“You promised me miracles, Majnun,” she says, stroking his chest. “Tell me of them now, so I have something to dream of.”

For a moment, Séverin cannot speak through his pain, but dawn is swift, and time is finite, and he must make use of what has been given to him.

He curls her hand to his chest and thinks of miracles. Once, he had promised her glass slippers and apples of immortality. Now, he wishes to show her something else entirely.

“I’ll … I’ll learn how to make cake,” he says.

Laila snorts. “Impossible.”

“No!” he says. “I will. I’ll make you a cake, Laila. And we’ll … we’ll have a picnic. We’ll feed each other strawberries to the utter disgust and repulsion of our friends.”

Laila is quietly shaking, and he hopes it is from laughter. Night fades quickly. A poisonous tinge of blue touches the sky.

“Do you promise?” she asks.

“I promise that and more, if it will make you come back,” says Séverin. “I promise to take you and Hypnos to the ballet in winter. We can stand in line for smoked chestnuts and try to stop Zofia from recreating such a delicacy at home with an open fire in the library. We can spend a whole day by the fireside, reading books and ignoring Enrique reading over our shoulders—”

“Majnun,” she says.

But he is not done. He grips her hand tightly.

“I promise that we can waste time as if we were gods with endless troves of it.”

The light grows brighter, and Séverin turns to her. He kisses her fiercely. Her tears wet his face.

She splays her hand against his, and when the light touches their joined palms, it is as if they have been knit together by a thousand dawns.

“You and I will always be connected,” she says. “As long as I live, so will you. I will always be with you.”

Séverin can feel it—this new interweaving between their very souls—but he does not understand what it means.

“Laila … wait. Please.”

He knows he will never forget her, but he memorizes her all the same: sugar and rose water, the bronze line of her throat, her ink hair, such that only poets may write in its shade. When he kisses her again, her teeth hit his, and the moment is so achingly human, it nearly moves him to tears.

“I will come back to you, Majnun,” she says. “I love—”

Dawn arrives.

It steals the night and her last words in one breath, and then—as ceremoniously as it brought him to the floor of heaven—it unceremoniously releases him back to his reality.

38

HYPNOS

In the years that followed, Hypnos would never be certain what he glimpsed that day on the top of the ziggurat. He had imagined a sentient, celestial presence … an engulfing of gold light. But it was not that. It could not be ordered into something so straightforward as color.

If anything, it was like a living song, undulating and incomprehensible.