It taught me to do whatever was necessary to get what I wanted, you evil bitch.
I did not answer, and after a moment Scimina sighed.
“So,” she said, “there are new alliances being formed on Darr’s borders, meant to counter Darr’s perceived new strength. Since Darr in fact has no new strength, that means the entire region is becoming unstable. Hard to say what will happen under circumstances like that.”
My fingers itched for a sharpened stone. “Is that a threat?”
“Please, Cousin. I’m merely passing the information along. We Arameri must look out for one another.”
“I appreciate your concern.” I turned to leave, before my temper slipped any further. But this time it was Naha’s voice that stopped me.
“Did you win?” he asked. “At your warrior initiation? Did you beat your opponent, or did he rape you in front of a crowd of spectators?”
I knew better than to answer. I really did. But I answered anyway.
“I won,” I said, “after a fashion.”
“Oh?”
If I closed my eyes, I would see it. Six years had passed since that night, but the smell of the fire, of old furs and blood, of my own reek after a month living rough, was still vivid in my mind.
“Most sponsors choose a man who is a poor warrior,” I said softly. “Easy for a girl barely out of childhood to defeat. But I was to be ennu, and there were doubts about me because I was half Amn. Half Arameri. So my grandmother chose the strongest of our male warriors instead.”
I had not been expected to win. Endurance would have been sufficient to be marked as a warrior; as Scimina had guessed, many things had changed for us. But endurance was not sufficient to be ennu. No one would follow me if I let some man use me in public and then crow about it all over town. I needed to win.
“He defeated you,” Naha said. He breathed the words, hungry for my pain.
I looked at him, and he blinked. I wonder what he saw in my eyes in that moment.
“I put on a good show,” I said. “Enough to satisfy the requirements of the ritual. Then I stabbed him in the head with a stone knife I had hidden in my sleeve.”
The council had been upset about that, especially once it became clear I had not conceived. Bad enough I had killed a man, but to also lose his seed and the strength it might have given future Darre daughters? For a while victory had made things worse for me. She is no true Darre, went the whispers. There is too much death in her.
I had not meant to kill him, truly. But in the end, we were warriors, and those who valued my Arameri murderousness had outnumbered my doubters. They made me ennu two years later.
The look on Scimina’s face was thoughtful, measuring. Naha, however, was sober, his eyes showing some darker emotion that I could not name. If I had to put a word to it, it might have been bitterness. But that was not so surprising, was it? I was not so Darre as, and so much more Arameri than, I seemed. It was something I had always hated about myself.
“He’s begun to wear a single face for you, hasn’t he?” Naha asked. I knew at once who “he” was. “That’s how it starts. His voice grows deeper or his lips fuller; his eyes change their shape. Soon he’s something out of your sweetest dreams, saying all the right things, touching all the right places.” He pressed his face into Scimina’s hair, as if seeking comfort. “Then it’s only a matter of time.”
I left, goaded by fear and guilt and a creeping, hateful sense that no matter how Arameri I was, it was not enough to help me survive this place. Not Arameri enough by far. That is when I went to Viraine, and that is what led me to the library and the secret of my two souls, and that is how I ended up here, dead.
14. The Walking Dead
“We cured your father,” said Sieh. “That was your mother’s price. In exchange she allowed us to use her unborn child as the vessel for Enefa’s soul.”
I closed my eyes.
He took a deep breath in my silence. “Our souls are no different from yours. We expected Enefa’s to travel onward after she died, in the usual manner. But when Itempas… When Itempas killed Enefa, he kept something. A piece of her.” It was difficult to catch, but he was rushing his words ever so slightly. Distantly I considered soothing him. “Without that piece, all life in the universe would have died. Everything Enefa created—everything except Nahadoth and Itempas himself. It is the last vestige of her power. Mortals call it the Stone of Earth.”
Against my closed eyelids images formed. A small, ugly lump of bruise-dark flesh. An apricotstone. My mother’s silver necklace.
“With the Stone still in this world, the soul was trapped here, too. Without a body it drifted, lost; we only discovered what had happened centuries later. By the time we found it the soul had been battered, eroded, like a sail left on a mast through a storm. The only way to restore it was to house it again in flesh.” He sighed. “I will admit the thought of nurturing Enefa’s soul in the body of an Arameri child was appealing on many levels.”
I nodded. That I could certainly understand.
“If we can restore the soul to health,” Sieh said, “then there is a chance it can be used to free us. The thing that subdues us in this world, trapping us in flesh and binding us to the Arameri, is the Stone. Itempas took it not to preserve life, but so that he could use Enefa’s power against Nahadoth—two of the Three against one. But he could not wield it himself; the Three are all too different from one another. Only Enefa’s children can use Enefa’s power. A godling like me, or a mortal. In the war, it was both—some of my siblings, and one Itempan priestess.”
“Shahar Arameri,” I said.
The bed moved slightly with his nod. Zhakkarn was a silent, watching presence. I drew Zhakkarn’s face with my mind, matching it against the face I’d seen in the library. Zhakkarn’s face was framed like Enefa’s, with the same sharp jaw and high cheekbones. It was in all three of them, I realized, though they didn’t look like siblings or even members of the same race. All of Enefa’s children had kept some feature, some tribute, to their mother’s looks. Kurue had the same frank, dissecting gaze. Sieh’s eyes were the same jade color.
Like mine.
“Shahar Arameri.” Sieh sighed. “As a mortal, she could wield only a fraction of the Stone’s true power. Yet she was the one who struck the deciding blow. Nahadoth would have avenged Enefa that day, if not for her.”
“Nahadoth says you want my life.”
Zhakkarn’s voice, with a hint of irritation: “He told you that?”
Sieh’s voice, equally irritated, though at Zhakkarn: “He can only defy his own nature for so long.”
“Is it true?” I asked.
Sieh was silent for so long that I opened my eyes. He winced at the look on my face; I did not care. I was through with evasions and riddles. I was not Enefa. I did not have to love him.
Zhakkarn unfolded her arms, a subtle threat. “You haven’t agreed to ally with us. You could give this information to Dekarta.”
I gave her the same look that I had Sieh. “Why,” I said, enunciating each word carefully, “would I possibly betray you to him?”
Zhakkarn’s eyes flicked over to Sieh. Sieh smiled, though there was little humor in it. “I told her you’d say that. You do have one advocate among us, Yeine, however little you might believe it.”
I said nothing. Zhakkarn was still glaring at me, and I knew better than to look away from a challenge. It was a pointless challenge on both sides—she would have no choice but to tell me if I commanded her, and I would never earn her trust merely by my words. But my whole world had just been shattered, and I knew of no other way to learn what I needed to know.