by Jane Kindred
With the disconcerting lack of prelude that was typical of Meer, Ra’s eyes opened. She sat up at the sight of Jak, her eyes alight, and stretched out her hand. Jak stepped back, out of reach. Ra’s hand retreated to her lap, and then gripped her open collar. With uncharacteristic modesty, she held the fabric tight in both fists, covering even her throat.
“I’ve come to give you the spoils of your madness.” Jak held out the jar. Ra reached for it, still trying to hold her robe together with one hand, but had to let go to take the urn. She placed it in her lap, infuriating Jak with her lack of response.
Jak couldn’t stand it any longer. “Why in your cursed Meerity didn’t you fix what you’d done?”
Ra looked up, her face serene. “My words,” she said. “I had spoken.”
“Your words?” Jak stared at her, incredulous.
“They can neither be taken back nor undone.”
A sharp, bitter laugh escaped Jak. “I’ve seen you undo things before. The quilt, your prelate—”
“Destruction,” Ra interrupted, curling a hand tighter about the urn as if protecting it. “Could I have hurled ‘destroy’ at him? I had already done so. To expect your understanding would be foolish, and to ask for your forgiveness would be woefully inadequate. All I know how to do right now is mourn.” Ra fastened the diamond buttons of her robe as she spoke.
Such self-congratulatory things she conjured in her “mourning”. Jak hated her.
Ra stroked the urn, handling it reverently, as she’d often handled Jak’s body. “I also have something for you.” She slipped her long limbs out of the bed and took the urn to the bureau.
“I want nothing from you.” Jak turned to leave.
“Jak—”
“Don’t you say my name!” Jak whirled on her at the arch. “I don’t want to hear it in your mouth.”
Ra had taken a small tin from the bureau, and she held it out. “Please. It’s something I’ve already given you. I simply want you to know of it.”
Jak had no idea what this cryptic talk meant. Probably more emotional necromancy. Jak snatched the metal box from Ra’s hand and pried up the lid. Inside was a bone, a vertebra of something. Jak picked it up and squinted at it. “What on earth is this supposed to mean?”
“It belongs to the one with whose name I assaulted you. The name I will not say again. He still lived. He does so no longer.”
The one with whose name I assaulted you. Jak’s head shook, aching, confused. “What? No. He fell. Fyn pushed him. He’s dead.”
“He survived his fall. He was living in the trading post just outside Mole Downs.” While Jak absorbed this impossible news, Ra returned the bone to the tin and closed it. “I don’t mean for you to keep this. It will be thrown out with the fa. But I thought you would need to see for yourself. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you more evidence, but there was…so little of him left.”
Jak’s face was flushed and dotted with perspiration. Kol had lived? All the years Jak had been free of him, he’d been barely farther than the Downs. The trading post was nothing more than a hive of scam artists where no Haethfalters deigned to trade, so none had discovered him. None until Ra.
“You should sit down.” Ra attempted to steer Jak toward the bed, but Jak flung Ra’s arms away.
“No! I will not be taken in by you.” Jak stumbled against the frame of the archway and fled.
A satchel sat inside the arch, forgotten in Jak’s haste. Ra picked up the bag and descended the stairs, trailing Jak to the court. She watched Jak pass through the arch of the riverside courtyard, reeling, but lighting finally on a stone bench beneath the dormant trees. Jak wasn’t in any danger. Ra would have to be content with this.
She set down the satchel and returned through the temple heavyhearted to wander its corridors. She hadn’t seen Merit yet, which was unlike him. Perhaps he’d stayed out of sight to give her time with Jak, for all the good that had done her. It seemed she shouldn’t have told Jak after all. She’d thought it would bring peace, or at least a sense of closure. She was forever wounding Jak, and there was no way to repair it.
Ra paused at the arch of the Sapphire Room, where Shiva had apparently stolen away in the night to sleep. With a start, she saw it wasn’t Shiva who lay in the sapphire bed, but Merit. Ra stepped closer, but he didn’t stir. It was unlike him not to wake instantly at the presence of another. He’d been trained to servitude since childhood.
“Merit.” She said the name sharply, but still he didn’t wake. He lay with his back to the door, and beyond him on the bed was a stain of something dark.
Ra grabbed the corner of the bed with a cry and crawled over it toward him. He was covered in blood. He remained motionless as Ra clutched at him, searching for the source of the bleeding. His face, like his garment, was smeared with blood, but she could find no injury, not even a tear on his clothing. His sword lay beside him, untouched. He appeared to be merely sleeping, his breathing steady, his heartbeat slow but strong. It was a Meeric sleep, and only Shiva could have immersed him in it, for some purpose Ra couldn’t fathom.
Jak shivered beneath the naked branches of fruit trees shifting overhead in the breeze. It was cold for the Delta, decidedly winter, which meant the mounds were now buried in snow. But it wasn’t the cold that made Jak shiver. Kol, alive. A wave of unrelenting and unrelievable nausea squeezed Jak’s insides. Jak hadn’t been free of him, hadn’t been safe. What if he’d come back to Haethfalt?
Jak was ignoring the rest of Ra’s words, had barely heard them. “There was so little of him left.” What had Ra done?
The cold was unpleasant, and Jak was breathing now, the trembling slowing. If the trip to Haethfalt was still to be possible, Jak would have to leave right away. The bag. Jak cursed. It was still in Ra’s room.
With a sigh, Jak rose and went into the temple, arms hugging one another, and stopped before the atrium where Ra had once spattered the essence of one who’d crossed her. Ra stood on the other side of the atrium before a vast gold mirror, reflected by its opposite twin so that her image receded into infinity. She was no longer wasting. She was tall, and strong, and beautiful. Her eyes were the worst, so calm and knowing. They were painfully sane.
“Merit.” Ra’s tone was distressed. “Something has happened to him. Shiva’s done something. I don’t know what to do.”
Jak approached her, reluctant. “What do you mean Shiva’s done something? What’s happened?”
Ra pressed her hands to her cheeks in agitation. “I don’t know what’s happened. He sleeps. He’s covered in blood.”
Jak felt the ice of fear. It wasn’t Shiva who’d done something. It was Ra. The madness was inescapable, as Jak had believed. Ra’s eyes were liars.
Ra’s face registered wounded acknowledgment of Jak’s suspicions. “I know you have no cause to trust me, Jak. But I’ve done nothing to him.”
Jak reddened. No thought was safe from her. “Then what do you mean, he sleeps?” Struggling with Deltan, Jak had asked Merit for less clarification. It was as though the languages they now spoke to one another were irreconcilably foreign.
Ra tilted her head toward the corridor. “Come.”
Jak followed her, distracted for the moment from the effrontery of Kol. Merit lay steeped in blood in the center of an incongruously clean velvet sea of deep blue. Jak smoothed a hand along the velvet beside him and pressed beneath the warm body.
“No blood underneath him.” Jak touched Merit’s peacefully rising chest. “It’s as if it was poured over him.” Bewildered, Jak stepped back, no more illuminated than Ra.
Ra pondered his sleeping form, shaking her head in puzzlement. “It almost looks as though he’s been weeping. If one could weep so much. But his are ordinary tears.”
Jak stole a glance at Ra, recalling the mysterious marks on her breasts that could only have come from Shiva. There was no telling what a crea
ture like that would do. “Why don’t you just tell him to wake? You say your words can’t be disobeyed.”
“Ai, Jak.” Ra sighed, lowering her eyes. “There is so much you don’t understand. This sleep is clearly Meeric. Even if it were not, I cannot conjure.”
“Can’t conjure?” Jak regarded her with disbelief.
“It stimulates the madness. I mustn’t touch it now, not until Shiva gives her word. I will not be mad again.” She took a blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed and draped it over Merit’s still form. “I suppose we can only let him sleep.” Ra stepped back, turning her troubled eyes to Jak. “You mustn’t go yet. I have no right to ask it of you, but you must stay—for Merit. Please.”
Jak had fallen into a trap, manipulated by Ra’s penitent demeanor. It was idiotic to stay in the company of such a necromancer, but Jak was suddenly unwilling to leave. It was only for Merit. He couldn’t be left like this. Ra had probably connived this after all to keep Jak here, but it was irrelevant. Jak was staying.
Retreating to the cold of the guest quarters after leaving the Sapphire Room and its somnolent occupant, Jak pulled on a pair of good wool socks and burrowed into the unmade linens of the bed. Ludtaht Ra tempted one to go about in bare feet with its illusion of perpetual midsummer, but irascible winter had finally encroached through the unprotected arches. Feet ensconced in the comfort of wool, Jak felt safer from Ra. It was a habit from childhood. With no skin uncovered, Kol had less to look at, less cause to hunt.
There was no avoiding him. “He still lived. He does no longer.” Jak threaded fingers shaky with disquiet through hair in need of a trim and rested for a moment on the palm of one hand. Fyn had pushed him, Jak was sure. The pacific, final look on Fyn’s face when she’d delivered the news of his fall had told Jak. There could have been no truce between them without that certainty. Too far within the crags of Mount Winter, his body was impossible to retrieve, and Jak had been tremendously comforted by the knowledge that the corpse couldn’t be brought to the Haethfalt crypt to be honored. He was gone. Jak was safe. Jak could begin to live.
The fallacy of that safety was earth-shattering. It was like finding one had skipped along a tightrope that turned out to have stretched not a mere foot above the ground, as one supposed, but thousands. He’d been just outside Mole Downs, less than a day away. Jak’s body stiffened in reflexive defense at the idea of him being near. He’d somehow walked away from the fall, the bastard, and survived. “He does so no longer.”
Jak had to know.
Ra was in the dining hall, seated at the foot of the table with her arms crossed over the wood and her chin resting on them in thought. Before her was an array of kitchen implements and tins arranged with artistry, a clear bafflement at their usage expressed in their lack of continuity.
“What did you do to him?” Jak asked from the arch. “Not Merit—I mean…him.”
Ra raised her head and gave Jak a long look. She stood and leaned with her back against the table, hands gripping it beside her, and looked up at the painted red vaults of a violent setting sun that graced the ceiling. “You don’t want to hear it before breakfast.”
“Yes I do.” Jak came closer, nerves set like steel. “Tell me. Now.”
Ra continued to look up at the sweeping shades of crimson. “I pierced his throat, and Shiva vivisected him,” she said without emotion. “And I tore open his gut. And then she…” Ra paused and looked at Jak, and her eyes held a darkness against which madness was nothing. “She eviscerated him and fed him the poison I took from you. I think it was the last that killed him.”
White noise like a rushing ocean throbbed in Jak’s ears. “Perhaps you’re right about breakfast,” said Jak as if from a distance, and was caught by Ra before hitting the ground.
A fire was roaring in the great stone pit when Jak began to feel sensation once more: shaking, sick, bombarded by a host of emotions. Ra sat at Jak’s side, silent and respectful, observing the flames.
“I will never forgive you.” The words were barely audible. Jak didn’t look up at her but sensed Ra turning her head. “For AhlZel,” Jak added with more certainty. “For Ahr. But for this…” Jak’s mouth trembled, and Jak covered it with an unsteady hand before going on. “It would be obscene to feel gratitude.” Jak bit back tears. “What you’ve done is unthinkable. How could anyone deserve that?”
“He suffered mere minutes.” Ra’s voice held a bloodcurdling darkness. “You suffered years.”
“I don’t want to think about this. I don’t. I don’t understand it—please don’t try to persuade me. I don’t want to understand.” Jak paused, eyes shut against the irreconcilable. “I won’t forgive you,” Jak repeated. “But I—I no longer—hate you.” Ra’s cool hand tucked back the hair that had fallen over Jak’s face, and Jak didn’t stop her. “My god, you love me, don’t you?”
“Ai, Jak.” Ra slipped onto her knees and raised her hands almost suppliantly to Jak’s face. “More than I can tell you.”
Jak pulled away. “Don’t. I don’t hate you, but I don’t love you either. You’ve destroyed me as surely as you have Ahr.”
Ra’s face was wounded but still at this pronouncement. “If I could undo it… ” She lifted her shoulders helplessly. “If I could put things right… I could never mean the things I said—I could never hurt you—mene lif, mene ra, mené Jak.” A host of other words poured out of her, a jumble of desperate Deltan Jak couldn’t follow.
Jak sprang from the bench and away from this Meeric incantation. “I can’t forgive you, Ra. I will not love you. Let me go.”
Fourteen: Resolution
Jak avoided her, leaving Ra to her own devices. Merit continued his inexplicable slumber through day and night, and Shiva was nowhere to be found. Ra looked in on him, sitting for hours at his feet, wondering what could be happening inside his head. Why would Shiva send him under? The blood, still, was a mystery that worried Ra. She began to think Shiva might have wrung it from him, perhaps from his eyes as it appeared, but for what? She’d slept once at Shiva’s doing, and woken also drenched in blood, but hers had been the blood of menstruation. She could think of no equivalent for Merit that could explain this.
If Merit needed this submersion, it could only be the death of Ahr that had so drained him. Perhaps Shiva had tried to swallow his grief and it had gone wrong, manifested in this blood stigmata. And Shiva, perhaps, had attempted this too soon after the burden that had come before—the burden of healing Ra.
She wandered the halls in search of distraction. The temple was empty except for Jak. She’d sent the servants away. Merit had announced to them on the evening of her arrival that her word was to be considered his, and they obeyed, assisted in no small part by the instinctive awe her presence inspired.
In Merit’s room, Ra inspected his wardrobe and found only the same black uniform of waistcoat and pants repeated. He was a man of comfortable habits. Ra unfastened the robe of Shiva’s bedtime whim and let it fall to the crimson carpet, taking one of Merit’s suits from the wardrobe. Shiva had been providing for her and modifying her habiliment as she pleased of the same matter, a method of conservation that allowed the freedom to create without expending significant energy. She tried on the suit and stood before his mirror, and it provided her with a brief moment of amusement. He was taller and broad-shouldered, and the garments hung on her like a child playing dress-up with her father’s things.
Ra returned to the wardrobe and slipped out of the oversized clothes to put them in their place. Lowering the shirt, she started at a sound and turned to find Jak in the archway. Ra clutched the shirt around her, sleeves hanging loose, as though caught in the act of something shameful.
“You startled me,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I thought perhaps Merit had woken.”
“I wanted a book.” Steel eyes regarded her peculiarly. Jak tightened the cord holding back the stubby ponytail with a charac
teristic fidgety gesture that made Ra ache to bring Jak ease as she’d once done—conjuring away discomfort with a touch. But that sort of magical shortcut was how things had gone so wrong. Ra couldn’t conjure forgiveness.
“He’s been teaching me Deltan.”
Ra raised her brow with interest. “Has he? I hadn’t even thought how you were getting along.” She shifted her weight, holding the placket of the large shirt closed in front of her. “I came to see if there was something of Merit’s I could wear. The robe is all I have, and I was tiring of it. But his things don’t fit.”
“What are the scars?” Jak plowed through the veneer of politeness.
It was a moment of silence too long before she answered. “What scars?”
“You choose, Ra.”
Ra’s eyebrow flitted upward, noncommittal. “It’s nothing.”
“It was MeerShiva.” Jak didn’t pose it as a question. “She’s mad. More mad than you.”
“Shiva is wise.”
“Wise. And what wisdom do you suppose she’s exercising on Merit? She could be consuming him for all we know. Leaching out his soul.”
“No.”
“I’ve changed my mind about staying.” Jak’s shoulders drew back resolutely. “The wind is high today. I don’t want to be trapped here through winter. Merit may never wake.” When Ra merely nodded, Jak pushed back a stray pale-ash lock of hair and eyed the shirt Ra still clutched around herself. “So you really can’t conjure. If you need something to wear, take what you like of mine. It will lighten my load.”
Jak’s room was opposite the one Ahr had chosen when they were here last, its window looking out over the Anamnesis instead of the interior courtyard. Jak opened the wardrobe for Ra and stepped aside as she examined the brushed cotton and canvas. Jak was shorter, and notably smaller in the bust, but the clothes Jak preferred were loose and undefining. They ought to do. Jak turned away to the window. The river below was dark and indolent.