The Awakened Kingdom

by N. K. Jemisin

  “This is a full Council,” she said. Her voice was really quiet; that was how everyone could tell just how mad she was. “Is there some reason why I was not informed of this meeting?”

  The young woman took a deep breath; I didn’t blame her. “You’re too close to the situation, Fahno-enulai. You would’ve had to recuse yourself in any case, so we bypassed that step for efficiency’s sake.”

  “I would’ve appreciated the chance to recuse myself,” she said, glowering, “especially as then you would’ve had to tell me what the hells this is all about.”

  “This isn’t about you, Fahno,” said one of the other women, from the far side of the circle.

  “Not about me?” Fahno’s voice was big and wide, like she was; when she used it fully, it almost filled the domed chamber. Several of the women nearest her flinched. “You drag my grandson here, on the eve of his marriage, and this has nothing to do with me?”

  Another woman leaned forward, looking as angry as Fahno. “If you want us to consider you, Fahno—and your permissiveness, your indulgence, how this boy’s wildness is due to your incompetence as a clan matriarch, we certainly will—”

  “If I may,” said Eino, from where he knelt behind Fahno. He said it lightly, in a pleasant tone, but his voice was just as deep and resonant as Fahno’s; everyone started and turned to him, Fahno included. He smiled and ducked his eyes demurely. “If I may, great warriors, Kitke-ennu, my beba. I would like to speak for myself.”

  “This isn’t the time,” Fahno snapped.

  “There will be no better, Beba. Please.”

  She stared at him; he stared back. For the first time I realized they had the same eyes, just as deepwater black and implacable, even though Eino’s were lined with kohl and silver-lidded and Fahno’s were deep-set and ringed from worry. She shook her head just a little, and I almost heard the speech-without-words between them! Or maybe I imagined it? I won’t be able to protect you, she said, I thought.

  I’ll protect myself, he said back, and I shivered all over without knowing why. But at the end of the exchange, Fahno sighed and stepped aside. She lingered in the circle, though, her arms folded, making clear by her presence that Eino was not without his supporters.

  I pushed forward through the crowd, too, before Mikna could grab me, and I took Fahno’s hand. She glanced down at me in surprise, and some of the old women gave me bad looks. I did not give them bad looks back! I was being very mature.

  “Please,” said Eino. He spoke quietly now, but his back was very straight, his hands very flat in his lap. “May I know why I have been brought here?”

  The young woman seemed to consider whether to answer. “There has been an accusation,” she said, finally—and then she eyed Fahno. “One that we have already dismissed as groundless, mind you. It was unofficial in any case, made by Luud mau Esuum, a young unproven man of one of the merchant clans. We are aware that young men can be…excitable.”

  Many of the women in the circle nodded, some indulgently, some maliciously. Eino bore it all without a twitch and said, “And what was the nature of the accusation, Kitke-ennu, if I—or my clan matriarch—may know?”

  “Sedition.” Kitke-ennu said this flatly, but there was a rustle around the chamber again—not amid the ring of Council-women this time, but the watching crowd, most of whom apparently hadn’t known. Kitke scowled. “But we have dismissed it, out of respect for Fahno-enulai, who has served Darr well in all her years.”

  “Sedition!” Eino laughed then, stilling the murmurs; women stared at him, shocked. He shook his head to himself. “Oh, poor Luud. He’d have done better to accuse me of luring him into iniquity; you would have believed that. What did you do to him, to scare him so badly that he told the truth?”

  Fahno flinched. Arolu gasped and put his sleeve to his mouth. Several women in the circle tried to speak at once; Kitke quickly held up a hand and leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. “Are you saying the charge is true?”

  “That depends on what you think of as sedition.” Eino shrugged, no longer demure or serene. The look on his face was openly contemptuous now; he looked around at the Warriors’ Council the same way Ia had looked at me on that first day, or Zhakkarn on the second—like he knew they were beneath him. He lifted his chin, as if to emphasize this. “I believe the Darre are stronger as a whole people, not with half of our kind reduced to possessions and treated like children. I act in accordance with this belief. Is that sedition?”

  “It is!” yelled one of the women behind us, and there were other murmurs in the room, some of them from the circle, others from beyond it. Kitke-ennu glanced around at them without moving her head; her jaw flexed.

  “I do not believe so,” she said—and there were murmurs in agreement with this, too, which made me happy. But then Kitke added, “Yet if men would be treated as women, then they must carry themselves as women, and exercise sound judgment, comport themselves with dignity. You cannot act the barbarian, Eino mau Tehno, and expect civilized folk to listen.”

  “The men of Darr have been civilized for two hundred years and more,” Eino said, his voice sharp and words quick. “It has gotten us nowhere. Perhaps barbarism will be more effective.”

  And he drew his hands into his sleeves for a moment, then slipped them out again; with his left hand he raised Lumyn’s mosaic knife.

  There were murmurs again, and gasps, and Fahno froze. “Eino—”

  He glanced at her, then set his jaw and drew his hands into his robes again. “I will not be bartered, Beba,” he said. “Not even for your sake.”

  “What are you doing?” Arolu, behind us, was trying to come forward; Mikna and Ia held him back. “No, no, he is my son, I cannot let him—”

  “There is no need for anything drastic,” Kitke-ennu said, holding up her hands in alarm; she’d half risen to her feet already. “To kill yourself—”

  “Kill myself?” Eino laughed again, so harshly that I jumped. “No. I do this with the Warriors’ Council itself as witness, in a house that belongs to all Darre. I am claiming myself.”

  We could not see what he did, there inside his robes, but we saw the sudden, sharp jerk of his movement. Saw how his face tightened, his lips drawing back from his teeth. He did not cry out, though I flinched, and so did Ia, at the white flare of his pain. I smelled his demon blood then, a lot of it! And a moment later, spots of darker color appeared on the cloth across his lap.

  There were SCREAMS! I was almost one of them! Fahno staggered back, staring at Eino; beyond her, Mikna and Arolu were just as shocked. Ia—he stared, too, but there was the tiniest of admiring smiles on his lips. Lumyn looked ill.

  Eino’s face had gone sallow. He swayed where he knelt, and I saw his eyes roll back. He was going to fall! So I ran over and caught him, and held him against me, while everyone around us just kept on freaking out.

  “I don’t suppose…you can heal me,” he murmured, through the screams and chaos. “Sweet bright hells, this hurts.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said, anxiously. “I still haven’t learned that. Ia’s coming, though—”

  “No. He can only n-negate what I’ve done. I don’t want it negated.” Eino’s eyes fluttered shut; he’d begun shaking, his skin turning cool and clammy. “I will be…what I choose to be. If they cannot make a p-place for me, I will carve my own.”

  I blinked. Oh.

  Ia and Arolu reached us, Arolu’s eyes wide and white; at once he tore off one of his sleeves, twisted it, and then pushed Eino back so he could get his robes up. Someone was calling for a bonebender. Eino, however, had started to laugh through his shaking. He murmured something; I leaned close to hear it.

  “I am a warrior,” he said, through gritted teeth, “and I will not fight fair.”

  I sat up, staring down at him. Ia, standing at the edge of my vision, suddenly looked sharply at me.

  Oh. I understood a new thing, all of a sudden:

  Power is not a thing that can be given.

  The men
of Darr had tried to give up theirs, to prove their loyalty after their fellows’ betrayal, but they were still Darre. The Darre as a whole kept trying to let go of their warrior selves, but they couldn’t; it was what had made them strong for so long, and they knew it. Even Ia—he had chosen to live among the mortals because they did not fear him, but that did not make him anything less than he was: the greatest and most terrifying of the Three’s remaining children.

  Everyone treated Eino like less than he was, but that did not make him so. Even when he tried to fit himself in with their thinking, when he let them use him, he was still not their thing. He was still himself: a great mortal temporarily folding himself small, choosing to bend and smile behind his sleeve and refrain from dancing in others’ presence. He might allow others to forget his worth, might have to remind them, might have to fight and bleed to make them recognize it—but as long as he remembered who and what he was, none of them could diminish him. He was, would forever be, glorious.

  Oh!

  And all he would ever have to do, to claim his true glorious self—

  OH! OH! OH!

  —was take his power back.

  I lifted my hands without quite knowing why. Just felt right. I made cups of my hands. Something filled them now, brimming gold and bright-hot and strange. Where had it come from? Mostly Eino—but there was some of me in there, too, just a little, just enough. A spark of myself. Why had I added that to Eino’s shining power?

  Because I had to. Because it was…it was why I was there! Why I was, at all.

  All around us the mortal realm seemed to swirl, as if something had set it spinning around an axis that was us. But here, here which had become the center of all things, everything was suddenly still.

  “Shill?” Ia’s voice was sharp.

  “This is yours,” I whispered to Eino, who squinted up at me, panting. “You took it back from them.”

  Eino looked utterly confused. “Mine? ”

  I grinned. “Here!”

  “Wha—” he began, before I plunged both hands up to the wrists into his body.

  Into him! Into the he-that-was-Eino, not the flesh, not just the soul! Oh, there are no words for it, not even in my sophisticated big-girl vocabulary, but it was beautiful and perfect, all the whatness and howness of existence pouring through me, finding all the whoness and whyness of him and filling it up, blowing it open, setting us both on fire like baby stars! And I was all swirly, WE were swirly together, there is nothing to describe it except

  YOU

  ARE

  And also, also:

  I

  AM

  Because I am! Because THAT IS WHAT I AM!

  Many things happened.

  There was light like morning all around me. In the light, my hair lifted and whipped. I rose—no, I grew, limbs and face getting longer, breasts and hips becoming more than thoughts, hair stretching into a whipping banner. As I grew I pulled the shining, screaming thing that was Eino with me, dragging him by his soul; I was laughing. We were laughing, him through his screams and me through my tears, as all around us gathered a ring of power so vicious and intense that the Raringa’s floor peeled apart in splinters and rubble and its roof shattered and flew outward and most of the mortals screamed and fled.

  And high above us the moon moved back into the place that it had held for eons, and the sun gasped and turned to see what was happening, and all the planets, everywhere, suddenly paid attention and got excited. All over existence I could feel all the incomprehensible members of my family perk up, or inhale, or sparkle, or ripple as they perceived the change.

  It is the best feeling I have ever had. I wanted to share it! So I sent the light forth in spreading-ring wavelets, seeking, feeling, knowing:

  A old woman in a place that does not revere old women the way the Darre do. She has nothing—no home, no family, no money, not even her full mind, but she has stood to scream at the cruel boys who’ve tried to take the little dog she loves, stood to fight them, because even she deserves to have something that loves her back—

  Yes.

  A young man who is smaller than he should be, visibly weaker; others have smelled his weakness. They hurt him, as they have done over and over, for no reason other than their own pleasure, but in this lone moment he is sick of it, he is done, and he balls his fists and launches himself at them even though he knows it is futile—

  Yes, this one, too.

  A child, a girl, the least-valued of her many siblings, the one who seems like nothing so her parents treat her like nothing, give her nothing that she does not take first, and she demands nothing except the one thing they owe her, which is that they look at her, look at her, LOOK AT ME RIGHT NOW—

  Oh, yes, yes, yes!

  And more, and more, new fires igniting as the wave of power circled the globe. Nothing special about any of them, nothing unique, just the right confluence of circumstance in the right moment of my maturation, and that was all it took. It hurt every time this happened, took that spark of me that seemed as necessary as their own strength—but I grew, too! Their power made me powerful even as I diminished. It was theirs! I was theirs! They took what they should always have had, and I made it real for them, made it right for me!

  “Shill!” Ia came through the light and grabbed me flesh and soul; I laughed wildly, wanting him to laugh with me. “Look at what you’re doing to yourself! Stop this!” But I did not care about his concern. I wanted more: to be more, to give more. This was me, and I had found myself at last, and I would revel in it ’til I no longer could!

  So Ia did the only thing possible: he surrounded me with the quintessence of himself so that the nothing of him clashed against the everything of me.

  And then, only then, did I stop doing what I was doing—whatever that was—and settle back into myself.

  I sagged to the floor, confused, because…because…what? I felt glorious. I also felt almost dead. This was a very strange combination of feelings.

  “No, Shill.” Ia held me still, stroking my hair back from my face. “No. Make them earn what you can give them. Make sure they’re worthy, little Sibling.”

  “Wh-what?” I couldn’t think. Why was Ia being so nice, all of a sudden? What had happened, exactly? I tried to sit up and could not. Ia helped me. I would think about that later, though, because suddenly there were more important mysteries to ponder.

  Like: what had wrecked the Raringa? There was rubble everywhere around me, a burst pipe at the back of the room spraying a flood, fallen lanterns smoldering and and torn scrolls fluttering and broken record-spheres rolling about. Most of the people in the chamber were not hurt, for which I was relieved. But—suddenly I remembered what I had done, what I had been compelled to do to Eino, and I gasped, looking around for him. “Where—” Then I saw him, and my mouth fell open.

  Because Eino floated unconscious at the center of the room in a slow-curling funnel of hair and robe. He glowed, blacklit and shivery—and all around him, swirling too in a delighted dance, were dozens of small colored balls. Some of them had clouds. As I watched, down through the hole in the Raringa’s ceiling came a tiny sun, which circled Eino once and then passed into Eino’s flesh, vanishing. I could feel other suns out there, queuing up to do the same thing: at least ten of them, happily giving themselves over to remake him into what they’d yearned for: a new god of mischief and troublemaking and stirring things up just for shits and giggles—or maybe because tradition had held sway for too long.

  A new…trickster. The Trickster.

  And elsewhere, everywhere around the mortal realm, all over this planet—there were others. One…two…six…a dozen…more. Newborn gods: mortals suddenly and shockingly turned immortal, all of them still forging the selves they would become, solidifying in power…but all of them made by me.

  “Oh,” I said, blinking. “Whoops.”

  It was Yeine, later when we had all gone back to Fahno’s house, who explained what had happened.

  “It’s som
ething I thought might take place eventually,” she said. She sat at the kitchen table; everyone in the house had gathered round in awe. Juem, with shaking hands, had offered her a roasted gran banana, and to everyone’s surprise she had grinned and enthusiastically accepted. It had been her favorite, apparently, when she was mortal.

  She looked at me, where I sat across from her. My mortal shape was taller than hers now, all grown up, with nice strong arms and long fast legs and nice white teeth, which I used to grin back at her.

  “I turn my back on you for three days, Shill.” She shook her head, amused and wry. “Well, that will teach me to assume I know what the universe needs. I thought it lacked…something. I thought that something might be what it had lost—and that was indeed the case.” She turned now to Eino.

  Eino, who floated in the middle of the room, because he could not figure out how to make himself stand on the ground. Everyone was giving him a wide berth, and he looked distinctly worried, himself. Poor baby god! At least he’d finally figured out how to make the planets stop bothering him.

  “Welcome to the family,” she said gently, and Eino flinched.

  “Please,” he said, fidgeting; his robes kept swirling around him in an unfelt wind, and his hair kept getting into his face. “Please, great Lady of Twilight—”

  “Yeine will do.”

  He looked distinctly uncomfortable. I leaned over to whisper to Yeine, “Boys aren’t supposed to get familiar with strange women.” Then I winked at Arolu, so he would know I had listened to him. He groaned from where he sat, looking faint as he had all afternoon.

  Yeine coughed, though I could tell she was really laughing. “Ah. Things have changed a bit since my day, I see; back then we couldn’t shut men up around strange women. But I think you’ll find, Eino mau Tehno, that the rules of mortality no longer apply to you now. Speak to whomever you like.”

  He stared at her, and gradually began to sag toward the ground. “It’s true, then. I’m…this is…” He lifted his hands, stared at them. “I’m a godling.”