The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (23 page)

“Don’t blame Ter,” T’vril said. “Today’s one of the few days we can be free of rank considerations. He wasn’t expecting to see that.” He nodded toward my forehead.

“What is this, T’vril? Where did these people…?”

“A little favor from the Enefadeh.” He gestured toward the entrance we’d just walked through, and upward. There was a faint, glasslike sheen to the air all around the centeryard, which I had not noticed before. We stood within a huge, transparent bubble of—something. Magic, whatever it was.

“No one with a mark higher than quarterblood sees anything, even if they pass through the barrier,” T’vril said. “An exception was made for me, and, as you saw, we can bring others through if we choose. This means we can celebrate without highbloods coming here to ogle our ‘quaint common-folk customs’ like we’re animals in a zoo.”

I understood at last, and smiled as I did. It was probably only one of many small rebellions that the lowblood servants quietly fomented against their higher-born relations. If I stayed in Sky longer I would probably see others…

But, of course, I would not live long enough for that.

That thought sobered me at once, despite the music and gaiety around me. T’vril flashed me a grin and let go my hand. “Well, you’re here now. Enjoy yourself for a while, hmm?” And almost at the moment he let me go, a woman grabbed him and pulled him into the mass of people. I saw a flash of his red hair among other heads, and then he was gone.

I stood where he’d left me, feeling oddly bereft. The servants celebrated on around me, but I was not part of it. Nor could I relax amid so much noise and chaos, however joyous. None of these people were Darre. None of them were under threat of execution. None of them had gods’ souls stuffed into their bodies, tainting all that they thought and felt.

Yet T’vril had brought me here in an attempt to cheer me up, and it would’ve been churlish to leave right away. So I looked around for some quiet spot where I might sit out of the way. My eyes caught on a familiar face—or at least, it seemed familiar at first. A young man watched me from the steps of one of the cottages, smiling as if he knew me, at least. He was a little older than me, pretty-faced and slender, Tema-looking but with completely un-Tema eyes of faded green—

I caught my breath and went over to him. “Sieh?”

He grinned. “Glad to see you out.”

“You’re…” I gaped a moment longer, then closed my mouth. I had known all along that Nahadoth was not the only one among the Enefadeh who could change his form. “So this is your doing?” I gestured at the barrier, which now I could see above us as well, like a dome.

He shrugged. “T’vril’s people do favors for us all year; it’s fitting we should pay them back. We slaves must stick together.”

There was a bitterness in his tone that I had not heard before. It felt oddly comforting in comparison with my own mood, so I sat down on the steps beside him, near his legs. Together we watched the celebration in silence for a long while. After a time I felt his hand touch my hair, stroking it, and that comforted me further still. Whatever form he took, he was still the same Sieh.

“They grow and change so fast,” he said softly, his eyes on a group of dancers near the musicians. “Sometimes I hate them for that.”

I glanced up at him in surprise; this was a strange mood indeed for him. “You gods are the ones who made us this way, aren’t you?”

He glanced at me, and for a jarring, painful instant I saw confusion on his face. Enefa. He had spoken as if I was Enefa.

Then the confusion passed, and he shared with me a small, sad smile. “Sorry,” he said.

I could not feel bitter about it, given the sorrow in his face. “I do seem to look like her.”

“That’s not it.” He sighed. “It’s just that sometimes—well, it feels like she died only yesterday.”

The Gods’ War had occurred over two thousand years before, by most scholars’ reckonings. I turned away from Sieh and sighed, too, at the width of the gulf between us.

“You’re not like her,” he said. “Not really.”

I didn’t want to talk about Enefa, but I said nothing. I drew up my knees and rested my chin on them. Sieh resumed stroking my hair, petting me like a cat.

“She was reserved like you, but that’s the only similarity. She was… cooler than you. Slower to anger—although she had the same kind of temper as you, I think, magnificent when it finally blew. We tried hard not to anger her.”

“You sound like you were afraid of her.”

“Of course. How could we not be?”

I frowned in confusion. “She was your mother.”

Sieh hesitated, and in it I heard an echo of my earlier thoughts about the gulf between us. “It’s… difficult to explain.”

I hated that gulf. I wanted to breach it, though I had no idea if it was even possible. So I said, “Try.”

His hand paused on my hair, and then he chuckled, his voice warm. “I’m glad you’re not one of my worshippers. You’d drive me mad with your demands.”

“Would you even bother answering any prayers that I made?” I could not help smiling at the idea.

“Oh, of course. But I might sneak a salamander into your bed to get back at you.”

I laughed, which surprised me. It was the first time all day that I’d felt human. It didn’t last long as laughs went, but when it passed, I felt better. On impulse, I shifted to lean against his legs, putting my head on his knee. His hand never left my hair.

“I needed no mother’s milk when I was born.” Sieh spoke slowly, but I did not sense a lie this time. I think it was just difficult for him to find the right words. “There was no need to protect me from danger or sing me lullabies. I could hear the songs between the stars, and I was more dangerous to the worlds I visited than they could ever be to me. And yet, compared to the Three, I was weak. Like them in many ways, but obviously inferior. Naha was the one who convinced her to let me live and see what I might become.”

I frowned. “She was going to… kill you?”

“Yes.” He chuckled at my shock. “She killed things all the time, Yeine. She was death as well as life, the twilight along with the dawn. Everyone forgets that.”

I turned to stare at him, which made him draw his hand back from my hair. There was something in that gesture—something regretful and hesitant, not befitting a god at all—that suddenly angered me. It was there in his every word. However incomprehensible relationships between gods might be, he had been a child and Enefa his mother, and he had loved her with any child’s abandon. Yet she had almost killed him, as a breeder culls a defective foal.

Or as a mother smothers a dangerous infant…

No. That had been entirely different.

“I’m beginning to dislike this Enefa,” I said.

Sieh started in surprise, stared at me for a long second, then burst out laughing. It was infectious, though nonsensical; humor born of pain. I smiled as well.

“Thank you,” Sieh said, still chuckling. “I hate taking this form; it always makes me maudlin.”

“Be a child again.” I liked him better that way.

“Can’t.” He gestured toward the barrier. “This takes too much of my strength.”

“Ah.” I wondered suddenly which was the default state for him: the child? Or this world-weary adult who slipped out whenever he let his guard down? Or something else altogether? But that seemed too intimate and possibly painful a question to ask, so I did not. We fell silent awhile longer, watching the servants dance.

“What will you do?” Sieh asked.

I lay my head back on his knee and said nothing.

Sieh sighed. “If I knew how to help you, I would. You know that, don’t you?”

The words warmed me more than I’d expected. I smiled. “Yes. I know, though I can’t say I understand it. I’m just a mortal like the rest of them, Sieh.”

“Not like the rest.”

“Yes.” I looked at him. “However… different I might be—” I did not like saying it aloud. No one stood near enough to us to overhear, but it seemed foolish to take chances. “You said it yourself. Even if I lived to be a hundred, my life would still be only an eyeblink of yours. I should be nothing to you, like these others.” I nodded toward the throng.

He laughed softly; the bitterness had returned. “Oh, Yeine. You really don’t understand. If mortals were truly nothing to us, our lives would be so much easier. And so would yours.”

I could say nothing to that. So I fell silent, and he did, too, and around us the servants celebrated on.

It was nearly midnight by the time I finally left the centeryard. The party was still in full swing, but T’vril left with me and walked me to my quarters. He’d been drinking, though not nearly as much as some I’d seen. “Unlike them, I have to be clearheaded in the morning,” he said, when I pointed this out.

At the door of my apartment we stopped. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it.

“You didn’t enjoy yourself,” he said. “I saw: you didn’t dance all evening. Did you even have a glass of wine?”

“No. But it did help.” I groped for the right words. “I won’t deny a part of me spent the whole time thinking, I’m wasting one-sixth of my remaining life.” I smiled; T’vril grimaced. “But to spend that time surrounded by so much joy… it did make me feel better.”

There was such compassion in his eyes. I found myself wondering, again, why he helped me. I supposed it made a difference that he had some fellow feeling for me, perhaps even liked me. It was touching to think so, and perhaps that was why I reached up to cup his cheek. He blinked in surprise, but he did not draw back. That pleased me, too, and so I yielded to impulse.

“I’m probably not pretty by your standards,” I ventured. His cheek felt slightly scratchy under my fingers, and I remembered that men of the island peoples tended to grow beards. I found the idea exotic and intriguing.

A half-dozen thoughts flickered across T’vril’s face in the span of a breath, then settled with his slow smile. “Well, I’m not by yours, either,” he said. “I’ve seen those showhorses you Darre call men.”

I chuckled, abruptly nervous. “And we are, of course, relatives…”

“This is Sky, Cousin.” Amazing how that explained everything.

I opened the door to my apartment, then took his hand and pulled him inside.

He was strangely gentle—or perhaps it only seemed strange to me because I had little experience to compare him against. I was surprised to find that he was even paler beneath his clothing, and his shoulders were covered in faint spots, like those of a leopard but smaller and random. He felt normal enough against me, lean and strong, and I liked the sounds that he made. He did try to give me pleasure, but I was too tense, too aware of my own loneliness and fear, so there were no stormwinds for me. I did not mind so much.

I was unused to having someone in my bed, so afterward I slept restlessly. Finally in the small hours of the morning I got up and went into the bathroom, hoping that a bath would settle me to sleep. While water filled the tub, I ran more in the sink and splashed my face, then stared at myself in the mirror. There were new lines of strain around my eyes, making me look older. I touched my mouth, suddenly melancholy for the girl I had been just a few months before. She had not been innocent—no leader of any people can afford that—but she had been happy, more or less. When was the last time I’d felt happiness? I could not recall.

Suddenly I was annoyed with T’vril. At least pleasure would have relaxed me and perhaps pulled my mood out of its grim track. At the same time it bothered me to feel such disappointment because I liked T’vril, and the fault was as much mine as his.

But on the heels of this, unbidden, came an even more disturbing thought—one that I fought for long seconds, caught between morbid, forbidden-thrill fascination and superstitious fear.

I knew why I had found no satisfaction with T’vril.

Never whisper his name in the dark

No. This was stupidity. No, no, no.

unless you want him to answer.

There was a terrible, mad recklessness inside me. It whirled and crashed in my head, a cacophony of not-quite-thought. I could actually see it manifest as I stared into the mirror; my own eyes stared back at me, too wide, the pupils too large. I licked my lips, and for a moment they were not mine. They belonged to some other woman, much braver and stupider than me.

The bathroom was not dark because of the glowing walls, but darkness took many forms. I closed my eyes and spoke to the blackness beneath my lids.

“Nahadoth,” I said.

My lips barely moved. I had given the word only enough breath to make it audible, and no more. I didn’t even hear myself over the running water and the pounding of my heart. But I waited. Two breaths. Three.

Nothing happened.

For an instant I felt utterly irrational disappointment. This was followed swiftly by relief, and fury at myself. What in the Maelstrom was wrong with me? I had never in my life done anything so foolish. I must have been losing my mind.

I turned away from the mirror—and as I did the glowing walls went dark.

“What—” I began, and a mouth settled over mine.

Even if logic hadn’t told me who it was, that kiss would have. There was no taste to it, only wetness and strength, and a hungry, agile tongue that slid around mine like a snake. His mouth was cooler than T’vril’s had been. But a different kind of heat coiled through me in response, and when hands began to explore my body I could not help arching up to meet them. I breathed harder as the mouth finally relinquished mine and moved down my neck.

I knew I should have stopped him. I knew this was his favorite way to kill. But when unseen ropes lifted me and pinned me to the wall, and fingers slipped between my thighs to play a subtle music, thinking became impossible. That mouth, his mouth, was everywhere. He must have had a dozen of them. Every time I moaned or cried out, he kissed me, drinking down the sound like wine. When I could restrain myself his face pressed into my hair; his breath was light and quick in my ear. I tried to reach up, I think to embrace him, but nothing was there. Then his fingers did something new and I was screaming, screaming at the top of my lungs, except that he had covered my mouth again and there was no sound, no light, no movement; he had swallowed it all. There was nothing but pleasure, and it seemed to go on for an eternity. If he had killed me right then and there, I would have died happy.