by Laini Taylor
She was chastened. Planning to kill somebody was what Minya did, and she hated the feel of it in her mind. “I don’t want to,” she whispered back, defensive. “But if she wakes up, we’re all finished. If she were dead, Lazlo would get his gift back and free you from this thing.”
With urgent impatience, he shook his head. “…loop…” It took him a few wheezes to be able to form the next whispered words. “…only… she… can break…”
It took a moment for Sarai to understand what he was telling her. “Are you saying that if she dies, they’ll be trapped like that? But… their gifts will go back to them. Rook…”
But Werran was shaking his head. “…loop…” was all he could say.
Sarai turned to watch the loop play out another iteration. Kiska’s fist clenched. Her head lowered. She was thrown backward. Rook caught her, raised his arm. He was trying to use his magic and failing. And as long as he was caught in the loop, he would keep on failing, just like Eril-Fane and Azareen had kept on dying. These were the seconds that were preserved. And all the while, Lazlo was motionless, powerless, cramped in his cage. Would he stay that way forever? Or would he die slowly of dehydration, starvation, while Sarai was just steps away, unable to reach him? Either thought was unbearable.
“What can we do?” she asked, helpless.
Werran’s desperate eyes told her that he could suggest no plan. All he managed in his airless whisper was, “… help.”
59
A GAME THAT KILL COULD NOT WIN
Help.
Werran might have been trying to plead “Help me,” or even “Help us,” and run out of breath, but it was the single word that rang in Sarai’s head.
Help. Help. Help.
It seemed to take up position opposite kill, as though they were facing queens on a quell board. This was a game that kill could not win—or, if it did, it would be an unbearable win that destroyed the very meaning of winning. If they killed Nova, they were sentencing Lazlo, Kiska, and Rook to either eternity in the loop or to dying in it, while Werran would suffocate in the serpent’s jaws. The rest of them would be alive, trapped in this terrible sky instead of Weep’s, and here they would stay until Sparrow could grow enough ulola flowers to refill the silk sleighs’ pontoons with lifting gas, and then what? Go back to Weep? Make some sort of life? Leave the seraph here, leave Lazlo here, alive or dead in that shimmering bubble for strangers to find some day in the future?
It was, all of it, unthinkable. There had to be another way.
Sarai went back to the others, still clustered in the archway. She told them what she’d learned and let it sink in. In their stricken silence, she felt her own desolation deepen. Perhaps she’d hoped that someone else would see a way out that she wasn’t seeing.
Calixte ventured, “Maybe she won’t kill us when she wakes up?”
But Calixte hadn’t been in the citadel to see Nova in action, and judging by the scene in the gallery, she had not become more tolerant since then. Besides, “maybe she won’t kill us” is very thin ice to skate on. There had to be something they could do.
Help. Help. Help.
Werran’s word was still ringing in Sarai’s mind. Help. All her life, Sarai had been a prisoner and a secret, and she had wondered what her fate would be. Would the humans find her and kill her, or would she remain a secret prisoner forever? Then Eril-Fane and his delegation had returned to Weep and changed everything. It had become a certainty: The humans would discover the godspawn, and they would kill them—unless Minya and her army killed the humans instead. It was only a question of who would die, and who would get to clean up the blood and keep living.
And then Sarai had met Lazlo—in his mind, in his dreams—and once again, everything changed. This dreamer-librarian from a far-off land had taught her to hope for a different life—one without any killing at all. In his mind, ugly things were made beautiful, and that went for the future, too.
But now he was trapped, and Sarai realized she’d been relying on him to make it all come true. His gift—power over mesarthium—had meant their liberation and their strength, but it wouldn’t help them now.
What would help them? Who would save them?
A panicked thrum was building in her blood—illusory blood, illusory thrum, but still real, as she was still real—and Sarai scanned the hopeless scene again: the monstrous half-formed serpent crushing a man to slow death in its jaws; the shimmering bubble too pretty for a prison; the huge white bird guarding the sleeping goddess.
Nova looked so small and exhausted, slumped over and limp, and Sarai couldn’t help but remember the terrible anguish she’d seen in her eyes, and worse: her brief, brilliant joy, when, for an instant, she believed she’d found her sister.
She heard herself say, “Maybe I can do something.”
Everyone looked at her. Minya spoke first. “What can you do?” she asked, and some of her old scorn clung to her words, but not much, thought Sarai. Not like before.
“She’s asleep,” said Sarai. “I… I could go into her dreams.”
“And do what?” Minya queried.
“I don’t know. Help her?”
“Help her?” Minya stared. They all did. “Help her?” she repeated, her shift in emphasis eloquent. “After what she’s done?”
Sarai was at a loss. “That’s grief,” she said of the scene in the gallery. She knew that Lazlo would have understood. “You don’t have to feel sorry for her, but killing her won’t solve our problems, and maybe the only way we’re going to get through this is if we can help her.”
Minya was studying Sarai, contemplative. “You can’t save everyone, Sarai. You know that, don’t you?”
Sarai wondered if Minya remembered her coming into her dreams, unwrapping the babies, making an escape door, trying to help her and failing. “I know,” she said. “But we can try. And… maybe that’s how we save ourselves.”
Minya took in these words. Sarai could see it—that she took them in and turned them over, considering them. The change was so tremendous it almost stopped her breath. She was so used to Minya not taking things in, but only spinning them round, sharpening them into weapons and flinging them right back. She was already tensed for it, so when Minya’s consideration seemed to absorb her words, and the expected recoil didn’t come, she felt… lightened? As though it might really be possible.
“All right,” said Minya.
All right, said Minya. Sarai struggled to keep her astonishment from showing. Minya was never agreeable. It was part of her makeup. Sarai hoped that the miracle of her acquiescence might be the start of a chain of miracles that could see them through this, back to the strange and wonderful future Lazlo had taught her to believe in.
It occurred to her that those miracles—and that future—rested entirely on her. With a deep breath, she turned toward Nova and Wraith.
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Sarai breathed, slowly approaching the chair, though she didn’t know if the bird understood. She held its gaze the whole time. Its black eyes were intense, unblinking, but it didn’t object as Sarai drew near. Uneasily, she came to stand beside Nova, near enough to touch her. Where, though? She was still wearing that oil-black garb with the plates of mesarthium she’d rendered into armor. Sarai was reminded of trying to find a place for her moths to land on sleeping humans, though that had been so much easier than this. Back then, if a dreamer woke, she herself wasn’t looming over them.
Sarai wondered if she would have been able to torment the people of Weep with nightmares if she’d had to stand right beside them, touching them, feeling their pulse spike under her hand. It was so much more intimate this way.
Tentatively, mindful of Wraith, she reached out for the little triangle of blue skin where Nova’s fair hair slipped over her neck, revealing it. Sarai’s hand hovered just above it as she kept eye contact with the bird, trying to assure it with her gaze that she meant no harm. It could have been her imagination, but it seemed the bird understood.
; So she placed her fingertips very softly against Nova’s skin and was drawn into her dream.
60
THIN ICE
Sarai found herself in a place that was not the citadel or the red-sea world or Weep or anywhere else she knew. It was killingly cold, and as far as she could see in every direction, there were only sheets of white ice. It wasn’t peaceful, as she had, in the past, imagined snowy landscapes in dreams. This was the sea, and it was frozen, all its latent violence still boiling beneath the surface. A skin of ice lay over it, but not quietly. It moaned and shrieked, shifting under Sarai’s feet. When a crack opened up, lightning fast and jagged as teeth in a monster’s jaws, she had to leap aside or be sucked down into the fathomless black water.
Fear slammed into her, and she had to remind herself that it wasn’t real, and that she had power here, and was at nobody’s mercy.
It took conscious effort to unfeel the cold. She’d never experienced anything like it, not in Weep, where there was no real winter. Feral’s stolen snowstorms didn’t even hint at this penetrating ache. Sarai could have willed it warm. She could have changed it to some other landscape altogether, but it was important to learn why she was here—or, rather, why Nova was.
Sarai searched for her. She turned a circle, gazing around at the sweep of vast empty white, and perceived a set of figures on the horizon.
They were three, too distant to make out. She started toward them, thinking Nova must be one of them, but before she’d gone more than a few feet, something caught her eye under the surface of the ice.
A face.
She recoiled from it, then forced herself to look, because in that split-second glimpse, she’d seen who it was.
It was Eril-Fane. He was dead and staring, trapped beneath the ice.
What was he doing in this dream? This world had nothing to do with him. Just beyond him, Sarai saw another face and braced herself. It was Azareen. Her eyes were open and staring and filmed with ice crystals. Her dying scream had frozen as bubbles welling out of her mouth.
It was terrible to see them like this, and Sarai clung to the knowledge that there was no truth to it. The two of them were very much alive and together in Weep. She went on, and almost right away encountered another dead face—a stranger this time. Then another. A trail of them lay under the ice all the way to the figures in the distance, like a path of awful stepping-stones. She stopped looking, stopped counting, and grew numb to them as she went past, rushing to get to the trio of figures as though that would be an end to it.
She reached them. They were garbed heavily in skins and furs, their faces—blue, all three—recessed into fur-lined hoods. The smallest of them was Nova. She looked afraid, determined, exhausted, grim. With her were two men: one old, and one of middle years. There was a sledge and dogs as well, and they were near the end of a long journey, their destination visible as smudges of chimney smoke on the horizon.
At least, it was Nova’s destination. The men would be going no farther. As Sarai watched, Nova spoke to them, her voice flat and her words final, issuing a command they were powerless to refuse. With a start, she realized that she could understand the command, the sense if not the precise words, the dream feeding her meaning on some level below language. It was very simple.
Go into the sea.
With terror in their eyes, the men stepped off the edge of a shelf of ice and sank like stones into the frigid black water. Just like that, they were gone.
Sarai felt sick, as though it were really happening. And she understood that it had really happened, just like this, and that these were the first men Nova had ever killed. These were the first, and Eril-Fane and Azareen the most recent. And that whole trail of faces, those were all the ones in between. Sarai turned to look back the way she’d come, and their sheer quantity numbed her. How many lives had Nova taken, how many souls loosed to their evanescence? After so many, would she even hesitate to add to her terrible tally?
Turning back, Sarai saw with a jolt that Nova was looking at her.
In the rush of her decision to try this, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder whether Nova would be able to see her. Minya was only the second who ever had, after Lazlo. Did this mean that Mesarthim could and humans couldn’t? Or was it one more way Sarai’s gift had changed since her death? It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was Nova’s dark-eyed suspicion, pinning her in place.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, and Sarai saw that she recognized her. Hostility flickered in her gaze.
“I followed the path,” she said, indicating the faces under the ice. The two men who’d just died were there now, too. The rift in the ice had refrozen, and their faces were pressed right up against it, as though they’d tried to get free. She wondered if Nova would understand her, as she understood Nova.
She seemed to. “From where?” she wanted to know, squinting out over the ice. She sounded very young. Her face was fuller, her eyes wider, not yet shaped by centuries of horizons.
“From… the end,” said Sarai.
“That’s not the end,” said Nova. “You don’t get to the end until you die.”
Sarai tried to process these words. Did she mean that you weren’t done killing until you were dead, that the life you left behind you was a path of corpses? She didn’t ask. Instead, she ventured, with a gesture at the two nearest faces, “But this is the beginning, isn’t it.” This was where Nova had become a killer, and there was no evidence of remorse in her. “What did they do, these two?”
Nova looked down at them with no more emotion than if they really were stepping-stones. She pointed to one. “He sold me.” The other. “He bought me.” She didn’t say the words father and husband, but the knowledge was imparted to Sarai through the medium of the dream.
Nova’s father had sold her to an old man when she was younger than Sarai was now. “I’m sorry,” said Sarai, her gut knotting with sympathetic misery.
While she watched, Nova pushed back her hood and took off her diadem. Her skin drained immediately of blue—and not to warm brown, like Sparrow’s had, but a paler shade of skin than Sarai had ever seen—a kind of milky ivory that, combined with her fair hair, made her look washed out, like a bit of sun-bleached bone. Even her lips were pale. The only thing that really stood out were her brown eyes, shining like wet river stones.
“Not as sorry as they were,” said Nova with a nod to the ice. “I couldn’t let them live.” She held up the diadem. “I can’t be blue when I get to Targay. I have to fade, but they’d have killed me as soon as my power was gone.”
“Your own father?” asked Sarai, and she was thinking of Eril-Fane, and her own very recent worries of what he’d do when he discovered her.
Nova shrugged. She sounded far away when she said, “No one loves anyone here. They all just scrape against each other, like rocks in a bag.”
Gently, Sarai said, “But you loved Kora.”
Loved. The instant Sarai spoke the word in past tense, the ice beneath her feet gave a deafening crack and opened up like another set of devouring jaws beneath her. She had to leap into the air and stay there. It took far more than the usual effort to believe she could float and not be sucked down. The aura of the dream was like a weight pulling at her feet, and when she chanced a look below, she saw all the staring dead gathered together like jetsam on a tide.
Nova still stood there, impossibly, her feet curled over the very edge of the ice that Sarai could see was as thin as paper. She was staring at Sarai. Her pupils had dilated, and there was menace and madness in them. “I love Kora,” she corrected, harsh. “And I’m going to find her, and if you try to stop me, you’ll end up with the rest of them.” She gestured to the dead.
A chill went up Sarai’s spine that had nothing to do with the ice. This might have been a scene from Nova’s youth, and this place might be her provenance, but when she spoke that threat, her eyes weren’t young at all. Everything was in them: all her years of seeking and failing and believing—believing what? Th
at she would save her sister, when there wasn’t even a wisp of hope to grasp at, let alone a strand to hang on to and follow into the dark. Belief like that, that hasn’t tasted any real hope in centuries, but has been fed and nurtured on darker things—loneliness, desperation—it doesn’t simply subside when faced with its own end. It doesn’t accept or adapt. It exists in spite of reason, and will only ever defy it.
Kora was dead.
The truth would destroy Nova. Somewhere, her mind had built a blur around it, like the one Sarai had encountered in Minya’s mind. But the truth has a way of seeping out. The mind can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone.
It struck Sarai that Nova’s belief was like this ice: It was fragile, it was thin, and it was all that was keeping her from plunging into her own black depths. A spark of panic chased the chill up Sarai’s spine. All of their lives rested on this ice, and it would not hold.
Nova was a half step in any direction from madness. Sarai could feel it in every crack of the ice, and in the pull of the black water, almost as though the sea were calling out to her by name.
Urgently, she fed her own will into the dream, refreezing the ice, strengthening it, and settling it, as though by doing so she could strengthen and settle what was breaking apart inside Nova. If only she could. Her mother could have, but wouldn’t have.
What could Sarai do? She had an arsenal of nightmares. If she wanted to hasten Nova’s madness, she was well equipped. But she didn’t want to be the Muse of Nightmares anymore. Who did she want to be? She remembered Lazlo telling her, before she went for the second time into Minya’s dreams, “You’re not trying to defeat her. Remember that. You’re trying to help her defeat her nightmare.”
But how could you defeat a nightmare that was only and simply the truth?