My aunt pointed down at the piece of paper.
“And all the princes of the land would kiss the earth beneath her feet—that would be you—and should she fall, I will fall with her, for we are as one, and the despair would dry the spring of life within me. Do you understand? You are bound together. He can’t kill you. If he does, he will die with you.”
My brain screeched to a halt. There was no way.
Curran laughed.
The two of us looked at him.
“It’s not funny,” I told him.
“It’s hilarious.”
“Will you cut it out?” I sat down in my chair, trying to process things. My brain was having real difficulties digesting this.
Curran’s grin was vicious. “I’ve been wondering why the hell he invested all that time into Hugh and then threw him away. Hugh almost killed you. Your dad was sitting in his Swan Palace feeling himself inch toward death’s door as you died of exposure, and he got so scared, he got rid of Hugh so it wouldn’t happen again. It was a knee-jerk reaction.”
“This can’t be right. I almost died more times than I can remember.”
“No, you’ve been hurt more times than you can remember,” Curran said. “Mishmar was the closest you’ve come to a physical death. Nasrin didn’t think you would make it. She told me to make my peace.”
“I almost bled to death in a cage when the rakshasas grabbed me.”
“No. You passed out, but Doolittle said there was a solid chance of recovery from the start. Mishmar was the worst.”
“Is that what you do?” Erra asked. “You keep track of the times she almost dies?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to find yourself some shapeshifter heifer and have a litter of kittens, rather than deal with all this?”
I thought we were over this.
“Well, if I’m banging a heifer, technically the kids would have an equal chance of being calves and kittens,” Curran said. “So it might be a litter or a small herd.”
“If Curran and I have a litter of kittens, will you babysit?”
Erra stared at me like I had slapped her.
“They will be very cute kittens,” Curran said.
I smiled at the City Eater. “Meow, meow.”
“You won’t have any kittens if my brother is allowed to roam free,” Erra snarled. “You came to me, remember that.”
“If I kill myself, will he die?”
“You’re not killing yourself,” Curran said.
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
He leaned toward me, his eyes full of gold. His voice was a snarl. “This is me telling you: you are not killing yourself.”
“Shut up, both of you.” Erra frowned. “If this were done in the old age, yes, he would die. In this age, I don’t know. The magic is weaker and his will to live is very strong. If you were killed while he’s outside his land, he would have a harder time dealing with it.”
“So it’s not a guarantee?” I asked
“No.”
“But it would hurt him?”
“Yes.”
“I know he tried to kill me in the womb but failed. He says he changed his mind. He probably changed his mind because he started to feel the side effects of trying to snuff me out.”
“If he dies, will she die?” Curran looked at Erra.
“Yes. Probably. Her magic has the potential to be as strong as his, but she’s untrained. It depends on where he is and where she is and if the magic is up. He’s stronger on the land he claimed, and she’s stronger in her territory. Her chances of survival are higher here.”
“So we can’t kill him?” Curran asked.
“Not if you want her to live.”
Curran swore.
I looked at Erra. “How then? How do I stop him?”
“One thing at a time,” Erra said. “First, we fight the battle, then we win the war.”
• • •
THE GUILD CALLED, and Curran popped over there “for a few minutes.” Erra retreated back into her blade. She wouldn’t admit it, but manifesting tired her out. She’d make a short appearance and vanish.
I sat alone in Cutting Edge. Nobody called with emergencies or dire predictions. I left the front door open and a nice breeze blew through it, ruffling the papers on Julie’s desk. Derek’s desk was always spartan, Ascanio’s was a collection of carefully color-coded folders, but Julie’s workspace was a mess of stickies, loose notebook pages, and pieces of paper with odd scribblings on them, sometimes in English, sometimes in Greek, or Mandarin, or Latin. A weirdly shaped white rock pinned down a stack of notecards; a smooth polished pebble the color of pure sapphire—it might have been the real thing for all I knew—lay next to a chunk of green glass, hopefully not from the Glass Menagerie; a little blue flower bloomed in a small clay pot next to a dagger . . .
I needed to go home and practice to control my land. Erra had some exercises I needed to do. But I wanted to sit here for another minute.
I had never wanted any of the war, power, land . . . I just wanted this, a small business where I chose which jobs I took and helped people. This office was my Water Gardens. I made a piss-poor princess of Shinar, but I was an excellent Kate of Atlanta.
Every time I had to use my power, I ran the risk of falling into a hole I couldn’t climb out of. Sometimes I teetered on the edge. Sometimes I fell in, caught myself on the cliff, and pulled myself back up at the last possible moment. It was getting harder and harder to stay up there. I didn’t know what exactly lay at the end of that fall, but I had my suspicions. Power, for one, but power wasn’t the real draw. I had power now and I would learn how to use it with my aunt’s instruction. No, what pulled me was certainty.
Once I fell, there would be no doubt. I would do what I needed to do without checking every tiny step against some imaginary set of rules. It wouldn’t matter who disapproved of me. I wouldn’t have to convince and cajole people. I wouldn’t have to bargain for them to please, please make some small, tiny effort to ensure their own survival. I could simply do. I hated waiting. I hated all the political bullshit. Don’t upset the Pack, don’t upset the witches, don’t upset the Order or the mages or the humans. It was like being thrown into a fighting pit with my hands tied together. I could still fight, but it was so much harder.
If I fell, Curran would leave me. Julie, too. I’d made her promise she would. Derek . . .
Voron used to tell me over and over that friendships and relationships weakened you. They made you vulnerable. They gave other people the ability to control you. He was right. I had ended up in this mess because I ran around trying to keep everyone safe, and now, as I hovered over the abyss, their love tethered me to the edge but their very existence pushed me in. I needed more power to keep them safe. I needed autonomy to make decisions.
In the end it wasn’t up to them what I became. It was up to me. Even if everyone I cared about got up and left to never come back, I stood for something. Some things were right and some things were wrong, not because Curran or Julie or Derek approved or disapproved, but because I did. I had a set of rules. I followed them. They made me me. I had to remember that.
And I had to own up to Curran about Adora. Hey, honey, here is a girl I saved against her will. Good news, I’m not her slave master. Bad news, she thinks my blood is divine and if she doesn’t serve me with her every breath, she won’t get into heaven. I have to shatter her world if she is ever to have a life. And by the way, I did all this, because I wanted to stick it to my father. Because sometimes, when the magic grips me just right, people become toys to me. Aren’t you proud of me? That would be a hellish conversation. With everything else I’d pulled recently . . . I didn’t know where that conversation would end.
The wind blew a piece of notebook paper off Julie’s desk. I walked over, picked it up, gathered a loose
stack of papers, and tapped it on the desk to get it all even.
“It’s the lot of the parents to fix the messes their children make,” my father said.
I turned around. He stood by the door, wrapped in a plain brown cloak that reminded me of a monk’s habit. The hood was drawn over his head. He held a walking stick in his hand.
“You look like a traveling wizard from some old book,” I told him.
“Do I?”
“Mm-hm. Or an incognito god.”
“Odin the Wanderer,” he said. “But I’d need a wide-brimmed hat and a raven.”
“And only one eye.”
“I’ve tried that look before,” he said. “It isn’t flattering.”
We’d been talking for a whole minute and he wasn’t screaming at me about resurrecting his sister. Maybe he really couldn’t feel Erra.
“Why are you here, Father?”
“I thought we’d talk.”
I sighed, went to the back, and got two bottles of beer from the fridge. He followed me to where a rope hung from the ceiling, attached to the attic’s pull-down ladder. I handed him the beer. “Here, hold my beer.”
“Famous last words,” he said.
I pulled the rope. The attic ladder dropped down. I took one of the beers from him and climbed up the steps. He followed me. We crossed the finished attic, where we kept our supplies, to a heavy steel door. I unlocked the two bars securing it and stepped out onto the side balcony. It was only three feet wide and five feet long, big enough to comfortably put two chairs. From this point we could see the city, the hustle and bustle of the street below, the traffic on Ponce de Leon, and beyond it, the burned-out husks of skyscrapers, falling apart a little more with each magic wave.
I took one chair; he took the other.
“Nice,” he said, and drank the beer.
“I like it. I like to watch the city.” I’d had the balcony and the attic ladder installed two months ago. When Jim found out, he had called me. He worried it was a security risk. Jim wouldn’t worry about anything related to me anymore. When a ten-year-old friendship shattered, the edges cut you.
My father drank his beer.
“What was Shinar like?”
He put his beer on the wooden railing and held out his hand. I touched it. A golden light rolled over the city below. I had expected crude, simple buildings the color of sand and clay. Instead beautiful white towers rose before me, drenched in greenery. Textured walkways led up terraces supporting a riot of flowers and trees. Sparkling ponds and creeks interrupted open spaces. In the distance a massive building, a pyramid or temple, rose, the first tier white, the second blue, the third green, topped with a shining gold sun symbol. People of every color and age strode through the streets. Women in colorful flowing dresses, in plain tunics, in military garb, carrying weapons and leading children by the hand. Older kids running, waving canvas bags at each other. Men in leather and metal armor, in robes like the one my father wore, in finery and a couple nude in bright swirls of red and blue body paint, some clean-shaven, some with a few days of scruff.
“No beards?” I said. Sumerian civilization was the oldest on record, and men on the few artifacts that survived always had full, curly beards.
“It came into fashion much later,” he said.
“It’s not what I expected.”
“It was called the jewel of Eden for a reason. I remember the night it fell. That tower with the red roof was the first. I ran out in the street and tried to hold it up and couldn’t. The magic simply wasn’t there. One by one, the buildings collapsed in front of me. Thousands died.”
The first Shift, when the technology wave had flooded the planet.
“Do you blame yourself?” I asked.
“No. None of us had any idea that such a thing was possible. There were no theories, no warnings, no prophecies. Nothing except for the random reports of magical devices malfunctioning or underperforming. Had we known, I’m not sure we would’ve done anything different. We were driven by the same things that drive people today: make our land better, our lives safer, our society more prosperous.”
The vision died and my Atlanta returned.
“I can rebuild it,” he said.
“I know. But should you?”
He looked at me. I took my hand away and pointed at the mouth of the street. “Several years ago, a man walked out over there and demanded everyone repent in the name of his god. People ignored him, so he unleashed a meteor shower. The whole street was in ruins. Looking at it now, you would never know. People are adjusting.”
“The car repair shop, those squat, ugly shops? That one repairs pots and sharpens knives. What does that other one do?”
“They make shoes.”
“So a tinker and a shoemaker.”
“People need pots and shoes, Father.”
“It’s hideous,” he said. “There is no beauty to it. It’s rudimentary and ugly. There is elegance in simplicity, but we can both agree a man with a thousand eyes couldn’t find elegance here at high noon.”
My father, master of witty prehistoric sayings. “Yes.”
“I can teach them beauty.”
“They have to learn it themselves.” I pulled out my spare knife. “Tactical Bowie. Hand forged. The blade is 5160 carbon steel marquenched—cooled in a molten salt bath—to strengthen the blade before being tempered. Ten-and-three-quarter-inch blade, black oxide finish. Long, slim, very fast.”
I pinched the spine of the blade with my fingers at the hilt. “Distal taper. The blade thins from hilt to tip. About six and a half millimeters here.” I moved my fingers to the tip. “About three and a half at the tip. Makes the blade lively and responsive. Pick up a sword or a knife without a taper and it will feel clunky in comparison.”
I touched the spine at the point where the blade curved down. “Clip point. Looks like a normal blade with the back clipped a bit. This clip curve is sharpened. If I’m pulling out this knife, I’m fighting in close quarters. This blade profile allows for greater precision when thrusting. It’s a wicked slicer, but it’s an even better stabber. This knife is one single piece of steel. The guard, the hilt, and the blade, all one piece. Simple paratrooper cord for the grip. You wanted elegance in simplicity. Here it is, Father.”
I passed the knife to him.
He held it up and studied it.
“There are countless generations between a simple flint blade and this knife. There is metallurgy, years of experimentation to get the right kind of steel, not too brittle, not too soft. More years to properly temper it. Chemistry. Craftsmanship. Secrets of forging the blade, passed from parents to children, read in books, practiced. Men died for the geometry of this knife. Their deaths helped to refine it into the perfect weapon. This knife represents a wealth of knowledge. But you want to take a big step and simply circumvent the learning process. If you gave this knife to a Cro-Magnon, he would appreciate it. But he wouldn’t know why it worked so well. He couldn’t reproduce it. Even if you taught him how, he would make lesser imitations of it. All that wealth of knowledge would never be acquired.”
“I can make a better knife,” he said.
I sighed. “The knife is good enough, Father. It suits my needs. Even if you tried, your blade wouldn’t be perfect.”
“And why is that?”
“Because you don’t stab people on a daily basis.” Right. Nice going. The next time I came to his castle, he would be stabbing people to learn the perfect knife design.
“You use a car, Kate. Do you know how it was made?”
“No, but I know people who do. We’re talking about the collective knowledge of the people. The knowledge that is a root from which other knowledge grows.” I drank my beer. “I bet if you made a better knife, you would confiscate all knives and replace them with yours, because they were better.”
“They woul
d be.”
“But everyone would have the same knife. There would be no need for progress.”
“So you would rather condemn these same people to generations of trying to learn something I already know.”
I sighed. “Do you want to be the fount of all knowledge?”
“I want these people to experience beauty and prosperity. I want them to have it now. Not tomorrow, not in the future, but now, because their lives are short.”
“If you remove adversity, you remove ingenuity and creativity with it. There is no need to strive to make something beautiful or better if it already is.”
“Life is full of infinite secrets,” he said. “There is always something needing ingenuity.”
“Don’t you want them to have pride? An old man remembers his first knife, compares it to the one his grandson made, and is proud to see how far we’ve come.”
“You are naive, Blossom. Let me build a house on this street. Go out and ask the first fifty people you meet if they would choose to live in the house they have now or the beautiful dwelling I built. Every single one of them will give you the same answer.”
“There is no getting through to you,” I said.
“You are a challenging child. You ask difficult questions.”
“I think I’m a very easy child.”
“How so?” He sipped his beer.
“You never had to bail me out of jail, chase my boyfriend out of my bedroom, or try to console me because I missed my period and cried hysterically, worried that I might be pregnant. Cops were never called to the house because I had a giant party. I’ve never stolen your car . . .”
He laughed. “You almost destroyed a prison that took me ten years to build. And you upset your grandmother.”
“You sent an assassin to kill a baby,” I said. “A baby. My best friend’s daughter.”
“If it helps, I wavered before issuing the order.”
He wavered. Ugh.
“Please tell me that there was something in you that rebelled against taking a baby’s life.”
“No. I wavered because I knew you wouldn’t like it. It would displease you and you would think I was cruel, so I hesitated.”