Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-four
One could have heard a pin fall in the chamber of the Great Sanhedrin, though no one so much as breathed loudly. All attention in the room focused on the shayd.
I was too stunned to move. My vision blurred, and my breath came in short bursts. The Ziz couldn’t be dead. We were going to save it.
Daziel recovered first. “How do you know?”
“It has become quite obvious,” the older shayd said. “I commend you—though your mother will not—on attempting to solve this on your own, but enough is enough. Leave the adults to their work.”
“What work will that be?” Daziel asked. He sounded challenging, his chin jutted out, but I could see the flicker of both fear and desperate hope in his eyes, as though he wanted nothing more than for an adult of his own people to sweep in and make everything right.
“Why, we will have to prepare to leave Ena-Cinnai,” the shayd said.
“There is little else to be done—with the Ziz gone, the winds will fluctuate so wildly the land will be unlivable within five years. Other lands will face their own difficulties, so it is not yet clear where will be the best place to go, but it is best to be ready.”
A moment of dreadful silence, and then the Sanhedrin broke into wild, unstructured yelling.
“I will discuss this with the Chief Judge and the grand duke,” the shayd said, his voice cutting through the noise. “You may call upon me at my usual rooms.” He vanished.
Chaos remained. I looked first at Aunt Tirtzah, appalled shock on her face, then Professor Altschuler, who wore a matching expression. So much for reassurance.
“Come on.” Daziel grabbed my hand. He pulled me back through the entrance door, into the small antechamber where we usually waited. No one bothered to stop us.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere we can talk.”
But we didn’t talk, not the whole fifteen-minute walk back to my aunt’s, not until we reached the relative safety of our room.
I threw myself on the bed, grabbing the blanket as though it, unlike the adults, could offer some measure of safety.
“Who was that?” I said, still shocked. “Do you think he was right?”
Daziel paced back and forth. Paz’s tiny head following him worriedly from the foot of the bed. “If he says the Ziz is dead, the Ziz is dead.”
“Is he right about the rest? The country will become unlivable—the world?” My throat was dry. I found it unfathomable, a nightmare I was desperate to wake from. “What are we supposed to do?”
Daziel looked grim. “I’ve never known him to be wrong.”
“Who is he?” I asked again, desperate to grasp the situation, to sort all the players, to find some angle to make this man less trustworthy.
“Ah.” Daziel stopped pacing. “That was my father.”
An entirely different kind of shock washed over me. “Are you serious?”
“Mm. Why?” He registered my alarm, which had graduated from angst on a worldwide level to deeply personal dismay. “What’s wrong?”
“Your father. Some warning would have been nice,” I said, aware I was being nonsensical; Daziel hadn’t known any more than me that his father would show up in the center of the Council room. But now I had to worry about meeting Daziel’s dad on top of everything else.
“He likes to be dramatic. One of the few pleasures allowed to him, he’d say.” Daziel sighed. “I’m sure we’ll see more of him soon.”
“When?” I looked down at my outfit, practical brown as usual. I wasn’t sure what one wore to meet the parent of their betrothed, but I’d have liked the chance to think about it. “Today?”
“I couldn’t say.”
The tone of his voice—defeated—caught my attention. “What do we do? If the Ziz is dead?”
Daziel looked on the verge of tears. “I don’t know.”
“But—how are we supposed to fix the winds? Bring on the Maestril? It should be here by now.”
Daziel shook his head. “We can’t.”
We had failed.
I hadn’t expected to fail. I’d known it was a possibility—I wasn’t an idiot—but in my heart, I supposed, I’d thought if I worked hard, if I didn’t give up, everything would be all right.
It wasn’t all right.
“Abandon Ena-Cinnai?” I said. “Surely not.”
Daziel came to the bed and lay down, pulling me into his arms. His voice was numb. “I don’t know.”
Hours passed; evening came. Eventually, we had to eat. We went to the kitchen and fixed ourselves bowls of leftover lentil soup, taking them out to the garden. “My aunt’s not back yet, is she?” I asked the housekeeper, Madame Chabert.
She shook her head. “She expects to be at the Sanhedrin until late.”
I half expected to be told to return, but maybe Aunt Tirtzah had decided we deserved a break—or perhaps no one needed to talk to a young shayd when an older one was around.
Daziel’s father.
As though my thought had summoned him, the older man entered the garden—by ordinary means, Chava at his side. She gave us a strained smile and retreated.
“So, this is where you’ve been hiding.” The man looked at me, his eyes as unnerving as Daziel’s the first time I’d seen them. “With a human girl. How quaint.”
Daziel straightened, his posture alarmingly perfect. “Father, this is Naomi bat Yardena.”
“Hello,” I said, uncertain of what to do in this situation.
“Typical-looking for a human, isn’t she?” the man said. “And no style.”
I flinched.
“Don’t be rude,” Daziel said.
Daziel’s father affected surprise. “Never. Let me look at you, girl. I have an interest in human civilizations.”
“Father,” Daziel said warningly.
“What? I fancy myself a bit of an expert.” The man withdrew a pipe from his sleeve and lit it. “I am composing an epic poem on the subject.”
“On humans,” I clarified, just to make sure.
“Yes.” He eyed me. “All so very needy, are you not? Enthusiastic but not very inventive lovers. And hard to shake.”
I flushed hot. Wow. Way to identify and go hard at my insecurities.
“Anyway, it’s time to come home,” the shayd said to Daziel. “Your mother is expecting you.”
“Father, there’s something—”
“I’m really not interested.”
“Naomi and I are betrothed.”
“No, you’re not,” his father said brusquely. “Sixty percent, maybe. Seventy percent at the most. Nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried,” Daziel said through gritted teeth. “I’m informing you.”
“And I’m informing you that you haven’t reached your majority. You have previous obligations.”
Previous obligations?
Daziel looked frustrated. Then he shook his head, as though shaking everything away. “How did you know the Ziz was dead?”
“The birds told us,” his father said. “And showed us the body.”
Daziel winced. “When?”
“Two days ago. Which is why we decided to call off this little adventure of yours. You took too long.”
“I would have taken less time if you’d helped.”
“Well, we didn’t,” his father said bluntly. He glanced at me again, then looked back to his son. “You may have the night to say goodbye. You will be at my rooms in the morning, ready to go. If you aren’t, I will fetch you like a child and drag you home.”
He vanished.
“Cool,” I said, and tried not to have a panic attack.
“Two days.” Daziel sounded numb. “Two days. If I’d moved sooner—told you earlier—we could have cured it.”
“Tried to cure it,” I reminded him. “We could have failed elsewhere.”
He let out a broken laugh. “But I failed here.”
“Daziel.” I put my hand to his cheek, made him look at me. “You can’t blame yourself for this.”
“Who else should I blame?” Self-recrimination filled his voice. “I made the call. I could have told you months ago.”
“You,” I repeated, aggravated, not at him but on his behalf. “Why was it on you? It’s like Yael said. This was bigger than you, than us. Your people, your government, they should have come to ours. It shouldn’t be on one individual to figure out how to save everything.”
Now he looked helpless. “But I could have done it. If I’d been smarter, faster. I could have saved the Ziz. And now it’s lost.”
“Oh, Daziel.” His pain cut through me as though I’d sliced my own hand. I gathered him to me, stroking his back.
We sat in silence for a moment, disheartened and depressed. I hated seeing him this way. So I changed the subject, trying to sound lighthearted instead of disconcerted. “Your father didn’t like me.”
Daziel looked pained. “He isn’t the most welcoming.”
“He said you have ‘previous obligations’?” I couldn’t suppress a displeased zing.
“There’s expectations in my family about what I should do with my life.”
“Like what? I thought you looked after a rock garden.”
He grimaced up at slowly drifting purple clouds. “For now.”
Great. I should have expected this. “I don’t suppose the ‘no more lies’ covered ‘clear up past lies by omission.’ ”
Daziel winced. “Ah. Yes. There are one or two of those.”
Our chairs jolted beneath us, and the stones of the garden path shuddered and jumped.
On the table, our glasses and soup bowls skittered.
Daziel leaped to his feet, grabbing my waist as though preparing to haul me into the sky, but the world stopped shaking as suddenly as it had started, leaving us standing together and trembling.
What was happening? If the Ziz was dead, were we really doomed? “Maybe one of the other scrolls also had helpful information,” I said, desperate for hope.
“Maybe.” He smoothed hair out of my face. “Come home with me.”
“What?”
“Come home with me. To the shedim lands. It won’t be easy on you, I shouldn’t lie, but we’re better prepared to handle strange natural magic.”
My heart skipped. I had no idea how to respond. I wanted to be with him too, but I couldn’t leave everything I’d ever known. “Daziel, I can’t. I have school.”
He laughed. “What’s school with the world falling apart?”
This was not a bad point. Still, the idea of leaving struck me as wrong. “I don’t know.” Surely there was still some way to stop the storms, the tremors, the destabilization of natural magic. I couldn’t leave everything at the height of this disaster.