She couldn’t help wondering: What if she weren’t blue? Would it make a difference to her unknown mother if she were human, with brown skin and no magic?
But she wasn’t a starry-eyed child anymore. She knew there was not now and never would be a place for her in Weep, or a mother waiting to claim her. Now when she thought of leaving the citadel, it was forests and meadows she dreamed of. Plants wouldn’t reject her. She was wild to go find some ferns, but the thought of people, crowds, cobbled streets, wrong turns, dead ends, staring eyes, gasps of shock...
It was just too much.
She reached out to the torch ginger and picked a flower. As she had yesterday with the anadne blossom, she held it while its life expired, feeling it ebb to a reedy pulse. There was something she’d been wondering.
The five of them hadn’t had anyone to show them how to use their gifts. It was all just intuition, and who knew what they might have missed. Sparrow had never known, for example, that her gift could work in reverse. But when Sarai died, it had. Her sorrow had leeched life out of the soil, and wilted plants around her. It was an unpleasant discovery. She didn’t want to be able to do that. She was Orchid Witch. She made things grow. Mostly plants, but not only. She had made Sarai’s hair grow longer, glossier. She had also made her own eyelashes longer in a burst of foolish vanity whose intended target, Feral the Oblivious, had certainly not noticed, not that it mattered now.
Sparrow wondered if there wasn’t anything more that she could do. She waited until the torch ginger flower was nearly empty of the fizz of life. Then she carefully touched its severed stem back to the stalk she’d plucked it from, lavished it with magic, and watched to see if anything would happen.
And maybe something did, or maybe something didn’t, but then Lazlo was in the arcade, calling out to her to come, and that put an end to the experiment, for the time being at least.
. . .
Lull was the drink Great Ellen had brewed to keep Sarai from dreaming. She’d taken it for years at bedtime, to block the nightmares that would turn against her the minute she fell asleep. Under the influence of lull, there were no dreams of any kind, but only a calm gray nothing.
Now Sarai faced a dilemma.
“If we give her lull,” Sparrow pointed out, “you won’t be able to get into her dreams.”
This was true. There would be no dreams to get into. Sarai wouldn’t be able to talk to Minya, or see into her memories, either. She would be closing the only door that gave them any hope of reaching her—at least for a time. But to not give it to her seemed unconscionably cruel. “We’re keeping her asleep,” said Sarai, “which means we’re keeping her locked in a loop of nightmares. We can’t let her wake up. It’s too dangerous. But at least this way she can have some peace.” Though she knew that lull’s gray “peace” was a far cry from anything like healing.
They wanted to know about the nightmares. They could see that Sarai was badly shaken. She hardly knew what to tell them. In the minutes that Lazlo had been gone to get them, the implications had unspooled around her, and where they led...
Trying to understand it, to believe it, it was like trying to touch a hot stove. She kept flinching back just short of it. “There are things that...may not be what they seem,” she said.
“What things?” asked Feral. “Just tell us, Sarai.”
“It has to do with the Ellens.”
“You mean why they’re like that?” Ruby waved a hand back in the direction of the gallery, where the nurses stood blank-eyed in the kitchen doorway.
Sarai nodded. “That’s part of it, I think.” This was only a surmise. How could she know? What did she know, really? “I saw some things in Minya’s dreams. And dreams aren’t reality, of course, but there’s something there that’s real, that’s shaping it all. The Ellens...when they were alive, I...”
It was so hard to say it out loud. It felt like cruelty to force her suspicions on them. Even if it were true, she thought, did they really need to know? Wouldn’t it be kinder to let them keep the lie?
No. They weren’t children for her to shelter, and she needed them. They had to try to figure this out together.
She let it out in a rush. “I don’t think they loved us.” Already, she was thinking of two distinct sets of Ellens: the living and the ghosts, as though they weren’t the same people. “And I don’t think they tried to protect us. I think it’s all a lie.”
The others stared at her, nearly as blank in their incomprehension as the Ellens themselves were blank in...whatever state they were stuck in.
Sarai told what she’d seen. She laid out each piece of the puzzle, not trying to make them into a picture, but just laying them out. She hoped, truth be told, that someone would form them into a different picture and disprove her dark suspicions. But the pieces seemed to assemble themselves:
There was the revulsion in the Ellens’ eyes. Sarai couldn’t unsee it, or the backhand, either. And there was the red hand—Minya’s red, slippery hand—and climbing over the bodies, and the timing of it all, and Minya’s words, “Do you want to die, too?”
There was the matter of the blur where Minya’s own mind was hiding the Ellens from her. Why would it do that?
But for Sarai, the most compelling puzzle piece was the Ellens themselves, frozen in the kitchen doorway as they had been from the exact moment Minya lost consciousness. The more she thought about them, the more they seemed like...discarded costumes hanging in a dressing room.
“Let me get this straight,” said Feral. “You’re saying that the Ellens aren’t...” He couldn’t finish. “What are you saying?” He sounded angry, and Sarai understood. It felt like losing someone— two someones—whom they loved and who loved them. Worse than that, it felt like losing the belief that they could be loved.
“That maybe they hated us like all the other humans did,” Sarai said. “And that maybe they weren’t kind and caring, and didn’t try to save us. That maybe it wasn’t Eril-Fane who killed them. I think...I think Minya did.” It was the only thing that made sense: the chronology, the red hand.
It also made no sense at all.
“If they didn’t love us when they were alive,” asked Ruby, fighting the conclusion, “why would they after they died?”
“They wouldn’t,” Sarai said. It was so stark, so simple.
There was one more puzzle piece, after all, and it was the one that completed the picture. “We always thought that Minya couldn’t master her slaves’ eyes,” she said. “That her possession was imperfect.” Turning to Lazlo, she asked, “Yesterday, when I...when I begged you to save me, when I said I’d changed my mind...could you tell it wasn’t really me?”
Slowly, he shook his head, and that was it: proof of nothing except that it was possible.
It was possible that the Ellens weren’t really the Ellens. That the ghost women who had raised five godspawn, who made them laugh and cared for them, and taught them and fed them and soothed their hurts, who settled their squabbles and sang them to sleep, were really nothing but puppets.
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.
Part III
kåzheyul (kah·zhay·ul) noun
The helpless feeling that one can
not escape one’s fate.
Archaic; contraction of ka (eyes) + zhe (god) + yul (back), meaning “gods’ eyes on your back.”
Chapter 28
Buried Gifts
The villagers kept a vigil around the wasp ship, waiting for the door to open again, but it did not. Night was falling. Kora and Nova had been inside for four hours, which was...too long. Their father was tense, sensing a slow diminution of their value the longer they were sequestered with strange men and without their clothes. Skoyë was tense, because if her stepdaughters’ gifts had been weak, they would never have been kept so long, and she loathed the prospect of their gloating faces, should they turn out to be chosen. Shergesh was tense; he already viewed the girls as his, even if he could only have one of them. Many others were anxious, too, awaiting theirs or their children’s turns to vie for the only chance they would ever have at glory and a different life.
Inside the ship, the atmosphere was even more fraught.
It was Nova who now wore a godsmetal glove. She had felt the hum overcome her, and sink into her core. She was Servant-blue, like in her dreams, but that was as far as it went. Ren the telepath had gone into her mind, as he had gone into Kora’s. He had coached and coaxed her.
Don’t think, just feel.
Go deeper.
Our gifts are buried within us.
But if anything was buried in Nova, she had found no hint of it, and was on the verge of panic. Was it possible she had no gift at all? She had never heard of that. Weak gifts abounded, but no gift? Never.
“It’s all right,” Solvay, the lone woman on the crew, had assured her early on, when Ren’s initial probing had failed to turn up any bright spot of difference, as it had with the burgeoning in Kora’s chest. “Some gifts take more time to reveal themselves than others. It’s an art more than a science, but we’re trained at it. We’ll find it.”
She’d been so kind, but that was several hours ago, and even she looked dubious now. They had performed every test they had, including the simplest of all: A smith’s gift was never coy. You had only to touch the metal to know. A smith would leave fingerprints, even as a baby. Nova had not. And though she thought she’d immured herself to the hope of it, still it was a blow. They had tried out water, fire, earth, to test for elemental magic. They had even administered little shocks intended to stimulate different nerve paths. It hadn’t hurt very much, but Nova was exhausted now. The Servants were speaking amongst themselves, and she and Kora could hear every word. “It’s unusual but not unheard of,” Antal of the white hair was saying. “I’ve heard of gifts that took weeks to manifest.”