“I take it you’re unhappy about something,” she said.
I smiled and saw her eyes flicker for an instant as she registered my sharp teeth. “Yes,” I said, raising my hand. In it, conjured out of possibility, lay ten thick, silver knitting needles. Each was longer than my hand. “But I will feel better in a moment. Cross your heart and hope to die, Remath. Here are my needles for your eyes.”
To her credit, she kept her voice even. “I kept my promise. I’ve done you no harm.”
I shook my head. “Shahar was my friend, and you have taken her from me.”
“A minor harm,” she said, and then she surprised me with a small smile. “But you are a trickster, and I know better than to try and argue with you.”
“Yes,” I agreed. And then I stepped forward, plucking the first of the needles from my palm and rolling it between my fingers in anticipation, because I am a bully, too, when all is said and done.
I heard Shahar’s cry before she ran in, though I ignored it. She gasped as she reached the chamber and saw blood and bodies everywhere, but then she ran forward—slipping once in someone’s viscera—and grabbed my arm. This did nothing to slow my advance, since for the moment I was much stronger than any mortal, and after being dragged forward a step or two, she abandoned that effort. But then she ran around me and put herself in my path, just as I put my foot on the first step of the dais that held Remath’s throne. “Sieh, don’t do this.”
I sighed and pushed her aside as gently as I could. This made her stumble off the steps, and she fell into the blood of some cousin or another of hers. I could smell the Arameri in him. Or not in him, not anymore; I laughed at my own joke.
As I stopped in front of Remath—who remained where she was, calm as death loomed—Shahar appeared again, this time flinging herself directly in front of her mother’s throne. Her gold satin robe was drenched with blood down one side of her body, and somehow she’d gotten it on the side of her face as well. Half her hair hung limp and dripping with it. I laughed again and tried to think up a rhyme that would properly make fun of her. But what rhymed with horror? I would ponder it later.
I stopped, however, because Shahar was in the way. “Move,” I said.
“No.”
“You wanted her dead, anyway.”
“Not like this, damn you!”
“Poor Shahar.” I made a singsong of it. “Poor little princess, how is she to see? With her fingers and her toes, once her eyes are with me.” I held the needle forward so that she could see it. “You have betrayed me, sweet Shahar. It is nothing to me to kill you, too.”
Her jaw tightened. “I thought you loved me.”
“I thought you loved me.”
“You swore not to harm me!”
She was right. Her failure to keep her word did not mean I should stoop to the same level. “Very well. I won’t kill you—just her.”
“She’s my mother,” she snapped. “How much do you think it will harm me if you kill her right before my eyes?”
As much as she’d harmed me by betraying my trust. Maybe a bit more. “I’m not interested in bargains right now, Shahar. Move, or I’ll move you. I won’t be gentle this time.”
“Please,” she said, which ordinarily would only have goaded me further—bully—but this time it did not. This time, to my own great surprise, the churning vortex of my rage slowed, then went still. In the sudden storm-calm, I gazed at her and realized another truth that she had hidden from me all this time. And perhaps not just from me. I glanced at Remath, who was staring at Shahar, surprised into an expression of astonishment at last. Yes.
“You love her,” I said.
And because Shahar was Arameri, she flinched as if struck and looked away in shame. But she did not move out of my way.
I let out a long, heavy sigh, and with it my power began to fade. I couldn’t have kept it up much longer anyhow; I was too old for tantrums.
Shaking my head, I let the needles drop to the floor. They scattered over the steps with tinny metal sounds, loud in the chamber’s silence. Listening to the nearby world, I could hear shouts and running feet—Captain Wrath and his men racing to save Remath and die in the trying because they were not sensible like Darre. Even the scriveners were marshaling, bringing their most powerful scripts, though they were disorganized because Shevir was here, his corpse cooling among the others I’d killed. I turned and looked at him, his face frozen in a look of surprise beneath the gaping hole in his forehead, and felt regret. He hadn’t been a bad man as First Scriveners went. And I had been a very bad boy.
On the strength of that, I took myself away from Sky, not really caring where I went instead, just wanting comfort and silence and a place to be miserable in peace.
I would not see Shahar again for two years.
BOOK TWO
Two Legs at Noon
I am a fly on the wall, or a spider in a bush. Same difference, except that the spider is a predator and suits my nature better.
I sit in a web that would give me away in an instant if he saw it, because I have woven a smiling face into the tiny dewdrop-beaded strands. It has never been his nature to notice the minutia of his surroundings, however, and the web is half hidden by leaves anyhow. With my many eyes, I observe as Itempas, the Bright Sky, Daybringer, sits on a whitebaked clay rooftop waiting for the sun to rise. It surprises me that he sits to observe this, but then many things have surprised me today. Like the fact that the rooftop is part of a mortal dwelling, and inside it are the mortal woman he loves and the mortal—but half-god—child she has borne him.
I knew something was wrong. There had been a day of change in the gods’ realm not long before. The hurricane that was Nahadoth met the earthquake that was Enefa, and they found stillness in each other. A beautiful, holy thing—I know, I watched. But in the distance, the immovable white-capped mountain that was Itempas shimmered and went away. He has been gone ever since.
Ten years, in mortal reckoning. An eyeblink for us, but still unusual for him. He does not sulk. More commonly he confronts a source of disruption, attacks it, destroys it if he can, or settles into some equilibrium with it if he cannot—but he has done neither this time. Instead he has fled to this realm with its fragile creatures and tried to hide himself among them, as if a sun can fit in among match flames. Except he isn’t hiding, not exactly. He’s just… living. Being ordinary. And not coming home.
The rooftop door opens, and the child comes out. Strange-looking creature, disproportionate with his big head and long legs. (Do I look like that in my mortal form? I resolve to make my head smaller.) He is brown-skinned and blond, freckled. From here, I can see his eyes, as green as the leaves that hide me. He is eight or nine years old now—a good age, my favorite age, old enough to know the world yet young enough to still delight in it. I have heard his name, Shinda, whispered by the other children of this dusty little village; they are frightened of him. They can tell, as I can with just a glance, that he might be mortal, but he will never be one of them.
He comes to stand behind Itempas and wraps his arms around Itempas’s shoulders, resting his cheek against his father’s densely curled hair. Itempas does not turn to him, but I see him reach up to touch the boy’s arms. They watch the sun rise together, never saying a word.
When the day is well begun, there is another movement at the rooftop door; a woman comes to stand there. She is Remath’s age, similarly blonde, similarly beautiful. In two thousand years, I will join hands with her descendant and namesake and become mortal. They look much alike, this Shahar, that Shahar, except for the eyes. This Shahar watches Itempas with an unblinking steadiness that I would find frightening if I had not seen it in the eyes of my own worshippers. When her son straightens and comes over to greet her, she does not look at him, though she absently touches his shoulder and says something. He goes inside and she remains there, watching her lover with a high priestess’s fanaticism. But he does not turn to her.