It was hate.

It was reflex, like drawing your knife when your foe’s hand twitches. It pounded through her like blood, like spirit. Her hands tingled with it. The sun seemed to brighten, and everything became simple. This was what Minya knew: Have an enemy, be an enemy. Hate those who hate you. Hate them better. Hate them worse. Be the monster they fear the most. And whenever you can, and however you can, make them suffer.

The feeling welled up in her so swiftly. If she’d had fangs they’d be beaded with venom and ready to bite.

But .. .bite whom?

Hate whom?

These were her people. Everything she’d done for the past fifteen years had been for them. This is us, Sparrow had said. Us us us. But they were over there, looking at her like that, and she was no part of their us. She was outside it now, alone, apart. A sudden void opened up in her. Would they all betray her, as Sarai had, and...what would she do if they did?

“We don’t have to decide the whole course of our lives right this moment,” said Great Ellen. She fixed her gaze on Minya. Her eyes weren’t hawk-like now, but soft and velvety brown and filled with devoted compassion.

Inside Minya, something was coiled, growing tighter and tighter the more the others faced her down. Telling her what to do could only back her into a corner, where she would, like a trapped thing, fight to the bitter end. From the start, Lazlo had raised her hackles by coming out of nowhere like an impossible vision—a Mesarthim, astride Rasalas!—and ordering her to catch Sarai’s soul. As though she wouldn’t have on her own! The gall of him. It burned like acid. He’d even pinned her to the ground, Rasalas’s hoof hard on her chest. It ached, and she was sure a bruise was forming, but it was nothing next to her resentment. By compelling her by force to do what she’d been doing already, it was as though he’d won something, and she’d lost.

What if he’d asked instead? Please, won’t you catch Sarai’s soul? Or, better yet, trusted that she just would. Oh, it wouldn’t have been all how-do-you-do and sitting down to tea, but would Sarai be frozen in the air right now? Perhaps not.

And though Lazlo couldn’t be expected to know her, the others certainly should. But of them all, only Great Ellen understood what to do. “One thing at a time and first things first,” she said. “Why don’t you tell us, pet. What’s first?”

Instead of ordering, the nurse asked. She deferred to her, and let her choose, and the coiled thing in Minya relaxed just a little. It was fear, of course, though Minya did not know it. She believed it was rage, only and always rage, but that was the costume it wore, because fear was weakness, and she had vowed to never again be weak.

She might have replied that first they would kill Eril-Fane. It was what they expected. She could see it in their wariness. But she saw something else in them, too: a budding defiance. They had tested their voices against her, and they still had the taste in their mouths. It would be stupid to push them right now, and Minya was not stupid. In life, as in quell, direct attacks meet with the greatest resistance. It’s better to be oblique, lull them into lowering their defenses. So she took a step back and, with effort, grew calm.

“First,” she said, “we should see to Sarai.”

And with that, she let her go—her substance, not her soul. No tricks. She’d made her point.

Released from her grip, Sarai fell back to the ground. It was abrupt, and she collapsed to her knees. All those long moments she’d been held rigid, paralyzed, she’d been fighting it, probing for weakness. But there was no weakness. Minya’s hold on her had been absolute, and now that she was freed, she began to shake uncontrollably.

Lazlo rushed forward to hold her, murmuring in his gravelly voice. “You’re all right now,” he said. “I have you. We’ll save you, Sarai. We’ll find a way. We’ll save you.”

She didn’t answer. She rested against him, depleted, and all she could think was: How?

The others—except Minya—all clustered around, stroking her arms, her hair, asking if she was all right, and casting shy looks at Lazlo, who was, after all, the first living stranger to ever stand in their midst.

It was Sparrow, face clouded, who turned to Minya and asked, uncertain, “What did you mean by ‘see to her’?”

“Oh,” said Minya, screwing up her face as though the subject were regrettable. “As you were so kind to point out to me before, Sarai’s dead.” She fluttered her fingers toward the body. “We can’t just leave that lying there, can we? We’re going to have to burn it.”

Chapter 5

The Sting and the Ache

Burn it.

It shouldn’t have come as a shock, but it did. The soil in the garden was too shallow for burial, and of course Minya was right: You couldn’t just leave a body lying around. But they were none of them ready to face what must be done. It was all too raw, the body too real and too... Sarai.

“No,” said Lazlo, stricken pale. He still couldn’t reconcile the two of her. “We...we have her body and we have her soul. Can’t we just...put them back together?”

Minya raised her eyebrows. “Put them back together?” she parroted, her tone mocking. “What, like pouring an egg back into its shell?”

Great Ellen placed a quelling hand on her shoulder and told Lazlo, with utmost gentleness, “It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid.”

Sarai knew her body was beyond repair. Her hearts had been pierced, her spine shattered, but still she wished for this same miracle. “Weren’t there godspawn who could heal?” she asked, thinking of all the other magical children born in the citadel and vanished from it over the years.

“Indeed there were,” said the nurse. “But they’d do us no good. Death can’t be healed.”

“One who could bring back the dead, then,” she persisted. “Weren’t there any?”

“If there were, they’re no help to us now, bless them wherever they may be. There’s no saving your body, love. I’m sorry for it, but Minya’s right.”

“But to burn it,” said Ruby in soft panic, for it was she who would have to light the fire. “It’s so...permanent.”

“Death is permanent,” said Less Ellen, “while flesh very much is not.” She was less a force of nature than Great Ellen, but she was a steady presence with her calming hands and sweet voice. When they were small she had sung them lullabies from Weep. Now she said, “It’s best done soon. Nothing to be gained by waiting.”

The Ellens should know. They had tended their own murdered bodies once upon a time, and burned them in a pyre along with all the gods and babies who’d died that same dark day.

Sparrow knelt beside the corpse. The movement was sudden, as though her knees gave out. A compulsion forced her to put her hands on the body. Her gift was what it was. She made things grow. She was Orchid Witch, not a healer, but she could sense the pulse of life in plants even at its faintest, and had coaxed forth blooms from withered stalks that to anyone else would seem dead. If there was life yet in Sarai, she thought she would at least know. Hesitating, she reached out, her hands trembling as they came to rest on the bloodied blue skin. She closed her eyes and listened, or did something like listen. It was no ordinary sense, and was akin to the way Minya felt for the passage of spirits in the air.

But Minya had sensed the flutter of Sarai’s spirit and hooked it. Sparrow felt only a terrible echoing nothing.

She drew back her hands. They were shaking. She had never touched a dead body, and hoped she never would again. It was so inert, so... vacant. She wept for all that it would never do or feel, her tears following the dried salt paths left by many others since last night.

Watching her, the rest of them understood that this was final. Lazlo felt a sting behind his eyes and an ache in his hearts, and so did Sarai, even though she understood that her eyes, her hearts, weren’t real, and so neither were the sting and the ache.

Ruby sobbed, turning to Feral to crush her face to his chest. He spread one big hand over the back of her head, his fingers disappearing in her wild dark hair, and bent over her to hide his face while his shoulders shook in silence.

The Ellens wept, too. Only Minya’s eyes were dry.

Lazlo alone caught the moment that she glanced down at the body in the flowers and looked, for an instant, like an actual child. Her eyes weren’t beetle shells then, and they weren’t ablaze with triumph. They were...lost, as though she hardly knew what she was seeing. And then she felt him watching and it was over. Her gaze slashed to meet his and there was nothing in it but challenge.

“Clean this up,” she told them, with a wave of her hand dismissing the corpse as naught but a mess in need of tidying. “Say good-bye. Do what you need to do. We’ll discuss Weep once you’ve finished.” She turned away. It was clear she intended to stalk off without another word, but was thwarted by the arcade, which Lazlo had earlier closed to trap her army. “You,” she commanded without looking back. “Open the doors.”

Lazlo did. As he had melted them closed, so did he melt them back open. It was the first time he’d done it in a state of calm, all else having happened in a blur of desperation, and he marveled at the ease of it. The mesarthium responded to his merest urging, and a small thrill ran through him.

I have power, he thought, amazed.

When the archways had been restored, he saw the ghost army waiting within, and worried that Minya would renew her attack, but she didn’t. She just walked away.

He had, in his hearts, declared war on the dark child, but Lazlo was no warrior, and his hearts had no talent for hate. As he watched her go, so small and all alone, a moment of clarity shattered him. She might be savage, beyond redemption, broken beyond repair. But if they wanted to save Sarai and Weep...they had to save her first.

Chapter 6

Every One Cried “Monster”

Minya pushed through the clot of her ghosts. She could have moved them aside to clear a path for herself, but it suited her just now to shove. “Back to your posts,” she commanded, harsh, and they immediately moved off to take up their prior positions throughout the citadel.