Their life was sweetly blessed. They had everything they wanted. Days of endless luxury. I, who had a taste of sweetness with Sid, understand why the High Kith never sought to learn whether they deserved what they had. I once feared that if I considered too closely why Sid wanted me, I might discover that her attention would never truly be mine, that I didn’t deserve it, or that it would be wrong to keep it.
Do you not love me like I love you? she asked. My perfect memory, a gift and a curse, makes me hear again the fear in her voice, and feel again my devastation to hear her ask that question at the moment of abandoning me.
The god of thieves has done me a favor. I desire Sid still, but I cannot feel my love for her. I feel love for no one, not even my people.
This is a good thing. Love is a problem. It blurs your sight, and stands in the way of what needs to be done. If I listened now to the love I once had for Morah and Annin, their kindhearted worries might trouble me. Instead, I tell my Half Kith to bind our sleeping enemies and carry them to prison. Morah and Annin might stay my hand as I reach for Rinah’s shoulder. “Tear down the wall,” I order her. “Use the indi vines.”
Rinah hesitates. The wall is too familiar, the most important element of our lives from birth. It stood the whole of our parents’ lives, and their parents’ lives, encircling the Half Kith for centuries. When I lived with Sid in the High quarter I sometimes missed the wall for its reliable, calm strength. The wall corrals us, but it also creates our home.
“Do it, Rinah, for your children. Remember how you feared they would be snatched away in the night. Remember how as they grew old enough to play in the streets, you dreaded that they might break one of the High Kith’s many rules, and be taken to prison, and come home with a missing limb, or weak from blood loss. Think of the world you want for them instead.”
Rinah’s face contorts. Indi vines thicken to the width of a burly man’s arm. Their green darkens to near black. They knot together and wedge into tiny pockmarks in the wall’s granite. Vegetal fingers dig into rock, then disappear, driving into stone like worms into earth. Rinah watches vines split the granite. The wall begins to crumble, dust sifting down. Rubble spills loudly from the cracks, hissing and thumping to the ground. With a thunderous crack, the wall breaks, pieces heaving down in chunks.
From the scattered debris, dust rises like smoke.
“Good,” I tell Rinah, who looks stricken and angry and glad.
“I suppose our days of forging and selling passports are over,” Aden says, “now that the wall is gone.”
I do not like his poor attempt at jovial familiarity, and at leaning on our history together so that he might share—or perhaps eventually control—the authority I now possess over this city. I do not like his smug expression, as if this is his victory, when he simply obeyed my command. It was I who foresaw how this clash would go, I who knew how to use my god-soldiers to strike. Aden is convenient to me for his power and popularity, but he is sorely mistaken if he thinks I have forgotten how he wished to control me with his so-called love, how he blamed me when I wanted someone else. He shamed me for wanting Sid. What a tiny-minded man, to construe my choice as shameful, simply because I did not choose him.
Let him watch his step. He lives only because I allow it.
“I never sold passports,” I tell him. “I made them to give away. To help.” How naïve I was! How easy it was for Raven, whom I loved like a mother, to manipulate me, feeding me sugary stories about the good we were doing for others. With the passports I forged, people trapped behind the wall could pretend to be Middling and escape. And they did … at a cost I never suspected. Raven made them give her all they had. She enriched herself, padding a home in the Middling quarter with luxuries. I—meek, trusting—had never guessed. I needed her love so much that I made myself believe she was the good person she pretended to be.
I am finished with love.
Aden must see some of my thoughts in my face. “You have changed.”
“Good.”
“You used to be kind, Nirrim. Gentle. I liked you better before.”
“Of course. I was easier for you to use.”
Aden’s expression twitches with genuine hurt. “All I wanted was to make you happy. Tell me how, and I will do it.”
“Make plans for public trials of the High Kith,” I say, “and mass executions. We shall tithe them as they once tithed us. Ten percent of all High-Kith adults shall be culled from the prison to pay the price for their people’s sins. Sharpen an ax, Aden. That will me very happy indeed.”
SID
WHEN WE REACH HERRAN’S BAY, a feeling as resonant as song fills my chest. I have not once felt homesick since I ran away, but now that I am back, homesickness floods me, belated. It is strange to feel longing for something just when I am about to get it, and when I had decided I didn’t want it. Longing thickens inside me, as though deriving its sudden strength from coming so late, so far after the fact.
Herran’s mountainous coast is lush with trees. Once the jewel in the Valorian Empire’s crown, the city grows out of the rocky cliffs that hug the bay. The newest homes, built after the war my parents won, are painted in soft pastels with bright blue shutters that must be shut when autumn comes and green storms riot up the coast. Nirrim’s island was summery, with odd bursts of icy wind that would last for a few days only, but my country has its seasons, and although the laran trees now hold their leaves like thick, green shawls, and all I smell is the sea’s brine, I know autumn is not far off. Soon, it will be Ninarrith, when my people light a hundred candles in honor of the last day the gods walked among us. I always thought the holiday a pleasant fantasy, an excuse for giving gifts, but after what I saw on Nirrim’s island, I wonder. I went searching for magic, and magic I found, but what was its source? Whatever her people could conjure was fleeting, thin, like rivulets from a nearly dry creek bed that cannot quench anyone’s thirst.
Nirrim, though, had something more. Deeper.
I try not to think about her. I think about the weather, as a true sailor would, for her life depends on it. I think about how the coming of autumn smells like honey and a lit match.
It smells like Nirrim’s hair, when I buried my face in it. My throat closes. For a moment I cannot see, my vision blurred. Then it clears.
A tall, broad figure waits at the pier. The shape of my father is instantly familiar.
I shouldn’t have hoped that the arrival of our two ships—Roshar’s an obvious Dacran vessel, skinny and long and flying his green flag, and mine one of the finest in my father’s fleet, which I commandeered the night I left Herran—would go unnoticed. A fool’s hope.
Perhaps I should be glad that my father hasn’t appeared with his entire guard. A small mercy. At least my prodigal return home isn’t public gossip. Yet.
Roshar rests a hand on my shoulder. “Best to face him sooner rather than later, princess.”
“Best you kiss my ass, prince.”
His hand tightens. “Don’t apologize to him for running away.” Surprised, I turn to him. He adds, “Never apologize for who you are or what you needed to do to be yourself.”
I almost believe my godfather. My eyes almost prickle with relieved gratitude. Even when I was small, I longed to have his self-possession, his easy-seeming way of flouting expectation. Of demanding people meet him on his terms, not theirs. I wanted this even though—or because—I knew nothing was easy for him. He shares his true feelings with few people. His mutilations keep them at bay. He has done things for which he will never forgive himself. So yes, the words sound like something he would mean. But as we disembark, I decide Roshar’s advice is a pretty-sounding lie. Be myself? Don’t apologize? I am supposed to marry Roshar’s sister’s son and inherit the realms of Herran and Dacra. He knows this. He helped arrange it. He might say understanding things—and he, who likes men just as I like women, understands me better than most—but he would never break my betrothal.