by Laini Taylor
“Tell me about her,” she urged, to keep her talking—as though it could keep her from doing anything else, like waking up or shattering into a million pieces. “What was she like?” As soon as the past tense slipped out of her mouth, she tensed and added hastily, “Before, I mean.”
Nova was on the edge, but she let the slip pass. “Before” made sense to her in a profound way. Before Skathis, before blue skin, before they were torn apart. “She was Kora,” she answered, as though everything was in the word, and, in the way of dreams, everything was.
Nova gave Kora to Sarai in the same way that Lazlo had given her cake and expanded the boundaries of pleasure: through this medium of joined minds that was Sarai’s gift. Memories washed over her. She saw two motherless girls in a barren world who were more real to each other than reflections in a mirror. Indeed, they had no mirrors where they came from, and each imagined the other’s face as her own. Sarai felt what it had meant to be half of a whole, and to trust in a voice that would never fail to answer. The memories sank into her.
She learned the stench of uuls and the sting of Skoyë’s slap, and she saw the glint of a ship in the sky and understood what it meant. She saw Skathis when he was just a minor imperial officer in the home world he would later leave in anarchy and chaos. And...
She saw Wraith emerge from Kora’s chest.
It startled her. Eril-Fane had said that Wraith came out of Kora, but Sarai hadn’t been able to imagine it. The bird was so big it hardly seemed possible that it could come out of so slight a girl, and even less so that it could return, but it did. It poured out of her chest like a ghost, and melted back in like a soul returning to its body.
It wasn’t a ghost. They’d always known that. It was more like Sarai’s own moths had been. “Korako’s gift was always a mystery to
us,” she told Nova. “I never knew it was like mine.”
Nova looked at her sharply. “You’re an astral?”
“A what?” Apologetic, Sarai explained, “No one ever taught us about our gifts. We were all alone here.”
“No one ever taught me, either,” said Nova, and she didn’t need to add that she’d been all alone, too. “Astral means ‘of the stars.’ It’s someone who can send their soul out of their body.”
Of the stars. Sarai liked that. She wanted to tell Lazlo. “Mine was moths,” she said. “A hundred of them.” Wrinkling up her nose, she added, “They flew out of my mouth.”
Nova’s eyes went wide, and Sarai had to smile. “I know it sounds terrible,” she said, “but it wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t?” asked Nova, noting the tense.
Slowly, Sarai nodded. For a moment she indulged herself in imagining a future in which she would meet new people and have to decide if and when to tell them, By the way, I’m not exactly alive. To Nova, she said simply, “I died, and my gift changed. I suppose I’m not an astral anymore. I’m not sure what I am now,” she admitted. “Besides a ghost.”
Nova looked at her as though it finally made sense, how Sarai had been able to turn into smoke, and all the rest of it. “You’re a ghost,” she said.
Sarai nodded. She kept thinking of Wraith melting in Kora’s chest. She remembered the burgeoning sensation in her own every night just after sunset. Astral, she thought with amazement. There was a name for it, because there were more of them—more god-spawn like her, and Kora had been one of them.
A wild thought took hold of her.
Abruptly, without leaving the dream, she shifted part of her awareness back to reality. With her moths, it had been seamless, shifting among the hundred of them with the mad choreography of a flock of swifts. She hadn’t tried splitting her attention since she’d lost them. It made for a strange twinning: the real room and the dream room, both at the same time. Nova was still cradling her head on one arm, and Wraith was still there, perched on her chairback, watching Sarai’s every move.
Sarai stared into the bird’s eyes and murmured, thoughtful, “Why are you still here?”
Words came back to her from her own earlier musing: A shred, an echo. Both of those sounded haphazard, but could it really be chance, that the bird remained?
A dying wish, that was more intriguing.
A message in a bottle, she thought, and it lit up her mind like the moment the setting sun touches the sea. Was she mad or brilliant? There was one way to find out. Did she dare? Was it possible? She was a ghost and Wraith was a...a left-behind piece of a soul? Who knew what arcane rules governed the likes of them. Holding the bird’s gaze, Sarai put her hand to her own chest, in the same spot where she had seen it melt into Kora’s, and she tapped her breastbone in invitation.
The bird understood. It didn’t hesitate. Its look sharpened and it dove. Sarai was overwhelmed by a rush of white. It felt like wind blowing into her through an open window—right into the very core of her.
From the archway, Minya, Thyon, and all the rest saw it happen. At first, they thought Wraith had lost patience with Sarai’s trespass. They gasped. Ruza started forward, his hreshtek in his hand, as though he would be able to defend her. Minya convulsively tightened her grip on Sarai’s tether, lest it be tugged from her grasp. Then Wraith flew at the very center of Sarai’s chest and they could do nothing but watch. Its vast wings folded back, and it vanished into her like inhaled smoke. Her back arched. Her head snapped back. Her feet weren’t touching the floor. Before anyone understood what was happening, Wraith had disappeared into Sarai.
“That can’t be good,” breathed Ruby, shocked.
Or, then again, maybe it could.
Chapter 61
Message in a Bottle
Just the other night, Sarai had swum in the sea with Lazlo in a dream, and found a floating bottle with a message inside. She had spotted it bobbing in a patch of phosphorescence, shaken out the rolled page, and read: Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.
That was ink on parchment, preserved in glass, all of it delivered in a dream.
This was memory and emotion, preserved in...Well, if anywhere in the layered worlds there existed scholars of godsmetal and its gifts, perhaps they could explain, beyond merely “Magic.” But “magic” will do.
When Wraith poured into Sarai, Kora appeared in the dream.
She was a phantasm, of course, but not of Sarai’s making. She looked like the woman Sarai had seen in the nursery doorway—she was even wearing the mesarthium collar—but she also didn’t look like her, because that woman had been blank-faced and stiff, and this one was anything but. There was so much in her expression, a lifetime’s worth of feeling—many lifetimes’ worth—concentrated into a moment. Fear was vying with courage, and courage was winning. Danger pulsed all around her. There was a feeling of having raced through a labyrinth and found only dead ends—a labyrinth with no solution. She was striving to face her last moments with grace, and there was sorrow, and regret, and there was longing, and yearning, and love.
So much love. Her eyes shone with it, and it was all for Nova.
As soon as Nova saw her, her hands flew to her mouth, one atop the other, as though to hold her sobbing in, because immediately her tears spilled over and her shoulders were shaking and her eyes were shining. “Kora?” she asked in a sweetly hesitant voice that knocked the centuries of hardship and bitterness off her, so that she seemed more like the girl who had crossed a frozen sea more than two hundred years ago. “Is it really you?”
Kora, or this phantasm of her, said, “My love, my own heart, I don’t have much time.”
She went to her and took her by the shoulders and just looked at her as though to fill herself up with the sight. Nova looked back at her the same way, and here, after all these years, was the face that was truer than a mirror—similar to her own, but not a copy. They weren’t twins, and...
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. Apart, each had been like a cry into empty space, no walls to throw an echo back. There had been no way to get back, only decades of hurtling headlong in silence, no reflection, no echo, no self.
Now they drank each other in and filled each other up, and Kora’s phantasm—this little piece of herself she’d managed to leave behind—spoke.
“I don’t have much time,” she said again, and licked her lips, and doom hung on her like a shawl. “I so desperately wanted to be here when you came. I always, always knew you would. I never doubted you for one second in two centuries. I could feel you out there, trying, and it broke my heart every day. From the moment I sent you the diadem and the letter, I knew you wouldn’t give up on me.” She let out a little choked sob. “And not a day of my life has passed that I haven’t been sorry. I’m so sorry, my Novali. Can you ever forgive me? I was so selfish. I knew you could make it to Aqa and save me, and we could kill that monster”—for an instant, her pretty face contorted with savage hatred that Sarai thought could only be for Skathis—“and we could be together and do anything.” Like a stanza of a poem worn soft with repetition, she whispered, “As blue as sapphires and glaciers, and as beautiful as stars.” Tears streaked her face. “But he took me away.”
She was holding Nova’s hands now, clasping them tight. “He took me out of the world, and then I knew that what I’d asked of you was impossible. And I knew that you’d do it anyway, and that I’d ruined your life.”
“You didn’t ruin my life,” said Nova, fierce. “He did, when he took you and left me in the dirt. And our father did. Rieva did. You gave me a life, with the diadem. A purpose. Do you think I could have stayed there and had that old man’s babies? I’d have walked straight into the sea. Kora, it knew my name. It called to me. The only thing that kept me alive was knowing that you were out there, and you needed me.”
Back in the wasp ship all those years ago, when Nova’s gift had erupted and gone wild, it was Kora who’d brought her back to herself, her sister’s voice like a rope thrown into a churning sea. And that was what her purpose had been like, all this time, and what Kora’s phantasm was now: a rope thrown into a sea, saving Nova from drowning.
“And the only thing that kept me alive was knowing you would come,” said Kora. “I couldn’t bear the thought that you’d get all the way here and find me gone.”
There was a half beat of silence, and then Nova asked, in a child’s broken whisper, devastated, unbearable, “Are you gone?”
And Kora, sobbing, her blue face shining like wet lapis, said, “Oh my Nova. I am.”
Sarai, standing back, watching, was overcome by the sisters’ welling grief. She was sobbing, too.
“No.” The word was pulled, twisting, out of the depths of Nova’s soul. Her treacherous whisper had always been right. “I was too late,” she said, weeping. “I’m sorry, Kora.”
“No,” said Kora with tigress ferocity. “What I asked of you was impossible. How could a girl from nowhere, with nothing, cross dozens of worlds all on her own?”
“It wasn’t impossible,” said Nova. “I did it! Which only means I could have done it faster.”
Kora was shaking her head. “It’s not your fault. I should have gotten free and found you. I should have been stronger.”
“It isn’t weak to ask for help.”
“It’s weak not to help yourself. But I tried. Nova, I almost did it. In a few more years I’d have been free. I stole a smith baby before Skathis could kill him. I took him and hid him far away, so that when he was older I could end Skathis and not be trapped on the wrong side of a portal. I would have found you. But I ran out of time.”
“I know,” said Nova, teeth gritted, because she had seen Kora’s death in her murderer’s own memory.
“I’m running out of time right now,” Kora said, and Sarai was pierced by her urgency. “Nova, listen to me. If you’re here, then you’ll know what became of me, and also...what I became.” Shame clung to her words. “I know you would have been stronger. You’d have saved all those children instead of helping sell them. My love, I know you’ll be angry, but I want you to listen to me. 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.”
Kora wrapped her arms around Nova, and Sarai caught a glimpse of Nova’s stricken face before she buried it in her sister’s shoulder and gave in to racking sobs. And as heartbreaking as that was, it was far worse when Kora faded—the phantasm faded, its energy expended in the fulfillment of its purpose—and left Nova sobbing alone. Alone again, truly and forever.
Sarai was standing, devastated, in the dream, her arms wrapped around herself, her face slick with tears. Nova met her eyes, and Sarai felt like she was falling with her into the black place inside her. There could be no denial after this. Kora was gone and Nova knew it.
“I’m sorry,” Sarai whispered.
Nova’s face crumpled and she curled over herself, the pain too much to bear. She shook her head from side to side, saying, “No, no,” but it wasn’t denial anymore. It was devastation. Her eyes were frenzied, mad with loss. Had the ice given way? Would she drag them all down with her?
Hearts hammering with fear, Sarai made an effort to infuse the dream aura with a feeling of calm. “She loved you very much,” she said. “She never doubted you. She knew you would do the impossible for her. Do you know how rare it is, to trust someone like that?”
“I already killed them,” said Nova.
Sarai didn’t know who she meant. All those faces under the ice. She had killed so many people.
“She said no vengeance,” said Nova, rigid with the horror of what she had done, “but I already killed them.”
Sarai understood in a rush. “Oh! No,” she said. “They’re alive. Sparrow saved them,” and Nova’s eyes closed—not squeezed shut, but softly, with unmistakable relief. “Really?” she asked, as though it were too much to hope that this small portion of her burden might lift.
“Really,” Sarai told her, a little of her tension cautiously ebbing. If Nova was feeling remorse for that, then maybe her sister’s words had gotten through to her. “He’s my father, the one who...” She trailed off. “He also did terrible things to save the people he loved. It wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t Kora’s, or yours. It was the gods, like a canker at the center of everything. But they’re gone. Let the ugliness die with them.”
Let all the ugliness end here, Kora’s phantasm had said.
“Can you?” Sarai asked. “Please?” There was a note of desperation in her voice as she thought of Lazlo, caged, and Rook, Kiska, and Werran trapped, and all the others as good as trapped, too, all of them at Nova’s mercy, and all depending on her. Nova heard the note in her voice, too, and understood it—and the reason for it. Here, in the dream, she’d been lost in the past. Now, suddenly, she recollected the present, and the dream split in half and spilled them both out.
Nova lurched awake and came upright, twisting free of Sarai’s light touch and turning, rising, all in one movement to face her. They were both breathing fast. The truth ached between them like a heart, but things were different in the waking world. Their communion had evaporated, that had allowed them to feel what the other was feeling, and understand each other, beyond all language barriers. Sarai couldn’t tell what Nova was thinking.
She held very still, as though she were facing a wounded predator, unpredictable in its pain and its power. She was conscious that Tzara’s arrow must be trained on Nova, ready to fly, and she was desperate that it not. She wanted to turn her head or call out, but she was afraid to
take her eyes off Nova, or to alert her to the others’ presence if she hadn’t already noticed them. So she only turned one hand toward the arcade, palm out, and silently willed them: Hold.
Her gaze flickered to Lazlo in his cage, and Nova’s followed. Nova winced when she beheld the tableau and had to reckon with what she’d done, then she flicked out a hand to open the loop. The iridescent bubble evaporated and Kiska and Rook were free. They stumbled, disoriented. Rook’s hand was still raised, ready to draw a loop of his own, but he stopped when he saw Sarai, and blinked.
Next, the serpent’s jaws opened and spilled Werran out before the creature collapsed back into the floor, leaving nothing but smooth mesarthium.
And then Lazlo.
The cage swelled as it sank, releasing him slowly as it melted away and set him down on the floor. Sarai flew to him. She caught him in her arms. His face was a rictus of pain, his limbs cramped in the position they’d held for so long. She helped him lift his head, and she set her brow against his and breathed his breath and kissed his perfect imperfect nose that stories had left their mark on, as they had left their mark in him.
“You’re still here,” he whispered like a prayer. His voice was ravaged. It sounded like he’d screamed until he wore his throat bloody, and Sarai realized he had believed she’d evanesced. He touched her face as though to make sure he wasn’t imagining her. “Are you all right?” He looked at her and looked as though he couldn’t get enough of looking, as though he’d been saving all his witchlight, and then he was crying, and she was crying, and he was smiling and he was slowly unfolding his limbs, wincing, and Sarai’s hearts felt as though all her moths and Wraith were living inside her chest, and a sweet wind had caught them and sent them all spinning.
Rook and Kiska were helping Werran to sit up. He was drawing deep, heaving breaths into his lungs. In the archway, the others were wary, glancing back and forth between Sarai and Lazlo, Kiska, Rook, and Werran, and Nova, who stood alone. Tzara had not lowered her bow.
