She nodded. I couldn’t see her, but I knew it. I didn’t need to see her to know anything she did.
“The sun has just set, though it still lights the sky,” she said, taking my hand again. “This is my time. He’ll wake when I let him—though I don’t intend to let him until we’re gone. It’s better that way.”
She led me downstairs. In the kitchen, she sat with me at the table, taking the other chair. Here, away from Nahadoth, I could feel something of her, but it was restrained somehow, nothing like that moment in the alley. She had an air of stillness and balance.
I debated whether I should offer her tea.
“Why is it better that Shiny stay asleep?” I asked at last.
She laughed softly. “I like that name, Shiny. I like you, Oree Shoth, which is why I wanted to talk to you alone.” I started as her fingers, gentle—and strangely, callused—tilted my face down so she could see me more clearly. I remembered she was much shorter than me. “Naha was right. You really are lovely. Your eyes accentuate it, I think.”
I said nothing, worried that she hadn’t answered my question.
After a moment, she let me go. “Do you know why I prohibit the godlings from leaving Shadow?”
I blinked in confusion. “Um… no.”
“I think you do know—better than any other, perhaps. Look what happens when even one mortal gets too closely involved with our kind. Destruction, murder… Shall I let the whole world suffer the same?”
I frowned, opened my mouth, hesitated, then finally decided to say what was on my mind.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that it doesn’t matter whether you restrict the godlings or not.”
“Oh?”
I wondered if she was genuinely interested, or whether this was some sort of test.
“Well… I wasn’t born in Shadow. I went there because I had heard about the magic. Because…” I would be able to see there, I had intended to say, but that wasn’t true. In Shadow I had seen wonders on a daily basis, but in practical terms, I hadn’t been much better off than I was in Strafe; I’d still needed a stick to get around. I hadn’t cared about being able to see, anyway. I had come because of the Tree and the godlings, and the rumors of still greater strangeness. I had yearned to find a place where my father could have felt at home. And I had not been the only one. All my friends, most of whom were not demons or godlings or magic-touched in any way, had come to Shadow for the same reason: because it had been a place like no other. Because…
“Because the magic called to me,” I said at last. “That will happen wherever magic is. It’s part of us now, and some of us will always be drawn to it. So unless you take it away completely, which even the Interdiction never managed to do”—I spread my hands—“bad things will happen. And good.”
“Good?” The Lady sounded thoughtful.
“Well… yes.” I swallowed again. “I regret some of what’s happened to me. But not all of it.”
“I see,” she said.
Another silence fell, almost companionable.
“Why is it better that Shiny stay asleep?” I asked, very softly this time.
“Because we’ve come to kill you.”
My innards turned to water. Yet strangely, I found it easier to talk now. It was as if my anxiety had passed some threshold, beyond which it became pointless.
“You know what I am,” I guessed.
“Yes,” she replied. “You bent the chains we placed on Itempas and released his true power, even if only for a moment. That got our attention. We’ve been watching you ever since. But”—she shrugged—“I was a mortal for longer than I’ve been a god. The possibility of death is nothing new or especially frightening to me. So I don’t care that you’re a demon.”
I frowned. “Then what…?”
But I remembered the Nightlord’s question. Does he love you yet?
“Shiny,” I whispered.
“He was sent here to suffer, Oree. To grow, to heal, to hopefully rejoin us someday. But make no mistake—this was also a punishment.” She sighed, and for an instant I heard the sound of distant rain. “It’s unfortunate that he met you so soon. In a thousand years, perhaps, I could have persuaded Nahadoth to let this go. Not now.”
I stared at her with my sightless eyes, stunned by the monstrosity of what she was saying. They had made Shiny nearly human, the better to experience the pain and hardship of mortal life. They had bound him to protect mortals, live among them, understand them. Like them, even. But he could not love them.
Love me, I realized, and ached with both the sweetness of the knowledge and the bitterness that followed.
“That isn’t fair,” I said. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t that stupid. Still, if they were going to kill me, anyway, I was damn well going to speak my mind. “Mortals love. You can’t make him one of us and keep him from doing that. It’s a contradiction.”
“Remember why he was sent here. He loved Enefa—and murdered her. He loved Nahadoth and his own children, yet tormented them for centuries.” She shook her head. “His love is dangerous.”
“It wasn’t—” His fault, I almost said, but that was wrong. Many mortals went mad; not all of them attacked their loved ones. Shiny had accepted responsibility for what he’d done, and I had no right to deny that.
So I tried again. “Have you considered that having mortal lovers may be what he needs? Maybe—” And again I cut myself off, because I had almost said, Maybe I can heal him for you. That was too presumptuous, no matter how kind the Lady seemed.
“It may be what he needs,” said the Lady, evenly. “It isn’t what Nahadoth needs.”
I flinched and fell silent then, lost. It was as Serymn had guessed: the Lady knew what another Gods’ War would cost humanity, and she had done what she could to prevent it. That meant balancing the needs of one damaged brother against the other—and for the time being, at least, she had decided that the Nightlord’s rage deserved more satisfaction than Shiny’s sorrow. I didn’t blame her, really. I had felt that rage upstairs, that hunger for vengeance, so strong that it ground against my senses like a pestle. What amazed me was that she actually thought there was some hope of reconciling the three of them. Maybe she was as crazy as Shiny.
Or maybe she was just willing to do whatever it took to fill the chasm between them. What was a little demon blood, a little cruelty, compared to another war? What were a few ruined mortal lives, so long as the majority survived? And if all went well, then in a thousand years or ten thousand, the Nightlord’s wrath might be appeased. That was how gods thought, wasn’t it?
At least Shiny will have forgotten me by then.
“Fine,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Get it over with. Or do you mean to kill me slowly? Give Shiny’s knife an extra turn?”
“He’ll suffer enough knowing why you died; how makes little difference.” She paused. “Unless.”
I frowned. Her tone had changed. “What?”
She reached across the table and cupped my cheek, her thumb brushing my lips. I nearly flinched but managed to master the reflex in time. That seemed to please her; I felt her smile.
“Such a lovely girl,” she said again, and sighed with what might have been regret. “I might be able to persuade Nahadoth to let you live, provided Itempas still suffers.”
“What do you mean?”
“If, perhaps, you were to leave him…” She trailed off, letting her fingers trail away from my face. I stiffened, sick with understanding.
When I finally managed to speak, I was shaking inside. I was angry at last, though; that steadied my voice. “I see. It’s not enough for you to hurt him; you want me to hurt him, too.”
“Pain is pain,” said the Nightlord, and all the small hairs on my skin prickled, because I had not heard him come into the room. He was somewhere behind the Lady, and already the room was turning cold. “Sorrow is sorrow. I don’t care where it comes from, as long as it is all he feels.”
Despite my fear, his careless, empty tone
infuriated me. My free hand tightened into a fist. “So I’m to choose between letting you kill me and stabbing him in the back myself?” I snapped. “Fine, then—kill me. At least he’ll know I didn’t abandon him.”
Yeine’s hand brushed mine, which I suspected was meant to be a warning. The Nightlord went silent, but I felt his rigid fury. I didn’t care. It made me feel better to hurt him. He had taken my people’s happiness and now he wanted mine.
“He still loves you, you know,” I blurted. “More than me. More than anything, really.”
He hissed at me. It was not a human sound. In it I heard snakes and ice, and dust settling into a deep, shadowed crevice. Then he started forward—
Yeine stood, turning to face him. Nahadoth stopped. For a span of time that I could not measure—perhaps a breath, perhaps an hour—they stared at one another, motionless, silent. I knew that gods could speak without words, but I was not certain that was happening here. This felt more like a battle.
Then the feeling faded and Yeine sighed, stepping closer to him. “Softly,” she said, her voice more compassionate than I could have imagined. “Slowly. You’re free now. Be what you choose to be, not what they made you.”
He let out a long, slow sigh, and I felt the cold pressure of him fade just a little. When he spoke, however, his voice was just as hard as before. “I am of my choosing. But that is angry, Yeine. They burn in me, the memories… They hurt. The things he did to me.”
The room reverberated with betrayals unspoken, horrors and loss. In that silence, my anger crumbled. I had never been able to truly hate anyone who’d suffered, no matter what evils they’d done in the aftermath.
“He has not earned such happiness, Yeine,” the Nightlord said. “Not yet.”
The Lady sighed. “I know.”
I heard him touch her, perhaps a kiss, perhaps just taking her hand. It reminded me at once of Shiny and the way he often touched me, wordlessly, needing the reassurance of my nearness. Had he done that with Nahadoth, once upon a time? Perhaps Nahadoth—underneath the anger—missed those days, too. He had the Lady to comfort him, however. Shiny would soon have no one.
Silently, the Nightlord vanished. Yeine stayed where she was for a moment, then turned back to me.
“That was foolish of you,” she said. I realized she was angry, too, with me.
I nodded, weary. “I know. Sorry.”
To my surprise, that actually seemed to mollify her. She returned to the table, though she didn’t sit. “Not wholly your fault. He’s still… fragile, in some ways. The scars of the War, and his imprisonment, run deep. Some of them are still raw.”
And I remembered, with some guilt, that this was Shiny’s fault.
“I’ve made my decision,” I said, very softly.
She saw what was in my heart—or perhaps it was just obvious. “If what you said was true,” she said, “if you do care about him, then ask yourself what’s best for him.”
I did. And in that moment I imagined Shiny, what he might become, long after I died and had turned to dust. A wanderer, a warrior, a guardian. A man of soft words and swift decisions and little in the way of kindness—yet he would have some, I understood. Some warmth. Some ability to touch, and be touched by, others. I could leave him that much, if I did it right.
But if I died, if his love killed me, there would be nothing in him. He would distance himself from mortalkind, knowing the consequences of caring too deeply for us. He would snuff that small ember of warmth in himself, fearful of the pain it brought. He would live among humanity yet be wholly alone. And he would never, ever heal.
I said nothing.
“You have one day,” Yeine said, and vanished.
I sat at the table for a long while.
Whatever the Lady had done to still time, it faded once she was gone. Through the kitchen windows, I felt night fall, the air turning cool and dry. I could hear people walking outside, cicadas in the distant fields, and a carriage rattling along a cobbled street. There was the scent of flowers on the wind… though not the flowers of the World Tree.
In time, I heard movement upstairs. Shiny. The pipes rattled as he ran a bath. Strafe was not Shadow, but it had better plumbing, and I shamelessly wasted wood and coal to give us hot water whenever we wanted it. After a time, I heard him let the water out, moving around some more; then he came downstairs. As before, he stopped in the doorway of the room, reading something in my stillness. Then he came over to the table and sat down—where the Lady had sat, though that meant nothing. I didn’t have many chairs.
I had to hold very still as I spoke. Otherwise, I would break, and it would all be for nothing.
“You have to leave,” I said.
Silence from Shiny.
“I can’t be with you. It never works between gods and mortals; you were right about that. Even to try is foolish.”
As I spoke, I realized with a shock that I believed some of what I was saying. I had always known, in part of my heart, that Shiny could not stay with me forever. I would grow old, die, while he stayed young. Or would he grow old, too, die of old age, and then be reborn young and handsome again? Not good for me, either way. I wouldn’t be able to help resenting him, feeling guilty for burdening him. I would cause him unimaginable pain as he watched me fail, and in the end we would be separated forever, anyway.
But I had wanted to try. Gods, how I’d wanted to try.
Shiny sat there, gazing at me. No recriminations, no attempts to change my mind. That was not his way. I had known from the moment I began this that it wouldn’t take much. Not in words, anyhow.
Then he got up, came around the table, and crouched in front of me. I turned, moving slowly and oh so carefully to face him. Control. That was his way, wasn’t it? I tried for it and held myself still. I fought the urge to touch his face and learn how badly he now thought of me.
“Did they threaten you?” he asked.
I froze.
He waited, then when I did not answer, sighed. He got to his feet.
“That isn’t why,” I blurted. Suddenly it was powerfully important that he know I was not acting out of fear for my own life. “I didn’t… I would rather have let them—”
“No.” He touched my cheek then, once and briefly. It hurt. Like breaking my arm all over again. Worse. That was all it took to shatter my careful control. I began to tremble, so much that I could barely get the words out.
“We can fight them,” I blurted. “The Lady, she doesn’t really want to do this. We can run or—”
“No, Oree,” he said again. “We can’t.”
At this, I fell silent. It was not the inability to think this time, just the utter certainty of his words. They left me with nothing to say.
He rose. “You should live, too, Oree,” he said.
Then he went to the door. His boots were there, neatly placed beside mine. He pulled them on, his movements neither swift nor slow. Efficient. He put on the lambskin coat I’d bought for him at the beginning of the winter, because he kept forgetting he could get sick, and I hadn’t felt like nursing him through pneumonia.
I inhaled to say something. Let the breath out. Sat there, trembling.
He walked out of the house.
I had known he would go like that, too, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He wasn’t human enough to care about possessions or money. I heard his heavy tread move down the steps, then down the dusty street. They faded into the distance, lost in the sounds of night.
I went upstairs. The bathroom was spotless as usual. I took off my robe and had a long soak, as hot as I could bear the water. I steamed even after I dried off.
It did not hit me until I picked up a sponge to clean the tub. Now that Shiny was gone, I would have to do that myself from now on.
I finished the tub, then sat down in it and wept for the rest of the night.
* * *
So now you know it all.
You needed to know it, and I needed to tell it. I’ve spent the past six mont
hs trying not to think about all that’s happened, which wasn’t the wisest thing to do. It was easier, though. Better to go to bed and simply sleep, rather than lie there all night feeling lonely. Better to concentrate on the tap-tap of my stick as I walk, rather than think of how, once, I could have navigated by the faint outline of some godling’s footprints. I’ve lost so much.
But I’ve gained some things, too. Like you, my little surprise.
On some level I knew it was a risk. Gods don’t breed as easily as us, but they made him more mortal than any god has ever been. I don’t know what it means that they left him this ability when they took so much else. I suppose they just forgot.
Then again, I can’t help remembering that evening, at my kitchen table, when the Lady Yeine touched me. She is the Mistress of Dawn, the goddess of life; surely she sensed you, or at least your imminence, while we sat there. That makes me wonder: did she notice you and let you live? Or did she…?
She’s a strange one, the Lady.
Even more strangely, she listened to me.
I’ve now heard the news from too many merchants and gossips to discount: there are gods everywhere. Singing in rain forests, dancing atop mountains, staking out beaches and flirting with the clam-boys. Most large cities have a resident godling these days, or two or three. Strafe is trying to attract one right now; the town elders say it’s good for business. I hope they succeed.
Soon the world will be a far more magical place. Just right, I think, for you.
And—
No.
No, I know better than to think it.
No.
And yet.
I lie here in my lonely bed, watching for the sunrise. I feel it coming—the light warms its way along the blankets and my skin. The days are getting shorter with the coming of winter. I’m guessing you’ll be born around the solstice.
Are you still listening? Can you hear me in there?
I think you can. I think you were made that second time, when Shiny became his true self for me, just a little. Just enough. I think he knew it, too, like the Lady knew it, and maybe even the Nightlord. This isn’t the sort of thing he would do by accident. He’d seen that I missed my old life. This was his way of helping me focus on the new one. And also… his way of making up for past mistakes.
The Broken Kingdoms Page 32