His brain presented this entire fantasy in roughly the time it took Strange to swing his leg across his creature’s back. As the party took flight, Thyon, earthbound, felt every choice he’d made, every action he’d taken, as a weight he carried with him. He wondered: Was it weight he could shed or throw off, or was it forever a part of him, as much as his bones and his hearts?

Chapter 32

All the Jagged Edges

Sarai knew her father well. Hundreds of times she’d perched moths on his brow, watched him sleep, and plagued him with nightmares. She’d traveled the pathways of his mind, and shuddered at the horrors there. She’d even seen him in the dreams of others—as a boy, a young husband, a hero. But she had never met him.

When she saw not one flying shape but four rising up from Weep, she knew who it must be, and backed away from the railing, a seethe of emotions filling her: fear, hope, shame, longing, each entangled in the roots of the others. She had hated him once. Minya had made sure of it. But the more time she spent spinning nightmares to torment him, the more she’d understood that the worst nightmare she could hope to conjure would pale beside the ones that already lived inside him. It wasn’t fear that ate him alive. Eril-Fane was brave; he could cope with fear. But guilt and shame were corrosive, and the great Godslayer was a husk.

Sarai had stopped hating him a long time ago, and ceased to plague him, too, though Minya had railed and ranted, called her a traitor and worse. But Sarai knew what she knew—what only she knew—and the greatest feat of strength she had ever witnessed was the one he performed every day: continuing to live for the sake of others, when it would be so much easier to stop.

Did she hope he would love her, be a father to her? No.

Yes.

But no. She knew what could only be known by sojourning in his mind: what Isagol had done to him—her mother, the beautiful, terrible goddess of despair. She had made him love her, and ruined love.

So Sarai smashed down the hopes that were trying to well up in her, even as she looked down at herself and transformed her slip into the respectable Weep costume that she’d worn in her dream. It would be enough if he managed to hide his abhorrence. That was what she told herself as he came.

. . .

Eril-Fane, on the gryphon with his mother riding behind him, was caught up in a memory of another ascent to the citadel. He hadn’t been astride a creature that time, but caught in the claws of one, plucked right off the street where he’d been walking with his bride. And though it was Skathis who’d taken him, all the horror of the memory was bound up in another. His horror belonged to her. The god of beasts had procured him as a plaything for his lover: Isagol, who was as queen to his fell king. How many years the pair had played their games, Eril-Fane had no way of knowing. Two hundred at least; that was how long they’d been here in this sky. Where before? They were immortal, were they not? They might have been ruining lives since time began, for all he knew.

How the citadel had loomed as they flew up toward it, so bright, so impossibly huge, and he had been... surprised. That was the overwhelming feeling, as Rasalas—the old, hideous version—dropped him into the garden like a piece of windfall fruit. It had all happened so fast. Eril-Fane had lived in fear of Azareen being taken, but he was the one on his knees in the garden of the gods.

And framed in an archway of the arcade was Isagol, waiting as though she had said to Skathis, Go and bring me back someone to play with.

Eril-Fane had seen her before, from a distance. He knew her red-brown hair and the band of black she painted across her eyes. He had witnessed the languid way she moved, as though she were bored and would always be bored, and despised the world because of it. His hatred of her was as old as himself, and as pure as his love for his wife. But as he knelt there, reeling with surprise, still not comprehending that his life as he knew it was over, he felt something else begin to stir in him.

It felt like...fascination.

That was how it began. Isagol sauntered toward him. Her hips moved in a way that was entirely unlike Azareen’s hips. The one, he found himself thinking, was like print: neat, economical, nothing to spare. The other was script: flowing and graceful, wasteful, hypnotic. One woman was a secret warrior, the other an evil goddess, and though Azareen wielded a hreshtek as though she’d been born to hold one, there was no doubt who was deadlier.

Isagol walked a circle around him, looking him over with interest. “Well done,” she said to Skathis.

“He’s in love,” the god of beasts told her. “I thought you’d like that.”

Her eyes brightened. “You’re too good to me.”

“I know.”

Skathis went inside, leaving them alone. Isagol was undefended. She came near enough to touch Eril-Fane and ran her fingers through his hair—softly at first—then she clasped it in a fist and jerked his head up to make him look at her. And...Thakra help him...Eril-Fane gazed at her, when he could have picked her up and heaved her right over the balustrade.

He remembered wanting to, but wanting...other things, too, and feeling sick with it, poisoned, turned inside out, exposed, as though she were rooting out darkness in him: desire and disfaith he’d never imagined himself capable of.

Because he wasn’t. It wasn’t him. He didn’t want her. And yet, he did.

This is what he was to learn: It didn’t matter if the feelings were his, or if she put them in him. Either way, they were real, and they would rule over him for the next three years, and all the years that came after.

She made him want her, and she made him love her. But, though she easily could have, she never took away his natural feelings. Isagol liked her pets dangerous. She was hard to thrill, and it excited her to keep them at war with themselves, ever walking a knife-edge between adoration and animus. That first day, she didn’t prevent him from hurling her over the balustrade. She simply made him desire her more than he desired her death, so that later—after—he would lie tangled in the silken sheets of her enormous bed, and believe in his bones that he had chosen this, that he had chosen her—over Azareen and fidelity, over justice and all that was good—that he chose her every moment he didn’t throttle her in her sleep, or gut her with the carving knife while serving her at table. She was an executioner by increments, a master of subtlety and tempter of fate, ever seeing how close she could slice the difference between hate and love.

Until one day she miscalculated and lost the game and her life.

And Eril-Fane had “won,” but it was a bitter victory. She had infested him, and infected him, and what he’d done in the aftermath could never be shriven.

Now he returned to the citadel, to meet the ghost of the daughter he had failed to murder on the day he turned savior and butcher.

Suheyla could feel her son shaking, and she wished she could eat his memories as Letha had eaten hers. She also had made this trip before—forty years earlier, though it all was a blank. She didn’t remember the approach, the loom of the citadel, the way it shone. It might have been her first time, but it wasn’t. She had lived up here a year, and returned home changed: minus a hand she didn’t remember losing, and also a baby she didn’t remember birthing—or conceiving or carrying, either. Aside from the signs of it on her body, it was as though it had never happened.

Some ten generations of the women of Weep had endured the same loss, or set of losses: time and memory, and all that the time and memory had held, including babies, so many babies. Mostly, Suheyla thought it a blessing not to have to remember. But other times she felt robbed of her pain, and thought she’d rather know everything. There was a sense among the women of Weep that they struggled with all their lives: that they were only partial people, the table scraps of the gods. That some part of them had been left behind in the citadel, or killed or devoured or snuffed out.

For Azareen it was different. She was in the citadel when it was liberated. It was her capture by Skathis that at last had stoked the rage that Eril-Fane needed. It was the sound of his wife’s screams that tipped the balance and freed him at last to murder the goddess he both loved and loathed. And once he’d begun, he was unstoppable. He slew them all. He slaughtered them, and so Letha ate no more memories. The women freed from the sinister arm remembered everything that had happened to them, and not only that. Many had godspawn growing inside them when they went back home.

Azareen was the opposite of Suheyla: She’d lost neither time nor memory. But that didn’t mean she was whole. No one was whole in the aftermath of the brutal occupation and its bloody end. Not in the city, not in the citadel. They had all lost far too much.

Lazlo had a sense of the colliding emotions on both sides of this meeting, but he knew that his understanding could barely scratch the surface.

He had flown on ahead, talked to Sarai and the others, gotten their agreement to bring the visitors. Now they were here. They dismounted. The garden seemed like a magical menagerie, with the gryphon, winged horse, and dragon joining Rasalas. Everyone on both sides was pale and wary. Lazlo introduced them, hoping to act as a bridge between them. He wondered if it was possible that all their jagged edges might fit together like puzzle pieces.

Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but wasn’t that the best kind?

He found himself talking too much, drawing the introductions out, because everyone was so silent.

Eril-Fane had meant to speak first. He had words all lined up in his head, but the sight of Sarai sent them scattering. In color and figure she was so like her mother. At first it was all he could see, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. But her features, so similar to Isagol’s, were wholly recast by what was in her hearts: compassion, mercy, love. These changed everything. He had been braced for her rightful anger and blame, but in her face he saw only her hesitant hope.

There was a signal beacon on the Cusp and another atop the garrison in Weep. When one flared alight, the other was lit in immediate response. That was what it was like in Eril-Fane’s chest when he saw Sarai’s hope. His own flared in answer. It hurt. It swelled inside him. It was the same species of hope as hers: fragile, and sullied by shame and fear.