The Inheritance Trilogy

by N. K. Jemisin

  “For how long?”

  They looked surprised. “For as long as friendship lasts,” said Shahar. “Life, I guess, or until one of us does something to break it. We can swear a blood oath to make it official.”

  “Swear a—” The words came out as a bestial growl. I could feel my hair turning black, my toes curling under. “How dare you?”

  Shahar, damn her and all her forbears, looked innocently confused. I wanted to tear her throat out for not understanding. “What? It’s just friendship.”

  “The friendship of a god.” If I’d had a tail, it would have lashed. “If I did this, I would be obligated to play with you and enjoy your company. After you grow up, I’d have to look you up every once in a while to see how you’re doing. I’d have to care about the inanities of your life. At least try to help you when you’re in trouble. My gods, do you realize I don’t even offer my worshippers that much? I should kill you both for this!”

  But to my surprise, before I could, Deka sat forward and put his hand on mine. He flinched as he did it, because my hand was no longer fully human; the fingers had shortened, and the nails were in the process of becoming retractable. I kept the fur off by an effort of will. But Deka kept his hand there and looked at me with more compassion than I’d ever dreamt of seeing on an Arameri’s face. All the swirling magic inside me went still.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re sorry.”

  Now two Arameri had apologized to me. Had that ever happened when I’d been a slave? Not even Yeine had said those words, and she had hurt me terribly once during her mortal years. But Deka continued, compounding the miracle. “I didn’t think. You were a prisoner here once—we read about it. They made you act like a friend then, didn’t they?” He looked over at Shahar, whose expression showed the same dawning understanding. “Some of the old Arameri would punish him if he wasn’t nice enough. We can’t be like them.”

  My desire to kill them flicked away, like a snuffed candle.

  “You… didn’t know,” I said. I spoke slowly, reluctantly, forcing my voice back into the boyish higher registers where it belonged. “It’s obvious you don’t mean… what I think you meant by it.” A backhanded route to servitude. Unearned blessings. I moved my nails back into place and sat up, smoothing my hair.

  “We thought you would like it,” Deka said, looking so crestfallen that I abruptly felt guilty for my anger. “I thought… we thought…”

  Yes, of course, it would have been his idea; he was the dreamer of the two.

  “We thought we were almost friends anyway, right? And you didn’t seem to mind coming to see us. So we thought, if we asked to be friends, you would see we weren’t the bad Arameri you think we are. You would see we weren’t selfish or mean, and maybe”—he faltered, lowering his eyes—“maybe then you would keep coming back.”

  Children could not lie to me. It was an aspect of my nature; they could lie, but I would know. Neither Deka nor his sister were lying. I didn’t believe them anyway—didn’t want to believe them, didn’t trust the part of my own soul that tried to believe them. It was never safe to trust Arameri, even small ones.

  Yet they meant it. They wanted my friendship, not out of greed but out of loneliness. They truly wanted me for myself. How long had it been since anyone had wanted me? Even my own parents?

  In the end, I am as easy to seduce as any child.

  I lowered my head, trembling a little, folding my arms across my chest so they would not notice. “Um. Well. If you really want to… to be friends, then… I guess I could do that.”

  They brightened at once, scooching closer on their knees. “You mean it?” asked Deka.

  I shrugged, pretending nonchalance, and flashed my famous grin. “Can’t hurt, can it? You’re just mortals.” Blood-brother to mortals. I shook my head and laughed, wondering why I’d been so frightened by something so trivial. “Did you bring a knife?”

  Shahar rolled her eyes with queenly exasperation. “You can make one, can’t you?”

  “I was just asking, gods.” I raised a hand and made a knife, just like the one she’d used to stab me the previous year. Her smile faded and she drew back a little at the sight of it, and I realized that was not the best choice. Closing my hand about the knife, I changed it. When I opened my hand again, the knife was curved and graceful, with a handle of lacquered steel. Shahar would not know, but it was a replica of the knife Zhakkarn had made for Yeine during her time in Sky.

  She relaxed when she saw the change, and I felt better at the grateful look on her face. I had not been fair to her; I would try harder to be so in the future.

  “Friendships can transcend childhood,” I said softly when Shahar took the knife. She paused, looking at me in surprise. “They can. If the friends continue to trust each other as they grow older and change.”

  “That’s easy,” said Deka, giggling.

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

  His grin faded. Shahar, though—yes, here was something she understood innately. She had already begun to realize what it meant to be Arameri. I would not have her for much longer.

  I reached up to touch her cheek for a moment, and she blinked. But then I smiled, and she smiled back, as shy as Deka for an instant.

  Sighing, I held out my hands, palms up. “Do it, then.”

  Shahar took my nearer hand, raising the knife, and then frowned. “Do I cut the finger? Or across the palm?”

  “The finger,” said Deka. “That was how Datennay said you do blood oaths.”

  “Datennay is an idiot,” Shahar said with the reflexiveness of an old argument.

  “The palm,” I said, more to shut them up than to take any real stance.

  “Won’t that bleed a lot? And hurt?”

  “That’s the idea. What good is an oath if it doesn’t cost you something to make?”

  She grimaced, but then nodded and set the blade against my skin. The cut she made was so shallow that it tickled and did not make me bleed at all. I laughed. “Harder. I’m not a mortal, you know.”

  She threw me an annoyed look, then sliced once across the palm, swift and hard. I ignored the flash of pain. Refreshing. The wound tried to close immediately, but a little concentration kept the blood welling.

  “You do me, I do you,” Shahar said, giving the knife to Dekarta.

  He took the knife and her hands and was not at all hesitant or shy about cutting his sister. Her jaw flexed, but she did not cry out. Nor did he when she made the cuts for him.

  I inhaled the scent of their blood, familiar despite three generations removed from the last Arameri I had known. “Friends,” I said.

  Shahar looked at her brother, and he gazed back at her, and then they both looked at me. “Friends,” they said together. They took each other’s hands first, then mine.

  Then—

  Wait. What?

  They held my hands, tight. It hurt. And why were both children crying out, their hair whipping in the wind? Where had the wind—

  I didn’t hear you. Speak louder.

  This made no sense, our hands were sealed, sealed together, I could not let them go—

  Yes, I am the Trickster. Who calls…?

  They were screaming, the children were screaming, both of them had risen off the floor, only I held them down and why was there a grin on my face? Why—

  Silence.

  3

  I SLEPT, and while I did, I dreamt. I did not remember some of these dreams for a long time. I was aware of very little, in fact, aside from

  something

  being

  wrong

  and perhaps a little bit of

  wait

  I

  thought

  what.

  Vague awareness, in other words. A most unpleasant state for any god. None of us is all knowing, all seeing—that is mortal nonsense—but we know a lot and see quite a bit. We are used to a near-constant infusion of information by means of senses no mortal possesses, but for a time there was nothin
g. Instead, I slept.

  Suddenly, though, in the depths of the silence and vagueness, I heard a voice. It called my name, my soul, with a fullness and strength that I had not heard in several mortal lifetimes. Familiar pulling sensation. Unpleasant. I was comfortable, so I rolled over and tried to ignore it at first, but it pricked me awake, slapped me in the back to prod me forward, then shoved. I slid through an aperture in a wall of matter, like being born—or like entering the mortal realm, which was pretty much the same thing. I emerged naked and slippery with magic, my form reflexively solidifying itself for protection against the soul-devouring ethers that had once been Nahadoth’s digestive fluids, in the time before time. My mind dragged itself out of stupor at last.

  Someone had called my name.

  “What do you want?” I said—or tried to say, though the words emerged from my lips as an unintelligible growl. Long before mortals had achieved a form worthy of imitation, I had taken the likeness of a creature that loved mischief and cruelty in equal measure, as quintessential an encapsulation of my nature as my child shape. I still tended to default to it, though I preferred the child shape these days. More fine control and nuance. But I had not been fully conscious when I took form in the mortal realm, and so I had become the cat.

  Yet that shape was clumsy when I tried to rise, and something about it… felt wrong. I wasted no time trying to understand it, simply became the boy instead—or tried to. The change did not go as it should have. It took real effort, and my flesh remolded itself with molasses-slow reluctance. By the time I had clothed myself in human skin, I was exhausted. I flopped where I had materialized, panting and shaking and wondering what in the infinite hells was wrong with me.

  “Sieh?”

  The voice that had summoned me from the vague place. Female. Familiar and yet not. Puzzled, I tried to lift my head and turn to face the voice’s owner, and found to my amazement that I could not. I had no strength.

  “It is you. My gods, I never imagined…” Soft hands touched my shoulders, pulled at me. I groaned softly as she rolled me onto my side. Something pulled at my head, painful. Why the hells was I cold? I was never cold.

  “By the endless Bright! This is…”

  She touched my face. I turned toward her hand instinctively, nuzzling, and she gasped, jerking away. Then she stroked me again and did not pull away when I pressed against her this time.

  “Sh-Shahar,” I said. My voice was too loud and sounded wrong. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and stared at her, buglike. “Shahar?”

  She was Shahar. I was certain of it. But something had happened to her. Her face was longer, the bones finer, the nose bridge higher. Her hair, which had been shoulder length when I’d last seen her—a moment ago? The day before?—now tumbled around her body, disheveled as if she’d just woken from sleep. Waist length at least, maybe longer.

  Mortal hair did not grow so quickly, and not even Arameri would waste magic on something so trivial. Not these days, anyhow. Yet when I tried to find the nearby stars to know how much time had passed, what came back to me was only a blank, unintelligible rumble, like the jabbering of memory-worms.

  “Cold,” I murmured. Shahar got up and went away. An instant later, something covered me, warm and thick with the scents of her body and bird feathers. It should not have warmed me, any more than my body should have been cold to begin with, but I felt better. By this point I could move a little, so I curled up under it gratefully.

  “Sieh…” She sounded like she was regaining her composure after a deep shock. Her hand fell on my shoulder again, comforting. “Not that I’m not glad to see you”—she did not sound glad, not at all—“but if you were ever going to come back, why now? Why here, like this? This… gods. Unbelievable.”

  Why now? I had no idea, since I had no idea what now meant. Of then, I remembered less thoughts than impressions: holding her hand, holding Deka’s hand. Light, wind, something out of control. Shahar’s face, wide-eyed with panic, mouth open and—

  Screaming. She had been screaming.

  Some of my strength had returned. I used it to reach for her knee, which was a few inches from my face. My fingers slid over smooth, hot skin to reach thin, fine cloth—a sleep shift. She gasped and jerked away. “You’re freezing!”

  “I’m cold.” So cold that I could feel the room’s moisture beginning to cling to my skin, wherever the blanket didn’t cover it. I pulled my head under the blanket, or tried to. That pulling sensation again. It held my head in place, though I could move somewhat against its tension. “Demonshit! What is that?”

  “Your hair,” said Shahar.

  I froze, staring up at her.

  She pushed at my arm, then pulled up a lock of hair for me to see. Loose-waved, dark brown, thick, and longer than her arm. Feet long. I couldn’t move because I was half tangled in it.

  “I didn’t tell my hair to get that long,” I said. It was a whisper.

  “Well, tell it to get short again. Or quit flopping about so I can get you loose.” She flipped up the blanket and started gathering my hair, tugging and finger combing. When she turned me onto my side, my head was freed. I’d been lying on the bulk of it.

  My hair should not have grown. Her hair should not have grown. “Tell me what’s happened,” I said as she shifted me about like an oversized doll. “How much time has passed since we took the oath?”

  “Took the oath?” She stared down at me, an incredulous look on her face. “Is that all you remember? My gods, Sieh, you broke the oath almost the instant you made it—”

  I cursed in three mortal languages, loudly, to cut her off. “Just tell me how much time has passed!”

  Fury reddened her cheeks, though the pale light around us—Sky’s glowing walls—made this difficult to see. “Eight years.”

  Impossible. “I would have remembered eight years.”

  I should have understood the anger in her voice as she snapped, “Well, that’s how long it’s been. Not my fault if you don’t remember it. I suppose you must have so many important things to do, you gods, that mortal years pass like breaths for you.”

  They did, but we were aware of the breaths. I wanted to know more, like why she sounded so angry and hurt. Those things called to me like the sting of broken innocence, and they felt important. But they also felt like the sorts of things that needed to be softened with silence before they were brought forth sharp, so I pushed them aside and asked, “Why am I so weak?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Where was I? While I was gone?”

  “Sieh”—she let out a hard exhalation—“I don’t know. I haven’t seen you once since the day eight years ago when you and I and Deka agreed to become friends. You tried to kill us and disappeared.”

  “Tried—I didn’t try to kill you.” Her face hardened further, full of hate. That meant I had tried to kill her, or at least she believed I had. “I didn’t intend to. Shahar—” I reached for her again, instinctive this time. I could pull strength from mortal children if I had to, but when I touched her knee again, there was only a trickle of what I needed. Of course; eight years. She would be sixteen now—not yet a woman, but close. I whimpered in frustration and pulled away.

  “I remember nothing from that moment until now,” I said, to take my mind off fear. “I took your hands and then I was here. Something is wrong.”

  “Obviously.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers and let out a heavy sigh. “Hopefully your arrival didn’t trip the boundary scripts in the walls, or there will be a dozen guards breaking down the door in a minute. I’m going to have to think of some way to explain your presence.” She paused, frowning at me hopefully. “Or can you leave? That would really be the easiest solution.”

  Yes, good for me and for her. It was obvious she didn’t want me here. I didn’t want to be here, either, weak and heavy and wrong-feeling like this. I wanted to be with, with, wait, was that—Oh, no.

  “No,” I whispered, and when she sighed in ex
asperation, I realized she thought I’d been responding to her question. I made a heroic effort and grabbed her hand as tight as I could, startling her. “No. Shahar, how did you bring me here? Did you use scrivening, or—or did you command it somehow?”

  “I didn’t bring you here. You just showed up.”

  “No, you made me come, I felt it, you pulled me out of him—” And oh demons, oh hells, I could feel him coming. His fury made the whole mortal realm throb like an open wound. How could she not feel it? I shook her hand in lieu of shouting at her. “You pulled me out of him and he’s going to kill you if you don’t tell me right now what you did!”

  “Who—” she began. And then she froze, her eyes going wide, because even she could feel it now. Of course she could, because he was in the room with us, taking shape as the glowing walls went suddenly dark and the air trembled and hushed in reverence.

  “Sieh,” said the Lord of Night.

  I closed my eyes and prayed Shahar would stay silent.

  “Here,” I said. An instant later he was beside me, the drifting dark of his cloak settling around him as he knelt. Chilly fingers touched my face, and I fought the urge to laugh at my own obtuseness. I should have realized at once why I was so cold.

  He turned my face from side to side, examining me with more than eyes. I permitted this, because he was my father and it was his right to be concerned, but then I caught his hand. It solidified beneath my touch, and strength flowed into me from the limitless furnace of his soul. I exhaled in relief. “Naha. Tell me.”

  “We found you adrift, like a soul with no home. Damaged. Yeine attempted to heal you and could not. I took you into myself to do the same.”

  And Nahadoth’s womb was a cold, dark place. “I don’t feel healed.”

  “You aren’t. I could not find a cure for your condition, nor could I preserve you.” His voice, usually inflectionless, turned bitter. It was Itempas’s gift to halt the progression of processes that depended on time; Nahadoth lacked this power entirely. “The best I could do was keep you safe while Yeine sought a cure. But you were taken from me. I had no idea where you had gone… at first.”