“I think it’s impossible that you were as hurt as you appeared to be,” Lady Peysimun snapped, her fisted knuckles white, “and are now perfectly fine. So the injuries must have been false.”
“I think,” Alyea said steadily, “I need to tell you the whole story. From the time I left Bright Bay. And I think we’ll need another pot of strong tea. Or maybe two.”
Over the course of three pots of tea, Alyea told a more complete story of her travels than she’d offered before; and her mother, expression unwaveringly grim, listened without comment and few questions.
Alyea ended with a heavily edited version of her recent encounter with Kippin and her discovery of Kam’s involvement in a very ugly group, then sat silent, studying her teacup and waiting for her mother to speak.
It took a long time.
“This is intolerable,” her mother said at last, her voice thin. “You’ve completely upset every single aspect of our lives.”
Alyea looked up, frowning at that reaction, and caught sight of a damp shimmer in her mother’s eyes. “It hasn’t been fun for me either,” she said dryly.
“No. I suppose it hasn’t.” Her mother dropped her own gaze to her teacup, turning it in slow circles. “So I have to tolerate this . . . this Deiq? In my own house? Or is it your house now? Eredion has been trying to explain what your becoming a desert lord means for us, but I don’t understand any of it. Everything he said sounded quite mad.”
“It’s still your house,” Alyea said. “Think of me as . . . as an advocate for the entire family now. And Deiq . . . yes. He’ll be staying for a while. I . . . I need him.”
“Considering the fuss he put up about staying with you, he’s not shown his face in this room since you woke up,” her mother said tartly.
“He knows I’m safe with Lord Eredion around. He’ll be back soon enough.”
“I don’t know.” Her mother shifted restlessly, tilting her empty teacup back and forth in her hands without looking up. “I don’t know that I like any of this.”
Alyea sat quietly, not sure how to respond. Weariness began to drag at her eyelids.
“This is impossible!” her mother exclaimed, setting the cup down and standing abruptly. She paced away, turned, and came back, face flushed with nervous tension. “Consorting with barbarians and monsters—it’s not right. Can’t you just . . . just resign?”
Alyea couldn’t help it; she leaned back and let out a long hoot of laughter.
“No,” she said once she caught control of herself. “I wish I could. But the changes are permanent. And they’re not barbar—”
“Yes, I can see you actually believe all these, these, hallucinations . . . that some strange creature got you pregnant and then took the child before the soul had even entered its body, that another one spoke to you and asked you to travel to Arason, of all places; and this Deiq, what you tell me about him—it’s ridiculous. It’s nonsense. He’s a merchant, Alyea. Merchants don’t turn out to be . . . no. If this fantastical flimflam is your new life, I want no part of it. It’s all lies. All nonsense. None of it can possibly be real. They drugged you, Alyea, you’ve been hallucinating all this time. You need to go on a fast and pray to cleanse yourself—”
Alyea stood, slowly, and said, “Mother? Look at me. I’m standing. I’m alive. You thought I’d die when they brought me in, didn’t you? But I’m fine, in less time than it would take to mend a sprained wrist. How do you explain that?”
“We must have been mistaken,” her mother said, but she looked away and her face drained of color at the question.
“No. You weren’t. Let me tell you what I remember of what Tevin did to me.” Alyea drew a deep breath and began talking. Before she’d finished detailing the first hour of her final captivity, her mother let out a rough sob, whirled, and ran from the room.
Alyea sank back onto the couch and muttered, “I definitely should have tried a gentler approach that time.”
Chapter Sixty-six
Deiq sat on a bench in the Peysimun gardens, watching blue-speckled king butterflies loft from flower to flower, his thoughts darting like the insects taking advantage of the drying air.
Once again, he faced choices drawn from stupid mistakes: trapped against the hard reality that he didn’t belong in the human world, couldn’t play by their rules and abide by their ways. He’d been forced to walk away from Onsia and her irrational demands; Alyea, just as rigidly biased in some ways, would never be able to accept Deiq’s essential difference.
Especially not now. Not after what her own kind had done to her. He’d seen human victims recovering from brutal torture in the past; it took them years to regain even basic stability. Alyea hadn’t trusted him even before the ordeal, and he didn’t have years to wait for her mind to heal. He’d missed his chance with her. He should have pushed harder, set aside emotional weakness, told her to ignore the false message. He’d had the right, damn it, as her teacher. He should have ordered everyone to clear out and leave them alone, instead of letting an inexperienced child dictate events based on shallow, stupid human politics.
But he hadn’t, because he’d been lazy. And now the only paths out led through variations on pain he didn’t want to contemplate.
He could feel the hunger gnawing at him again. If Alyea did slide into the full change next time he saw her, it would drag him past restraint; he’d hurt her badly, without time to explain.
Someone moved nearby: Eredion approaching. Deiq hesitated, then stayed still, allowing the Sessin lord to find him.
“Deiq,” Eredion said with audible relief a moment later, and sat on the bench without waiting for invitation, tugging the laces on his formal shirt open. The emerald green and sand-tan of Sessin Family colors brought out the sallow exhaustion in the man’s face. “Gods, I’m glad you’re here. That woman is fucking insane.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes and hacked a bootheel restlessly against the pebbly ground. “I’m glad I found you first, actually. It’s not a good idea for either of us to go in there right now. Alyea really set her off.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure. All I can make out from her screeching is something about you being a monster and me being a traitor, and both of us being responsible for Alyea turning against her.”
“All of which,” Deiq observed, “is, actually, true.”
Eredion shot him a hard sideways glare. “Thanks.” He kicked at the gravel again, then, with a hard sigh, bent to pull off his boots.
“You expected sympathy?”
“No. I suppose not. Ahh. . . .” He set the boots aside, stripped off his knee-stockings, and buried his large feet under the pebbles. “Damn, I hate wearing those things these days. Especially in hot weather.”
They sat quietly, watching the butterflies, for a time.
“Did you . . . talk to her yet?” Deiq asked at last, not looking at the Sessin lord; trying not to think about the fact that Eredion hadn’t protested Deiq’s own implicit self-designation of monster. It added another layer of silent misery and frustration; he found himself wanting to say Even now, you see me that way? Even you?
If even Eredion couldn’t let go of seeing Deiq as a monster at core, there really wasn’t anything better to hope for from Alyea—after all, he’d almost gotten her killed.
Eredion shook his head. “Started to. Didn’t get far. She had to rest, and then the king showed up—and then her mother insisted on going to talk to her. And now she’s exhausted again, and sleeping like a rock. I’m hoping she sleeps through the entire of her mother’s temper tantrum.”
“Has she asked to—see me?” The words slipped free before he could stop them.
Eredion gave him a long, hard stare. “She wants to talk to you,” he said after a moment. “I told her I needed to finish explaining some things first.”
Deiq exhaled slowly. “So she doesn’t know about . . . feeding.”
“Not yet. That’s the next part.” Eredion paused, then added, “I’m starting to see signs that the fin
al changes are kicking in. You ought to stay close, instead of wandering around. It won’t be long now.”
Deiq’s stomach lurched with dread; he changed the topic. “Have we heard anything more from Idisio?”
“Nothing.” Eredion hesitated, as though considering whether to allow the diversion, then asked, “Are you thinking of going to find him?”
“No. By this point, he’s either dead or on her side. Let the Forest deal with them. Or Arason.”
“You don’t give him much credit.”
“He’s inexperienced, and barely adult.” Deiq fixed his gaze on a nearby gods’-glory flower, methodically tracing the blue and cream striations on the blossom, the variations of green down the vine and leaves. It’s not my fault. It’s not. I didn’t have any way to stop it. The price was too damn high. But that sounded too much like self-pity to voice aloud. He kept his tone hard. “She survived Ninnic’s child. He doesn’t stand a chance against her.”
Eredion let the silence settle for a moment, then said, in a low and carefully neutral tone: “And neither do you, at your current strength.”
Deiq blinked hard and stood. If I’d been at full strength was a road too painful to go down at the moment, and would leave someone writhing in entirely too much agony at the end.
He couldn’t face Alyea, not after how he’d failed her; knowing he would fail her yet again, and hurt her. He couldn’t go back to his kin, couldn’t stay among humans. There were too many temptations, and sooner or later he’d give in . . . no. Never again.
“Where are you going?”
“To walk with other monsters,” Deiq said. “And to learn about prayer.”
Chapter Sixty-seven
Alyea sipped a cup of delicate mint tea, appreciating the early-morning quiet, and waited for Eredion to speak. He sat across from her at the small breakfast table, studiously attending to his own cup of tea, his head tilting now and again as though to shake thoughts into a better focus.
In contrast to his finery of the day before, he wore a dun and brown outfit made of fine linen; it hung loose from his shoulders and hips, as though he’d lost weight himself, and his dark hair had a dull, dry look to it.
“Your mother,” Eredion said finally, “did her damnedest to throw me out last night.”
“And failed, apparently.”
“She couldn’t tell me the order came direct from you, and you’re the one in charge here these days. She didn’t care for that truth much.”
Alyea sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose; hearing echoes of just how bad that fight had been in the dryness of his voice. She resisted the urge to apologize for her mother’s attitude. That would only show weakness, and even with Eredion as close to a friend as she dared have at the moment, she knew better than to think he would allow friendship to get in the way of politics. My job is protecting Sessin Family interests, he’d said once: a clear warning not to ever really trust his intentions.
She saw a glint in his eye that told her he’d followed that thought; decided not to pursue the point. Instead she said, “Where’s Deiq? Did she manage to throw him out?”
Alyea half-hoped the answer would be yes. She was still more than a little aggravated with Deiq’s egotistical arrogance, his manipulative methods. She could have died from his damn lesson.
“He left before she could throw him out and hasn’t been back since. I’m not entirely sure where he is.” He looked uncomfortable for a moment, as though the admission pained him.
“Can’t you—” She touched her temple, uncertain whether she had it right; he shook his head.
“He won’t answer me, and I can’t get a fix on where he is if he won’t talk.”
“So he ran off to brood; so much for protecting me.”
Eredion looked up at her sharply, his dark eyebrows contracting into a scowl. “Don’t be an idiot, girl. And don’t pick a fight with me as a way of readying to confront your mother, either.”
Alyea set her teacup down hard and glared. Eredion returned it with equal intensity. After a moment, she dropped her gaze and grimaced, inclining her head in silent apology.
“Better,” he said. “Deiq’s not here right now because he’s afraid of you, Alyea.”
She looked up fast, truly shocked. “Afraid of me? Afraid? Are we talking about the same person?”
He nodded, unsmiling.
“Afraid,” Alyea muttered, and sipped tea, thinking about that.
The chabi game with Oruen came to mind; she decided to shift the conversation on a tangent, as if it were an ayn she might slide diagonally across a chabi board. Perhaps she could even turn the discomfort around onto Eredion and gain an advantage in this already-strange conversation. Afraid? Deiq wasn’t afraid of anything.
“Do you know, he told me once that you’re his father.”
To her surprise, Eredion laughed.
“That’s . . . something of a joke between us,” he said a bit ruefully. “Obviously, it’s not true.”
“Why did he lie?”
Eredion sobered. “It’s a convenient lie with deep roots,” he said. “All I can say is that when he told you that, he didn’t trust you. Beyond that you have to talk to him for an explanation.”
“Would he tell me the truth now?”
Eredion shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t really know how much he trusts you. Probably less than he trusts me, and that’s not far at all.”
She set her cup down on the table with a sharp click. “But you say he cares? That doesn’t make any damn sense, Eredion! When you love someone you trust them! You don’t lie to them! And you’re not afraid of them!”
He snorted. “You’ve still got a very narrow definition of love,” he noted. “But in any case, I did warn you not to call his feelings for you ‘love’. Don’t put human morals and standards onto his actions. He is what he is. He’s lied so often over the years I doubt even he knows the truth behind half his words any longer. And he’ll lie to you in a heartbeat if he thinks it’s best—for him, for you, for a larger cause. But he’ll always have a reason for the lie. Usually a damn good reason.”
“That’s not much comfort,” she said dryly. “So far I’ve heard nothing that endears him to me, Eredion.”
The Sessin lord’s mouth quirked. “I know. Deceitful, manipulative, ruthless, and dangerously charming doesn’t really add up to a nice picture, does it? But the same words could be used to describe Oruen. Or Scratha. Or me, for that matter. If you want simple honesty, Alyea, go find yourself a farmer at the edge of some tiny northern village. But don’t look at that farmer too closely, or you might be dismayed by what’s under his homespun.”
She refilled her cup, not looking at him, and thought about what he’d said. Her anger began to wither a little; had Deiq really believed she’d be fine, left alone with ordinary bandits? She tried to see it from Deiq’s point of view, and couldn’t quite manage.
“A human,” Eredion said after a while, “would lie for his own greed. A swindler out for money, a man sweeping a woman into bed. Small things. Small lies. Small lives. Deiq doesn’t care about personal power. He goes through life searching for something to believe in for a few years, something to funnel his tremendous energies into for as long as possible. His Farms are a good example: he developed a passion to make sure the southlands didn’t depend on the northern kingdom for food. Once they were established, he backed out and let humans take over. He only keeps his name on the Farms in order to protect the Farms from political shifts.”
“What’s his passion now?” Alyea asked, propping her chin on one hand and tilting the teacup slowly back and forth in the other.
“At the moment,” Eredion said, “I believe he’s about to embark on another mad quest to change the world. If he survives long enough.”
“Survives?” Alyea sat up straight, alarmed.
Eredion sighed and rubbed at one cheek. “Yes. Survives. Which brings me to what I need to finish explaining. I don’t know
how to say any of this gently, so bear with me, please. And remember, too, that most of what I know comes from a number of very frank talks with Deiq. I doubt anyone beyond Heads of Family know some of what I’m about to tell you, and I think he’s told me secrets even most of them don’t know. So please don’t repeat this information carelessly.”
He waited for her nod, then drew a steadying breath, shut his eyes and said rapidly, as though the words actually hurt him, “Ha’reye and ha’ra’hain aren’t human. They need more than just physical food; not every day, but on a fairly regular basis. Desert lords were created, in part, to fill that need. For ha’reye and ha’ra’hain to feed from.”
“What?” Her cup slipped from her hand and splashed tea across the table.
Eredion opened his eyes and regarded her gravely, undisturbed by the liquid dripping into his lap. “Not a pretty picture at all, is it?” he said. “But that’s what it comes down to. I’ve heard a hundred flowery explanations and lovely words about sharing and helping that miss the point completely. I won’t hand you any of that nonsense. Something about a human’s willpower, a human’s spirit, inner strength, life, whatever you want to call it—Deiq’s never been able to really explain it to me—offers a piece of essential nourishment for ha’reye, and by extension, for ha’ra’hain.” He paused. “A bit humbling, isn’t it, to realize that in exchange for all your new strength and clarity and power you’ve become nothing more than . . . than a cow waiting to be milked.”
She stared at him, utterly appalled, unable to speak.
“I used to think it a noble sacrifice,” he said. “When I understood what it really meant, I was horrified. But over the years I’ve come to something of a balance between the two extremes.”
He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose with a knuckle.
“I suspect,” he said, “your thoughts at the moment are something like: Why didn’t anyone tell me before I became a desert lord? How could anyone willingly submit to something so horrible? Why doesn’t someone stop it? Am I right?”
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