. And then, gently, as though afraid of causing pain, she began to wash the blood away.
When she had finished, the water in the basin was muddy red and she was, too, from holding her own dead head in her lap to rinse the blood from its hair. She looked down at the wet, stained silk clinging to her legs, and grappled with the knowledge that it was all illusion. The slip wasn’t wet. The slip wasn’t there, and neither was the body beneath it. Everything about her was illusion now. She looked and felt exactly as she had before, but none of it was real, and none of it was fixed. She knew that this ghostflesh copy was an unconscious projection—her mind’s re-creation of her accustomed self—and that she didn’t have to stay this way.
Ghosts weren’t bound by the same rules as the living. They could shape themselves however they liked. Less Ellen, who in life had lost an eye, in her ghostself restored it. Great Ellen was ever-changing, a master of the medium. She might wear singing birds as hats, or sprout an extra arm when need arose, or turn her head into a hawk’s.
As children, enchanted by their nurses’ transformations, Sarai and the others had liked to say what they would do if they were ghosts. It hadn’t been morbid, just fun, like the most amazing game of dress-up ever. You could have ravid fangs or a scorpion’s tail, or turn yourself miniature, like a songbird. You could be striped or feathered or made of glass, translucent as a window. You could even be invisible. It had seemed a grand game back then.
Now that it came to it, though, Sarai just wanted to be herself.
She brushed her fingers over the sodden, discolored silk of her lap, willing it clean and dry. And, just like that, it was.
“Well done,” said Great Ellen. “It takes most of us a deal of time to figure out how to do that. The trick is to believe it, and that’s quite a hurdle for most.”
Not for Sarai. “It’s like in dreams,” she said.
“You have an advantage there.”
But in dreams, Sarai had control over everything, not just the fabric of her self. Cleaning blood out of silk was nothing. She could turn day to night and up to down. “In dreams,” she said with longing, “I could bring myself back to life.”
“Would that you could,” said Great Ellen, reaching out to stroke her hair. “My poor, lovely girl. It’ll be all right. You’ll see. It isn’t life, but it has its merits.”
“Such as being a slave to Minya?” Sarai asked bitterly.
The nurse let out a sigh. “I hope not.”
“There is no hope. You know how she is.”
“I do indeed, but I’m not giving up on her and neither should you. Come, now. Let’s get your body dressed.”