Eril-Fane admitted, “I’ve been better. I hoped you’d come. Tell me now, Lazlo. Are we in danger?”

“No,” Lazlo answered, and was profoundly grateful that it was true. If it weren’t for Ruby and Sparrow drugging Minya, he would have landed here saddled with the decision of who to save and who to sacrifice.

From Azareen issued a sound of disbelief. “So everything’s just fine now? Is that what you’re telling us?”

He shook his head. “I’m telling you that you’re not in danger. That doesn’t mean everything’s fine.” He saw her wariness, and couldn’t blame her for it. As succinctly as he could, he apprised them of the situation:

That Sarai was dead, but not gone. That her soul was bound by an ageless little girl, the same one who held all the ghosts in thrall, and who had attacked their silk sleigh. That the girl alone of the godspawn possessed a will for vengeance, and that she was drugged now, unconscious, buying them time to come up with a plan.

“Kill her,” said Azareen. “There’s your plan.”

“Azareen,” Eril-Fane reproached.

“You know I’m right,” she said, then told Lazlo, “She wants revenge, and you want to protect us? Go back up there and kill her.”

“Azareen,” repeated Eril-Fane. “That cannot be the only answer.”

“Sometimes it is. As it was for Isagol, Skathis, and the rest. Sometimes killing is the only answer.”

Harsh as it was, Lazlo supposed it must be true, that some people were beyond all hope of redemption, and would only cause grief and suffering as long as they were allowed to live. “I hope this is not one of those times,” he said. Reasons ran rampant in his mind. She is a survivor. She is what you made her. She is my sister. But he only said, “She holds Sarai’s soul in the world. If she dies, Sarai will be lost.”

This quelled Azareen’s insistence. She clamped her mouth shut and remembered the way Eril-Fane had fallen to his knees and wept at the sight of his dead daughter. If it truly came down to a choice between godspawn and humans, well, then she would do what needed to be done. But she knew that if it came to that, it would spell an end to any hope, however remote, of her husband reclaiming his right to live and be happy.

“Her name is Minya,” Lazlo told them, hoping to make her real to them. “She was the oldest in the nursery when...Well. She saved four babies.” His eyes flickered to Eril-Fane. It all led back to the Carnage, and it felt like blame to say so. “She...she heard everything.”

“Don’t try to spare me,” said Eril-Fane, grim. “I know what I did. And now she wants revenge. Who can blame her?”

“I can.” said Azareen. “We’ve endured enough. Sacrificed enough!”

A new voice answered, “That’s seldom our decision to make.” It was Suheyla. When she’d witnessed Lazlo’s descent, she’d been headed for the garrison already, with a stack of her big discs of flat-bread, wrapped in a cloth and still hot, balanced on her head. Now she regarded him from under her burden. This was her first sight of him blue, and it jarred her less than she’d feared it would, perhaps because she’d braced herself. Or maybe it was just that his face was still his face, his eyes still his eyes—guileless, earnest, and full of hope. “Look at you,” she said, lowering her bread to the ground. “Who’d have thought?” And she held out her hand to him.

He took it, and she laid her other—her tapered wrist where once a hand had been—atop it and gave a squeeze. It reminded him of the sacrifices the people of Weep had made, and also of their resilience. “I was as surprised as anyone,” he said. “I’m sorry to have left without saying good-bye.”

“Sometimes these things are beyond our control. Now, what’s this about my granddaughter’s soul?”

Granddaughter. There was claiming in that word, and Lazlo experienced a keen pang of hope on Sarai’s behalf. He knew what it would mean to her to be claimed as family. He answered Suheyla. He couldn’t see, as others could, the way he looked when he spoke of Sarai, or know the effect it had on them—as though the idea of her was translated through his love and wonder, and all their associations with “godspawn” were called into question.

“She’s been going into Minya’s dreams,” he said. “She thinks she’s trapped, somehow, by the past. We hope that she can help her to finally be free of...of what happened that day.”

It struck Azareen and Suheyla perhaps more even than the two men: that the little girl was a counterpoint to Eril-Fane, both of them trapped by the same horrific day, both of them saviors, and both broken. Azareen swallowed hard, and was prey to an echo of yesterday’s omen: the white bird and its shadow, and the sense that fate was hunting, and had already picked out its quarry.

No. It couldn’t have him.

“So take the citadel away,” she blurted, her voice thrumming at the border of passion and desperation. “If you can’t kill her, at least do that, and let us be free, too.”

A silence followed her words as the others took them in. Eril-Fane spoke first. “We need to bring our people home,” he told Lazlo, who saw shame in his face as though it pained him to ask them to leave, as indeed it did. But his first duty had to be to his people, and his city.

Lazlo nodded. This was, after all, why he’d come here: to help Weep solve this very problem, little suspecting, at the time, that he was the only one who could. With Minya unconscious, there was no real impediment. “That’s fair,” he said, and, at the prospect of pulling up anchor and moving the whole citadel, felt both apprehension and excitement. Move it where?

The answer that came to him was... anywhere.

Apprehension fell away. Lazlo let the realization fill him: that he was in possession of a magical metal palace he could shape with his mind—a magical flying metal palace he could shape with his mind—and for the first time in his life, he had a kind of family, and together they had...the world, the whole world, and time. That was crucial. They had time.

“I’ll ask the others,” he said.

“You’re the one who can move it,” Azareen insisted. “It’s your choice.”

Lazlo shook his head. “Just because the power is mine, it doesn’t follow that all the choices are.” But he saw that Azareen’s harshness was stemming not from hate of the godspawn, but worry. Her stern, lovely features were pinched with it, and her hands were clasping and unclasping, unable to be still. “But I think they’ll agree,” he told her. “Sarai already pleaded with Minya to consider it.”

There wasn’t much more to say. Lazlo would return to the citadel and talk to the others, then come back and relay their decision. He was concerned about the anchors, and whether there might be damage to surrounding structures when he lifted them up. At least the city was empty. There would be no risk of injuries, but Eril-Fane said he would send soldiers to make sure the areas were clear.

“We could use supplies for a journey,” Lazlo said. “There’s not much to eat up there.” He gestured to his clothes. “Or to wear.”

“We can do that,” said Eril-Fane.

Azareen almost felt relief—to be so nearly free of the citadel and godspawn. At least, she sensed what it might feel like, but she wasn’t ready to trust it, not until the sky was clear, and maybe not even then. Did she remember how to feel relief? If anything, she was holding her breath, waiting for the words she already knew that Eril-Fane would speak.

“Do you think...Can I meet her?” he asked, hesitant. “Can I come up with you?”

Lazlo already knew how Sarai yearned for her father to want to know her, so he nodded, and didn’t try to speak for fear that emotion would overcome him.

“And I as well,” said Suheyla.

Azareen wanted to scream. Didn’t they feel it, Fate’s bowstring drawing taut? She tried to dissuade them. “Just let them leave,” she pleaded. “Don’t go back up there.”

But the Godslayer’s burden of guilt and shame would not permit him to evict the survivors of his own bloodbath as though they were a nuisance, without at least going himself to face them—face her, his daughter—and take responsibility, and give her a place to put all the blame she had to have been carrying all this time. He owed her that at least. He could stand there and accept the weight of her blame, and hope it left her lightened.

He passed temporary command to a captain named Brishan, and gave orders to his quartermaster to begin drawing up lists to provision the citadel.

The four of them could have fit astride Rasalas if it came to it, but such inelegance was unnecessary. The creature was the beast of the north anchor. There were three more anchors and a beast for each, and Lazlo reached out into the scheme of energies, feeling for them and waking them as he had awakened Rasalas. It was easier now. He didn’t even need to be near them, or see them. He had the feeling that his power was growing all the time. He reached and they responded, each quickening, and, like Rasalas, transforming at the touch of his mind into his creatures, so that what Skathis had made hideous became beautiful.

By the time they landed beside Rasalas, they were no longer the grotesques that had glowered over the city.

Thyon, coming out through the guardhouse with Ruza, Tzara, and Calixte, saw them, and thought they looked like they had flown straight out of the illustrations in Miracles for Breakfast, the fairy-tale book that, once upon a time, Strange had brought him in good faith, and he had kept, in bad. There was a winged horse, a dragon, and a gryphon, all exquisite.

A stir went through the Tizerkane, but their fear couldn’t properly kindle. These were not the beasts of their nightmares.

They mounted: Azareen astride the horse, and Suheyla behind her son on the gryphon, leaving the dragon riderless.

Inside of a second, Thyon’s mind flashed before him an alternate history of his own life, in which he thanked the boy who brought him a fairy-tale book at dawn, instead of scorning him and pushing him down stairs. And later, instead of threatening him and stealing his books, and trying to steal his dream, he might have introduced him to the Godslayer himself, and recommended him for the delegation. If he had done these things, all of which, he had no doubt, Strange would have done in his place, then might he be mounting that metal dragon now, and flying up to the citadel with them?