“You have to help Nirrim,” Annin says again.
“No,” I say, revolted. “I will never be party to what she has done. If I need to lead a rebellion against her, that is what I will do. I have a ship and I have a crew.” I also have thirty-pound cannons aboard that ship, hidden behind closed portholes, but Annin and Mere don’t need to know that. “Get me out of here, and I will see what I can do.”
Annin catches my hand. “It’s not her fault. Not exactly. She is not herself. A god stole her compassion.”
This sounds like a children’s tale. “There are no gods. At least not here, in this realm.”
“It was the god of thieves,” Mere says. “He lived here for centuries, posing as the Lord Protector. He ruled Ethin, pretending to be human, and every time he pretended to die, he would steal the city’s memory from itself, and be elected again by the Council, who believed he was an entirely different person.”
“How do you know this?”
“Some of it, Nirrim told me herself,” Annin says, “and I told Mere. But it was Morah who explained to me exactly what the god took. Nirrim’s magic doesn’t affect Morah, because Morah’s gift is truth. She is descended from the god of foresight, so Morah simply knows things. You cannot lie to her. She said she had a vision of how to help Nirrim, and left the city in search of it.”
“Where?”
Annin wrings her hands. “I don’t know. Morah told me I couldn’t know, or Nirrim would force the information from me. But she said if I could find someone I trusted enough to overthrow Nirrim because that person loved her, and didn’t want to destroy her, I should say what I do know: Morah left a map that will lead you to where she is now. The map is hidden in the kitchen of the tavern, below a tile painted with the god of hospitality. Will you find Morah? Will you save Nirrim?”
How can I do that, when Nirrim’s hands drip with blood? She is not the person I once knew, once loved.
Mere says, “I saw Nirrim, after you left Ethin. She came to me.”
What does that matter, a visit, when weighed against so much wrong, such violence, such revenge? Why does Mere speak of it?
“Sid, you broke her heart.”
“Nirrim told me,” Annin says quietly, “that she felt better without her heart. She let the god of thieves take what he wanted for the sake of Ethin, because he promised to return the city’s stolen memory to it in exchange. So that we would never say It is as it is anymore, but would know why our world looks the way it does, what our history is, and how the Half Kith were treated badly for so long. She wanted to give us that knowledge.”
“The price the god demanded must have seemed, to her, easy to pay after you left,” Mere says. “What good is a heart when it hurts so much?”
I remember the letter in Nirrim’s dress pocket, how she kept it. How she wanted me, in her throne room, and tugged me to her. One never bargains with a god—any Herrani child knows that. We have all been told the stories. To win against a god is always also to lose. Whatever price a god demands will be more than you can pay.
Yet I can understand why Nirrim would have felt desperate, ready to agree to anything. Didn’t my father feel that way, when he poisoned the Valorian nobility during the Firstwinter Rebellion? Didn’t my mother, when she told the Valorian emperor she would marry his son if he lifted his siege against Herran’s city? Roshar, when he was enslaved by the Empire, tried to run away even when he knew the punishment, and suffered it, his face mutilated by his captor. What of my nurse, who made a bargain within herself to devote her life to ruining Kestrel’s?
I was desperate, too. I made a bad bargain. Desperate to secure my parents’ love, afraid that if they really knew me, they would no longer like me, I agreed to a betrothal that would be a loveless lie. I was ready to betray myself.
Nirrim willingly surrendered a part of herself to a god—an extraordinary mistake. But while the circumstances were unusual, maybe what Nirrim did was, in a way, perfectly ordinary.
It was what we are all tempted to do: trade something precious for any chance to claw our way out of despair.
Is it possible that Nirrim could be made whole again?
I remember my father’s palm against my cheek. If you love her, he said, fight for her.
I remember how bloody his hands were, and my mother’s. I remember how Emmah let herself be twisted by a thirst for revenge, yet had always cherished me. I think of my monstrous grandfather, locked in his prison, searching my face to find traces of his daughter. I think about the wrong that people do for the sake of love, and how it is possible to love a villain. I wonder what my father would do, or my mother, or Roshar.
Oh, you’re asking me? my godfather whispers in my mind. Little lion, you know full well what to do.
And what is that?
Be the damn hero.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll try. But I have no idea what I’m doing.”
That much is obvious, Roshar says.
“For starters,” I say, “can you get me out of here?”
Annin takes a red feather from her pocket. “Maybe you can use this.”
THE GOD
IN HERRAN, OUR FAITHFUL CELEBRATE Ninarrith, a day when they pray for our return.
We left for your sake, I would tell them. When did a god ever do a human good? What did my love bring Irenah except brief joy and the baby that came of it? Irenah lived long enough after the birth to love the child, and then she was gone. Gods are not all-powerful, not even Death, and had I gone to him and betrayed my sin of visiting the mortal world, and beseeched him, he would not have intervened. I might have accused him. The Seamstress was once mortal, I could have said. You made her one of us. The pantheon is incomplete, after our loss of the god of discovery. Make Irenah a new god, to complete the hundred.
And what of your child? he would ask sadly. Death is stern but the kindest, perhaps, of us all. He would say, What will you do when her time comes, and that of her child, and of that child’s child? They will all die. To love a mortal is to know loss. It is the nature of mortality: to know that nothing beloved will be yours forever. Every relationship you cherish ends in death.
Irenah slipped away from me. Death claimed her. He took her to his lands, the shadowy realm beyond where we gods live. As I cannot die, so can I never follow her.
After Irenah’s death, I returned home and hid my grief, even from myself. Ethin held nothing for me but suffering. Yet I could not help but watch.
I watched the dark-eyed Sid of the Herrani, released from her prison by Nirrim’s friends, present a red feather to the guards.
The queen has granted me passage from the city, Sid said. You know I am her favorite subject. Look, here is a sign of her favor, the sigil she gave to me to prove her orders: a feather from her Elysium bird.
Perhaps I did a little more than watch that moment. Perhaps I also gave Sid’s lie an extra aura of believability. Sid walked free, and retrieved the map from its hiding place. She took the path from the city that delved into the jungle. In the heat, which made the thick greenery almost slippery with humidity, she passed where I once grew, my roots curling into the ground, my blossom heavy and soft in the sun. Consulting the map, she stepped off the path, using her dagger to hack her way through vines. Boots muddied, skin traced with thin bloody lines acquired by pushing through bushes with sharp-edged leaves, she stumbled into the clearing made thousands of human years ago.
You came, said Morah, whose blood flowed with just enough of a gift inherited from her long-ago ancestor, the god of foresight.
What is this place? Sid, sweaty and bedraggled, stared at the mysterious objects marking the clearing.
It is the way to the realm of the gods, Morah said. Will you go?
Overwhelmed with exhaustion, with the improbability of it all, Sid sank to sit in the mud. Me?
You.
How?
I don’t know, Morah said.
If you don’t know, how would I know? Sid said, desperate, despairing. I’m n
ot god-touched, not like my father. Even if I could—I can’t believe I’m saying this—go to the realm of the gods, they probably would be none too happy to see me. I don’t light candles in their temples as often as I should, my mother is a complete infidel—
Try, Morah said.
Sid covered her eyes and sighed into her palms.
I love Nirrim, too, Morah said. Find the god of thieves. Ask for Nirrim’s heart. Steal it if you must.
Steal from the god of thieves?
Try, Morah said again, and Sid remembered telling her father it was cold in her parents’ shadow, that she longed for a story of her own. Sid looked out at the clearing, its borders hedged by walls of greenery, the sky above a brutal blue. She took the speckled yellow feather that had belonged to her parents from her pocket, and matched it against the red Elysium one. The humble yellow feather’s vane was slender. Sid wondered where the bird that had dropped this feather was now—if it was even alive. This feather was older than she was. The Elysium feather’s opalescent quill shone in the light, its pink afterfeather a soft down. Sid thought—as I have often thought—about how humans invest objects with such meaning.
I think it is because mortals always miss what is not there. They long for what is gone—a moment, a home, a person. In this, mortals and gods are alike.
I miss Nirrim, Sid thought.
In the clearing, one hundred slender silver poles stood tall, each at a distance from the other. How could poles become a path to an immortal realm? she wondered, when a red blur soared out of the jungle and perched on top of one of the poles. It was an Elysium, though not Nirrim’s—this one had strong streaks of green down its back. It opened its mouth to sing, and vanished. It was as if it had evaporated upon the point of that tall, shining pole, like a colorful cloud melted away instantly by the sun.
* * *
At that moment, in Ethin, Nirrim’s bird sang, too, distracting Nirrim from her search in the Council library. She was looking for information on Herran. It was a beautiful country, Sid had told her once long ago, its crops abundant. From the city, one could see the northern mountains. They looked like smoky blue glass. People rode horses. What is a horse? Nirrim had asked, and when Sid described them, the animal sounded like a mythical creature.
Such a country, Nirrim thought, would benefit from my rule. It did not matter that Sid had claimed that her parents loved her, and stood by her choices. Sid belonged to Nirrim, not to the king and queen of Herran.
Sid must have been lying to herself, Nirrim decided, just as she once had, inventing a way for a cruel parent to seem less cruel. Yes, it would be for Sid’s own good if Nirrim harnessed the power of her people’s magic and seized Herran. It would be for the good of all Herrani. Her fingers paused on the spine of a book and pulled it from the shelf. In the careful hand of a councilmember was drawn a map of the seas around Herrath, and the lands beyond. The map was accompanied by a few pages of history—too little for Nirrim’s liking, but enough to tell her the brief story of Queen Kestrel and King Arin. It was a tale of hatred, sacrifice. Devotion. It was the kind of mortal tale the gods love.
Nirrim skimmed through the pages, impatient with the details of their relationship, eager for practical information, such as ordnance, defenses, and the number of the standing army. She found notes on the Herrani language, with pages of vocabulary.
She was barely reading, just committing each page to memory, when her Elysium called again and floated out the door.
It was hunting for something.
Nirrim, my daughter, born of mortal blood and divine grace—the only one of her kind, a true demigod—shoved the book under her arm and left the library to follow the god of discovery’s bird. As she quickened her pace through the palace halls, terror and rage churned in her chest. She had already guessed where the bird was going, and dreaded that she might know the reason.
Nirrim followed the bird’s elegant swoop toward her rooms, and flung open the doors.
Her lover was gone.
NIRRIM
HOW COULD SID LEAVE? WHY?
The hollow space inside my chest no longer feels like freedom: a light, floating emptiness that gives me a sense of calm and purpose. Instead, it trembles like glass about to shatter. I don’t understand. Sid returned to Ethin. She said she couldn’t bear to be away from me. That selfish mother of hers lured her away. That father made her feel unworthy, like she could never measure up to his history. But Sid fought her way free of her parents’ lies, hadn’t she, and came home to me, penitent and loving? She saw me arrayed in glory. My beauty. My strength. How my people adore me.
I shout for my guards. Someone must know where Sid had gone. She could not simply vanish. And when I find her, I will make her pay for this insult, for this loneliness washing through me, this hurt to be abandoned twice by the same person.
I slam the book from the library flat open on the floor and whistle for my bird. “Find them,” I tell the Elysium, pointing at the drawn portraits of the king and queen of Herran. Then I reach for pen and paper. Using my new knowledge of the Herrani language, I write a message—no matter if it is in disordered grammar, my word choice limited to the small number of Herrani words I found in the book. The message I write will be clear enough. I roll the scrap of paper tight and tie it to the bird’s leg.
If the king and queen of Herran do not surrender their kingdom to me, I will send them the dismembered head and hands of their only child.
SID
MORAH RETREATS INTO THE SHADE of a small stone temple nearly lost in the twisting vines of the jungle. Dragonflies, their tight, focused bodies a shiny black, their wings like glass, dart among the one hundred poles. Frogs sing in the trees, more melodious than the sizzling sound of cicadas, yet resembling the insects’ constancy, their crescendo and fall.
I wander among the silver poles, which shine bright in the sun, each a tall sliver of light. But there is no path to anywhere. As much as I walk among them, I see nothing but more poles and the surrounding trees. I place a palm against one of them, watching my hand cast a narrow shadow on the silver until it disappears beneath my palm. The silver is warm to the touch, but it is an ordinary warmth, one caused by the heat of the day—of the sun and my flesh. I do not vanish as the bird did. I go nowhere. I am simply here.
A dragonfly lands on a pole, wings trembling. It, too, does not vanish.
Perhaps only one pole would give me access to the gods. Perhaps the way to the realm is to choose the right pole, and I have been lucky to have the Elysium show me which one.
But when I approach that very pole and touch it, nothing happens. I circle it, searching the silver for some mark or clue—writing, or a seam I can split open. Could a doorway to the gods be compressed inside of a pole? It seems impossible … but this whole endeavor seems impossible.
It occurs to me that if the gods are real, then it is no mere story that my father is touched by Death. That god haunted Arin, guided his life. Yet does Death cherish him, as my father believes? Or has that god bided his time, waiting to give Arin the Plain King one final twist of the knife by stealing his only child? Although the weather is hot, the pole I touch feels suddenly cold. I shiver, afraid.
The pole, however, reveals no hidden seam, no clue to how to make myself vanish as the Elysium vanished. I am relieved.
And disappointed. I think of Nirrim, of who she used to be, so ready to see how my arrogance was really self-doubt. She was so true to herself. Brave and honest, while I hid behind jokes and slippery double-meaning words. I think of her surrendering that part of herself for the sake of revealing this country’s truth to its people.
I think of myself, yearning to live up to my parents’ example.
I want my own story.
I want to save, and be saved.
The pole I touch is identical to every other pole of the hundred. This one, like the others, reflects my face. It reflects the sky. The green of the trees. The frogs’ song annoys me now. It makes me feel stupid. My mot
her would know what to do, if she were here. There is no code Queen Kestrel cannot crack, no riddle she cannot solve.
I sit in the mud, surrounded by one hundred towering needles. I flop onto my back and fling my arm over my eyes against the sun, trying to blot out the sounds of frogs and birds. Perhaps the way to understand the poles is not to look at them, but to listen.
Yet I hear nothing but the jungle. If the poles make any noise, or speak in some language, it is inaudible to me.
My frustration grows. It feels like pressure set against a locked door, leaning and shoving, ready to burst through.
But I am my mother’s child. I can lie as well as she, and win as well as she. I was born in the year of the god of games. What is this, but a game I need to play?
I enjoy quick moves in a game, the sequence of play where one move provokes a chain reaction, until I sweep what everyone has wagered to me, mine by right, by skill. But I know that not all games have such a rhythm, or don’t until the very end. Borderlands, for example, and Bite and Sting build slowly. They involve setting a trap and waiting to see if it will be sprung.
Maybe what this situation requires is patience.
I sit up, eyes open, and wait. I watch the poles as though they are not inanimate objects but living things, and the more I stare, the more they do look alive. As the sun moves in the sky, the light changes the poles’ appearance. Some of them cease to look bright, but instead pale and dull, as though carved from birch. As the sun goes down, some poles darken until they look like lead, and then vanish, disappearing into the poles lined up behind them. But when I spring to my feet, spurred by hope, and rush to where those poles were, I find that what I have witnessed is only an optical illusion. The vanished poles are in fact there, and have always been there. A mere trick of the light made them seem gone. I shift position in the clearing, turning in a circle. Some poles, depending on how the light hits them and where I stand, appear or disappear, and seem darker or brighter.
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