The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  Only when we had exhausted the light, though, did Antares stop. He claimed that we were close enough to the village now that tomorrow we would pillow our heads upon down instead of earth. Though I made her a comfortable pallet, still Emine did not stir, and I fought not to panic when the little water I poured into her mouth dribbled out again.

  While Antares dug a pit for the fire made necessary by the cold but so small that it did little more than keep us from freezing to death, I thought of other fires, other camps, of Gannet. I thought of the rain that had delayed us in Ambar, when we had huddled together, telling stories. My ignorance then had been a blessing, for all my troubles had seemed many. It was worse now. I could not forgive him and perhaps would not even admit my longing to him if it had been he who kindled the fire now, but he would’ve done it differently, and maybe I would have surprised us both. Shadows descended that were cast neither by the trees nor by Antares as we crouched on opposite sides of the fire. The flame caught our thoughts and burned them up, his for fuel and mine for ash, muting the light and heat. Emine lay on one side, her chest rising and falling in regular breath.

  “I saved Imke from the sea in Cascar,” Antares said, surprising me from my reverie. The fire was very low and lengthened the shadows from his brow and nose, obscuring his eyes completely. “She was drowning. Rogan helped drag Morainn ashore, and Triss was able to swim on her own. I swam out to meet Imke, and she thanked me for saving her life.”

  He did not say what it was about this that hurt him, but I knew it all the same. He had saved her, and she had gone on to take many innocent lives. Whether she had done it with her own hands or not didn’t matter. She was a heretic and had schemed with heretics.

  “But you don’t wish you hadn’t,” I urged, and now he looked up at me, his features sharpened by the movement. “You are a good man, Antares. You should not regret that.”

  “I would have thought that you would feel my failure more keenly,” he said, and I felt again the thrill from Theba, the delight in torturing me when there was the opportunity for a moment to become intimate. She blurred the lines between what was real and what wasn’t, tried to show me what I wanted to get.

  “Haven’t I shown that I wouldn’t?” It was a struggle to speak the words, but I did so through my teeth. My senses grew in potency, and Antares’s scent filled my nostrils as fully as the fire and the chill-stripped trees. He crossed to me and opened his pack, removing rations enough for us both and pressing a small tin pot for tea into the earth where the fire was catching. Not looking at me, he filled it with clean snow that quickly began to melt.

  “I know it has been a struggle for you, Eiren. But you have been given a gift many would give their lives to possess.”

  Many had. I caught my lip between my teeth to keep from speaking or worse. I was reminded of Shran’s histories, of Theba’s lust for a mortal man. I had never thought of questioning it, and it had made no sense when I had first heard it and made even lesser sense with every telling. But I felt her compulsion in me now, sharp as the bite of hunger. I was sure I had never been so starved. Even as I thought of Gannet, she used my own senses against me.

  “You speak out of ignorance,” I said, willing my senses to root, to ignore what she tried to do. I would not move to him; she could not make me.

  “I speak out of reverence,” Antares insisted, and now he was near and my restraint made no difference. Instead of his scent, I could smell now the heady perfume of exotic flowers paired with brazier smoke. The light was by turns moonlight and firelight, but it was the green light of the fires that had burned in the theater the night of the opera, when heat had poured off Gannet’s body and into mine. And so it was now that I imagined him, too warm to be the stone his expression too often promised. Theba used my hands to reach for Antares, feeling not his coarsely spun shirt but the smooth plane of Shran’s chest bared to a balmy night. Even as my lips parted to protest, I felt Gannet’s tongue and Shran’s teeth, and I ached from toes to crown to be with the one that I had abandoned.

  But I had abandoned him. He wasn’t here, and I wasn’t there anymore, with him. I would never again have that brief moment that I shared with him in the opera box. Rejecting Theba meant I must reject him, too.

  My moan was one of frustration. I opened my eyes, not realizing that I had closed them, and beheld Antares looking at me strangely from across the fire. Had he even moved? What had I last heard that was true? Theba’s power over me was greater by the hour, and she had found a way to bend me to her will, at last. I was sick at the destruction we wrought together but felt something else entirely in our desire.

  “Is that tea? Can I have some? Is there food, too?”

  Emine’s head lifted from the ground, hair in untidy peaks, eyes sunken but sharp.

  “Emine,” I said, rising and bundling the blanket that had slipped from her shoulders more tightly around them. She grinned at me, offering no explanation for why she had been in the wood. I was so grateful for her interruption I didn’t even care. “There’s plenty to eat.”

  “Not a bite until you tell me what you’re doing out here,” Antares growled. Obviously, I was the only one feeling generous.

  “I followed you.” Emine’s eyes dodged ours, following Antares’s hands now as he poured tea into two small cups, pointedly avoiding filling a third. “And then I got lost. That was when the bad men found me.”

  I didn’t feel any dishonesty from her, but neither did I feel like we’d been given the whole story.

  “Did they say anything to you?” I asked. “Did they try to hurt you, before we came?”

  She shook her head. “They didn’t talk to me at all. Just tied me up and started—started digging a hole.”

  Antares didn’t need my gifts to feel her fear. Though he remained tight-lipped, he passed her a cup with an admonition that it was still hot. Perhaps because she was young, all her thoughts were all bobbing urgently on the surface: relief, curiosity, will. If there was anything she wasn’t telling us, it was crowded out by the mundane reality of being small, scared, and hungry.

  I squeezed her shoulder lightly before returning to my pallet. Though Emine’s presence was an unnecessary complication, I was glad she was there. She smiled at me over her cup.

  “Tell me a story before bed?”

  It was my turn to smile.

  “Of course.”

  Chapter Five

  By late afternoon of the next day, well before the sun began its descent, we came upon a village situated at the edge of the wood. The trees here were sparsely needled, and those with bare branches were planted in ordered rows: an orchard. We were no longer under Zhaeha’s influence, then.

  Still, it was the smallest and poorest Ambarian settlement I had seen. The dwellings were squat and could be distinguished from the forest only in shape, built from thatch, wood, and mud. Though it was so cold that I imagined I would not leave the fireside if I had any choice, there were many villagers out of doors working, and in the case of the village children, deep in elaborate play. They eyed Emine warily and she them, in the way unfamiliar children will in the moment before they have decided to be enemies or friends. Hardly anyone else seemed at first to notice us until a young man, sweating at a forge, ceased his hammering to come out and greet us. Even this seemed more in response to his desire for a break than any real interest in our presence.

  Antares, however, had no interest in diverting the man.

  “A babe was born here recently, to a mother who has seven others. Where does she live?”

  The young man pointed down the dirt track that served as the village’s main thoroughfare, but his eyes did not leave Antares’s face. “She has late flowers blooming beside the door,” he clarified. His eyes glossed quickly over Emine, over me. “Do you mean the child harm?”

  His question did not matter one way or another, but I sensed what response Antares gave would determine whether or not this man would find a way to warn the woman of our approach.

&nb
sp; “We mean him great honor,” Antares replied curtly. He had what we needed, and he turned from the man, dismissing him.

  We began to walk, our footfalls firm and certain on this beaten lane, so different from the treacherous paths we had taken in the wood. I wondered if our actions would make a widow maker of this woman’s husband, a man to take the place of the one I had willfully freed. Would Antares return him by force to Adah, as well? I trusted in his physical strength and his strength of will, but perhaps not his ability to deliver an infant and a grown man without incident.

  “What happens to the mother, when her babe is weaned?” I asked suddenly, feeling shameful for having only just now considered her fate. I eyed Emine, who looked gloomily away. Did she wonder about her mother?

  Antares did not appear to share any of my concern or my guilt. “She will return here, to her life,” he answered, taking my arm to guide me around an icy patch in the road. He offered Emine no aid, but she hopped deftly over. I felt the sturdiness of his convictions in that grasp as well as his desire that I should share them. “I know it must seem strange to you, this task. But I assure you, it is necessary. Don’t you wish you never had to know all you would be leaving behind? Your life would be much easier now.”

  He believed what he was saying and would not understand the vehement horror that filled my mind at the idea of never knowing all that had made me who I was. I had wondered many times what Gannet would have been like had he been raised to the self I knew he possessed and kept hidden, but never had I considered what I would be without it. Theba had the power to seize control from me now. She would have known absolute power if I had not some will to resist her.

  “I haven’t lost anything that I have left behind,” I said quietly as we reached the hovel. “I do not think this child’s ignorance to be a blessing, but a curse.”

  Emine snorted at our exchange.

  “You both talk a lot about things you can only guess at,” she said, her little voice hot with feeling. Antares ignored her. His attentions were still on me, and I thought for a moment he would argue me to reason as Gannet might have, but it was not his place to convince me of anything. Gannet would have fought me, and I would have been secretly thrilled in fighting back, but Antares had only the will to serve. I felt my resolve harden and the flame of irritation gutter before springing higher, hotter. Even as Antares reached to knock upon the flimsy door, I laid a hand upon his arm.

  “Did you know that I killed Kurdan?” I said, searching his face as the confession left my lips. “He attacked me and I killed him. If I’d never known my life before Theba, I would not have regretted taking that man’s life, or any other.”

  Antares’s face was as open and guileless as a pool of still water.

  “Is that really what you want? To be sorry every time you do something you must?” Antares returned after a lean moment, the words pulled like a thread from a hem. There were many more where those had come from, but the door was opening and I let go of his arm, turning my attention to the young woman framed there. She looked too young by far to have so many children, but they clustered around her like hens in a yard. She cradled the smallest to her breast.

  Alber.

  I realized I did not know how this was done, if she knew who we were or why we were here. I braced myself for her surprise and her horror, but even as Antares opened his mouth to speak, she hefted the child irritably to her shoulder.

  “Cries night and day he does, and no one to help me with him.” Her speech was rough around the edges, more than I was used to in Ambar and more even than that of the young man who had greeted us. “But I had a dream you would come. I’m only sorry you haven’t got a use for any of the others.”

  Her coarseness was too much for me to bear, and I could not disguise my look of distaste. The woman’s eyes traveled down my frame, the soiled traveling dress that would nevertheless seem a fine thing compared to her garb and the scraps that passed for clothing on her many children.

  “I can tell you haven’t got any, or you wouldn’t be making that face.” She coughed and wiped a filthy hand between her mouth and nose. As Antares stepped within, the children drew back, each one finding a shadow to retreat to, the largest of them receding to the large, sagging bed, the only piece of furniture the woman’s home boasted. Antares didn’t spend much time looking around, though he spared a smile for the children before reaching into the pouch at his waist and withdrawing a second, smaller pouch. This one jingled, and that had everyone’s attention.

  “There will be more when you return,” he said, and even the youngest of the children, a girl who could have been no more than four, knew what he referred to. “And for the expense of seeing that your other children are cared for.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed, and I did not have to look too deeply to know what she thought. Her oldest child had work, enough for the children to live meanly for the months she would have to remain away. But she had no intention of telling Antares that. She looked down at the babe, who had begun to fuss and squirm, and I followed her gaze back and back to his conception, to the little purse of coins that had bought a night in her bed and six months of hard looks from the other women in the village. But now she had a prize, though it was what the child would provide her, not the child itself.

  If I were an infant and so unwanted, I would not need to be Alber’s icon to be unhappy.

  “I’ll make arrangements for the children,” she said, but what I heard was her desire to run and gloat to a neighbor. She took the infant with her and left me and Antares in her home, with her children, whose eyes had not followed their mother’s departure. How many times had they been left alone? Did they like it better without her? My parents had five children altogether and had more love for each than even the resources of a kingdom could rival.

  “Come and hear a story of your baby brother,” I said suddenly, crossing the little distance to the middle of the small room the whole family seemed to share, dropping to my knees on the brushed dirt floor. I held out my arms, for a moment thinking that they would not come, but when they did, I noted Emine’s dark head among them. I imagined Esbat and Lista each on a knee as they had done with my mother, Jurnus sprawled just out of reach but close enough to place one finger upon my leg if he needed to remind me that he was there, too. Anise would kneel, stately, beside me and a little behind, as though she were too old for such things but loved them still.

  “There was a man who made his fortune making houses. He built little cottages for men and women who were only just married, constructed temples to house the faith of an entire village, and made shop fronts to shelter their dreams of wealth. Later, he would return to the newly married couple to build extra rooms when they expected one, two, and three children, and to the villages when they gave up their gods and needed homes for new ones.

  “But his greatest work was the palace he was asked to design and build for the king. He exhausted an entire forest of timber and a quarry of precious stones before it was finished. The king was so impressed that he took the carpenter into his dearest confidence. A house for him was a fine thing, but what he needed most, what he desired most of all, was a house fit for the thing he loved best: his pet rabbit, Slippers.”

  They giggled now and it was a musical thing, brightening the corners of the dreary little cottage. The rafters rang with it, and I let them go on longer than I would have my own siblings.

  “The carpenter was puffed with pride at being given so great a task. A house for a king was one thing. Many before him had made such things. But a house for a rabbit? This was a challenge he relished.

  “But it was not as easy as the carpenter had hoped it would be. Would the rabbit prefer a hutch? An elaborate burrow? A miniature of the palace that matched that of his master? Each stone he laid dissatisfied him, and he would tear it out of the mortar again. The wood he cut was always crooked and ended up in a pile to be burned. The fine tiles he shaped and sanded for the little roof were never the right color, th
e right thickness, the right weight, and he grew so mad with anger that he threw them on the ground and stomped upon them in the street.

  “He began to build with other things. He snatched laundry from the line when servants, husbands, and wives weren’t looking and staked a frame in the mud to hang the flimsy walls upon it. From a farmer’s garden, he rolled an entire patch of pumpkins for the floor and sheaves of corn for the roof. The sorry family whose clothes he had stolen had to dress themselves in the ash from the carpenter’s fires when he grew sick of his imperfect work, and the farmer feasted on discarded stones. Still the carpenter worked day and night, building and breaking down again until the law of his village dragged him before the king for thievery and madness.

  “The king was surprised to see him so bedraggled, dirty, and weary. ‘What has happened to you, friend?’ the king asked. ‘You left here a rich man with the trust of your king and important work to do. Why have you not done it?’

  “The carpenter’s head hung low. He had failed the king, and he had failed Slippers, too. He lay himself prostrate on the fine floor he had tiled for the king himself. As he lowered his face to the ground, he saw it skewered between two reflective tiles: on one side, brilliance, and on the other, creativity. Two faces. Two possibilities.

  “The carpenter looked up at the king.

  “‘I beg you cleave me in two, so I might live to do your bidding.’

  “The king could not for a moment speak, so taken aback was he by such a strange request. But the carpenter was desperate.

  “‘Take your sword and split me or I shall die!’”

  Shudders from the children followed my words, along with the necessary gesture that accompanied the story: a single finger drawn from nose to navel.