If they were lucky, the citadel hadn’t gone far. The silk sleighs might have been a marvel in Zeru, but they wouldn’t do for protracted pursuit of a mesarthium ship through an unknown world or worlds. Their only hope was to catch up to it before it got away.

“And then what?”

Eril-Fane voiced the question, but they were all thinking it. If— when—they caught up to the citadel, what then? The invader, who they all now knew was Korako’s sister, had beaten them badly. What would be different this time?

“We’ll surprise them,” said Sarai, though that hardly constituted a plan. How could they plan when they didn’t know what they’d find, or even if they’d find anything at all? They could go through the portal and be greeted by the nightmare landscape, the white stalks growing out of the tempestuous red sea, but no citadel, and no idea which way to go.

“This enemy steals magic,” said Eril-Fane. “You can’t rely on your abilities. It wouldn’t hurt to have warriors with you.”

Azareen, by his side, went cold, but she was unsurprised. She knew by now that Eril-Fane would never be free of the past, never able to turn and face forward. She didn’t look at him, but stood rigid, braced to hear him offer himself up to die again for his sins.

“But not us,” he said, and she felt the warm weight of his hand on her back, and turned in shock to look up at him. “Our duty is here,” he said. “I hope you understand.”

“Of course I do,” said Sarai, who would not have let him come in any case. This wasn’t his fight. She hoped his fight was over, and anyway, it was best not to tempt Minya’s forbearance any further. Sarai knew better than to imagine she’d forgiven him. This could be just a game of quell in which she found herself outnumbered in enemy territory. Who was to say she wouldn’t yet seek her vengeance when she regained her advantage?

Azareen was blinking back tears. Sarai, moved, pretended not to notice. “We don’t need warriors,” she assured them.

“Can we come anyway?” someone asked.

Sarai turned to see two Tizerkane standing back, awkward and hesitant. She knew them, of course. She knew everyone in Weep. They were Ruza and Tzara. Lazlo’s friends.

“You want to come?” she asked, caught off guard. Lazlo had told her, despairing, how deep their hatred of godspawn ran.

“If you’ll have us,” said Ruza, looking uncomfortable. “If it were me gone missing, he’d come looking. Not that I’m special, I mean. He’d come looking for anyone.” He turned to the golden godson and wrinkled his nose with unconvincing distaste. “Even you.”

“I know he would,” said Thyon, who understood now, as he hadn’t before, what it was to help someone for no other reason than that they needed it. “Can I come, too?” he asked, afraid that the girl— the ghost—would reject him and that they would leave him behind.

And Sarai did hesitate. She had not forgotten what it was like inside his dreams—how airless and tight they were, like coffins. And she remembered him at Lazlo’s window, too, arguing, right before she died. His manner had been so guarded, so scathing and cold.

He seemed different now. Not to mention, he had saved her. “If you wish,” she said.

Calixte appealed to come, too, and was welcomed, and that made nine: five godspawn and four humans. Two silk sleighs and one cut in the sky. That was the math of their rescue operation, and there wasn’t a moment to lose.

Chapter 56

Pirates of the Devourer

In every world, the seraphim had cut two portals: a front door and a back door, so to speak—a way in from the previous world, and a way out to the next. When navigating the Continuum, there were two directions: not north and south, right and left, up and down, but al-Meliz and ez-Meliz. Toward Meliz, and away from Meliz. The seraph home world, where the Faerers’ journey had begun, was the only compass point that mattered.

The cut in the sky over Weep was Zeru’s ez-Meliz portal. The world on the other side was called Var Elient, and it was not all red sea and mist. But the red sea, called Arev Bael, went on for many weeks’ journey, and had eaten more ships than it had ever let pass. The seraph Thakra, in an age long gone, had dubbed it the Devourer, and balked— or so the story went—at destroying the monsters that swam in it.

Var Elient was a world whose point of pride was that its monsters were too monstrous for even gods to destroy.

And maybe they were, or maybe the Faerers had just been too tired after destroying Zeru’s beasts.

Only the foolhardy and desperate ever sailed the Devourer now that there were airships. There had been, for a long time, a high portal tax and a thriving transport business in flying outworlders to the island that wasn’t really an island, but a cut tezerl stalk—one of the vast white stalks that grew out of the sea. They used to come to buy magical children. It wasn’t a secret. No one in Var Elient could afford them themselves, but they had relied on the tax and the transport revenue. And then it all came to an end.

They blamed Nova, as well they might, since she was the one who crashed a stolen kite skiff on the island, slew the guards, and took over, killing on sight anyone who came after, and collecting their airships like it was a portal harbor.

But it wasn’t really her fault. The portal, which was Var Elient’s al-Meliz door, had closed before she got there, and stayed closed. Skathis’s auctions were over.

She had found three children in cages and freed them, but she had only freed them so far. She might have taken them somewhere else—anywhere else—so they could have some other life. But she chose to stay, and what could they do? She made the choice for them all, so that she could be near the portal when it reopened, as she never doubted it would.

And that is how Kiska, Werran, and Rook became pirates of the Devourer—“pirates” in the nonmagical sense—and grew up boarding and seizing airships over the roiling red sea. Perhaps Nova had bowed to fate, and determined to embody the word that defined her.

They were loyal to her in the blind way of saved children, but as they came home from Zeru in the godsmetal warship, they were not quite as blind as they had been before.

“That was Minya,” Kiska said under her breath as Nova guided the seraph down to their island, to moor it as though it were just another ship they’d seized for their fleet. “We just stole this ship from Minya.”

Werran shook his head. He might have believed it was her for a moment, but it was deniable after the fact. “How could it be? She’d be our age.” He was holding one arm gingerly against him, his wrist a mess from his ghost bite. “Whoever that was, was just a little girl.”

“Maybe she was Minya’s daughter,” said Rook. The math would have had her giving birth at fourteen or fifteen, which was uncomfortable, but not impossible.

“Don’t be stupid. You both know it was her.”

“So what if it was?” asked Werran with a belligerence born of discomfiture. “What are we supposed to do about it now?”

“Go back?” suggested Kiska, hugging her arms around herself and pacing. She’d shut off her gravity boots and they clicked against the metal floor with each step. “Make sure they’re all right?” The words all right nearly stuck in her throat. She darted an uneasy glance in Lazlo’s direction. He was lying deathly still with the crook of his arm flung across his face, concealing it. If what he had been saying— screaming—was true, then they were not all right.

“We can’t go back,” said Rook.

“Why not?” Kiska stopped pacing. “We have plenty of ships.”

“That’s hardly the point,” he said, shooting a look toward Nova. There was a pounding in the base of his skull, and his joints ached and his fingers were numb from the lightning blast that had thrown him. It reminded him of being five years old, in a cage, with guards teaching him what to be afraid of. Nova had freed him from that.

They all watched her and fell silent. She hadn’t said a word during the entire transition between worlds, and they hadn’t bothered her, for the ostensible reason that she had to concentrate to pilot the immense ship through the narrow gap. But that wasn’t the only reason. They didn’t like to admit it, even to themselves, but they were worried.

There was something unknowable and untouchable about Nova. They’d lived with her for most of their lives, but not for most of hers. They were twenty, twenty-one. She was...well, they didn’t know, but she was old. Her life reached deep into a past they couldn’t imagine. What they knew of her was like...like rain on the lid of a cistern. They couldn’t even see the dark water below, much less guess what it held. And sometimes her eyes were faraway, and sometimes they were murderous. She could be funny, and she could cut throats, and she could sink into silence for days. But whatever else she was, she was, above all, single-minded.

Nova had a purpose, or she’d had a purpose: to find her sister. So what would she do now?

The ship—citadel, seraph—came to a stop, and Nova moved for the first time in many minutes. She’d been floating out in the center of the room, the white bird gliding its endless circles around her, but now she turned and came toward where they were waiting in the door. Lazlo still lay on the walkway, and Kiska was glad to see Nova free him.

For all of half a second.

She released his legs from the metal, and he felt it, and flung his arm off his face to come upright, but even as he rose, two masses of godsmetal, each as big as his head, detached from the walkway and flew up to meld themselves around his upper arms and shoulders and lift him into the air so that he was suspended, feet dangling. “Let me go!” he said, hoarse from all his futile screaming. Nova went around him and he tried to grab at her but couldn’t reach, and she didn’t seem to notice or hear him holler. She just floated him along behind her.

Kiska, Rook, and Werran were three abreast in the doorway. They’d have to step aside to let her pass, but for the moment none of them moved. They looked from Lazlo’s grief-ravaged face to Nova’s, which was very weary, and...blankly benign. The wrongness of it held them all rooted as she slowed to a stop before them, waiting for them to step out of her way.