But saving them had only been the beginning. She’d had to keep them alive—four babies in her care, inside a crime scene of corpses and ghosts, and herself just a traumatized child. Her mind was formed in the desperate, keep-alive pattern of those early weeks and months as she spent herself out and burned herself up. She didn’t know any other way. There was nothing left over, nothing, not even enough to grow. Through sheer, savage will, Minya poured even her life force into the colossal expenditure of magic necessary to hold on to her ghosts and keep her charges safe—and not just safe but loved. In Great Ellen, she had given them a mother, as best she could. And in the effort of it all, she had stunted herself, blighted herself, whittled herself to a bone of a thing. She wasn’t a child. She was barely a person. She was a purpose, and she hadn’t done it all and given everything just to lose control now.
Power flared from her. Ruby, Feral, and Sparrow cried out as the dozen ghosts who remained in the garden—Great Ellen among them—unfurled and flew at Lazlo with their knives and meat hooks, and Great Ellen with her bare hands shaping themselves into claws as her teeth grew into fangs to shame even Skathis’s Rasalas.
Lazlo didn’t even think. From the towering wall of metal that was backdrop to the garden—and made up the seraph’s shoulders and the column of its neck—a great wave of liquid metal peeled itself away and came pouring down, flashing with the first rays of the rising sun, to freeze into a barrier between himself and the chief onslaught. At the same moment, Rasalas leapt. The creature didn’t bother itself with ghosts but knocked Minya to the ground like a toy to a kitten, and pinned her there, one metal hoof pressing on her chest.
It was so swift—a blur of metal and she was down. The breath was knocked out of her, and… the fury was knocked out of Lazlo. Whatever she was, this cruel little girl—his own would-be murderer, not least—the sight of her sprawled out like that at Rasalas’s mercy shamed him. Her legs were so impossibly thin, her clothes as tattered as the beggars in the Grin. She didn’t give up. Still her ghosts came at him, but the metal moved with them, flowing to block them, catching their weapons and freezing around them. They couldn’t get near.
He went and knelt by Minya. She struggled, and Rasalas increased the pressure of its elegant hoof against her chest. Just enough to hold her, not enough to hurt. Her eyes burned black. She hated the pity she saw in Lazlo’s. It was a thousand times worse than the fury had been. She gritted her teeth, ceased her ghosts’ attack, and spat out, “Do you want me to save her or not?”
He did. Rasalas lifted its hoof and Minya slid out from beneath it, rubbing the place on her chest where it had pinned her. How she hated Lazlo then. In compelling her by force to do what she’d been planning anyway, it felt as though he’d won something, and she’d lost.
Lost what?
Control.
The queen was vulnerable on the quell board with no pawns to protect her. This new adversary possessed the gift she’d always craved, and up against it, she was nothing. His power swept hers aside like a hand brushing crumbs from a table. His control of mesarthium gave them their freedom in every way they’d ever daydreamed—but Minya didn’t even know if she would be counted among them, or would be swept aside just like her power and her ghosts. They could leave her behind if they wanted, if they decided they didn’t trust her—or simply didn’t like her—and what could she do? And what of the humans, and the Godslayer, and revenge?
It seemed to her the citadel swayed beneath her, but it was steady. It was her world that swayed, and only she could feel it.
She rose to her feet. Her pulse beat in her temples. She closed her eyes. Lazlo watched her. He felt an ache of tenderness for her, though he couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was simply because with her eyes closed she really looked like a six-year-old child, and it brought home that once upon a time she had been: just a six-year-old child with a crushing burden.
When she settled into a stillness of deep concentration, he let himself hope what he had so far only wondered: that it might be possible Sarai was not lost to him.
That she was, even now, adrift—like an ulola flower borne by the wind. Where was she? The very air felt alive with possibility, charged with souls and magic.
There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.
Sathaz had finally learned that if he climbed into the pool and kept very still, the moon would come to him and let him be near her. Only near, never touching. He couldn’t touch her without shattering her, and so—as Lazlo had told Sarai—he had made peace with the impossible. He took what he could get.
Lazlo had loved Sarai as a dream, and he would love her as a ghost as well.
He finally acknowledged that what he carried in his arms was not Sarai but only a husk, empty now of the mind and soul that had touched his in their dreaming. Carefully he laid her down in the flowers of the garden. They cushioned her like a bower. Her lifeless eyes were open. He wished to close them, but his hands were sticky with her blood, and her face, it was unmarred, even serene, so he leaned in close and used his lips: the lightest touch, catching her honey-red lashes with his lower lip and brushing down, finishing with a kiss to each smooth lid, and then to each cheek, and finally her lips. Light as the brush of a moth wing across the sweet ripe fruit with its crease in the middle, as soft as apricot down. Finally, the corners, sharp as crescents, where her smile had lived.
The others watched, with breaking hearts or hardened ones, and when he stood and stepped back and turned to Minya, he felt like Sathaz in the pool, waiting for the moon.
He didn’t know how it worked. He didn’t know what to look for. Really, it wasn’t so different from waiting for her in a dream when she might appear anywhere and his whole being clenched into a knot of eagerness. He watched Minya’s face, alert to any change in her expression, but there was none. Her little grubby visage was mask-still until the moment her eyes sprang open.
There was a light in them. Triumph, Lazlo thought, and his hearts gave a leap of joy because he thought it meant that she’d found Sarai, and bound her.
And she had.
Like an etching in the air that slowly filled with beauty, Sarai was gathered out of nothingness and bound back into being. She was wearing her pink slip, and it bore no blooms of blood. The smooth blue of her chest was unpierced by the iron finial, and her hair was still studded with flowers.
For Sarai, the sensation of re-raveling was like being saved from drowning, and her first breaths drawn with phantom lungs—which were, like everything about her new state, illusion, but illusion given form—were the sweetest she had ever known.
She was not alive and she knew it, but… whatever her new state might lack, it was infinitely preferable to the unmaking that had almost devoured her. She laughed. The sound met the air like a real voice, and her body had mass like a real body—though she knew it followed a looser set of rules. And all the pity and outrage she’d felt on behalf of Minya’s bound ghosts deserted her. How could she ever have thought evanescence was kinder? Minya had saved her, and Sarai’s soul flowed toward her like music.
That was what it felt like to move. Like music come to life. She threw her arms around Minya. “Thank you,” she whispered, fierce, and let her go.
Minya’s arms had not responded, and neither had her voice. Sarai might have seen the cool flicker of her gaze if she weren’t so swept up in the moment. None of her old fears could compare with the wrenching loss she had just escaped.