“I could never run out of wishes.” He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at her, serious. “They just might be mostly on other people’s behalf, since I have all I could ever want.”
So did she. Family, freedom, safety, him. She leaned in and kissed him. She had more than she had ever dared dream, and yet, new dreams sprout up when old ones come true, like seedlings in a forest: a new generation of wishes.
As sweet as her kiss, Lazlo could tell she had something on her mind. “What about you?” he coaxed.
“I’ve been thinking about my gift,” she said, “and what I might do with it. And…who I might be.”
He waited for her to go on.
“When I was in Minya’s dreams, and Nova’s, I could see, or sense, what was wrong, but I couldn’t fix it.”
“Fix them, you mean?”
She nodded. “I keep seeing her fall,” she confessed. “I should have known she would do something like that. I’d just been in her mind.”
“I think it was just too late for her,” he said gently. “Sometimes it will be. It wasn’t your fault, Sarai. But you saved the rest of us. And if you want to help people—if that’s your wish—then you will.”
“It is,” she said, and felt it take root within her, this purpose, as though speaking it had given it the light it needed to grow. This was her wish: to help people whose minds were unquiet, who were trapped in their own labyrinths, or stranded on cracking ice. This was what she wanted to paint a target around, to use Suheyla’s metaphor. “But I felt so…useless with Minya and Nova. I think I need to work on my archery.” She tried to make a joke out of it, her worry that it would always be beyond her, that conjuring nightmares was her true calling and she would never be able to do anything else.
And Lazlo might not have been able to fill her up with certainty, but he could fill her with witchlight, and he did. The way he looked at her, she felt like some kind of miracle, as though his dreamer’s eyes cast her in their glow of wonder. “Sarai,” he said. “It’s stunning, what you can do. And of course you need practice. It’s the mind. It’s the most complex and astonishing thing there is, that there’s a world inside each of us that no one else can ever know or see or visit— except you. I just tell metal what to do. You meet people inside their minds and make them feel less alone. What’s more extraordinary than that?”
She let herself start to believe it. She ran her fingers over the rough edges of Lazlo’s face—the line of his jaw, the angle of his broken nose. His lips, which weren’t rough at all. The bite had healed. There wasn’t even a scar.
She had found herself wishing, several times during all the chaos, for her mother’s gift, so she could just take away all the hate, the fear and fury. But she saw now that Isagol’s gift might be useful in defusing a threat, but it couldn’t help people, even if it was used for good. It was false. To just take away someone’s hate like that, it would be stealing a part of their soul. But maybe Sarai could help them let it go on their own, guide them, show them new landscapes, make new doors, new suns. Maybe.
She couldn’t yet begin to imagine the lives all the other godspawn had been living out in whatever worlds had claimed them, but she thought some of them might need that. She even thought that all her years immersed in nightmares might help her to navigate theirs, if only to lead them through and out the other side. If they wanted it. If they invited her. Maybe she could help.
She stretched like a cat and rolled her neck from side to side. “Isn’t it funny that I don’t have a real body but I still imagine aches as though I did? Why not just leave that part out, self?”
“You do have a real body,” Lazlo argued. “I can feel it perfectly well,” he said while conscientiously doing so.
“You know what I mean.” Sarai closed her eyes as Lazlo rubbed the imagined soreness from her imagined muscles.
“If you left that part out,” he said, “you’d feel less real, wouldn’t you? Being alive includes aches, as well as pleasure.”
“I wonder…” Sarai mused, dreamy, as waves of imagined pleasure rolled through her.
“What do you wonder?”
“Of all the godspawn out there, in all the worlds, with all their gifts, might there be one who. .. I don’t know.” What would even help her? Her body was gone. How could she possibly live again properly? “Someone who…makes new bodies for souls who need them?” She had to laugh at herself. It was a highly specific and unlikely sounding gift. “What are the chances?”
Lazlo, who had heard from Ruza at dinner all about dragon eggs and Thyon’s theory, said, “Out of hundreds of worlds? It would be stranger if there wasn’t someone like that out there.”
“Well then,” breathed Sarai, wanting to believe it, “I wish to find them, wherever they are, so that I can feel all the aches and all the pleasure that are the privilege of the living. In the meantime, you’ll just have to keep on sharing yours.”
She stretched against him, feline, and Lazlo took her in his arms, his ghost girl, goddess, muse of wonder, and assured her that he took his responsibility very seriously. And as the great metal eagle, the Astral, made its way through night and mist, they lost themselves in each other, the very same place they had each been found.
Epilogue
Back in Amezrou, too, as it happened, there were those who were thinking about wishes.
Eril-Fane and Azareen could scarcely believe that their sky was clear and they were alive. They were tired, still recovering from having their hearts regrown, and there was a lot to see to these days, what with organizing the clearing of rubble, and slowly, in a more orderly fashion than they’d left in, bringing their people back from Enet-Sarra.
Still, a quiet moment found them, and Azareen finally asked the question that had been on her lips since her husband died in her arms. “My love,” she said, trying to read his face, as she had been trying all these years. “You said, ‘I wish…’ What do you wish?”
Eril-Fane found himself shy—the great Godslayer blushing like the boy who had given his sparring partner a bracelet for her sixteenth birthday and danced with her, his big hands trembling on her waist. For so long, he had been poisoned and poisonous, but now he felt…clean and thirsty and expansive, like a root-bound plant repotted in a new and generous garden.
“I wish…” he said, his gaze holding hers taut, his eyes wide with sweet, boyish fear. “To marry you,” he finished in a whisper, and he took something out of his pocket. He hadn’t forgotten his own dying wish. He’d thought of it just as much as she had over these past few weeks. You learn what you want when you think you can’t have it, and Eril-Fane wanted his wife. He held a ring in his fingers. It wasn’t the one he’d made her before, that she’d worn in her sleep all these years. It was new, gold and lys, with crystals making the shape of a star.
“We’re already married,” said Azareen, trembling, because a storm had kicked up in her mind and those were the first words to spill out.
“I want to start again,” said Eril-Fane. He looked hopeful and worried, as though there was the smallest chance of her saying no. “Will you start all over again? With me?”
Azareen did not say no.
The priestess could perform the rites some other day. They consecrated their marriage themselves. Eril-Fane carried Azareen up the stairs of their little Windfall house as though she were made of silk and air. He kicked the door shut behind them, as he had eighteen years ago. Eighteen years. It had been longer since they’d last made love than they’d even been alive before the first time.