The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (31 page)

Scimina was right. I was nothing compared to my mother.

“You told me only I could use the Stone to free you,” I said. “Because I possess Enefa’s soul.”

“Yes. This was explained to Kinneth. But since the opportunity had presented itself… We suggested to her that being disowned would get her free of the sigil. And we aimed her toward your father.”

Something in my chest turned to water. I closed my eyes. So much for my parents’ fairy-tale romance.

“Did she… agree from the start to have a child for you?” I asked. My voice sounded very soft in my own ears, but the room was quiet. “Did she and my father… breed me for you?”

“No.”

I could not bring myself to believe him.

“She hated Dekarta,” Nahadoth continued, “but she was still his favorite child. We told her nothing of Enefa’s soul and our plans, because we did not trust her.”

More than understandable.

“All right,” I said, trying to marshal my thoughts. “So she met my father, who was one of Enefa’s followers. She married him knowing he would help her achieve her goal, and also knowing the marriage would get her thrown out of the family. That got her free of the sigil.”

“Yes. And as a test of her intentions, it proved to us that she was sincere. It also partially achieved her goal: when she left, Dekarta was devastated. He mourned her as if she’d died. His suffering seemed to please her.”

I understood. Oh, how I understood.

“But then… then Dekarta used the Walking Death to try to kill my father.” I said it slowly. Such a convoluted patchwork to piece together. “He must have blamed my father for her leaving. Maybe he convinced himself that she’d come back if Father was dead.”

“Dekarta did not unleash the Death on Darr.”

I stiffened. “What?”

“When Dekarta wants magic done, he uses us. None of us sent the plague to your land.”

“But if you didn’t—”

No. Oh, no.

There was another source of magic in Sky besides the Enefadeh. Another who could wield the gods’ power, albeit weakly. The Death had killed only a dozen people in Darr that year; a minor outbreak by all the usual standards. The best a mortal murderer could do.

“Viraine,” I whispered. My hands clenched into fists. “Viraine.”

He had played the martyr so well—the innocent used and abused by my scheming mother. Meanwhile he had tried to murder my father, knowing she would blame Dekarta and not him. He had waited in the corridors like a vulture while she came to plead with Dekarta for her husband’s life. Perhaps he had revealed himself to her afterward and commiserated with her over Dekarta’s refusal. To lay the groundwork for wooing her back? Yes, that felt like him.

And yet my father had not died. My mother had not returned to Sky. Had Viraine pined for her all these years, hating my father—hating me for thwarting his plans? Had Viraine been the one to raid my mother’s chest of letters? Perhaps he had burned any that referred to him, hoping to forget his youthful folly. Perhaps he’d kept them, fantasizing that the letters contained some vestige of the love he’d never earned.

I would hunt him down. I would see his white hair fall around his face in a red curtain.

There was a faint, skittering sound nearby, like pebbles on the hard Skystuff floor. Or claw tips—

“Such rage,” the Nightlord breathed, his voice all deep crevasses and ice. And he was close, all of a sudden, so close. Right behind me. “Oh, yes. Command me, sweet Yeine. I am your weapon. Give the word, and I will make the pain he inflicted on me tonight seem kind.”

My anger was gone, frozen away. Slowly I took a deep breath, then another, calming myself. No hatred. No fear of whatever the Nightlord had become thanks to my carelessness. I fixed my mind on the dark and the silence, and did not answer. I did not dare.

After a very long while I heard a faint, disappointed sigh. Farther away this time; he had returned to the other side of the room. Slowly I allowed my muscles to unclench.

Dangerous to continue this line of questioning right now. So many secrets to discover, so many pit-traps of emotion. I pushed aside thoughts of Viraine, with an effort.

“My mother wanted to save my father,” I said. Yes. That was a good thing to understand. She must have grown to love him, however strangely the relationship had begun. I knew he’d loved her. I remembered seeing it in his eyes.

“Yes,” said Nahadoth. His voice was as calm as before my lapse. “Her desperation made her vulnerable. Of course we took advantage.”

I almost grew angry, but caught myself in time.

“Of course. So you persuaded her then to allow Enefa’s soul into her child. And…” I took a deep breath. Paused, marshaling my strength. “My father knew?”

“I don’t know.”

If the Enefadeh did not know what my father thought of the matter, then no one here would know. I dared not go back to Darr to ask Beba.

So I chose to believe that Father knew and loved me anyway. That Mother, beyond her initial misgivings, had chosen to love me. That she had kept the ugly secrets of her family from me out of some misguided hope that I would have a simple, peaceful destiny in Darr… at least until the gods came back to claim what was theirs.

I needed to stay calm, but I could not hold it all in. I closed my eyes and began to laugh. So many hopes had been rested on me.

“Am I allowed none of my own?” I whispered.

“What would you want?” Nahadoth asked.

“What?”

“If you could be free.” There was something in his voice that I did not understand. Wistfulness? Yes, and something more. Kindness? Fondness? No, that was impossible. “What would you want for yourself?”

The question made my heart ache. I hated him for asking it. It was his fault that my wishes would never come true—his fault, and my parents’, and Dekarta’s, and even Enefa’s.

“I’m tired of being what everyone else has made me,” I said. “I want to be myself.”

“Don’t be a child.”

I looked up, startled and angry, though of course there was nothing to see. “What?”

“You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.”

If he had said it in his usual cold voice, I would have walked out in affront. But he truly did sound tired, and I remembered the price he had paid for my selfishness.

The air stirred nearby again, soft, almost a touch. When he spoke, he was closer. “The future, however, is yours to make—even now. Tell me what you want.”

It was something I had never truly thought about, beyond vengeance. I wanted… all the usual things that any young woman wanted. Friends. Family. Happiness for those I loved.

And also…

I shivered, though the chamber was not cold. The very strangeness of this new thought made me suspicious. Was this some sign of Enefa’s influence?

Accept that and be done.

“I…” I closed my mouth. Swallowed. Tried again. “I want… something different for the world.” Ah, but the world would indeed be different after Nahadoth and Itempas were done with it. A pile of rubble, with humanity a red ruin underneath. “Something better.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” I clenched my fists, struggling to articulate what I felt, surprised by my own frustration. “Right now, everyone is… afraid.” Closer, yes. I kept at it. “We live at the gods’ mercy and shape our lives around your whims. Even when your quarrels don’t involve us, we die. What would we be like if… if you just… went away?”

“More would die,” said the Nightlord. “Those who worship us would be frightened by our absence. Some would decide it was the fault of others, while those who embrace the new order would resent any who keep the old ways. The wars would last centuries.”

I felt the truth of his words in the pit of my belly, and it left me queasy with horror. But then something touched me—hands, cool and light. He rubbed my shoulders, as if to soothe me.

“But eventually, the battles would end,” he said. “When a fire burns out, new things grow in its wake.”

I felt no lust or rage from him—probably because, for the moment, he felt none from me. He was not like Itempas, unable to accept change, bending or breaking everything around him to his will. Nahadoth bent himself to the will of others. For a moment the thought made me sad.

“Are you ever yourself?” I asked. “Truly yourself, not just the way others see you?”

The hands went still, then withdrew. “Enefa asked me that once.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No.” There was sorrow in his voice. It never faded, for him. How terrible to be a god of change and endure grief unending.

“When I am free,” he said, “I will choose who shapes me.”

“But…” I frowned. “That isn’t freedom.”

“At the dawn of reality I was myself. There was nothing and no one else to influence me—only the Maelstrom that had given birth to me, and it did not care. I tore open my flesh and spilled out the substance of what became your realm: matter and energy and my own cold, black blood. I devoured my mind and reveled in the novelty of pain.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. I swallowed hard and tried to will them away, but abruptly the hands returned, lifting my chin. Fingers stroked my eyes shut, brushing the tears away.

“When I am free I will choose,” he said again, whispering, very close. “You must do the same.”

“But I will never be—”

He kissed me silent. There was longing in that kiss, tangy and bittersweet. Was that my own longing, or his? Then I understood, finally: it didn’t matter.

But oh gods, oh goddess, it was so good. He tasted like cool dew. He made me thirsty. Just before I began to want more, he pulled back. I fought not to feel disappointment, for fear of what it would do to us both.

“Go and rest, Yeine,” he said. “Leave your mother’s schemes to play themselves out. You have your own trials to face.”

And then I was in my apartment, sitting on the floor in a square of moonlight. The walls were dark, but I could see easily because the moon, bright though just a sliver, was low in the sky. Well past midnight, probably only an hour or two before dawn. This was becoming a habit for me.

Sieh sat in the big chair near my bed. Seeing me, he uncurled from it and moved onto the floor beside me. In the moonlight his pupils were huge and round, like those of an anxious cat.

I said nothing, and after a moment he reached up and pulled me down so that my head rested in his lap. I closed my eyes, drawing comfort from the feel of his hand on my hair. After a time, he began to sing me a lullaby that I had heard in a dream. Relaxed and warm, I slept.

TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, the Nightlord had said.

Something better for the world, I had replied.

But also…

In the morning I went to the Salon early, before the Consortium session began, hoping to find Ras Onchi. Before I could, I saw Wohi Ubm, the other High North noblewoman, arriving on the Salon’s wide, colonnaded steps.

“Oh,” she said after an awkward introduction and my inquiry. I knew then, the instant I saw the pitying look in her eyes. “You haven’t heard. Ras died in her sleep just these two nights past.” She sighed. “I still can’t believe it. But, well; she was old.”

I went back to Sky.

I walked through the corridors awhile, thinking about death.

Servants nodded as they passed me and I nodded back. Courtiers—my fellow highbloods—either ignored me or stared in open curiosity. Word must have spread that I was finished as an heir candidate, publicly defeated by Scimina. Not all of the stares were kind. I inclined my head to them anyhow. Their pettiness was not mine.

On one of the lower levels I surprised T’vril on a shadowed balcony, dangling a clipboard from one finger and watching a passing cloud. When I touched him, he started guiltily (fortunately catching the clipboard), which I took to mean he had been thinking about me.

“The ball will begin at dusk tomorrow night,” he said. I had moved to stand at the railing beside him, absorbing the view and the comfort of his presence in silence. “It will continue until dawn the next morning. That’s tradition, before a succession ceremony. Tomorrow is a new moon—a night that was once sacred to the followers of Nahadoth. So they celebrate through it.”

Petty of them, I thought. Or petty of Itempas.

“Immediately after the ball, the Stone of Earth will be sent through the palace’s central shaft to the ritual chamber, in the solarium spire.”

“Ah. I heard you warning the servants about this last week.”

T’vril turned the clipboard in his fingers gently, not looking at me. “Yes. A fleeting exposure supposedly does no harm, but…” He shrugged. “It’s a thing of the gods. Best to stay away.”

I could not help it; I laughed. “Yes, I agree!”

T’vril looked at me oddly, a small uncertain smile on his lips. “You seem… comfortable.”

I shrugged. “It isn’t my nature to spend all my time fretting. What’s done is done.” Nahadoth’s words.

T’vril shifted uncomfortably, flicking a few stray windblown hairs out of his face. “I’m… told that an army gathers along the pass that leads from Menchey into Darr.”

I steepled my fingers and gazed at them, stilling the voice that cried out within myself. Scimina had played her game well. If I did not choose her, I had no doubt she had left instructions for Gemd to begin the slaughter. Gemd might do it anyhow once I set the Enefadeh free, but I was counting on the world being preoccupied with survival amid the outbreak of another Gods’ War. Sieh had promised that Darr would be kept safe through the cataclysm. I wasn’t sure I entirely trusted that promise, but it was better than nothing.

For what felt like the hundredth time, I considered and discarded the idea of approaching Relad. Scimina’s people were on the ground; her knife was at Darr’s throat. If I chose Relad at the ceremony, could he act before that knife cut a fatal wound? I could not bet my people’s future on a man I didn’t even respect.

Only the gods could help me now.

“Relad has confined himself in his quarters,” T’vril said, obviously thinking along the same lines as me. “He receives no calls, lets no one in, not even the servants. The Father knows what he’s eating—or drinking. There are bets among the highbloods that he’ll kill himself before the ball.”