With studied boredom in her tone, Shahar said, “Uncle, you’re being even more obscure than usual.”
“My apologies.” He didn’t look apologetic at all. “I merely came to mention a detail about the meeting Sister asked that you attend tomorrow. She’s ordered full privacy — no guards, no courtiers beyond the ones invited. Not even servants will be present.”
At this, Shahar and Dekarta both looked at each other, and I wondered what in the infinite hells was going on. Remath should never have declared her intention for a private meeting in advance; too easy for other Arameri or interested parties to slip in a listening sphere. Or an assassin. But Ramina was marked with a full sigil; he could not act against his sister even if he wanted to. Which meant that he was speaking on Remath’s behalf. But why?
Then I realized Ramina was still looking at me. So it was something Remath wanted me to know, in particular. To make sure I’d be there.
“Damned twisty-headed Arameri,” I said, scowling at him. “I’ve had a horrid day. Say what you mean.”
He blinked at me with such blatant surprise that he fooled no one. “I should think it would be obvious, Trickster. The Arameri are about to implement a trick that should impress even you. Naturally we would welcome your blessing for such an endeavor.” With that, he smiled and strode after his sister.
I stared after him in confusion, as if that would help. It didn’t. And now I spied Morad approaching at the head of a phalanx of servants, all of them pausing to bow as Ramina walked past in the palace archway.
Shahar turned to me and Deka, speaking low and quickly. “I must attend to Canru and the Teman party down at the Salon; they’ll be very put out about this. Both of you, request quarters that can be reached through the dead spaces. Sieh knows what I mean.” With that, she, too, left us, heading over to join her fiancé.
“Are you all right?” I heard Canru ask her. I tightened my jaw against inadvertent approval and turned to Deka.
“I suppose you’ll want to settle in, too,” I said. “Order the scrivener corps about and start dissecting your new prize, or whatever it is you people do.” I looked over at the trussed-up masker.
“I’d much rather go somewhere and have a long talk with you about what just happened,” he said, and there was something in his voice, a smoothness, that made me blush inadvertently. He smiled, missing nothing. “But I suppose that will have to wait. I’ll be taking one of the spire rooms — Spire Seven, most likely, if it’s still available. Where will you be?”
I considered. “The underpalace.” There was no place more private in all of Sky. “Deka, the dead spaces —”
“I know what they are,” he said, surprising me, “and I can guess which room you’ll be in. We’ll come around midnight.”
Flustered, I watched Deka as he turned to greet Morad. I heard him issue orders as easily as if he had not just returned from a ten-year exile, and I heard Morad answer with, “At once, my lord,” as if she had never missed him.
All around the courtyard, everyone spoke with someone else. I stood alone.
Obscurely troubled, I went over to the masker and prodded him with a toe, sighing. He grunted and struggled toward me in response. “Why must all you mortals be so difficult?” I asked. The dead man, predictably, did not answer.
My old room.
I stood in the open doorway, unsurprised to see that it had not been touched in the century since I’d left. Why would any servant, or steward for that matter, have bothered? No one would ever want to dwell in a chamber that had housed a god. What if he’d left traps behind or woven curses into the walls? Worse, what if he came back?
The reality was that I had never intended to come back, and it had never occurred to me to weave curses into anything. If I had, I would never have burdened the walls with anything so trivial as a curse. I would have created a masterwork of pain and humiliation and despair from my own heart, and I would have forced any mortal who invaded the space to share those horrors. Just for a moment or two, rather than the centuries I endured, but none of it blunted.
An old wooden table stood on one side of the room. On its surface were the small treasures I had always loved to gather, even when they had no life or magic of their own. A perfect dried leaf, now probably too fragile to touch. A key; I did not remember what it opened or if its lock still existed. I just liked keys. A perfectly round pebble that I had always meant to turn into a planet and add to my orrery. I had forgotten about it after I’d gotten free, and now I had no power to correct the error.
Beyond the table was my nest — or so I had styled it, though it had none of the comfort or beauty of my true nest in the gods’ realm. This was just a pile of rags, gray and dry-rotted and dusty now, and probably infested with vermin to boot. Some of the rags were things I had stolen from the fullbloods: a favorite scarf, a baby’s blanket, a treasured tapestry. I’d always tried to take things they cared about, though they’d punished me for it whenever they’d caught me. Every blow had been worth it — not because the thefts caused them any great hardship, but because I was not a mortal, not just a slave. I was still Sieh, the mischievous wind, the playful hunter, and no punishment could ever break me. To remind myself of that, I had been willing to endure anything.
Dust and mite food now. I slid my hands into my pockets, sat down against a wall, and sighed.
I was dozing when they arrived, through the floor. Shahar, to my surprise, was the first one through. I smiled to see that she held a small ceramic tablet, on which had been drawn a single, simple command in our language. Atadie. Open. I had shown her the door, and she’d had someone make her a key.
“Have you been wandering the dead spaces by yourself these past few years?” I asked as she climbed out of the hole and dusted herself off. She or Dekarta had made steps out of the reshaped daystone. He came up behind her, looking around in fascination.
She looked at me warily, no doubt remembering that the last time I’d seen her, really spoken to her, had been two years before, the morning after we’d made love.
“Some,” she said, after a moment. “It’s useful to be able to go where I want with none the wiser.”
“Indeed it is,” I said, smiling thinly. “But you should be careful, you know. The dead spaces were mine once — and any place that was mine for so long is likely to have taken on some of my nature. Step into the wrong corridor, open the wrong door, and you never know what might jump out and bite you.”
She flinched, as I’d meant her to, and not just at my words. Betrayer, I let my eyes say, and after a moment she looked away.
Deka looked warily at us both, perhaps only now realizing how bad things were between us. Wisely, he chose not to mention it.
“There’s panic in Shadow,” he said, “and we’re getting reports of unrest from elsewhere in the world. There have been riots, and the Order has instituted extra services at all White Halls to accommodate the Itempans who suddenly feel compelled to pray. Mother’s called an emergency session of the Consortium in three days’ time, and she’s authorized the Litaria to facilitate travel by gate for all the representatives. Rumor has the Arameri all dead and a new Gods’ War impending.”
I laughed, though I shouldn’t have. Fear was like poison to mortals; it killed their rationality. Somewhere, there would be deaths tonight.
“That’s Remath’s problem, not mine,” I said, sitting forward, “or yours. We have a more significant concern.”
They looked at each other, then at me, and waited. Belatedly I realized they thought I was about to explain something.
“I haven’t got a clue what happened,” I said, raising my hands quickly. “Never seen anything like that in my life! But I have no idea why anything happens the way it does around you two.”
“It didn’t come from us.” Shahar spoke softly, with the barest hint of hesitation. I scowled at her and she blanched, but then tightened her jaw and lifted her chin. “We felt it, Deka and I, and this time you did, too. We have felt that power
before, Sieh. It was the same as the day the three of us took our oath.”
Silence fell, and in it I nodded slowly. Trying not to be afraid. I had already guessed that the power was the same. What frightened me was my growing suspicion as to why.
Deka licked his lips. “Sieh. If the three of us touch, and it somehow causes this … this thing to occur, and if that power can be directed … Sieh, Shahar and I —” He took a deep breath. “We want to try it again. See if we can turn you back into a godling.”
I caught my breath, wondering if they had any idea of how much danger we were all in.
“No,” I said. I stood and stepped away from the wall, too tense to maintain my pose of indifference.
“Sieh —” Deka began.
“No.” Gods. They really had no idea. I turned and began to pace, nibbling a thumbnail. All that happened in darkness. Sky’s glowing halls had been designed specifically to thwart Nahadoth’s nature, and Itempas was diminished to mortality. Yeine, though … every creature that had ever lived could be her eyes and ears, if she so chose. Was she observing us now? Would she …?
“Sieh.” Shahar. She stepped in front of me and I stopped, because it was either that or run into her. I hissed, and she glared back. “You’re making no sense. If we can restore your magic —”
“They’ll kill you,” I said, and she flinched. “Naha, Yeine. If the three of us have that kind of power, they’ll kill us all.”
They both looked blank. I groaned and rubbed my head. I had to make them understand.
“The demons,” I said. More confusion. They did not know they were Ahad’s descendants. I cursed in three languages, though I made sure none of them were my own. “The demons, damn it! Why did the gods kill them?”
“Because they were a threat,” said Deka.
“No. No. Gods, do both of you only ever listen to teaching poems and priests’ tales? You’re Arameri; you know that stuff is all lies!” I glared at them.
“But that was why.” Deka was looking stubborn again, as he’d done as a child, as he’d probably done in every Litaria lesson since. “Their blood was poison to gods —”
“And they could pass for mortals, better than any god or godling. They could, and did, blend in.” I stepped closer and looked into his eyes. If I wasn’t careful, if I did not work hard to keep the years hidden, mortals were not fooled by my outward appearance. Now, however, I let him see all I had experienced. All the aeons of mortal life, all the aeons before that. I had been there nearly from the beginning. I understood things Deka would never comprehend, no matter how brilliant he was and no matter how diminished I became as a mortal. I remembered. So I wanted him to believe my words now, without question, the way ordinary mortals believed the words of their gods. Even if that meant making him fear me.
Deka frowned, and I saw the awareness come over him. And though he loved me and had wanted me since he was too young to know what desire meant, he stepped back. I felt a moment’s sorrow. But it was probably for the best.
Shahar, sweet, beautiful betrayer that she was, leapt to my point before her brother did.
“They made mortalkind a threat,” she said very softly. “They fit in among us, yes. Interbred with us. Passed on their magic, and sometimes their poison, to all their mortal descendants.”
“Yes,” I said. “And though it was the poison that was of immediate concern — one of my brothers died of demon poison, which set the whole thing off — there was also the fear of what would happen to our magic, filtered and distorted through a mortal lens. We saw that some of the demons were just as powerful as pure godlings.” I looked at Deka as I said it. I couldn’t help myself. He stared back at me, still shaken to discover that his childhood crush was something frightening and strange, oblivious to my real implication. “It wasn’t hard to guess that someday, somehow, a mortal might be born with as much power as one of the Three. The power to change reality itself on a fundamental level.” I shook my head and gestured around us, at the room, Sky, the world, the universe. “You don’t understand how fragile all this is. Losing one of the Three would destroy it. Gaining a Fourth, or even something close to a Fourth, would do the same.”
Deka frowned, concern overwhelming shock. “And what we did … you think the Three would see that as the culmination of their fears?”
“But it’s not as though we did anything harmful —” Shahar began.
“Changing reality is harmful! If you tried it again, even to help me — Deka, you understand how magic works. What happens if you misdraw a sigil or misspeak a godword? If the two of you try to use this power to remake me …” I sighed, and faced the truth I hadn’t wanted to admit. “Well, think of what happened last time. You wanted me to be your friend, a true friend — something that I could never have been as a god. You would have grown up and understood how different I was. You would have become proper Arameri and wondered how you could use me.” Now I looked at Shahar, whose lips tightened ever so slightly. “If I had stayed a god, our friendship would never have survived this long. So you, some part of you, made me into something that could be your friend.”
Deka took another step back, horror filling his face. “You’re saying we did this? The collapse of the Nowhere Stair, your mortality …?”
At this I sighed and went back to the wall, sliding down to sit against it. “I don’t know. This is all guesses and conjecture. Your will, if it had this strange magic behind it, may have focused the magic just enough to cause a change, but then it backlashed … or something. None of that answers the fundamental question of why you have this power.”
“It isn’t just us, Sieh.” Shahar again, quiet again. “Deka and I have touched many times, and nothing came of it. It’s only when we touch you that there’s any change.”
I nodded bleakly. I had figured that out as well.
Silence fell as they digested everything I’d said. It was broken by the loud grumbling of my empty belly and my louder yawn. At this, Dekarta shifted uncomfortably. “Why did you come here, Sieh? There are no servants this far down, and this room is … foul.” He looked around, his lip curling at the pile of ancient rags.
A foul place for a fouled god, I thought. “I like it here,” I said. “And I’m too tired to go anywhere else. Go away now, both of you. I need to rest.”
Shahar turned toward the hole in the floor, but Deka lingered. “Come with us,” he said. “Have something to eat, take a bath. There’s a couch in my new quarters.”
I looked up at him and saw the bravery of his effort. I had jarred his fantasies badly, but he would try, even now, to be the friend he’d promised to be.
You are the one who did this to me, beautiful Deka.
I smiled thinly, and he frowned at the sight.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Go on. Let’s all be ready to face your mother in the morning.”
So they left.
As the daystone of the floor resealed itself, I lay down and curled up to sleep, resigning myself to stiffness by morning. But as soon as I closed my eyes, I realized I was no longer alone.
“Are you really afraid of me?” asked Yeine.
I opened my eyes and sat up. She sat cross-legged in my old nest, dainty as always, beautiful even amid rags. The rags were no longer dry-rotted, however. I could see color and definition returning to what had been a gray mass and could hear the faint tightening of the thread fibers as they regained cohesion and strength. Along one of Yeine’s thighs, a line of barely visible mites had begun to crawl, vanishing over the rise of her flesh. Sent packing, I imagined, or she might be killing them. One never knew with her.
I said nothing in response to her question, and she sighed.
“I don’t care if mortals grow powerful, Sieh. If they do, and they threaten us, I’ll deal with that then. For now” — she shrugged —“maybe it’s a good thing that some of them have magic like this. Maybe that’s what they really need, power of their own, so they can stop being jealous of ours.”
“Don’t tell Naha,” I whispered. At this she sobered and grew silent.
After a moment, she said, “You used to come to me whenever we were alone.”
I looked away. I wanted to. But I knew better.
“Sieh,” she said. Hurt.
And because I loved her too much to let her think the problem was her, I sighed and got up and went over to the nest. Climbing into it brought back memories, and I paused for an instant, overwhelmed by them. Holding Naha on a moonless night — the one time he was safe from both Itempas and the Arameri — as he wept for the Three that had been. Endless hours I’d spent weaving new orbits for my orrery and polishing my Arameri bones. Grinding my teeth as another guard-captain, this one a fullblood and cruel, ordered me to turn over for him. (I had gotten his bones, too, in the end. But they had not made as good toys as I’d hoped, and eventually I’d tossed them off the Pier.)
And now Yeine, whose presence burned away the bad and burnished the good. I wanted to hold her so much, but I knew what would happen. It amazed me that she didn’t. She was so very young.
She frowned at me in puzzlement, reaching out to cup my cheek. My self-control broke, and I flung myself against her as I had done so many times, burying my face in her breast, gripping the cloth at the back of her vest. It felt so good, too, at first. I felt warm and safe and young. Her arms came around me, and her face pressed into my hair. I was her baby, her son in all but flesh, and the flesh didn’t matter.
But there is always a moment when the familiar becomes strange. It is always there, just a little, between any two beings who love one another as much as she and I. The line is so fine. In one moment I was her child, my head pillowed on her breast in all innocence. In the next I was a man, lonely and hungry, and her breasts were small but full. Female. Inviting.
Yeine tensed. It was barely perceptible, but I had been expecting it. With a long sigh I sat up, letting her go. When her eyes — troubled, uncertain — met mine, I turned away. I am not a complete bastard. For her, I would stay the boy that she needed and not the man I had become.