Days of Blood & Starlight(110)

“I’m going to be the scariest grandma in the world,” she muttered, grouchy and kind of looking forward to it.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She flipped over and buried her face in her pillow. She screamed into it, got a mouthful of musty hotel pillow, and instantly wanted to bathe her tongue in running water. Of course the pillowcase had been washed since the last occupant, she told herself. Of course. That was why it tasted like stale stranger head.

Mik’s hand was on her back, making slow circles. She turned her face to him.

“I’m finger-painting with your sweat,” he informed her. “That was a heart.”

“A sweat heart. How romantic.”

“Oh, you want romantic? Okay. What does this spell?”

She felt his fingertip slide over her skin, and spoke each letter as it formed. “Z-U-Z-A-N-A. Zuzana. W-I-L-L. Will. Y-O-U.” She paused. “You.” She lay very still, listening with her skin for the next letter. “M.” Her voice dropped. She watched Mik’s face. He was smiling to himself, mischievous, his eyes on his work. Strawberry stubble covered his jaw. A beam of sunshine slipped through a broken slat in the shutter and glanced across his eyelashes; they looked dusted with light.

“A.” Zuzana said. Oh god. Zuzana will you M-A—

Her heart pounded. Could he feel it through her back? When they’d talked about marriage back in Prague she’d been dismissive. Well. She’d been embarrassed to have been caught thinking about it; that wasn’t who she was, some flit girl who dreamed of wedding gowns, and she was just way too young.

R, she felt. “R,” she whispered.

Mik’s hand fell still. “Wrong,” he said. “That was a K.”

“K? That’s not how you spell—” She cut herself off.

“How you spell what?” Mik’s voice was teasing. “I was writing Zuzana will you make me a sandwich? What did you think?”

She jerked her shirt down over her back. “Nothing,” she said, rolling off the bed.

Mik caught her around the waist and dragged her back. “You didn’t think—? Oh. How embarrassing for you.”

Her face was hot. He’d done it again. Jesus. Apparently she was a flit girl who dreamed of wedding gowns. “Let me go,” she said.

But he didn’t. He held her. “I can’t ask you that yet,” he whispered in her ear. “I still have two tasks left.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not joking.” He sounded serious, and when she looked up at him, at his sweet, earnest face, he looked serious. “Were you?” he asked.

Well, yes, she had been joking about the three tasks. Seriously. She wasn’t a fairy-tale princess. Only, she kind of felt like one right now, and it wasn’t the worst feeling she’d ever had. “No,” she said; she stopped trying to get away. “I wasn’t joking, and here’s your second task. Get the air-conditioning back on, so you can cure my ennui.”





75


IT WAS NEAR AND IT WAS WINGS


Karou was in her room. It was night. Again. A day had passed since the pit. Somehow.

The door was closed, but Mik’s planks were gone. They had taken them, and the shutter bolts, too, and her safety, which, it was now clear, had never been more than an illusion.

She pictured the moon’s racing swerve around the world, and the world’s hurtling course around the sun, and the glitter of the stars in their arcs—but… no. That was illusion, too, just as the rising and setting of the sun was a trick. It was the world that moved, not the stars, not the sun. The sky moved, panning across that vastness as it rolled through space, hurtling end over end, and that hurtling was what kept her pinned here. One of billions.

It doesn’t matter what happens to me, she told herself. I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free. As Brimstone is free.

Stardust. This was science, she had heard it and read it—all matter came from the explosions of stars—but it sounded like the humans’ own version of Eretz myths. A little drier, maybe: no rapist sun, no weeping moon. No stabbing moon. That was the Kirin story: The sun had tried to take Ellai by force and she had stabbed him as Karou had stabbed Thiago. Nitid had wept, and her tears became chimaera. Children of regret.

Karou wondered: Had Ellai wept? Had she bathed in the sea and tried to feel clean again? That could have been part of the story: Her tears gave the seas their salt, and everything in the world was born of violence, betrayal, and grief.

Karou had bathed in the river. Her tears wouldn’t make it to the sea; they would water date palms in some oasis; they would become fruit and be eaten, and perhaps be wept again through other eyes.

That’s not how it works.

Yes, it is. Nothing is ever lost. Not even tears.

What about hope?

She was as clean as it was possible to be without hot water and soap. She had submerged herself in the rushing water until her arms and legs were numb, her bruised, torn skin scrubbed free of blood—her own blood and… not only her own blood. Not even mostly.

And not only Thiago’s, either.

She heard a sound and it was near and it was wings.

She jolted her mind from the memory like it was a face she could slap.