It might have been Shiny speaking, or my own guilt.
After what felt like a very long time, I regained enough wit to think.
I sat up, slowly and with great effort. My arm, the good one, did not obey my will at first. I told it to push me up, and instead it flailed about, scrabbling at the surface beneath me. Hard, but not stone. I sank my nails into it a little. Wood. Cheap, thin. I patted it, listening, and realized it was all around me. When I finally regained control of myself, I managed a slow, shaky exploration of my environment, and finally understood. A box. I was in some kind of large wooden crate, open at one end. Something heavy and scratchy and smelly lay upon me. A horse blanket? Shiny must have stolen it for me. It still reeked of its former owner’s sweat, but it was warmer than the chilly predawn air around me, so I drew it closer.
Footsteps nearby. I cringed until I recognized their peculiar weight and cadence. Shiny. He climbed into the crate with me and sat down nearby. “Here,” he said, and metal touched my lips. Confused, I opened my mouth, and nearly choked as water flooded in. I managed not to splutter too much of it away, fortunately, because I was desperately thirsty. As Shiny turned up the flask for me again, I greedily drank until there was nothing left. I was still thirsty but felt better.
“Where are we?” I asked. I kept my voice soft. It was quiet, wherever we were. I heard the bap-plink of morning dew—such a welcome sound after days without it in the House of the Risen Sun. There were people about, but they moved quietly, too, as if trying not to disturb the dew.
“Ancestors’ Village,” he said, and I blinked in surprise. He had carried me across the city from the Shustocks junkyard, from Wesha into Easha. The Village was just north of South Root, near the tunnel under the rootwall. It was where the city’s homeless population had made a camp of sorts, or so I’d been told. I’d never visited it. Many of the Villagers were sick in body or mind, too harmless to be quarantined, but too ugly or strange or pitiful to be acceptable in the orderly society of the Bright. Many were lame, mute, deaf… blind. In my earliest days in Shadow, I’d been terrified of joining them.
I didn’t ask, but Shiny must have seen the confusion on my face. “I lived here sometimes,” he said. “Before you.”
It was no more than I’d already guessed, but I could not help pity: he had gone from ruling the gods to living in a box among lepers and madlings. I knew his crimes, but even so…
Belatedly I noticed more footsteps approaching. These were lighter than Shiny’s, several sets—three people? One of them had a bad limp, dragging the second foot like deadweight.
“We have missed you,” said a voice, elderly, raspy, of indeterminate gender, though I guessed male. “It’s good to see you well. Hello, miss.”
“Um, hello,” I said. The first words had not been directed at me.
Satisfied, the maybe-man turned his attention back to Shiny. “For her.” I heard something set down on the crate’s wooden floor; I smelled bread. “See if she can get that down.”
“Thank you,” said Shiny, surprising me by speaking.
“Demra’s gone looking for old Sume,” said another voice, younger and thinner-sounding. “She’s a bonebender—not a very good one, but sometimes she’ll work for free.” The voice sighed. “Wish Role was still around.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Shiny, because of course he intended to kill me. Even I could tell that these people didn’t have many favors to call in; best they not spend such a precious one on me. Then Shiny surprised me further. “Something for her pain would be good, however.”
A woman came forward. “Yes, we brought this.” Something else was set down, glass. I thought I heard the slosh of liquid. “It isn’t good, but it should help.”
“Thank you,” Shiny said again, softer. “You are all very kind.”
“So are you,” said the thin voice, and then the woman murmured something about letting me sleep, and all three of them went away. I lay there in their wake, not quite boggling. I was too tired for real astonishment.
“There’s food,” Shiny said, and I felt something dry and hard brush my lips. The bread, which he’d torn into chunks so I wouldn’t have to waste strength gnawing. It was coarse, flavorless stuff, and even the small piece he’d torn made my jaws ache. The Order of Itempas took care of all citizens; no one starved in the Bright. That did not mean they ate well.
As I held a piece in my mouth, hoping saliva would make it more palatable, I considered what I had heard. It had had the air of long habit—or ritual, perhaps. When I’d swallowed, I said, “They seem to like you here.”
“Yes.”
“Do they know who you are? What you are?”
“I have never told them.”
Yet they knew, I was certain. There had been too much reverence in the way they’d approached and presented their small offerings. They had not asked about the black sun, either, as a heathen might have done. They simply accepted that the Bright Lord would protect them if He could—and that it was pointless to ask if He could not.
I had to clear my dry throat to speak. “Did you protect them while you were here?”
“Yes.”
“And… you spoke to them?”
“Not at first.”
With time, though, same as me. For a moment, an irrational competitiveness struck me. It had taken three months for Shiny to deem me worthy of conversation. How long had he taken with these struggling souls? But I sighed, dismissing the fancy and refusing when Shiny tried to offer me another piece of bread. I had no appetite.
“I’ve never thought of you as kind,” I said. “Not even when I was a child, learning about you in White Hall. The priests tried to make you sound gentle and caring, like an old grandfather who’s a little on the strict side. I never believed it. You sounded… well-intentioned. But never kind.”
I heard the glass thing move, heard a stopper come free with a faint plonk. Shiny’s hand came under the back of my head, lifting me gently; I felt the rim of a small flask nudge my lips. When I opened my mouth, acid fire poured in—or so it tasted. I gasped and spluttered, choking, but most of the stuff went down my throat before my body could protest too much. “Gods, no,” I said when the bottle touched my lips again, and Shiny took it away.
As I lay there trying to regain the full use of my tongue, Shiny said, “Good intentions are pointless without the will to implement them.”
“Mmm.” The burn was fading now, which I regretted, because for a moment I had forgotten the pain of my arm and head. “The problem is, you always seem to implement your intentions by stomping all over other people’s. That’s pretty pointless, too, isn’t it? Does as much harm as good.”
“There is such a thing as greater good.”
I was too tired for sophistry. There had been no greater good in the Gods’ War, just death and pain. “Fine. Whatever you say.”
I drifted awhile. The drink went to my head quickly, not so much dulling the pain as making me care less about it. I was contemplating sleeping again when Shiny spoke. “Something is happening to me,” he said, very softly.
“Hmm?”
“It isn’t my nature to be kind. You were correct in that. And I have never before been tolerant of change.”
I yawned, which made my headache grow in a distant, warm sort of way. “Change happens,” I said through the yawn. “We all have to accept it.”