The Ever Cruel Kingdom

by Rin Chupeco

  “No.”

  “Lucky.” Arjun used sarcasm just as expertly as he used his Howler.

  I looked back at the camp. “Do the clans make it a habit to gather together like this?”

  “Last I remember was maybe ten years ago. The Salt Sea was rapidly retreating, and they were trying to come up with a fair way to ration our drinking water, or possibly dig for underground aquifers like the ones underneath the Golden City. Most clans usually go their own way. Our paths cross occasionally, long enough to barter every now and then. Most are nomads, excepting the Addax clan.”

  “Why?”

  “They had an oasis, so their camp was the closest thing to a marketplace we had out here. If our supplies were low, they could always be counted on to have a little to spare, and there was always something we could trade. They . . .” His frown returned. “They don’t have that anymore.”

  “Mother Salla mentioned you knowing someone from there?”

  A spot of red appeared on his cheeks. “That’s not important.”

  I giggled. I’d read enough romance to make a guess, and it felt good to laugh. “You should tell Haidee.”

  “I will. Just figuring out the right time.” He was crimson now. I took pity on him and changed the subject.

  “So it’d take something really cataclysmic for all the tribes to be willing to stay in one place.”

  “Yeah. The rain would have gotten everyone’s attention, for starters. Mother Salla plans to wait a couple more days, see if any other clans drift in. How are you holding up?” He saw my hesitation and added hastily, “Don’t answer if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I want to. I’m scared, frankly. This is all new to me.”

  “If there’s anything you need, you only have to ask. Can’t imagine what this must be like for you.”

  I smiled at him. He was very kind, and I was glad for Haidee. “I’m surprised you’re not freaking out more. It must feel weird to have someone show up one day claiming to be your girlfriend’s twin.”

  He reddened again. “I’m not,” he sputtered. “Haidee isn’t my—well she might be, but not exactly, we never talked about—”

  “Arjun!” Haidee was heading our way, carrying a contraption that resembled a large pot. Several strips of metal were hammered into a crisscrossed shape at its bottom.

  Arjun sighed and looked at me. “Are you also a mechanika?”

  “I don’t know what that word means,” I admitted.

  “It’s someone who invents things no one really asks for.” But his expression was markedly different from his flippant tone. He was already smiling, the harsh demeanor he liked to fall back on thawing at her presence. It made him look younger than he probably wanted.

  “It’s for cooking,” Haidee announced proudly as she reached us. “We won’t need to fire up any stones—the sun’s heat does all the work. Won’t need incanta, either. Metal like this traps heat from the sun quickly, and it should cook most food in twenty minutes, tops. I’ve set some wooden slats here to protect your skin from burning—” She broke off. “But I can talk about it later,” she added, looking guilty. “Was I interrupting?”

  “Not at all. It actually sounds rather interesting. But I was hoping we could . . . talk? For a little while?” I glanced over at Arjun, and he nodded to indicate he understood.

  I knew that Haidee had been giving me time to process everything that had happened—it was difficult, adjusting to a strange new world that was the exact opposite of the one you were used to.

  But what I really wanted to do was throw my arms around her waist and not let go until we’d talked about everything. I wanted to tell her about growing up in Aranth. I wanted to ask her a billion questions about what life was like in the Golden City. There was still the problem of the Abyss and of the creatures there, but I wanted to make up for all the years that we were apart, wanted to be some kind of family with her no matter how contemptible our mothers turned out to be.

  Haidee looked surprised, then happy. “Absolutely,” she said, not bothering to hide her eagerness. Her hands wouldn’t keep still, like she had to stop herself from throwing her arms around me, too. I knew that the thought of family appealed to her.

  I just wasn’t sure if she’d want to be one with me, once she knew everything I’d done.

  I reached into my robes and drew out her journal. It contained all the notes she’d taken from the book she said a sand pirate named Sonfei had lent her, about the galla rituals and the lore surrounding our mutual ancestor, the goddess Inanna.

  “You wrote about the radiances that the galla would bestow, along with the terrors they would impose.” I closed my eyes, swallowing. “They came to me. They gave me the gift of clarity and the ability to glean brief visions of the future, but made me reckless. They gave me the ability to grow and tend to plants, but poisoned the soil in their wake. They gave me greater strength with patterns, but they also made me cruel.” I hugged the book to my chest, trembling. “I accepted six of those seven radiances. I still have them. And the terrors, too. I thought they would renege on the deal and take back everything. Their voices in my head dissipated when I rejected the final gift. I thought they were gone for good, that I was finally free. But I’m not, am I?”

  Haidee frowned. “I saw the vines you wrapped around one of Mother’s cannons to disrupt its glowfires. That was one of these radiances, right?”

  “Can you do it too?” I shifted the patterns around us, a variety of greens and golds that twisted into the sand until, inexplicably, a shrub sprouted by our feet. It rose higher, twisting and forming branches above us until a tree stood in its place, roughly seven or eight feet high. Thick leaves grew along its branches where I could see small, rounded fruit, ripe for the picking. But just as quickly I saw the ground around it sink, turn brown and sickly looking.

  Haidee’s eyes glittered as she tried to copy the incanta, knitting the same braids of color, but nothing sprouted beside my plant, for all her efforts. “No,” she said slowly. “I can’t. I’m not surprised, given what we already know of the ritual.”

  “Why can’t I give them back?” It was hard not to give in to despair. “I don’t want them. I never should have accepted them to begin with. I was hoping there’d be something in your notes that could help me, but . . .”

  “Your mother, Asteria, would have gone through the same ritual. Did she show any similar abilities?”

  But she’s not my mother. Having to acknowledge that hurt, but I schooled my features. “None that I’ve seen. She could see brief glimpses of the future, but that’s it. I always thought it was a natural extension of a goddess’s abilities.”

  “Neither my mother nor I have any gifts for prophecy. But your mother is proof that nothing has to change. You can still use the galla’s gifts to help people.” Haidee looked hopeful. I had known she would be optimistic; from our first meeting she had accepted me without blame or envy. I wished I had her self-assurance.

  “I still don’t want it. The power—it changes you. For every new skill I gain, there’s a fresh cruelty I receive along with it. They made me selfish, and aggressive, and cold. I . . . I killed someone.” The words hung heavy in the air. I waited for her to recoil, but she showed no reaction. “I wish I could say I didn’t want to, that I was forced. But I wasn’t. I enjoyed doing it. I don’t want these gifts. Not anymore. They’ve cost me far too much, more than anything I could ever gain from them.”

  She knew bits and pieces of my story by now, cobbled together from what Lan, Noelle, and I myself had told her back at Brighthenge. The idea that her twin sister had killed someone should have repulsed her. It might have repulsed me, had our roles been reversed.

  “Do you think we should never have done this? Tried to close the rift, tried to make Aeon right again?” The guilt had been eating me up ever since we’d arrived here.

  “I . . .” She paused. “I don’t know. I never realized it could go this way. I’m already exhausted at the very thought that the
re’s still so much more to be done. But now that we’re here, we have to see it all the way through. We have to get rid of the galla, of Inanna’s corruption, once and for all. It’s just . . .”

  She looked away, as if ashamed. “Mother told me that I’d made it worse. I hate that she might have been right. But if the alternative is to accept that our world is slowly dying and we can do nothing about it . . . I reject that. I refuse to believe that our only option is to wait for death.” She turned back to me. “You have the galla’s gifts. Perhaps there’s a way we can use that to our advantage—”

  “No.” I was shaking my head. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  I pointed to the ground, where the sand had blackened, the corruption already taking root. “In a few days, this will rot away, and nothing else will ever grow here. What looks to be a blessing has always been a curse instead.”

  “But nothing had ever grown there to begin with,” Haidee said thoughtfully. “I’ve done research on sustainable farming, and desert sand isn’t conducive to it—unfortunately. Whether it rots tomorrow or not, you’ve grown something in a place that would never have been able to in normal conditions, and that’s saying something.” Haidee’s own eyes glowed as she drove terra patterns underneath the sand once more. But nothing grew, and she sighed in defeat. “I was expecting that, I suppose. I’m not the one who’s been offered the galla’s gifts. . . . Still, I hate failing.”

  “You’re not worried? I could do worse. I’ve done much worse.”

  “We’ll find a way.” It was such a terrible promise, with nothing to back it up. But she said it with such sincerity and conviction, my eyes welled up. How could she be so confident? “I’m not our mothers. I’m not going to abandon you.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Asteria isn’t my mother. Why do you talk like she still is?”

  “She didn’t need to give birth to you to be yours. I’m angry and disappointed with my mother, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t the woman who raised me and cared for me, despite both our shortcomings. It wouldn’t matter if Asteria had given birth to me, either. Latona would still be my mother. In the end, that’s what a parent is, right?”

  I choked, caught between laughter and tears. I don’t know what I was going to say when I faced Mother again, but for now Haidee was good at helping ease my anxiety. “Thank you.”

  “Your Holinesses.” Noelle was trotting toward us, her eyes full of puzzlement. “The clan leaders are still in the tent with Lady Salla, but a few people have been understandably curious about our new botanical acquisition.”

  Haidee and I looked at each other. “They’re going to find out about us sooner or later,” Haidee finally said. “It can’t hurt for them to know we could provide them with food.”

  I agreed. “Lady Noelle, please let them know that they are free to take as much fruit as they would like for their midday meal.”

  “As it pleases you, Your Holiness.”

  “Is she your Devoted?” Haidee asked as Noelle moved obediently away.

  I thought about the people I had tried to recruit during the expedition to Brighthenge, cringed at the demands I had made of them, the loyalty I had no right to claim. “No. I don’t want to continue the custom of having Devoted. But I trust Noelle implicitly. I could find no better friend.” I paused. “Haidee . . . I wish we’d met under better circumstances. There’s so much I could tell you about her, and Aranth. About what it’s like to live surrounded by seas and storms. About Lan.”

  “You care for Lan very much?” Haidee asked, the words slightly uncertain, as if she wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk about my relationship or keep it private.

  She needn’t have worried. “I love her. I could have died—or worse—during the journey here, if it wasn’t for my Lan. I’d give everything up to be with her.” I looked over at Arjun, who was still scowling into the distance. “And him?”

  “Yeah. He’s annoying and complains too much and snores too loudly and hogs all the space. And I love him.”

  “Snores?” My eyes widened. “You mean you’ve . . . you know?” Lan had propositioned me early in our courtship, long before she knew I was the goddess she was supposed to be protecting. I had panicked, because all the experience I had came from the romance novels I loved, and she had assumed I knew much more. We had definitely progressed further than that since then, but were things more . . . permissive, here in these sunlands?

  I could have been referencing other, more innocuous things, but she knew immediately what I meant. Her grin widened even as a blush papered her cheeks. “Arjun and I have done . . . things. Amazing things. Things he was insufferably smug about afterward. But, technically, yes and no. We didn’t go through the whole, well—”

  She didn’t even need to finish the sentence. I understood perfectly. “We’re the same,” I admitted shyly. Weren’t these the kind of confidences you would tell a sister? It was a strange comfort, like the years spent not knowing the other existed didn’t matter. It didn’t feel awkward at all to be divulging secrets now. “We didn’t have much time to do more, but it felt—”

  “I know. I had no idea you could—”

  “Yes, and isn’t it stunning how—”

  “Oh, sweet Aeon, did she also—” She was coloring in earnest now. I was certain I was reddening in the exact same way.

  “Did he—”

  “Yes. He was strutting about afterward like he’d closed the Abyss himself—”

  “Lan doesn’t strut, but it was—glorious. I had never felt so—”

  “I can hear you two,” Arjun growled, horrified.

  Haidee giggled, though she lowered her voice. “It wasn’t all fun and games during our travels. He was stung by a huge scorpion. He almost . . .” Her grin faded. “He was temporarily paralyzed, but I thought it was worse than that.”

  I could only nod, sympathetic. Underneath her cheerful disposition was a doggedness that I recognized because I shared it; I would have fought anyone and anything for Lan, too. And I had.

  “And he’s still dragging his heels about sneaking into the city with me. I know Vanya can—”

  A commotion rose from the tents. Mistress Tamera of Clan Fennec emerged, looking furious. She was followed by Master Lars of Clan Gila, Master Giorme of Clan Dorca, and then Mother Salla herself, lips pursed. Apparently, Mother Salla’s attempts at explaining us had not gone well.

  The commotion drew Lan closer; she lifted an eyebrow at me, a silent question in her eyes. I shook my head. The clans had a right to be angry. Latona had never treated the nomads well, so it was natural for their hostility to be extended to her daughters.

  The group of elders stopped abruptly in their tracks, taking in the tree, before Tamera turned her ire on us.

  “You’ve brought goddesses here?” she shouted. “What trick do you intend to pull, Salla? Are you spying for the city dwellers?”

  “If we were working for Latona, you would all be her prisoners by now. Use your head, Tamera.”

  “I had not thought to believe it myself,” Lars marveled, “but there are two of them. So it’s true that the other goddess survived.”

  Tamera glared at us. “I was willing to ignore your former position as a Devoted because you have proven yourself a staunch ally over the years, Salla, but what possible reasons could you have for trusting these two?”

  Mother Salla snorted, like it was a ridiculous question. “You want Aeon healed just as much as I do, and only the goddesses can bring that about. Look around us. Did you want to spend the rest of your life waging war with Latona over a desert?”

  “The Sun Goddess didn’t leave us much choice, as you recall.”

  “We have a choice now. They need our help. Or will you let your prejudices stand in their way?”

  The other woman took off her cap, rubbing at her bald scalp. “I promise nothing until I hear what it is they want from us.”

  “Thank you, Lady Tamera,” Haidee said
.

  She laughed. “Not a lady,” she said, and Lan started at that. “But I will listen, even if you may not like my answer.”

  “I am sorry,” my twin said, “that you have spent your lives out here in the desert, when my mother should have done more. I should have done more. My sister and I are trying to find a way to heal the breach and undo the Breaking.”

  “And what if that requires you to stand against your mother?”

  “I already am.”

  “Would you kill her, if it comes down to it?”

  Haidee looked shocked. “I—no. She might not listen to reason, but I won’t let her harm any of you.”

  “And that is exactly my fear, Your Holiness,” Tamera shot back, the title clearly meant to be an insult. “Your hesitation will mean our deaths. I cannot trust my family’s lives to such indecisiveness.”

  A shout from Arjun interrupted us. He was pointing at a fleet of vehicles heading our way.

  “Hellmakers,” he roared. “Hellmakers, twenty out!”

  Haidee paled.

  “Another clan?” I asked, puzzled, but my sister was already running toward Arjun, the others scrambling to get into their own jeeps. Her reply drifted back to me, slamming hard into my gut once the words set in.

  “Not a clan. Cannibals!”

  Chapter Four

  Haidee Versus the Cannibals

  BY THE TIME ARJUN SOUNDED the alert I was already moving, leaving a stunned-looking Odessa behind as I tore through the sands to get to the closest rig. Arjun was already behind the wheel, readying his Howler. A cluster of gold and brown rigs sped toward us. “Clan Addax colors,” he said grimly.

  The blood-colored vehicles in relentless pursuit behind them, though, were most definitely not a part of the alliance.

  “They’re not going to make it,” I muttered. The Hellmakers were too close, within firing range. They could massacre Clan Addax before any of them reached us.

  Lan and Noelle made a beeline for our rig as well. “How good are you with guns?” Arjun asked them as I slid into the empty seat beside him.