But...if that was true, then where was his body?
Sarai felt dizzy. All the possibilities of life, death, and magic spun in her head. If Eril-Fane was a ghost, there would be two of him, as there had been two Sarais in the garden: ghost and corpse, side by side. But there was no corpse. There was only him—weak, in pain, covered in blood, but alive, and rising shakily to his feet.
“I said, HOLD YOUR FIRE!” he boomed again, and the rain of arrows stuttered to a stop. “Tizerkane, stand down!” he commanded. “These children are under my protection!”
A stark silence fell. Even the ghosts fell still as Minya stared at her foe, hate and confusion at war in her expression. All eyes were on the Godslayer.
All but Sparrow’s. Hers were closed. Her breathing was shallow. The arrow jutted from her shoulder, and blood drizzled, brilliant, from her wound. All these things told a story—of a girl caught in crossfire—but there was more to the story, and Sarai was just seeing it.
Up in the citadel, when the time loop broke open, it was Sparrow who had pelted down the walkway to the warriors. When the hand reached in and grabbed them, when it dropped them here on the ground, she’d stayed with them, and now she was bent over Azareen. Her hand was thrust under the warrior’s breastplate. Sarai could see her fingers through the hole the wasp stinger had punched through the bronze.
Sparrow’s hand was on Azareen’s wound. That was the story.
Eril-Fane was alive. That was the story.
Sparrow’s eyes were closed in deep concentration, and her skin was gray, and that was the story. She was gray, but as Sarai looked on, this ceased to be true. Sparrow’s color was fugitive, changing fast enough to watch. The gray hue took on a new richness as the last hint of blue left her flesh, giving way to beautiful, silken, chestnut brown. Except for the blood, the arrow, and her clothes—a slip from the closet of the goddess of secrets—she could have been a girl of Weep. Sparrow looked human.
“Oh,” breathed Sarai, trying to understand.
Sparrow—Orchid Witch—could make things grow, and not just flowers and kimril. But could she really have done this, regrown what was sundered inside Eril-Fane?
What other explanation? And she was trying to heal Azareen, too. But...if all the blue was gone from Sparrow’s skin, did she have any magic left to do it?
Sparrow was still bent over her, eyes closed, but if Azareen wasn’t healed already, she wasn’t going to be.
Sarai swallowed hard. By now everyone was watching. Eril-Fane had no sooner risen and stopped the battle than he dropped back to his knees beside his wife. His face was strained, his jaw clenched. He focused on Azareen with an almost savage intensity. He gathered up her hand and curled it in both his own. “Live,” he whispered to her. “Azareen, live.” A choked sob escaped from his throat, and he added, like a prayer: “Thakra, please.”
Azareen opened her eyes.
For a moment, the pair gazed at each other with all the hope and wonder of their younger selves, as though their lost lifetime—these past eighteen years—hadn’t happened, and all was before them. When Azareen spoke, it was to ask, her voice faint, the question that death had repeatedly interrupted. She’d thought she’d never get to hear her husband’s answer, or know what he’d wanted to tell her at the end. “My love,” she whispered. “What do you wish?”
But she would have to keep waiting for the answer.
Sparrow collapsed. Eril-Fane caught her, noticing the arrow and blood for the first time. “Medics!” he hollered, and barked out several names.
Outside the protective circle of ghosts, the Tizerkane who belonged to the names were caught between obedience and a wall of souls with wings and spears.
“Stop!”
The shriek came from Minya. It was shrill. In one fluid motion, a score of ghosts turned to the center of the circle and trained their spears on Eril-Fane. When Minya looked at him, she saw slaughter. He was the Carnage, and now he had Sparrow. “Get your hands off her, child-killer!” she snarled.
“Minya!” Sarai turned to her, heartbeats spiking. Would she undo Sparrow’s miracle, and kill what she had saved? Was Minya so far gone, so broken that she would throw away this last chance to set aside their hate and live?
But everything Sarai might have said died at the sight of Minya, and so did all that might have been. For her, anyway.
Because Minya was gray, too.
Chapter 51
Happy Evanescence
Lazlo roared his voice to a rasp, but Nova seemed not to even hear him. An unsettling, serene vagueness had come over her like a trance—as though she were elsewhere, and her body was just holding her place in the world.
Lazlo was still trapped, his legs held fast in the metal, as the citadel poured itself through the portal, and any hope of saving Sarai grew more and more remote.
When he’d begged Nova to leave the last anchor, he’d been thinking of Weep—its bedrock and buildings, its river raging underground. It was only after she ignored him, and all the mesarthium was sucked from the cracks, that the other implication struck him. In that instant, when he realized what it meant and what would happen, he had felt like he was back in the street, bereft at the sight of Sarai’s broken body arched over the gate. He had vowed never to fail her again. “Do you think anything could keep me away?” he’d asked her just that morning.
Now something—someone—was keeping him away, and he was losing his mind. Nova wouldn’t listen, and didn’t understand him anyway. He’d tried appealing to the others. “They have no mesarthium. They’ll fade. Do you understand what that means?”
Rook, Kiska, and Werran were uneasy with the way things had gone. Lazlo could tell by their tight expressions and the quick, dark glances they were giving Nova and one another, but they were clearly afraid to defy her. “At least leave them some metal,” he pleaded. He saw that they wore medallions at their throats, as Nova wore her diadem. They all wore mesarthium against their skin. “Like that,” he said, pointing at Werran’s medallion. “Just enough to keep them from fading.”
Werran lost patience, his conflicted guilt making him snap. “Being human isn’t a fate worse than death. They’ll learn to live with it.”
Learn to live with it. Hysteria welled up in Lazlo. “You think I’m losing my mind because they’ll become human?” His scream-ravaged voice thundered, feverish and rough. Never in his life had he raged like this. He looked like a man possessed. “Listen to me! That little girl you grew up with? Don’t you know what her gift is? She catches souls. She keeps them from evanescing. If she fades, yes, she’ll become human. Maybe she’ll learn to live with it.” He shoved his fingers into his hair and clutched his skull, digging in, trying to dull the roar of despair. “But Sarai won’t. She won’t live with it, because she’s not alive. You’ve got to help me! If Minya loses her power, Sarai will evanesce.”
. . .
Minya didn’t understand what was happening. She stared at Sparrow, whom Eril-Fane had passed into Ruby’s arms. She was unconscious, and no medics had been bold enough to breach the barrier of ghosts. “What did you do to her?” she demanded. She wasn’t referring to the arrow or the blood, but Sparrow’s color—as though humanity were a disease and Eril-Fane and Azareen had infected her with it.
“They didn’t do anything,” Sarai told her. Azareen was sitting up now, too, with help from Suheyla. Like Eril-Fane, she looked weak and drawn, but she was alive. “Sparrow did it herself,” Sarai said. “She healed them, and it used up all her magic.”
Minya had never looked so scornful. “Don’t be stupid. Our magic can’t get used up.”
“It can,” Sarai said, cold with the terrible truth of it, and what it meant for her. “It does. If we’re not in contact with mesarthium.”
“It’s the source of our power,” Feral explained. “We never knew until we put you on your bed and you started to turn gray. We thought you were dying, but Lazlo knew what to do. He put you on the floor.”
He kept talking, but Sarai stopped hearing. At the sound of Lazlo’s name, she nearly doubled over. It felt like being punched, and unable to draw breath, because she understood right then and there that she would never see him again.
By the hue of Minya’s skin, Sarai knew she didn’t have much longer.
She recalled Lazlo’s surprise at Minya’s fading so quickly. The rest of them slept in their beds every night—or in Sarai’s case every day. They were out of contact with the metal for hours at a time and showed no sign of fading. But then, they weren’t using their gifts in their sleep; Minya was. She had no respite from hers. All those ghosts, she had to be bleeding power every second, but it had never mattered before, because she was always in contact with the metal. The citadel had constantly been feeding her power. And now it wasn’t.
Sarai threw back her head and looked up at the sky, just in time to see the last glint of the seraph vanish from sight. It was gone from Zeru. In desperation, she turned to her father. “Is there any mesarthium in the city?”
“The anchors...” he said, uncertain. He’d been unconscious when the citadel reclaimed them.
Sarai shook her head. “They took them. They’re gone. Was there any somewhere else, even a little bit?” There was urgency and fear in her voice.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Eril-Fane asked.
But Feral understood, and so did Ruby. Tears sprang to her eyes. Her hand flew to cover her mouth. “Oh. Oh no. Sarai.”
The Ellens understood, too. Stricken, they both looked at Minya. Her brows knit together with ferocity, confusion, and something like dread. She looked down at her hands, which were the color of ash, then sharply back up.
Sarai couldn’t have said how she expected her to react. Minya had threatened her with this very fate, and been willing to see it through. She’d called Sarai a traitor, used her as a puppet, held her soul as a bargaining chip. It wouldn’t altogether have surprised her if Minya shrugged and bid her happy evanescence, as coolly as saying happy birthday.