by Laini Taylor
She hadn’t lived to see her own freedom, but she had provided for theirs—back then and then again when she used her last moments of life to leave a message for her sister that said, “Let all the ugliness end.”
And so it had, at least for them, and for Amezrou too.
But out in the layered worlds were blue children who’d grown up in slavery—their own brothers and sisters—and there was no question of leaving them there. They themselves had been granted deliverance, and with it came the duty to deliver others. Skathis’s book, which they had begun to translate—with help from Rook, Kiska, and Werran, whom Nova had taught the gods’ tongue—contained not only navigational charts but a ledger. Every godspawn birth was recorded, and every sale: dates, gender, gift, buyer, and even amount paid.
They should be able to trace them. Some trails would go cold. Some would be dead. Some might neither need nor want rescuing. But they would do their best to deserve their freedom and power, and to be the antithesis of Skathis and Isagol.
“We aren’t our parents,” Sarai had told Minya shortly after her own death. “We don’t have to be monsters.”
Minya still maintained that monsters are useful to have on hand, and Sarai had to agree—so long as they were on your side, and weren’t, for example, making you bite a lip you wished to lick, or any other such grave misdeed.
Minya shrugged and declared her “boring.”
Boring was not the word Sarai would use to describe licking Lazlo’s lip, or anything else in her life these days—or her afterlife, if you wished to be technical. She was still bound to Minya, and still a ghost, with all the restrictions that went along with it. As Great Ellen had told her before, “It isn’t life, but it has its merits.”
“Such as being a slave to Minya?” she’d asked then, but she had good reason to hope it wouldn’t be like that. Minya hadn’t possessed her since waking up on the floor, and though she’d yet shown no outward signs of… Ellenness?… to hint at new wholeness, she was not her old self, either. Sarai found herself watching her, wondering what was at work in her. Were her fragments finding a way to mesh back together into a single person?
This scrutiny did not go unnoticed. “Must you look at me like that?” Minya demanded.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a child you need to take care of.”
Sarai didn’t know what to say to that. Was Minya a child or not a child? She was both and neither. “Fine. But I haven’t thanked you yet. For saving me.”
“Which time?” asked Minya, ungracious. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about feelings. As she looked at Sarai, the impulse to make Great Ellen’s hawk face was overwhelming, but of course her face couldn’t do it. The fragments were back, and they felt too big for her, like extra pits shoved into a plum. Add to it the gratitude and tenderness that were coursing up Sarai’s tether, and she felt like she might split apart and explode.
“Minya…” Sarai started to say, because she actually still hadn’t thanked her, but she found that her mouth abruptly stopped working, and then she was turning, and her feet, through no effort of her own, were carrying her away. She couldn’t even make a sound of startled protest. The conversation was over, and the clock reset on how long since her last possession.
With the arrival of the Lady Spider, the crew of the Astral was all accounted for—that was the name they’d decided on: the Astral, as “Wraith” sounded menacing, and they all appreciated the layered meanings of star voyagers and souls sent forth, and that it honored Sarai’s gift as well as Korako’s.
They were eager to go, to cast off from this moorage and begin. It was as easy as wishing. Lazlo had only to will the eagle to fly and it did. It glided above Arev Bael—“the Devourer,” which had devoured Nova—and even navigated between the tezerl stalks with an endowed intelligence that did not require his conscious guidance. They went west, toward Var Elient’s ez-Meliz portal, where, in a few days’ time, they would encounter people—people from another world—and make themselves and their mission known.
They were fourteen in all: nine godspawn (including one ghost) and five humans, which had necessitated a lengthening of the table in the gallery. They all convened for their first meal of the voyage, and found themselves settling into places that were beginning to feel like their own. The food was so much better now, and they were all learning how to cook, thanks to the tutelage of the fourteenth and most unexpected member of the crew: Suheyla.
“Are you sure?” Eril-Fane had asked his mother at least a hundred times before their final farewell.
“Quite,” she had assured him, bright-eyed. “What else am I to do? My house washed away.”
Eril-Fane was a patient son. “We can build you a new house,” he’d pointed out. There would be quite a lot of that going on in Amezrou.
“What a bother,” she’d said, “when this one’s already built.” She’d gestured around herself, and how could he argue? Already she’d made her mark on this place, from the rugs and cushions she’d looted shamelessly from the Merchants’ Guildhall to the hooks she’d directed Lazlo to fashion over the table, for the hanging up of discs of hot bread.
Suheyla had grasped her son’s hand. “I’ll be back, you know, but I do have to go. Our people need you. These children need me.”
It was true, and it was good to be needed, and to think that she could have a hand in shaping the men and women these powerful young people would become. They needed a grandmother, someone who knew how to do things, who could teach them how to take care of themselves—and, all-importantly, bake cake—and provide a seasoned perspective as they faced their unguessable trials.
That was her main reason for joining them, and it was reason enough. The other she hadn’t spoken aloud, but her interest in Skathis’s ledger did not go unnoticed. Lazlo, without comment, made sure to find time to read it with her, tracking down the names of babies born in a certain month forty years earlier, and trying to trace when and where they’d been sold.
Perhaps she would find her lost child, perhaps not. She would certainly find lost children—more lost children, that is. Make no mistake, that’s what these children were, though a little less lost every day. She did what she could. They were remarkably resilient, even Minya, who had been through the most. She didn’t say very much, and Suheyla didn’t press her. She mothered her by stealth, in small doses, and often without direct eye contact, the way one might set a skittish cat at ease.
The girl had changed her ragged garment, at last, for one Suheyla left where she could find it, and she had a loose tooth, her first ever, which had to mean that whatever had frozen her age at six had unfrozen, and that she would not continue forever a child. That night at dinner, the tooth came out.
She was biting into bread and gave a little gasp. Her hand flew to her mouth, and out it fell, tiny as a kitten tooth. She stared at it with mingled wonder and horror. “A piece of my body just fell off,” she said darkly.
Tzara choked a little on the wine she was swallowing.
“It’s all right,” said Kiska. “There’s a better one where that came from. Just wait.”
Minya knew how it worked. She’d been through it with Sarai and Feral, Ruby and Sparrow, and had, as Great Ellen, strung their baby teeth onto little necklaces she kept in a wooden box. As for what to do with her own, Suheyla said to put it under her pillow and make a wish. “That’s what we do in Amezrou.”
“And I suppose all the wishes come true,” Minya said, sarcastic.
“Of course not, silly girl,” Suheyla retorted. She had not grown up in an era of optimism, but that didn’t mean they’d lived without dreams. “Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.”
64
A NEW GENERATION OF WISHES
Sarai was still thinking about those words later, when she went with Lazlo back to their room. They were sharing one, larger than the others’, but not by double.
It preserved some elements of the glade Lazlo had made, notably the bed crafted especially for the goddess of dreams. The iguana was still around, occasionally prowling out from the undergrowth to beg for a treat.
“Do you remember what Suheyla said about wishes?” Sarai asked, sinking down onto the bed.
“About the bull’s-eye?” Lazlo asked, following her down. His weight made a divot in the mattress that pulled her toward him. “I liked it.” He nuzzled her, his breath warm on her cheek. “I must be a pretty good archer, because all my wishes have come true.”
“All of them?” she asked, closing her eyes, smiling as he kissed her neck. “Then you’d better get some new ones. You can’t let yourself run out of wishes.”
“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.
They took their time. They had forgotten so much. Slowly, it all came back.
Fate must have been feeling sympathetic for all the time they’d lost. They made a son that night, though it would be some weeks before they knew it, and months before they met him and named him Lazlo—and some years after that before he met his namesake, and his grandmother and ghost half sister, as well as a whole lot of others when the Astral came back and visited Amezrou on its way to begin a new journey in the opposite direction, toward Meliz, the seraph home world, and whatever—and whoever—they might find along the way.
But that’s another story.
THE END
(OR IS IT?)
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This marks eight years and six books with the fantastic family at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers! That’s close to three thousand pages of gods and chimaera and moths and wars and young people searching for hope, love, and identity in this world and others. I’m so incredibly grateful to everyone who’s helped turn my words into better words and then magicked them into books, my favorite objects in the world. Thank you!