Hundreds of worlds. Hundreds of worlds, and they would see them, because they were leaving Zeru, and he, Thyon Nero, was going with them. He would never go back to Zosma, where the queen wore a necklace woven of his golden hair, and some blurry outline of a future wife awaited his return. Instead he was joining a crew of gods and pirates for a mission straight out of a myth. It wasn’t even an alternate version of his life. He hadn’t gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it’s enough to start doing things differently now.
“You’ll hatch one, too, of course,” Ruza informed him, as though they had already found their dragon eggs and it was only a matter of divvying them up.
“Yes, I will,” agreed Thyon, “and mine will be faster than yours.”
Ruza was affronted. “It will not.” For his part, he could not have imagined Thyon as a boy on a pony. For all that he was less untouchable than he had been, the golden godson still looked as though he’d been made by a god in a dreamy mood and delivered in a velvet-lined box.
“Will too,” said Thyon.
Calixte, with her fingers to her temples and eyes closed, said, “I’m seeing a vision of the future in which you’re both eaten like idiots trying to steal dragon eggs in some weird world.”
But they hardly heard her, because a breeze had caused the Lady Spider to yaw just enough that Thyon’s shoulder came to rest against Ruza’s, and he left it there, and that took all their focus as Calixte navigated into the new skyship hangar that Lazlo had integrated into the citadel’s magnificent new form.
It was an eagle, of course.
There had been no real question. Ruza’s dragon arguments aside, the only other option had been leaving the citadel as a seraph, and nobody wanted that. Their feelings for seraphim in general were complex. The angels’ hubris, in cutting the portals, had resulted in strife across the Continuum. And yet, if they’d never done it, there would be no godspawn and none of them would even be here to debate the shape of skyships.
As a practical matter, it would have been easiest to leave it as it was. As an emotional one, they couldn’t purge off the taint of Skathis fast enough, so Lazlo had set to work transforming it.
Everything was shifted. In seraph form, it had been vertical and long. Now it was condensed, broadened. Gone were the dexter and sinister arms, replaced by the eagle’s wings. The nursery was no more, and the small, barren rooms that had once held human mothers were likewise erased, much as the memory of what had happened in them had been erased. Their own large chambers, once the gods’, were replaced by more modest ones, and more of them. Minya no longer claimed a whole palace she didn’t need.
The gardens had quadrupled in size, in their new location between the eagle’s wings, and were growing quantities of new vegetables and fruits. Sparrow glowed with purpose and pleasure. She had even brought up some ferns from the forest and planted a shady glade just for them. Feral, too, retained his purpose. Water would always be essential, and he was keen to work on developing other dimensions of his gift. Perhaps, one day, he would be more than a cloud thief, able to strike with lightning.
As for Ruby, she was feeling a little obsolete, now that nonmagical systems were in place for cooking and heating up bathwater. She did not respond with grace to Feral’s suggestion that she take up a hobby.
“I know just the thing,” she said, and flicked a look at Werran, who was minding his own business in one of the new deep chairs in the gallery.
As one might imagine, the introduction of four new young men into their circle had made Ruby rather giddy.
When they’d finally, properly had a chance to meet Kiska, Rook, and Werran, she had eschewed all the obvious questions, such as what their life had been like for the past fifteen years, and wanted only to know which god had been their parent.
When Rook revealed that he was the son of Ikirok, she’d gasped with dismay, “You’re my brother?” before adding, insincerely, “I mean, oh, good, a brother,” and turning to Werran to ask, hopefully, “What about you?”
Werran’s resemblance to Lazlo was no accident. He was Skathis’s son, and Lazlo greeted the news of a brother with much more enthusiasm than Ruby did.
Feral found himself disposed to like Rook, while standing up taller and casting his voice deeper whenever Werran was around. He’d have thought the golden faranji would be his primary rival— the fellow was just ridiculous—but the degree of wariness he showed around Ruby suggested otherwise. He seemed almost to take refuge behind his Tizerkane friend when she approached him with that hungry look in her eyes, and she gave up eventually and left him in peace. “He must have something against blue skin,” she reasoned, piqued, and tossed her wild hair. “His loss.”
As to whose, if anyone’s, gain, that remained to be seen.
In the new configuration of bedrooms, there was no question of keying doors to touch. Lazlo, determined that no one should ever be trapped if something happened to him, reconceived all the doors to open and close, lock and unlock like normal ones—with keys or crossbars.
He also made medallions for them all to wear, like the ones Kiska, Rook, and Werran had, so that they wouldn’t have to worry about losing their magic, no matter where they were.
There were discoveries to be made in the citadel, notably inside the seraph’s head, where they found Skathis’s treasure chamber. It was a flat-out marvel: a museum of alien currencies, with coins and gems and vials of curious dusts, whole barrels of eyes, from what creature they had no way of knowing, and crystals that gave off glints of amber light, and strands of pearls that floated like air bubbles. There were feathers and geodes, fabrics and maps, contraptions of arcane technology. It wasn’t terrible to find themselves in possession of an enormous otherworldly fortune.
There were new rooms, too: one for games, and not just quell; a full alchemical laboratory; and a library with books of actual ink on paper. Most were donated by the people of Weep—Amezrou—but there was one that had come from much farther away—though even that distance seemed humble now. Thyon, returning from a supply run, had approached Lazlo, stiff and shy, and thrust a book at his chest. “This is yours,” he’d said, half swallowing the word sorry.
Lazlo, taking the book, had discovered it to be none other than Miracles for Breakfast, the volume of tales he’d brought to the Chrysopoesium in what seemed quite another lifetime. His eyebrows shot up. “It’s not mine,” he said, flipping to the first page, where it was stamped Property of the Great Library of Zosma. “What would Master Hyrrokkin say if he knew the golden godson was stealing library books?”
“I didn’t bring the rest of your books,” Thyon said. “I’m sorry.” He did a better job with the word this time. “I had no right to take them.”
But Lazlo held no grudge. “Do you realize, Nero, that if you hadn’t come to my window in Weep that night with your shard of mesarthium, I’d never have stopped the citadel from falling, and we would all be dead?”
“Do you know, Strange,” returned Thyon, who was not about to take any credit, “that if you hadn’t given me the spirit from your veins, I wouldn’t have had a shard to begin with?”
“Well then,” said Lazlo, wry. “It’s a good thing we were always such excellent friends, working together for the good of all.”
It mightn’t have been true before, but perhaps it could be.
It took all their efforts to make the citadel a home that could shelter and sustain them. All trace of the gods was now gone—including their hideous clothing, left to molder down on the island, in the very cells that had once held the children they sired and sold—save this one: the ship’s new form, an homage to Korako, who may have been the one to take them from the nursery but had saved them, too, in more ways than they’d realized.
The eagle had dropped the kimril tubers that saved them from starvation, and for that they’d always been grateful. (Except Ruby, who declared she’d have preferred to starve.) But now they knew that Korako had also saved Lazlo as a baby. Skathis would have murdered him, as he had all babies with his gift, but Korako had gotten to him first, and, by way of Wraith, spirited him to Zosma—a sort of hidden key with which she’d hoped to one day unlock her prison.
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.”