by Rin Chupeco
The other Catseye, Sumiko, had offered her services to me. Lan had sung her praises, but I’d made excuses, pleaded for more time to process my feelings on my own. Talking didn’t feel like it was going to help me. Not right now.
I stood and wandered the outskirts of camp for several minutes, and nearly stumbled upon Mother and Asteria, talking quietly. I crouched behind a dune, knowing I shouldn’t be eavesdropping but unable to help myself. “Did Devika ever tell you about this stone of immortality?” Mother asked.
“I found one mention of it in a book before. I wondered about it being called that, because I knew we weren’t immortal. Devika was quick to tell me it wasn’t real. Only Jesmyn thought there might have been more to it, but even she told me it wasn’t a viable alternative.”
“What did she say?”
“That we were better off without it. That to use the stone that way would mean sacrificing the both of us, since it would require both aspects of Inanna’s nature. I had no idea what she meant, and she realized pretty quickly she’d divulged information I wasn’t supposed to know. She never said anything about it after that, no matter how many times I asked. I didn’t know then that they were planning to . . . that by ‘sacrifice’ she meant . . .” Her voice trailed off.
There was silence for a while. “Where did we go wrong, Asteria?” Mother asked, sounding weary. “We knew they were keeping things from us. We promised we wouldn’t let them tear us apart.”
“And they did anyway.”
“And all for Aranth?” Mother let out a teary laugh. “We actually allowed a boy to come between us?”
“You love him, Latona. Don’t diminish what he meant to you.”
“I am sorry that he loved me, Asteria. I’m sorry that . . .”
“Don’t be. I’m glad he did. I cared for him too, but . . . I was jealous of him more than not.”
“Of him?” Mother sounded amazed.
“You and I were always together, until he arrived. He took up all of your time, and I was left alone with the council, with the duties we should have been sharing. I rarely saw you after you took up with him. I missed you more than anything. But with the final galla, he . . .” She hesitated. “He would have been safe. I swear it.”
“But you named your city . . .”
“Mainly out of spite. I was angry. You were right. I wanted to have some kind of control over him, but not in the way you thought. It faded after a few months, and for the longest time I just wanted to shut myself away and cry. I should have searched for you to be sure, but I was terrified of going back. I went so far as to try to access the portal, but it didn’t work. If I’d been more honest with myself, I would have named my city after you instead.”
“I wanted to die. I wanted to just lie down under the sun and close my eyes and stop thinking. It was Lord Arrenley who convinced me to keep going, to find a way to protect what remained of my people. This doesn’t excuse his betrayal, but it’s the only reason I haven’t done more than imprison him. I owe him that much. But more than I lost Aranth, I lost you. I had Aranth’s coat, but I had nothing to remember you by. When I learned you were still alive . . . I reacted badly.”
“We are both good at reacting badly, I think,” Asteria said softly. “I am so sorry. I wish we had more time.”
“I wish that, too. I wish we could do everything differently again, Astie. But I’m glad we can make things better for our daughters now. I’m so glad we at least have today—” Mother’s voice broke off. “Haidee,” she began, her voice louder. “Is there something you would like to discuss with me?”
I started on my feet, stammering out apologies and hurrying away, though my heart felt lighter than it had a few minutes before. At least they were talking. At least they were trying to forgive each other. It was the best I could hope for.
I found another dune to perch on. He was fond of doing that, I remembered. He’d climb the highest one he could find and stand guard like he was solely responsible for the protection of the whole camp. He always liked to act tough, but it could never hide his kindness. He was . . .
Tears blurred my vision. I’d almost forgotten that I knew how to cry.
There was movement behind me, but I ignored her, continuing to stare up at the rising sun even as Mother settled herself beside me, carefully rearranging her robes.
“Aranth could never figure out if he preferred the sunrise or the sunset more,” she said. “He was the scholar of us two, interested in all the complexities of how the world turned, and how its turning affected us. He built astrolabes to study the stars, and tracked the changing patterns in the weather, hoping to refine his ability to predict the rain and the snow. I never had his mind for mechanika, but he never made me feel like I was foolish for not knowing as much as he did. You are a lot like him in that, I think. You are a lot like him in many ways.”
I said nothing. The pinks gave way to yellows, clouds slipping across the sky. From the corner of my eye I saw Mother’s hair billowing in the wind, mimicking those colors.
“I kept his favorite jacket in my wardrobe. For years I would take it out and breathe in, trying to remember. But his scent would fade a little every time, and I had to decide if I would rather stop bringing it out so his scent could last longer, or keep it closer to me, even if I had to let him go quicker than I wanted. It took me two years before I could speak his name out loud. And even then it hurt so badly that I never said it again.”
“His name is Arjun.” She was right; the pain scraped at my throat, and the words came out raw and aching, stripped of anything that could protect me from the hurt. “And if I’d chosen to imprison myself for over seventeen years, never seeking to undo the mistake I’d made, he would hate me for my selfishness.”
She bowed her head, accepting the barb. “From the little I’ve seen of him, I find that unlikely. You convinced him to travel with you to the center of the Breaking, with nothing more concrete than a mirage’s word, a couple of letters, and your own convictions. He might have disapproved, but I doubt he would have hated you when it’s clear he trusted you almost from the start. Despite everything I’ve done to harm his family.” There was a light touch against my hand. “Haidee. I know I haven’t been a very good mother to you. Ever since I was a young girl I’ve always had someone to rely on. First it was Namu and my Devoted, and then Asteria, and then Aranth. But after the Breaking, I was alone for the first time in my life, and I was afraid. I thought I’d lost everyone who’d ever been important to me, and so I sought to protect the little that I had left. And you—you were all I had.”
I couldn’t say anything. She squeezed my pinkie finger.
“I’d always believed Odessa gone. I would have fought Inanna herself, if I’d known she was still alive.”
“And Asteria?”
“Asteria and I parted on the worst possible terms. She had always been better at everything. Better at incanta, better at leading, better at getting people to love her. I was willing to give her the Devoted, the people, rulership of Aeon. All I wanted was Aranth, and perhaps a quiet little corner of the world so we could live in peace, with you and Odessa. But even Aranth she wanted. I started to hate her after that, but that didn’t mean I never stopped loving her, either. I just didn’t want to be looked at as an inferior version of her. And in the end, I wept for her just as much as I had wept for Aranth.”
I finally tore my gaze away from the sun. Mother looked forlorn and exhausted. She’d always appeared so perfect and aloof before, carrying on like she could never make a mistake.
“And now that you know she’s alive? And that Odessa is alive?”
“I didn’t want to step outside the city. I didn’t try to bring Aeon back to the way it was, because I knew I couldn’t have done it on my own. But now that you are both here with me again . . . I will help. I have been running away, for far too long.” She turned to face me. “I think,” Mother said, “that I would like nothing more than to fight alongside Asteria, alongside you and Odessa.
I am so sorry, my love.”
I understood her a little more now. She had lost my father and hadn’t known how to stop grieving. His jacket had stayed in her closet, his scent lingering longer, but so had her pain.
I didn’t know if I could stop grieving, either.
“Maybe . . .” Mother’s voice wavered. “Someday, maybe we can all be a family again. You and me and Haidee and Asteria.”
I stepped into her outstretched arms and, finally, allowed myself to weep—huge, racking sobs that took bits and pieces of me with every tear, until I had nothing left inside me to break.
“I want to conduct an experiment.”
Odessa was sitting on a sand dune, watching Lan confer with a few of the other clan members, and she glanced at me as I walked up. “What do you mean?” she asked.
I took her hands in mine. “Do you think you could . . . ?”
“Yes. But are you sure that you’re—”
“I’m positive. We’ve done it before, we can do it again. Besides—”
“All right. I trust you.”
We fell silent, our eyes closing at the same time. I could feel a strange glow emanating from within us both. As before, I saw her weave the incanta to grow her tree, watched as they sank into the sand beneath us. But for the first time I reached out to join my gate with hers, our patterns intertwining until they felt strong and intractable, bursting with the promise of change.
There was a strange cracking sound, and a green sprout rose from the ground before us. The bud grew, flowered briefly, and then surged upward, twisting around itself to form braids of twigs and branches, continuing above us until, finally, a massive tree trunk stood in its place; branches growing, leaves forming.
Some of the clans who’d been watching us had never seen a tree before, and their gasps were loud as they watched this fresh miracle.
The tree was now roughly six feet tall, and still growing; from among its leaves more flowers sprouted, shed their petals, and formed small fruit that ripened before our eyes. Some grew round and orange, a sharp sweetness carrying in the air; others grew lengthwise and curved, or yellow and bottom-heavy, or red and puckered. I had never thought that one tree alone could produce different kinds of fruit. But there they were, begging to be plucked and consumed, promising sustenance. Shadows stretched over the sand, offering us shade.
With a cry of happy surprise, Noelle leaped up, pulling herself up through the branches to retrieve some of the lower-hanging fruit. Soon many others crowded around the tree, hands raised as Noelle tossed the ripest of the fruits down to them.
“See?” I whispered, opening my eyes.
“Yes,” Odessa said. “I felt—I feel—” She lifted her hands to her face, looked surprised to find them shaking. “It feels . . . good.”
“I think we need each other to do what we both can’t alone. I couldn’t have done it on my own. And that’s why I don’t want you ever talking like you’re less than what you are. I’ve only just found you. I don’t want to lose my sister all over again. We can do this. I know we will.”
Odessa smiled, her eyes coming alive with tears. She hugged me. “You will never lose me,” she whispered.
I hugged her back, looking up at our tree. I wish Arjun could have seen this, I thought. He would be stuffing his face along with the rest of them.
Odessa must have known what I was thinking, because her arms around me tightened.
A broken column was all that was left of the statue marking the portal’s location. Had Asteria and her people not pointed the way, I would never even have known its significance. Opening it would have demanded another blood sacrifice, but I was adamant that there would be no more of that for this journey.
Except the alternative was to travel to the Great Abyss through the Sand Sea, a journey that would take weeks we couldn’t spare. Especially if there would be galla dogging our steps the whole time.
Instead, Odessa and I were ready to perform yet another miracle.
“I’d like some further information regarding this gateway,” Lan grunted, irritable. “Where is Vanya?”
The boy himself chose that moment to come trotting up, nervously smoothing down his rumpled clothes and studiously avoiding looking in Lisette’s direction. I wanted to sigh, but didn’t. Vanya could very well die today, as could so many others who’d chosen to follow us, and I couldn’t fault him for making the most of his time here. “There’s an inscription on the monument outside the Brighthenge temple, where the portals originated,” he said immediately, once we’d posed our question. “‘A life for the west. A life for the east. Immortality, below.’ The first two sentences are self-explanatory, but sacrificing a life doesn’t seem to gain us access to the below, which I assume is the way into the Cruel Kingdom.”
“We know that already, Vanya,” Latona said brusquely. “Out with it. Tell us what you think.”
The boy gulped. “It’s those paintings back in the underground temple, Your Holiness. They were very specific when it came to Inanna’s legend, and quite detailed. The one in which both Inanna and her sister descend into the underworld does not depict them making use of a blood sacrifice to enter.”
“Would a temple dedicated to Inanna portray her initiating something so cruel as a blood sacrifice?” Tamera scoffed.
“She was depicted as running away while her sister called out desperately to her for help. If it didn’t shy away from that act of cowardice . . .”
“I think I know,” I said. “We need a goddess with the Gates of Life, and the other with the Gates of Death.”
“Yes,” Asteria said thoughtfully. “I believe that’s right. Latona and I’ve hardly ever used our powers together in that way before—”
“—and only on trivial things,” Mother chimed in. “Pranks on some of the Devoted—”
“A few spells to impress some of the city folk, mostly to show off. We were so young and foolish then. We didn’t know—”
“—that we could have done so much more for everyone, should have realized that was the reason the Devoted wanted to keep us separated. But it was too late.”
“Good Mother,” Lisette groaned. “They’re doing it, too.”
The Golden City mechanika had been busy. Jes and Rodge were overjoyed to see me again, neither willing to relinquish me from their hugs until I’d told them they still had a job to do, and not a lot of time to finish it. Yeong-ho was more reticent—no doubt he was still smarting over my decision to have him knocked unconscious—but he softened well enough when I apologized, and beamed when Mother made it a point to thank him for his ingenuity. “I understand that this was on such short notice,” she said. “You more than exceeded my expectations. Thank you.”
“It’s always been my pleasure, Your Holiness.” What Yeong-ho had done was fashion a smaller version of the air-dome, to be set up around the perimeter of the small monument and afford everyone within it some measure of protection. It would be stronger than the dome we’d managed to create back at the neutral grounds, and its compactness made it even more durable than the Golden City’s.
Odessa spent most of the morning being mobbed by the other Aranthians. My twin’s fears that she would be seen as a traitor by her people were instantly dispelled when many of them converged on her, laughing and clinging. It had not taken long for her to dissolve once more into tears, her guilt all the lesser than it had once been. Quite a few had latched on to Lan as well, her surprise turning to something bordering on bashfulness as other Catseye healers checked her wounds in between scolding her lightly for being reckless. Lan, I felt, had very little idea of how beloved she was among her own colleagues.
“You have done better than I have,” one of them, Lenida, bemoaned. “To look after Her Holiness Odessa was not an enviable position. We frequently drew straws to determine which of us would be assigned to the Spire. Of course, I was quite vigilant, but—” She broke off at Odessa’s sudden peal of laughter, and I had to smile at the sound.
“Lan,” sai
d another of Asteria’s Devoted—a Starmaker called Gracea, I remember. The Catseye paused, and they eyed each other warily. “I am glad that you are safe,” the former finally said, if a bit stiffly, and held out her hand.
After a moment, Lan took it. “So am I.”
“I heard about Janella.”
“I am not sorry for it.”
The other woman finally smirked. “Well, now. So we do have something in common.”
At least one person from Aranth didn’t agree. Asteria remained apart from the rest, placing a Howler on one of the small stone cairns that bordered camp. “Janella’s,” she sighed, looking up when she saw me approach. “She told me she had received several of these from Lord Arrenley as a gesture of goodwill. She thought she could reach an agreement with Latona’s people, persuade her not to fight. I didn’t know about the stone of immortality.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. In many ways, Janella was my creation. Have I ever mentioned that I saved Lan once, took her out of the streets? I once did the same with Janella, who I discovered in even more dire circumstances than my Catseye. For many years, she served as my weapon within the Devoted. But I never realized the toll that would take on her, just as I didn’t realize the toll it would take on Lan.” She turned away sadly. “She’s another soul on my conscience. That she could never wield a fire-gate had always been a source of disappointment for her. I’m glad she had the chance to use it, however briefly.”
It was a good day to reestablish connections. Two men waited for us by the monument, looking so much like Vanya that I didn’t doubt who they were, and they knelt before we could bid them otherwise. “I am Captain Misha of the Tenth division of Silverguards,” the taller of the two said. “This is my brother Ivan.”
“There is no need for this, milords,” Odessa protested.
“We must undo the damage our father has done to our family honor, Your Holiness,” Ivan said grimly. “My brother personally arrested him and saw him to the gaols. His actions have besmirched both our names and Vanya’s.”