“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.