House of Rage and Sorrow

by Sangu Mandanna

  You have no real power. But that would be real power, wouldn’t it?

  “And Elvar?”

  “He will either surrender or die fighting.”

  I know which one he would choose. I shake my head. “How can you ask that of me? They were kind to me. They gave me a home and a place in the world. How can you ask me to betray the only family who have loved me?”

  “Your brothers are my family. I will do whatever it takes to keep them alive.”

  And there it is. Something shrivels and dies inside me, something I didn’t even know had dared to unfurl: hope.

  “So you just want me to abandon my war against Alex,” I say. “Truce or alliance, you don’t care. You just want me to leave him alone.”

  “I am offering you what you have always wanted. To be part of our family. To be one of us. You could be Queen of Kali, a lifetime away from the servant you once were. I know we don’t have much of a relationship now, but that could be different in a few years. In time, we can learn to trust each other, perhaps even love each other.” Her face hardens. “But if you continue down this path, if you keep fighting Alexi, I will never be able to love you. I will never be able to forgive you if you bring him to ruin.”

  A cold wind blows through the courtyard, rippling through my hair and sending a chill all the way into my bones. My fists clench at my sides.

  “It makes no difference to me if I was born first,” I tell her. “I don’t want to be Queen of Kali. I’m not ashamed that I was once a servant. If you knew me at all, you’d know that. You’d know that a crown could never tempt me away from this war. Alexi is not going to get away with what he did to Rama.”

  “Alexa, be reasonable.”

  “My name is Esmae!” I snap. “Alexa died in the deep dark of space almost eighteen years ago.” I want to turn around and walk away, but all I can see is a lifetime of hope turning to ash and a twin brother who will always win. And all I can feel is rage. “You have been so determined to have only two children, Mother, so I’ll make you a promise. By the end of this war, you will have only two children. I just can’t promise they’ll be the ones you want.”

  Her face pales. “How can you say that? How can you swear such a thing?”

  “Easily. Alexi will have to kill me or I will kill him first.”

  I’m not sure where I plan to go, because I certainly can’t march back into the palace and switch off the shield without anyone noticing me now, but I turn away from her. Before I can take more than a step, her prosthetic right hand closes over my wrist and pulls me back toward her.

  The metal is like a clamp. An unbreakable grip. Too late, I remember the way General Khay’s cold, strong prosthetic arm tightened around my throat and lifted me into the air. Too late, I hear her voice in my ear. Expect no mercy from them, Esmae, and show them none in return. And never, ever turn your back on them.

  My mother twists my wrist and I buckle to my knees with a cry that’s as much surprise as it is pain.

  “What are you—”

  Silver shines in the moonlight as she raises a knife with her left hand. She brings it down. My vision goes white with pain.

  I bite down on my scream, but a howl slips past my teeth anyway. I look down to see my right thumb on the courtyard stone. It’s bloody and torn and jagged white bone peeks out of the flesh.

  Shock and pain make me dizzy. It was so quick, so brutal. She took the thumb from my right hand. Like Ek Lavya, the tragedy that rippled across almost a hundred years to shape the world we know, I have lost my bowstring thumb. I’ll never nock an arrow again. I’ll never draw a bow. I’ll never make a fist. I’ll never hold a sword the same way.

  I’ll never defeat Alexi.

  My mother has made sure of that.

  Titania knew. I see that now. She knew that my mother would one day get the better of me. That was why she wanted General Khay to train me. She wanted me to learn how to fight my own mother.

  I stay on my knees after my mother lets me go, reeling from the pain, clutching my bleeding hand to my chest as blood pools into my lap.

  “I would have kept my end of the bargain if you had accepted the truce or if you had agreed to join us, you know,” my mother says quietly. “I would have welcomed you into whatever home we end up in. We could have perhaps been happy one day, all of us.”

  “How could I have been happy?” I scrape out each word. “After what he did?”

  She smiles, but it’s such a sad, bitter smile. “Do you know why he asked that there be no punishment for that boy’s death?” She lowers herself to look me in the eye. There are too many ghosts in my mother’s gray eyes. “Because he wasn’t the one who killed him.”

  My voice wobbles. “I don’t understand.”

  “Alexi wanted to win that duel to get Titania, but he didn’t want to kill you. He knew what the gods had seen and he knew you would be the end of him, but still he refused to do what was necessary. He would never have killed you. So Leila Saka injected Alexi and Bear with a serum the night before the duel, so that they wouldn’t wake up until well into the day, and I went to see Amba.”

  “No,” I say, hoping that if I say it enough it’ll stop the words from coming. “No.”

  “I had one boon left,” says my mother. “She tried to refuse me, but she could not. I asked her to cloak me so that I would look like Alexi. And because I knew she would warn you, I made her swear never to tell you.” Her voice is raw with pain, but she smiles ruefully. “Of course, Amba had already made her plans with your friend. She did not tell me, of course. She let me take Alexi’s place in the duel. She let me kill the wrong person. So, you see?” Her eyes are too bright in the moonlight, as if there are tears there she refuses to shed. “It was I who tried to kill you.”

  Mother. The word weighed more than the universe to me … and weighed nothing at all to her.

  “I didn’t want it to come to that,” she says, as if that makes it better. “But it was my curse. My choices. So it was my responsibility to protect them from the consequences.”

  “Shloka?” I croak.

  She nods. “Yes. I told Leila to go after you. Alexi and Bear didn’t know about that.”

  “But they knew about the duel. Why didn’t they tell me the truth? Why didn’t they ever say?”

  “Why do you think? They wanted to keep me safe from you. I am not helpless, but I am no match for you either. They believed Alexi stood a better chance at fending off your fury than I did.” She stands. “I think it was also a matter of pride. Alexi didn’t want to be seen as a coward who sent his mother to do his dirty work.”

  The world swims in and out. The deception and the betrayal swallow me whole. All this time, it was her. All this time, they lied. Even Bear. For her, for pride, for the family that will never include me. Alex broke his promise to me, tricked me, unleashed beasts to fight me, fought a war for a crown that it turns out was never even his, but he didn’t try to murder me on the day of the duel. He didn’t murder Rama. Our mother did.

  I’m not leaving you alone with her, he said just now. Not because he thought I would hurt her, but because he thought she would hurt me. And then he left anyway. He chose her over you, Esmae. There was never a family for you to find with them. They could never have been yours.

  I want to scream, but when I open my mouth, a laugh comes out instead. It’s sharp and jagged like glass.

  “You should have done a better job,” I tell her. “Trying and failing to kill me once is one thing, but trying and failing three times seems an awful lot like incompetence. And what about tonight? You could have killed me, but you did this instead?” I hold up my right hand, the four lonely fingers pointing straight up. “Do you really think this will stop me? Do you really think all I am is a bow and a sword? I am more like you than you know, Mother. I will find another way to tear you all apart. You should have killed me.”

  Blood trickles down my wrist. She stares down at me for a long time, pale and cold and haunted by a ghost I can’t see
.

  Then she reaches out with her prosthetic hand and strokes my hair. I feel it trembling against me. “You’re right,” she says softly, her eyes still too bright. “You are so much like me.”

  And then, still stroking my hair, she raises her knife again and glides it gently across my throat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The knife stops halfway across my throat. At first, I think wildly that she stopped, that my mother couldn’t bring herself to complete what she had started. Then, blinking through the blood and pain, I see that there’s another hand on hers.

  “Kyra,” says Amba, stern and cold, “put the knife down.”

  My mother makes a sound that’s more sob than laugh. “How long have you been watching?”

  “I have been here the whole time. A myna in a mango tree. You should have paid more attention. Did you think I wouldn’t be close? Did you think for one moment that I, who know exactly what you’ve done, would leave you alone with your daughter?” Amba’s eyes glitter. “You have no boons left, Kyra. Put the knife down or I will make you.”

  “You can’t do that,” says my mother. “You can’t stop me. You know what it will cost you.”

  Amba’s grip tightens over the knife. “Yes, I do know.”

  I can’t move. I don’t dare with the knife still at my throat, blood all over it.

  My pulse flutters wildly and I try to speak, but only blood bubbles out of my mouth. I try again. “Amba. Don’t. Don’t.”

  “Consider this very carefully, Amba,” my mother says. “Is she worth it?”

  “The knife. Now.”

  I know how this is going to go and there is nothing I can do to stop it. My mother is steel itself and she doesn’t back down. She wrestles the knife out of Amba’s grip and tries to thrust it deeper. Amba slams her palm into the middle of my mother’s chest. My mother’s eyes widen in shock before she vanishes, knife and all.

  Amba sinks to her knees in front of me and presses her forehead to mine. “Forgive me,” she whispers, “For all of it.”

  For just one moment, she smiles at me.

  Then she starts to scream.

  And there’s a roar, from somewhere deep inside the world, a cry of terror and agony that makes my bones tremble.

  It’s the sound of a god falling.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Titania

  The roar shakes the universe. Everyone hears it. Mortals on every ship and every planet cover their ears and try in vain to block the sound out. They are afraid. They don’t understand. Rickard is the only one old enough to remember the last time.

  The celestial world knows. They do not all know what has happened or whom it has happened to, but they know what that roar means.

  And so, spread far across the galaxy in their temples and their palaces and their realms in the stars, the gods weep.

  On the Empty Moon, Vahana raises their head and shrieks into the sky.

  Miles ahead of me, as I chase her through the stars, Sorsha howls back into the void.

  As for Kirrin, he knows what is about to happen an instant before it does. I see through his eyes, at the gates of Arcadia with Alexi and Bear, when Kyra appears out of nowhere with a bloody knife in her hand and tears in her eyes.

  “Kyra,” he croaks, “What have you done?”

  For he knows there’s only one way she could have been sent there like that, and what that would have done to the god who sent her.

  There is one other mortal who knows what the roar means, better than anyone else alive. Max is still on his way back to Kali when it happens. The moment he hears the universe scream, he turns his ship around.

  I see the blood through Amba’s eyes. I see Kyra’s knife. I see the desperate hurt in Esmae’s face. I feel Amba’s pain as she falls.

  I spin away from Sorsha and fly to Arcadia.

  I should have told Esmae the truth about how Rama died. Maybe she would have seen the knife coming if I had.

  I wanted so badly to keep the truth from destroying her, but it came for her and swallowed her up anyway.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  This is not supposed to happen to gods. They live while we fade and die. They go on. They’re not supposed to fall like Valin did. But then that’s what gods do, isn’t it? I said bitterly to Amba not long ago. You stand above the rest of us and let us bear the wounds you don’t dare risk yourselves.

  She’s not standing above me now.

  “Amba,” I croak, blood sputtering from my throat and mouth as I try to speak.

  She’s stopped screaming. She sits back on her heels, her shoulders bowed, her brown skin glossy with sweat, her eyes wide and dark. She trembles, but her mouth twists in a what I imagine she thinks is a smile. “Hush,” she says, and the tremor in her voice gives away the pain and fear she’s trying so desperately to hide. “You’ll bleed out if you keep speaking.”

  She’s right. I’m no use to her or to anyone else if I die here. Keeping the four fingers of my right hand pressed against my throat, I fumble in the slick blood and sweat for the bottom of my tunic. I curl my fingers into the fabric and rip off a strip of the cloth. My breath comes out in faint gasps, each one bringing up another spatter of blood. I wrap the torn strip of my tunic around my throat and knot it awkwardly with my left hand to keep it in place. Then I do the same to my right hand with a second piece. It’s not much, but it should keep me from bleeding out for a few minutes.

  “Good,” says Amba. “Good.”

  I kneel beside her and take her hand. She stays very straight for a moment longer, then her shoulders crumple and she leans on me.

  “I’m afraid, Esmae.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of a universe without the stars. Without the celestial realms, without flight, without stardust and godfire. I don’t know if I can bear the agony of losing my world.”

  My cheeks are wet, and I rub the tears away with the back of my wounded hand. “Do you want me to tell you a story?”

  “I know all the stories,” she replies with some of her old bite.

  “You don’t know this one.”

  “Very well,” says Amba, “Tell me. In as few words as possible, mind, because I do not think it at all wise to be so chatty with a partly slit throat.”

  “There was once a little girl who wanted her mother,” I whisper. “For years and years, she searched the world. She refused to give up. She fought everyone who tried to stop her, from princes to kings to the gods themselves. Always, always, there was that word driving her on. Mother. Like a battle cry, like a favorite song. Mother.”

  “I know this story,” Amba says quietly. “I know what happens when she finds her mother in the end.”

  “That’s not the end.”

  “No?”

  “In the end,” I tell her, “the little girl, now almost grown, came to see something she had failed to understand before. She saw that all her life, when she called for her mother and thought no one ever answered, someone did. Someone always answered.”

  Amba doesn’t speak, but I don’t need her to. I know she understands.

  “I love you,” I tell her.

  She smiles. It’s small and trembles on her lips, but it’s real. “And I you.”

  An engine rumbles in the distance. We look up and see a starship slip out of the night sky, landing roughly on the other side of the courtyard wall. A moment later, Max appears over the wall and drops into the courtyard. He staggers briefly to a stop when he sees us and then rushes the rest of the way.

  “Your throat,” he says hoarsely. “You should be dead.”

  “It is thanks to yours truly that she isn’t, second favorite brother of mine,” says Amba.

  “Who’s your favorite?” he asks her, putting his fingers to the pulse on the inside of my wrist.

  “Tyre, obviously. He never causes me any trouble.” Amba frowns. “Max, you’re kneeling on Esmae’s severed thumb.”

  He gives the stone beneath him a startled look and swears under hi
s breath.

  “That’s not very kind of you, Max,” I say mournfully. “I think my thumb has suffered enough tonight, don’t you?”

  “Tyre would never have been so cruel to Esmae’s thumb,” Amba chimes in.

  Max ignores our nonsense and rather sensibly attends to practical matters instead. He fishes a medical laser out of the pocket of his jacket. He reaches for the bloody strip of cloth around my throat. “I’m taking this off, okay? I need to seal the wound up before you bleed right out.”

  I tense as the cloth comes off, pulling bits of dried blood with it. Max immediately switches the laser on and slides the hot beam of light over the gash in my throat. It hurts like all hell, but I have to admit it’s not as bad as having my shoulder stitched up by hand. When Max draws back, there’s only a dull ache and a knotted scar where the wound was.

  Then he works on the open wound where my severed thumb was. He’s precise and gentle, his hands as steady as they are when he paints wooden carousels and creates birds out of feathers and metal. I’ve often thought he’s so much better at fixing things than he is at breaking them.

  I’m the opposite.

  “Do you want me to call him?” Max asks Amba.

  “I suppose you had better.”

  Max finishes sealing my hand. Then he calls for Kirrin.

  Kirrin appears at once. He’s frantic. “I couldn’t find you,” he says to Amba, his entire body shaking as he kneels beside her. “I couldn’t find you.”

  She puts her hand over his. “I have been severed from the celestial world. You won’t be able to feel me anymore.”

  I look at them side by side and marvel at how brightly Kirrin shines. The blue of his skin glows like moonlight. I was always so used to Amba that I never realized she used to shine like that, too. Now she’s almost gray, with only the faintest glimmer of otherworldly light left on her mortal skin.

  “Kirrin, you know what to do,” says Max. “Quickly, before the last of the stardust fades.”