The Broken Kingdoms (8 page)

“Ah,” I said, though I didn’t really understand. That child had been older than Madding? And why had Sieh called the woman his mother if she was younger? “The respect due a big brother—”

“No, no, that doesn’t matter to us.”

I frowned in confusion. “What, then? Is he stronger than you?”

“Yes.” Madding grimaced in consternation. I had a momentary impression of aquamarine shading to sapphire, though he did not change; just my imagination.

“Because he’s older?”

“Partly, yes. But also…” He trailed off.

I groaned in frustration. “I want to sleep tonight, Mad.”

“I’m trying to say it.” Madding sighed. “Mortal languages don’t have words for this. He… lives true. He is what he is. You’ve heard that saying, haven’t you? It’s more than just words for us.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. He saw that in my face and tried again. “Imagine you’re older than this planet, yet you have to act like a child. Could you do it?”

Impossible to even imagine. “I… don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Madding nodded. “Sieh does it. He does it every day, all day; he never stops. That makes him strong.”

I was beginning to understand, a little. “Is that why you’re a usurer?”

Madding chuckled. “I prefer the term investor. And my rates are perfectly fair, thank you.”

“Drug dealer, then.”

“I prefer the term independent apothecary—”

“Hush.” I reached out, wistful, to touch the back of his hand where it rested on the sheets. “It must have been hard for you during the Interdiction.” That was what he and the other godlings called the time before their coming—the time when they hadn’t been permitted to visit our world or interact with mortals. Why they’d been forbidden to come, or who had forbidden them, they would not say. “I can’t see gods having many obligations.”

“Not true,” he said. He watched me for a moment, then turned his hand over to grasp mine. “The most powerful obligations aren’t material, Oree.”

I looked at his hand clasped around the nothingness of my own, understanding and wishing that I didn’t. I wished he had just fallen out of love with me. It would have made things easier.

His grip loosened; I had let him see more in my expression than I’d meant to. He sighed and lifted my hand, kissing the back of it. “I should go,” he said. “If you need anything—”

On impulse, I sat up, though it made my back ache something awful. “Stay,” I said.

He looked away, uneasy. “I shouldn’t.”

“No obligation, Mad. Just friendship. Stay.”

He reached up to brush my hair back from my cheek. His expression, in that one unguarded moment, was the softest I ever saw it outside of his liquid form.

“I wish you were a goddess,” he said. “Sometimes it feels as if you are one. But then something like this happens…” He brushed my robe back and grazed a bruise with his fingertip. “And I remember how fragile you are. I remember that I’ll lose you one day.” His jaw flexed. “I can’t bear it, Oree.”

“Goddesses can die, too.” I realized my error belatedly. I’d been thinking of the Gods’ War, millennia before. I had forgotten Madding’s sister.

But Madding smiled sadly. “That’s different. We can die. You mortals, though… Nothing can stop you from dying. All we can do is stand by and watch.”

And die a little with you. That was what he’d said before, on the night he’d left me. I understood his reasoning, even agreed with it. That didn’t mean I’d ever like it.

I put my hand on his face and leaned in to kiss him. He did it readily, but I felt how he held himself back. I tasted nothing of him in that kiss, even though I pressed close, practically begging for more. When we parted, I sighed and he looked away.

“I should go,” he said again.

This time I let him. He rose from the bed and went to the door, pausing in the frame for a moment.

“You can’t go back to Art Row,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? You shouldn’t even stay in town. Leave, at least for a few weeks.”

“And go where?” I lay back down, turning my face away from him.

“Maybe visit your hometown.”

I shook my head. I hated Nimaro.

“Travel, then. There must be somewhere else you want to visit.”

“I need to eat,” I said. “Rent would be nice, too, unless you intend for me to carry all my household possessions when I go.”

He sighed in faint exasperation. “Then at least set up your table at one of the other promenades. The Easha Order-Keepers don’t bother with those parts of the city as much. You’ll still get a few customers there.”

Not enough. But he was right; it would be better than nothing. I sighed and nodded.

“I can have one of my people—”

“I don’t want to owe you anything.”

“A gift,” he said softly. There was a faint, unpleasant shiver of the air, like chimes gone sour. Generosity was not easy for him. On another day, under other circumstances, I would’ve been honored that he made the effort, but I was not feeling particularly generous in that moment.

“I don’t want anything from you, Mad.”

Another silence, this one reverberating with hurt. That was like old times, too.

“Good night, Oree,” he said, and left.

Eventually, after a good cry, I slept.

Let me tell you how Madding and I met.

I came to Shadow—though I still thought of it as Sky then—when I was seventeen. Very quickly I fell in with others like me—newcomers, dreamers, young people drawn to the city in spite of its dangers because sometimes, for some of us, tedium and familiarity feel worse than risking your life. With their help, I learned to make a living off my knack for crafts and to protect myself from those who would have exploited me. I slept in a tenement with six others at first, then got an apartment of my own. After a year’s time, I sent a letter to my mother letting her know I was alive, and received in return a ten-page missive demanding that I come home. I was doing well.

I remember it was the end of a day, and wintertime. Snow is rare and light in the city—the Tree protects us from the worst of it—but there had been some, and it was cold enough for the cobbled paths to become icy death traps. Two days before, Vuroy had fractured his arm falling, much to the dismay of Ru and Ohn, who had to put up with his incessant complaining at home. I had no one at home to take care of me if I fell, and I couldn’t afford a bonebender, so I went even more slowly than usual on the sidewalks. (Ice sounds much like stone when tapped with a walking stick, but there is a subtle difference to the air above a patch; it is not only colder but also palpably heavier.)

I was safe enough. Just slow. But because I was so intent on not breaking a limb, I paid less attention to my route than I should have, and given that I was still relatively new to the city, I got lost.

Shadow is not a good city to get lost in. The city had grown haphazardly over the centuries, springing up at the foot of Sky-the-palace, and its layout made little sense despite the constant efforts of the nobles to impose order on the mess. Long-time denizens tell me it’s even worse since the growth of the Tree, which bifurcated the city into Wesha and Easha and caused other, more magical changes. The Lady had been kind enough to keep the Tree from destroying anything when it grew, but entire neighborhoods had been shifted out of place, old streets erased and new ones created, landmarks moved. Get lost and one could wander in circles for hours.

That was not the real danger, however. I noticed it quickly that chilly afternoon: someone was following me.

The steps trailed twenty feet or so behind, keeping pace. I turned a corner and hoped, to no avail; the feet moved with me. I turned again. The same.

Thieves, probably. Rapists and killers didn’t much care for the cold. I had little money on me, and I did not look wealthy by any stretch, but most likely it was enough that I looked alone and lost and blind. That made me easy pickings on a day when the pickings would be slim.

I did not walk faster, though of course I was afraid. Some thieves didn’t like leaving witnesses. But to hurry would let this thief know that he had been spotted, and worse, I might still break my neck. Better to let him come, give him what he wanted, and hope that would be enough.

Except… he wasn’t coming. I walked a block, two blocks, three. I heard few other people on the street, and those few were moving quickly, some of them muttering about the cold and paying no attention to anything but their misery. For long stretches, there was only me and my pursuer. Now he will come, I thought several times. But there was no attack.

As I turned my head for a better listen, something glinted at the corner of my vision. Startled—in those days I was not quite used to magic—I forgot wisdom, stopped, and turned to see.

My pursuer was a young woman. She was plump, short, with curly pale green hair and skin of a nearly similar shade. That alone would have alerted me as to her nature, though it was obvious in the fact that I could see her.

She stopped when I did. I noticed that her expression was very sad. She said nothing, so I ventured, “Hello.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You can see me?”

I frowned a bit. “Yes. You’re standing right there.”

“How interesting.” She resumed walking, though she stopped when I took a step back.

“If you don’t mind me saying so,” I said cautiously, “I’ve never been mugged by a godling.”

If anything, her expression grew even more mournful. “I mean you no harm.”

“You’ve been following me since that street back there. The one with the clogged sewer.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you might die,” she said.

I stumbled back, but only one step, because my heel slipped on a bit of ice alarmingly. “What?”

“You will very likely die in the next few moments. It may be difficult… painful. I’ve come to be with you.” She sighed gently. “My nature is mercy. Do you understand?”

I had not met many godlings at that point, but anyone who dwelled for long in Shadow learned this much: they drew their strength from a particular thing—a concept, a state of being, an emotion. The priests and scriveners called it affinity, though I had never heard any godling use the term. When they encountered their affinity, it drew them like a beacon, and some of them could not quite help responding to it.

I swallowed and nodded. “You… You’re here to watch me die. Or”—I shivered as I realized—“or to kill me, if something only does the job halfway. Is that right?”

She nodded. “I’m sorry.” And she really did seem sorry, her eyes heavy-lidded, her brow furrowed with the beginnings of grief. She wore only a thin, shapeless shift—more proof of her nature, since any mortal would have frozen to death in that. It made her look younger than me, vulnerable. Like someone you’d want to stop and help.

I shuddered and said, “Well, ah, maybe you could tell me what’s going to kill me, and I can, ah, walk away from it, and then you won’t have to waste time on me. Would that be all right?”

“There are many pathways to any future. But when I am drawn to a mortal, it means most paths have exhausted themselves.”

My heart, already beating fast, gave an unpleasant little lurch. “You’re saying it’s inevitable?”

“Not inevitable. But likely.”

I needed to sit down. The buildings on either side of me were not residential; I thought they might be storehouses. Nowhere to sit but the cold, hard ground. And for all I knew, doing that might kill me.

That was when I became aware of how utterly quiet it was.

There had been three other people on the street two blocks back. Only the green woman’s steps had stood out to me, for obvious reasons, but now there were no other footfalls at all. The street was completely empty.

Yet I could hear… something. No—it was not a sound so much as a feeling. A pressure to the air. A lingering whiff of scent, teasingly unidentifiable. And it was…

Behind me. I turned, stumbling again, my heart leaping into my throat as I saw another godling standing across the street from me.

This one was paying no attention to me, however. She looked middle-aged, islander or Amn, black-haired, ordinary enough except that I could see her, too. She stood with legs apart and hands fisted at her sides, body taut, an expression of pure fury on her face. When I followed her gaze to see who this fury was directed at, I spied a third person, equally tense and still but on my side of the street, closer by. A man. Madding, though I didn’t know this at the time.

The air between these two godlings was a cloud the color of blood and rage. It curled and shivered, flexing larger and flinching compact with whatever forces they were using against each other. Because that was, indeed, what I had walked into, for all that it was silent and still: a battle. One did not need magic-seeing eyes to know that.

I licked my lips and glanced back at the green-skinned woman. She nodded: this was how I might die, caught in the cross fire of a duel between gods.

Very quickly, as quietly as I could, I began to back up, toward the green woman. I didn’t think she would protect me—she’d made her interest clear—but there was no other safe direction.

I’d forgotten the ice patch behind me. Of course I slipped and fell, jarring a grunt of pain from my throat and my stick from my hand. It landed on the cobblestones with a loud, echoing clatter.

The woman across the street jerked in surprise and looked at me. I had an instant to register that her face was not as ordinary as I’d thought, the skin too shiny, hard-smooth, like porcelain. Then the stones under me began to shake, and the wall behind me buckled, and my skin prickled all over.

Suddenly the man was in front of me, opening his mouth to utter a roar like surf crashing in an ocean cave. The porcelain-skinned woman screamed, flinging up her arms as something (I could not see what, exactly) shattered around her. That same force flung her backward. I heard mortar crack and crumble as her body struck a wall, then crumpled to the ground.

“What the hells are you doing?” the man shouted at her. Dazed, I stared up at him. A vein in his temple was visible, pounding with his anger. It fascinated me because I hadn’t realized godlings had veins. But of course they did; I had not been in the city long, but already I had heard of godsblood.