It had been one madness after another since Gannet and Morainn had come into my life, and though he was here with me, I felt alone with the wild terrors that he had introduced. Gannet would no doubt insist that I would have awakened to Theba’s madness in time, and I was grateful he wasn’t present to argue the point.
Even as I doubted what I had seen through Ji’s eyes, I perceived the other world, a strange periphery of shadow and flickering torchlight, the smooth, well-tended surfaces of ancient stone now sand-scarred from neglect. I could almost smell the crude animal fat-soaked torches they’d used to brighten the long, dark nights many ages ago. I slipped on the fine threads of a carpet that wasn’t there, followed a worn stair to emerge into the night. I’d gone the wrong way but was too arrested by the sight to retreat.
I should’ve guessed that our subterranean sanctuary was part of the palace, but I was still surprised to look up and see the terraces, the moon-polished veneer of stone walls. Gannet had told me this city had been the seat of our ancient kingdom. What mythical figures had walked here, ruled here, died here?
“It isn’t safe for you to be out here.”
It was Lista, sword perhaps unwisely sheathed, eyes mere shadows with the moon behind her.
“I’m no safer underground,” I insisted, shaking my head to clear it. She’d been carrying a torch but had hastily extinguished it before surfacing. I could smell the burning oil still, as familiar a scent as the expression of concern she wore.
Of all my siblings, Lista had been the only one who had never asked me directly about my gifts. Esbat had an intellectual curiosity, Anise a patronizing concern, Jurnus a rude air of wanting to know if this was something he could best me at. But Lista had simply never inquired, only allowed me to continue being odd, worthy of worry. I’d assumed her too ignorant to care, or too frightened to probe, but now I wondered if her acceptance didn’t come from a different place, a bolder strength. Would knowing the source of my power, the depth of my gifts, change how she treated me?
I didn’t have to ask to know that it would not.
“I can’t very well let you get into trouble on your own,” Lista said, her smile eclipsing the worries her face had taken on the months since we had seen each other. “I’m glad you’re back, Ren. Even if I can’t really believe what has brought you here.”
“It doesn’t matter if you believe me,” I said quietly, hearing the words in another voice, another time, when Gannet had first said them to me, when I had been as reticent as they. It would amuse him, I knew, to see me defending the knowledge I had once scorned.
“But why would the Ambarians worship her?” Lista questioned, ignorant of the offense she dealt. I held fast to the flare of Theba’s temper, remembering a story I should have found solace in months ago. I cast my eyes across the dark ruins of the city, shuddering as I spied the fires of the Ambarian encampment. It was far enough away that I might have mistaken it for star glow but still too close for comfort.
“You’ve heard the same stories that I have,” I said. “Without Theba, life and love would be endless. The truest pleasures are fleeting. She keeps them that way.”
Lista eyed me warily, knowing well that I meant to tell her a story. I couldn’t help but smile. This was the first moment I felt like I had truly come home.
“There was a brief time when Theba made herself absent from the affairs of mortals, and while it should’ve been cause for celebration, instead it was a plague. Theba’s passion for Shran was all-consuming. While she made a devoted toy of the king, his kingdom languished.
“Without Theba’s breath to sow weeds and sing insects among the crops, they outgrew their furrows and choked each other, tendrils crowding. Blossoms had little chance to bud in the shade and entire yields were lost.
“Without Theba’s hands to smother them, the sick wasted and wasted but didn’t pass, the elderly languished, babes without mothers to nurse them cried piteously without relief. No one could die, nothing could change, and the little beauties of the world went unnoticed without Theba’s cruelty as contrast.
“At last, it was Shran himself who noted the strange plague that visited his kingdom, sharing his worries with his wife, Jemae. But it was not Jemae he spoke with but Theba in disguise. She was so ashamed and startled by her inaction that she flew from him in an instant, causing three of the nearest rivers to flood their banks, a dozen granaries to burn, and a wasting sickness to claim the oldest and weakest within the city walls.”
“I doubt anyone thanked her for that,” Lista interrupted, casting a dark look at me. I sighed. This was not so uplifting a tale after all.
“No, her name was a curse. It still is. But it doesn’t change the balance she brings to the world.”
There was no one else to defend her, to defend me, but it made me sick to do it. I felt an uncurling, syrupy warmth in my chest, the low bubble of a chuckle that wasn’t mine in my throat.
“She was here, in Re’Kether.”
I was speaking, but it wasn’t me. Theba parted my lips, moved my hands as they alighted on one of Lista’s armored shoulders. Bile rose so high in my throat I was sure she could see it behind my eyes.
“Would you like me to show you?”
“You’ve never been here before, Eiren. How would you know?”
“I’ve been here.”
And I had been, but it was Theba who laid claim to these ruined stones. My toes curled and I stood, leading, and only after I had taken a few steps did Lista rise and follow, too. We walked back the way we had come, this time out of another door, the lintel cracked and sagging. I wanted to scream at her to stay or to run very fast in the opposite direction, but she was coming after me. Because she trusted me. Because I was her mild sister. Because she didn’t believe that I was a monster.
But I was. Oh, I was.
Lista had a torch, though I didn’t need it to see. Where there was no moonlight I employed my dark sight, or Theba did, as though holding lenses up to my eyes. We snaked through a squat door in the garden wall, a servant’s entrance. I should’ve railed that she drew us away from the safety of my family, of more soldiers, but I wanted to know what Theba knew, what she clearly meant to reveal to us both.
And she intended to take her time. I wasn’t fighting her as hard as I had before, and she used my curiosity as a means to greater control. Theba delighted in my body, tripping my fingers along the rough walls as we passed through close corridors, touching my hair, tasting my lips with my tongue. They were dry and my throat was, too, and I thirsted suddenly for wine to wet them, or a kiss. She would need rivers and armies to sate her, but I would have settled to share a cup with just one man.
“Many blamed Jemae for the kingdom’s fall,” Theba said in my voice, her smile on my lips all wrong. But Lista couldn’t see it, wouldn’t suspect anything even if she could. Theba was carrying on as if I hadn’t stopped telling the story. “It began then, when a woman so beguiled Shran that he failed his people.
“She considered herself blameless, though it was she who possessed Jemae, she who drove Shran to near madness with want of her. He had loved his wife and together they had loved their kingdom, but Theba had given him room enough in his heart only for slavish devotion.”
I tripped and stumbled against a narrow stair, the pain for a moment granting me some control over my body. I reached out for Lista, as though with a touch I could warn her, but it was too brief. The slip caused Theba to clutch at me even tighter, and we continued up, Lista trailing, Theba leading, my will a powerless haze that threatened to blind me.
“If she was at fault, then she suffered plenty,” Lista reasoned, Jemae’s story unfolding in her mind, swelling as Jemae’s belly had with a child that was not her own.
“She couldn’t suffer enough.”
These words caused Lista’s senses to sharpen, and I knew the look she gave me without being able to see her, eyes fixed on the climb ahead. She didn’t suspect the truth, that I wasn’t in control but rather that I had
become cruel. She believed something in me had changed in my time apart from my family.
And it had.
“Eiren, we really shouldn’t be out here. The patrols have never penetrated this deeply into the city, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t begin tonight.” Theba ignored her, and Lista followed, partly out of a desire to protect me and partly her own curiosity. We passed out of the dark stair and into a wide, open one, the time-balding stone of the steps beneath our feet giving way to a beautiful chaos of mosaic tile. The colors had kept their vibrancy despite the neglect of many hundreds of years, perhaps because this place was largely shielded from the elements. Moonlight filtered in through miraculously intact latticework screens in the high ceiling, angled smartly to divert the rain.
Lista’s torch created the shadows of wild creatures as we climbed on, their teeth seeming to nip and grind at our heels, sharpened by my imagination. I did not have to wonder long where they chased us, where Theba was leading us, for I recognized it the instant we passed through a high archway and onto what once had been a lush rooftop garden. Silks had hung here, in another time, the smells of waxy, flowering trees profuse in the air. I had dreamed this place.
I knew now it hadn’t been a dream.
I saw the low stone bench where Theba had taken Shran, where he had presumed to take his wife, centuries of neglect failing to diminish the cold burn of the memory in me. The heat of his skin felt as near to me as though I wore it myself. I shivered and was relieved that I could. I felt Theba inexplicably retreating, and I was grateful to Lista for not asking me immediately how I’d known this place.
Why did Theba want me to see this? I could only think that she wanted me to feel as she felt, but what cause had the Dread Goddess for sympathy? Was it not enough to control my body? Must she rule my heart and my head, as well?
Despite her earlier protest, Lista walked ahead of me onto the terrace, running her hands along the crumbling facade that would make it difficult to jump from here to the ground, several hundred feet below. It looked as though it had once boasted a parade of mythical architectural beasts, mostly serpents, and the rare, unlucky creature ensnared in the serpent’s jaws. There was sand everywhere, evidence that storms had been the only occupants of Re’Kether for some time. Storms and ghosts.
The feeling was different here, more akin to the dread I had felt the night I had escaped the barge and yet somehow completely divorced from the wild terror of that night, too. And while there was certainly some of that here, stinging my eyes like smoke from a fire, there was a bitter sweetness in the air, too, as though someone had cast a handful of dried herbs on the fire just as it was dying, tempering the smell. I took a few steps forward, my lips parted as though I might taste what lingered here, the traces of forgotten love, lust, deception.
“Jurnus will piss hot oil if he finds us up here.” Lista’s words drew my attention, her smirk grounding me in the present. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere that Shran retreated to, a very long time ago. Jemae, too.”
This was a place that had been beautiful and secret, a place to escape to when the pressures of court became too much. I was troubled by what was obviously a gift from Theba, showing me this place. I glanced at Lista, but she was looking behind me, beyond me, her eyes hard in the moonlight. I followed her gaze to the distant fires of the nearest Ambarian encampment.
“After they took you, we didn’t know what to expect,” Lista said quietly. “We spent three days in the reliquary, relieving ourselves in one corner, sleeping in another.”
I knew better than to say that I was sorry.
“And within days of being allowed some freedom to ‘ease the transition of power’ for our people, Jurnus raced after you. He killed two of their soldiers in the process. When he didn’t come back, they chained father up. And mother a week later, when they found her mixing poisons. Then they made a spectacle of laying open the backs of the herbalists who had supplied her and burned three community gardens.”
My sharp intake of breath was too loud for the terrace. My father, my mother, our people, we all understood physical pain. But our land was cultivated at great cost. The dozens of families that depended on those gardens would starve, or steal, or worse. Lista’s thoughts were a turmoil of memory, the moments she stole to tend to the raw wounds on our parents’ wrists blurring into clandestine encounters with one of the Ambarian soldiers, the knives she smuggled from his things. The one she’d used to cut his throat.
“How did you get away?” I asked finally, not looking at her.
“The Ambarians assumed that three sisters would behave themselves, with a hunted brother and a shackled mother and father. They were wrong.” Lista forced me to meet her eyes. She needed me to know that she had suffered, that she had survived and was stronger for it. “They also didn’t expect our people to have caches of weapons and water and gold enough for bribes.”
“And now you’re here.”
“And now you’re here,” Lista repeated, her emphasis punctuated by her hands reaching out to clasp mine. She chewed her lip. “You really can’t help us?”
I didn’t need her to explain what she meant. I shook my head, thinking of Theba walking us both here, driven by some need that I couldn’t understand. The Dread Goddess had her own agenda, and it didn’t align with mine.
“There’s not a weapon in the world you’d want to put in my hand. Trust me.”
But she didn’t trust me, not about Theba. And I couldn’t expect her to, not when Gannet and I had promised them just that: a weapon.
Chapter Twelve
Lista returned me to my chamber, making plausible explanations to the two soldiers we encountered on our descent. She hugged me, and I allowed myself to relax into the embrace. Captivity, the war, both had changed her. She was like silk that has shredded in a strong wind, whose fibers go on to feed a strong rope.
Dawn could not have been more than an hour off, and I fell straightaway into my bed, not even bothering with the little lamp. But it flared to life no sooner than my head hit the pillow, and I shot back up, my fright transforming quickly to shock.
“What are you doing in here?” I hissed at Gannet, who leaned against the far wall, back stiff as the stones themselves. I snatched at the loose collar of my dress before remembering that I hadn’t bothered undressing before falling into bed.
“I was waiting for you.”
“Obviously.” I bit my tongue to keep from being so obviously baited. “But why? If my brother or father, or gods forbid, my mother, learn you’re in here, you’ll find it impossible to scout the ruins tomorrow as you’ll be without the use of your legs.”
Gannet stiffened. “I know how to go unnoticed when I need to.”
“You’re the least noticeable masked man of my acquaintance.”
“Eiren, what happened on the stair?” He fought the urge to grin, his determination always easier for him than his long-neglected sense of humor. “I felt you change, but it was gone again as quickly as it came. I came to ask you about it and you were gone. So, I waited.”
I sat up, and before I could think better of it, beckoned him to join me at the edge of the bed. He didn’t fight the request, but he didn’t sit near enough for us to touch, either.
“It was another vision of Re’Kether as it was. But this one was different. I became somebody else. I walked through a moment in her life, knew the people that she knew.”
“Was it a story that you remember? Did anything look or sound familiar?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t an unreasonable line of questioning, but I didn’t know any stories about any Ji, or Mara.
“I don’t even remember it all now. But maybe you do?” I told myself I didn’t only want to touch him because I could now, because he was there, but because he might be able to help. I laid a hand on his cheek and tried to share the strange vision with him, but there were no memories to transmit, just snatches of detail clouded as though with sleep, like a dream. For the first ti
me, I didn’t have to try to hide something from Gannet; he simply couldn’t see. I let my hand drop reluctantly to the thin blanket and retreat to my lap. “I saw a strange figure, like a ghost, on the stair. And when she touched me, I was transported.”
“But you didn’t go anywhere,” Gannet observed, eyes worrying the air before him with thought. “It’s really not safe for you here.”
“It’s not safe for me anywhere.” I felt like the admonishment was swiftly becoming a refrain for my life. “I tried to go back to the stair, to find the ghost again, but Lista found me and Theba—Theba took control of me. Walked me to an empty part of the palace above.”
Gannet’s eyes flashed in alarm.
“You couldn’t stop her?”
“No.” I squirmed. “But I didn’t try very hard. I wanted to see what she wanted to show me. Is this something that happens to other icons? Don’t you lose control sometimes?”
It was Gannet’s turn to be uncomfortable.
“I’m not always clear which wants are mine and which aren’t. I’m not sure that’s the same.”
“Wants?” I felt my heart quicken. His eyes were still, potent as the night. He feared to speak what he thought next, but he made it plain for me.
Sometimes I feel the line between us begin to blur. I don’t have the control I once did. I feel you here, everywhere.
He reached tentatively to trace a finger down my shoulder, catching against the fabric of my dress and grazing bare skin. A thrill danced in me, and I collapsed helplessly into it.
The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two Page 12