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Girls were gifts to be given, not kept—or more like livestock to be sold, as any father of a desirable daughter on Rieva was aware.
She was a ghost and he was a god, and they kissed like they’d lost their dream and found it.
Minya cocked her head. “Us, monsters? And you defend the father who tried to kill you in your cradle. The great Godslayer, butcher of babies. If that’s what it means to be a hero, Sarai—” She bared her little milk teeth and snarled, “I’d rather be a monster.”
Whenever Minya won at quell—and Minya always won at quell—she upended the game board and sent the pieces flying, so the loser had to crawl around on hands and knees and gather them up. It was important that losers understood what they were; sometimes you had to drive the point home.
It was fear, of course, though Minya did not know it. She believed it was rage, only and always rage, but that was the costume it wore, because fear was weakness, and she had vowed to never again be weak.
Lazlo had never imagined a day he’d be rummaging through a dead god’s closet, but then, it was far from the strangest thing to happen to him today.
“There’s the kind of guest who’s honored to be invited, and the kind who believes he’s bestowing honor by accepting.”
Many a choice is made in this way: by pretending it makes itself. And many a fate is decided by those who cannot decide.
Why had the gods bred themselves on humans? Bred themselves on. His jaw clenched and he banished the pallid term, even from his mind. Why had the gods raped humans and forced them to bear—or father—their “godspawn”?
Sarai shook her head. “You’re right. It isn’t helpful.” “I know. But it’s the right answer for somebody’s problem, somewhere in the world.” “And does some stranger out there have the answer to ours? Can we meet them at a crossroads and swap?”
He hoped at least that Lazlo saw how foolish it all was. Sarai wasn’t like that. Lazlo was lucky. Well, Sarai was dead, so maybe not lucky lucky.
“You say it with your face.” “That’s just his face,” said Calixte in a pretense of defending him. “He can’t help having indignant nostrils. Can you, Nero? You probably come from a long line of indignant nostrils. Aristocrats are issued them at birth, along with haughty eyes and judgmental cheeks.” “Judgmental cheeks?” repeated Ruza. “Can cheeks be judgmental?” “His manage.”
They always die! Minya had just said. Did she live this, then, over and over? Was she always, always trying to save them, and always, always failing?
The kitchen was obscure to him in the way that women were obscure, and that wasn’t because women worked in the kitchen. Those weren’t the women he meant. Those were servants, and as such, had hardly occupied his thoughts as people, let alone females. Kitchens and women were both subjects that simply did not intrigue him.
“Are you arguing with that bacon?” Calixte asked. “I hope you’re winning, because I’m starving.” With a wicked grin, Tzara added, “Cannibalism doesn’t really fill you up, you see.”
Ruza had yet to meet a philosophical dilemma that could spoil his appetite.
Which would mean, if it were true, that they were Minya. And that maybe, just maybe, the ragged little girl with the beetle shell eyes, malefic, hate-ravaged, and bent on vengeance, was only a piece of who she was. A little, broken piece.
She told Lazlo he didn’t have to stay. “Well, that’s a relief,” he said. “I was wondering when I’d get a break from the woman I love, who is the first and only person I’ve ever loved, and who I would happily sit beside under literally any circumstances forever.”
“Show me this bed,” she said, her voice low and liquid, and Lazlo took her by the hand and led her through the trees. The iguana was not invited.
A MAN WHO LOVES YOU ENOUGH TO COME BACK TO YOU EVEN WHEN YOU’RE A BITING GHOST
This is what he was to learn: It didn’t matter if the feelings were his, or if she put them in him. Either way, they were real, and they would rule over him for the next three years, and all the years that came after.
She was an executioner by increments, a master of subtlety and tempter of fate, ever seeing how close she could slice the difference between hate and love.
As for Minya, she was lost in a lull fog, unaware that the enemy had come, and that her family was smiling at them in the garden, forming another “us” without her—an unthinkable “us” that spat on everything she’d done to keep them alive.
Feral returned with water. It was sweeter than the water in Weep and she wondered, as she drank it, where in the world it came from, this rainwater procured by a cloud-stealing boy. And she wondered, too, where in the world they’d end up, these cast-off children claimed by no one.
Not that Ruza was holding his hand. He was only touching it. It was nothing. When he let go, though, and drew his hand away, Thyon felt its absence keenly.
You didn’t have to have seen the whole world to know that this wasn’t in it.
How people love to see a dream shatter, thought Nova from far away. To see the dreamer hobbled and lamed, foundering in the shards of their broken hopes. This is what you get for believing that you could have more. You’re no better than us. You’re nothing special.
A bold young queen in that distant world was even now training a legion of angels and chimaera to battle the darkness and hopefully destroy it. But that’s another story.
There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else. And if you choose the dream, if you keep on going, then you can never quit, because it’s all you are.
We might be at odds, hate each other, and desire each other’s destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.
Staggering, she stared at the little girl in the doorway and couldn’t fathom how she could hold such power. It was so much heavier than any gift she’d ever taken. She could feel it burning through her as though she were a candlewick. How was it possible for such a tiny thing to bear such magic and not be consumed?
He was a rapist for fun before he began to turn a profit.
Because home was and had always been Nova, and Kora died believing her sister would come.
Of course, she told herself, he’d done it for Sarai’s sake, not hers. Who would ever save her for her own sake?
“They’ll kill us no matter what we do,” the little girl said. “And I’m going to take them with us.”
Do you want to die, too? Do you? They probably thought she was going to kill them next.
“They were all I could carry,” Minya told her, shaking. “I know. You did so well. It’s over now,” Sarai told her. “I promise. It’s all over.”
She had been a creature riddled with empty spaces, a ventriloquist, a puppet master, a little girl in pieces. Now she was just a person.
An image had popped into his mind of an elaborately carved headstone engraved with the words STEPPED ON BY AN ANGEL IN THE PRIME OF HIS LIFE.
Sparrow appealed to him. “Would you please tell her that her breasts are perfect as they are?” He sputtered, going violet. Ruby also appealed to him. “But they could be more perfect, couldn’t they?” Poor Feral didn’t know the right answer. He sensed danger in all directions. “Um.”
All these years, all those souls. Who might Minya be if she hadn’t borne that burden? Who would she become, now that it was gone?
She pointed to one. “He sold me.” The other. “He bought me.” She didn’t say the words father and husband,
Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.
With no mirrors on Rieva, Nova never saw her own face clearly until she left. And when she did, it wasn’t the right face. It was close, but wrong. Always, the sight of her own face had jarred her with its almostness, its not-quiteness. It had never felt as real to her as the one she grew up looking at. Here was her real reflection. This was who she was: what she saw looking back at her when her sister looked at her, and it had been the same for Kora.
I wanted so much to be here for you, but that doesn’t mean I deserved to live. I was part of something terrible, whether I chose it or not. They weren’t wrong to kill us. Promise me: no vengeance. Let all the ugliness end here. I love you so much.”
“You’re still here,” he whispered like a prayer.
Maybe the day would come when Thyon was no longer gobsmacked by the fact that the meek junior librarian who used to walk into walls while reading was now in possession of a massive, impregnable, interdimensional skyship that he controlled with his mind. But that day was not today.
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.
“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.”
The iguana was still around, occasionally prowling out from the undergrowth to beg for a treat.
