When I was little, he would sing a lullaby to me every night before bed. How did I get so far away from that moment, when I was cherished? How is it that right now, all I can see before me is the intimidating man who drove his sword into the chests of countless Valorians, who even once threw them off a cliff? Who orchestrated the poisoning of an entire gathering of Valorian lords and ladies, dancing and sipping iced apple wine until the first one began to choke?
My thoughts, hurtling ahead of me, stop hard.
Earlier, I had contemplated Roshar, wondering whether he could have poisoned my mother. Aloofly, even smugly, I told myself it was important to consider the worst, even if it meant thinking my beloved godfather had poisoned my mother. But that was not the very worst possibility.
It cannot be my father. I refuse to believe it. If it is true that my father harmed my mother, then my life is a lie, the world I understand does not exist, I know nothing, and I am no one.
THE GOD
WHEN I WAS A ROSE, blooming on a bush outside the city walls of Ethin, the rain fell on my soft, silent head. The sun forced me open. An ice wind came and went, chilling me, casting a thin glaze of ice over my petals and down my stem, so that I looked made of glass. I did not die and I did not fade, for I remained a god, no matter my form. When the sun came again, the ice melted and dripped away. I bloomed again.
Mute, I watched the human world. The hummingbird that delved inside me. The velvet nights. The snake that hid from the sun in the cool of my thorny branches, my serrated leaves. My presence in Ethin violated the promise the pantheon made, each to the other, never to return to the mortal realm. Yet one does not wager with the god of games and neglect to pay her due.
As I watched the sugarcane grow in the distance, and yearned for a human, any human, to take the path that led to me, I watched the rest of the world, too.
In Herran, Kestrel lay on her back in the grass, head pillowed on Arin’s lap as he sat, the scent of summery earth carried by the breeze. Two horses wandered nearby in the meadow with its haze of blue and violet wildflowers. Arin, looking down at his wife, traced the curve of Kestrel’s cheek with a speckled yellow feather.
Are you asleep? he asked.
Yes, she answered.
Do you think you might ever tell a simple truth when asked a simple question?
She opened her golden eyes and smiled. I love you, she said. Is that a simple truth?
It will do.
I had a dream like this once, she said. Long ago, when I was in the Valorian capital, and you were far from me, and I missed you. Am I dreaming? If I am, I don’t want to wake up.
Don’t wake up.
Kestrel closed her eyes again. He felt her grow heavier. As she slipped into sleep, he counted her freckles. Ninety-eight. They would fade, come autumn. He was beginning to feel hazy with the heat, with the soft pleasure of her head in his lap, when she startled awake.
Bad dream? he said.
She shook her head, her braids rustling against his trousers. She reached for his hand and placed it flat against her belly. I felt something, she said. I felt something move inside me.
He didn’t dare hope. Her face was alive with wonder.
It felt like a tadpole, she said.
Still he could not speak.
Arin, I think I felt a baby.
He saw her brush away a drop of water that had fallen like rain onto her cheek. She sat up and kissed his wet eyes, kissed the scar that sliced down from his brow into his left cheek.
Are you happy? Kestrel asked.
Yes. He held her to him. The yellow feather fell to the grass.
Yes.
NIRRIM
I WAKE UP SANDY-EYED, a fresh breeze silky on my skin. It tastes like salt. Before sleep, I left the balcony doors open so the sea air could come in, just as Sid liked it. The memory of her stretches out next to me in bed and finds me. She is a slow riser, the way people with soft lives are, but I never resented it in her, not when she would nuzzle her face against my back and wake up wanting me.
Enough.
I am starting to think that my gift might be a curse, the way my memory conjures ghosts to stalk and distract me. I must be careful. The quiet floating in from the windows in this house as I move through it, searching, tells me that the chaos and destruction of last night has died down. I need to renew it, yet focus it in my name, according to my goals, my rule. I will re-create Ethin. The purge of High Kith has already begun. The agora is wet with their blood. But the Middlings need to know they answer to me.
I open drawers and find little. The wardrobes hold clothes she could not be bothered to take. Shirts fitted perfectly. Jackets with neat, sharp lines. Floating dresses that have no reason to look so smug in their beauty. Sid never liked them.
Downstairs, I scan the slick tiles of the kitchen. I find a muslin sack filled with what seems like fragrant earth—the brown, granular substance that, mixed with boiled water, made the bitter eastern drink Sid liked so much. The brown grit pours like sugar, but more slowly, densely. I drag a finger through the sack’s contents and lick it clean. The bitter taste shocks my tongue, but I like it. I can’t help but like it. It tastes like her deep morning kiss. I close the bag and shove it back on its shelf hurriedly, as though it is dangerous.
In the sitting room, there are books, some open and facedown—Sid, like a true noble, had little reverence for valuable objects. A worn deck of Pantheon cards rests on a spindly table.
My Elysium bird chitters in the sitting room’s corner, iridescent talons clinging to the back of a chair, and launches through the air to alight upon my shoulder. Annoyed, I brush it off. It squawks, fixes me with a green, reproachful eye, and flits back to its chair, watching me with a cagey, almost feline look as I continue my search.
I do not need things the way a human does, as vessels for lost moments, yet greed courses through me. I don’t even know what I want until I find it: a vial of her perfume. It smells of citrus and wood roasted to the point of crumbling into the fire. I inhale it. I can practically taste it. I bring the scent of her inside me and make it mine. Then I stopper the vial and go out into the city, so that I can make the city mine, too.
The old paved stones of the agora are slippery in places, sticky in others. My sandals stain red. The executions have not stopped. A crowd still fills the agora, the morning light delicate on their sleepless, entranced faces. As smoke from last night’s fires lingers in the air, Aden’s friends, who have no magic of their own and so must be good for something, bring the next High Kith to the gory chopping block. She is a woman my age. She wails, bare heels scrubbing the marble pavement as she resists being brought forward by two men who clamp a grip on her arms and drag her when she sags, silk dress ripping along a seam, hem drinking the spilled blood. Headless bodies lie stacked around the broad, flat wooden block. Aden, who glances up and sees me, says something to his friends that I am too far away to hear, and they pause, too, which must give the woman some hope. She follows their gaze to me. As I approach, I hear the begging tone of her voice long before the words become clear. “Please,” she says when I am close. She must intuit that these men will do what I demand. “I have done nothing to deserve this.”
Did she not live her life at the expense of mine? Did she not drink elixirs made from my people’s blood, and delight in the magic it gave her? She knew hundreds of Half Kith were locked behind the wall, where artisans made goods for which they were paid the smallest of coins. Those mirrors, those beautifully carved cedar boxes that smelled like the trees they came from, once decorated her home. A tortoiseshell earring dangles like congealed honey from one ear.