He was, and he could have done well enough without supper, but he made himself pause. Sarai was her grandchild, after all, her only one. He’d been angry that morning that she and Eril-Fane hadn’t met the news of her existence gladly, but in light of what the Tizerkane reaction had been, he saw that theirs had been generous, if honest. He tried to appreciate what this all meant for her.

She set out bowls of soup and hung a fresh disc of bread from the big hook. It had seeds and petals baked into it in a pattern of overlapping circles—a light meal, maybe, but she must have spent hours on it. Usually she was effortlessly chatty, but not tonight. He saw a shy but shamefaced curiosity in her, and several times she’d seemed about to speak, and then think better of it.

“The other day,” he said, “you told me just to ask. Now it’s my turn. It’s all right. You can ask.”

Her voice was timorous. “Does . . . does she hate us very much?”

“No,” he said, “she doesn’t hate you at all,” and he felt confident that it was true. She’d talked of the paradox at the core of her being, and the curse of knowing one’s enemies too well to be able to hate them. “Maybe she used to, but not anymore.” He wanted to tell her that Sarai understood, but that absolution could come only from Sarai.

He ate fast, and Suheyla made him tea. He declined it at first, eager to go, but she said it would help him fall asleep faster.

“Oh. Then that would be wonderful.”

He drained it in a gulp, thanked her, paused to press her hand, and went at last to his room. He opened the door and . . . halted on the threshold.

Moths.

Moths were perched on the wooden headboard and the pillows and the wall behind the bed, and when the door opened, they lifted into the air like leaves stirred by a wind.

Sarai, he thought. He didn’t know what to make of their numbers. They overwhelmed him, not with fear—or, gods forbid, disgust—but with awe, and a prickle of dread.

Maybe he brought all the dread with him from the guard station and the brutal, bloody words of his friends, and maybe the moths brought some of it on their furred twilight wings. He understood one thing in the swirl of creatures: Sarai was waiting for him.

He closed the door. He would have washed and shaved his face, cleaned his teeth, brushed his hair, changed. He blushed at the thought of taking off his shirt, though he knew she’d seen him sleeping that way before. He settled for brushing his teeth and taking off his boots, and then he lay down. Overhead, moths clustered on the ceiling beam like a branch in dark bloom.

He realized, once he was settled, that he’d left enough room on the bed for Sarai—on the side she’d chosen in the dream—though all that was needed was his brow for her moths to perch on. Some other time it might have made him laugh at himself, but not tonight. Tonight he only felt her absence from a world that didn’t want her.

He didn’t move over, but closed his eyes, feeling the moths all around him—Sarai all around him. He was breathless for sleep to come so that he could be with her, and tonight there was no euphoria keeping him awake. There was only a slow sinking, and soon enough—

The moth, the brow.

The threshold of the dream.

Sarai found herself in the amphitheater market. She craved the color and sweetness of Dreamer’s Weep, as she thought of it, but here were neither. The place was empty. A wind scoured through, blowing scraps of refuse past her ankles, and a terrible pit of fear opened in her. Where was all the color? There should have been silks fluttering, music in the air, and laughter drifting down from the children on their high wires. There were no children on the high wires, and all the market stalls were bare. Some even looked burned, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

The city had stopped breathing.

Sarai stopped breathing, too. Had she made this place, to reflect her despair, or was it Lazlo’s creation? That seemed impossible. Her soul needed Dreamer’s Weep, and she needed him.

There he was, right there, his long hair wild in the wind. His face was somber, the easy joy gone from it, but there was still—Sarai breathed again—such witchlight in his eyes. She had witchlight in her own. She felt it go out from her like something that could touch him. She stepped forward, following in its path. He stepped forward, too.

They came to stand face-to-face—arm’s reach without reaching. The three strings that joined them wound them ever nearer. Hearts, lips, navels. Closer, still not touching. The air between them was a dead place, as though both of them were carrying their hopelessness before them, hoping for the other to dash it away. They held everything they had to say, every desperate thing, and they didn’t want to say any of it. They just wanted it to vanish—here, at least, in this place that was theirs.

“Well,” remarked Sarai. “That was a long day.”

This earned a surprised laugh from Lazlo. “The longest,” he agreed. “Were you able to sleep at all?”

“I was,” she reported, finding a small smile. “I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.”

“That’s good,” Lazlo breathed. “I was worried.” He blushed. “I may have thought about you a few times today.”

“Only a few?” she teased, blushing, too.

“Maybe more,” he admitted. He reached for her hand. It was hot, and so was his. The edges of their hopelessness dissolved, just a little.

“I thought about you, too,” said Sarai, lacing their fingers together. Brown and blue, blue and brown. She was transfixed by the sight of them. She murmured, “And it’s only fair to tell you that I dreamed of you.”

“Oh? I hope I was well behaved.”

“Not too well behaved.” Coyly, she added, “No better than this morning, when the sun so rudely rose.”

She meant the kiss; he understood. “The sun. I still haven’t forgiven it.” The space between them could only shrink, not grow. Lazlo’s voice was music—the most beautiful smoky music—when he caught Sarai up in his arms, and said, “I want to catch it in a jar and put it away with the fireflies.”

“The moon on a bracelet and the sun in a jar,” said Sarai. “We really wreak havoc on the heavens, don’t we?”

Lazlo’s voice sank deeper in his throat. Smokier. Hungrier. “I expect the heavens will survive,” he said, and then he kissed her.

How had they survived a whole day on the merest touch that was last night’s kiss? If they’d known then what a kiss was, they couldn’t have. It would have been unbearable to come so close—to barely feel and almost taste and be snatched apart before . . . well, before this. But they hadn’t known.

And now they did.

Now, right now, they learned. Sarai leaned into Lazlo, her eyes closing in anticipation. His were slower. He wanted to see her. He didn’t want to miss even a second of her face. Her smooth cerulean loveliness held him spellbound. There was a dusting of nearly invisible freckles on the bridge of her nose. The glide of their faces was as slow as poured honey, and her lips. Ever so slightly, they parted. The bottom one, voluptuous as dew-bright fruit, parted from its fellow—for him—and it was the most enticing thing he’d ever seen. A blaze of desire surged through him and he leaned into the honey-slowness, pushing the hopelessness out of his way to take that sweet, soft lip between his own.

The searing softness, the melt.

When Lazlo had wished to discover, with Sarai, the realm of the unknowable, he had thought of great, huge mysteries like the origin and nature of gods. But right now, he’d have given it all up for this small mystery, this tiny, newest, and best mystery of Weep. This kiss.

This exact kiss.

Lips. The wonder of lips that could brush or press, part and close, and—parting, closing—catch the other’s lip in the sweetest of bites. Not a true bite. Not teeth. Ah, teeth were still a secret. But the tip of the tongue, well. Hopelessness had little chance against the discovery of the tip of the tongue. And the thing that was almost blinding, unfathomable, was this: Heady as it was—so heady he felt dizzy from it, tipsy—still he sensed that even this was only the threshold to another realm of the unknowable. A door pushed just ajar, and the thinnest sliver of light hinting at radiance beyond.

He felt light and heavy at the same time. Burning, floating. He’d never suspected. He’d been aware of girls, of course, and had all the sorts of thoughts that young men have (the better ones, anyway; better young men and better thoughts) and of course he wasn’t ignorant of the . . . biology of things. But he’d never had any inkling of what he now sensed lay beyond that tantalizing door. It was a radiance that felt rich and deep and huge and close and secret and delirious and . . . sacred.

It was his future with the girl he held in his arms, and whatever he had felt and feared on his walk home from the guard station, now he was certain: There would be a future.

Hope was easy, after all. Here in this place, anyway.

He drew her closer, his arms full around her waist, and lost himself in the marvel of her, of this. He breathed the scent and taste of her, and shivered when her fingers traced up his arms to the nape of his neck. She wove them through his hair and awakened more sensation, a fire of pleasure that radiated down his shoulders and up his scalp, nudging at that tantalizing door with all its luminous secrets. When he broke the kiss, finally, it was to press his face to hers. The ridge of his brow to hers, his cheekbone, rough, against hers, smooth.

“Sarai,” he breathed against her cheek. He felt like a glass filled with splendor and luck. His lips curved into a smile. He whispered, “You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes,” and understood finally what that phrase meant.

Sarai pulled back, just enough that they could look at each other. Her amazement mirrored his own, her gaze the equivalent of a whispered Oh, husky and astonished and awakened.

The laughter reached them first—children’s laughter—and then the color. They broke their gaze to look around, and saw the city no longer holding its breath. There were swallowtail flags snapping on the domes, and the sky was a mosaic of kites. And the market stalls were no longer empty, but coming to life as though opening for the morning, with vendors in long aprons setting out their wares. Flocks of brilliant butterflies moved through like schools of fish, and the upper levels of the amphitheater were espaliered with jeweled fruit trees.