“But…it will take me a week alone to sail back,” says Sigrud.
“Shit,” she says. “You’re sure?”
“At least that, if the weather is forgiving.”
“Damn it all. Then you can’t get there in time. How in the hells are we going to get around this?” She grunts. “Here. Let me think real quick.”
She steps back and looks away. Her eyes appear to grow faintly silver, as if a dense fog is rubbing itself along their backsides, inside her skull. It’s an incredibly disturbing sight. “When did you leave Dhorenave?” she asks.
“Nine days ago.” He cringes. “What are you…doing?”
“Looking at the past. So that would be…Ah. Huh. All right.” She blinks and the fog drains from her eyes. She takes a deep breath with the air of someone about to try to jump over a wide gorge. “Okay. I am about to try something, ah—how should I put this?—completely crazy.”
“All…right?”
“You survived me sending you back, what, two or three hours?” she says. “You kept all your memories. That should be wildly impossible. I mean, it’s an offense to me, personally, that you can do that.”
“I apologize.”
“Shut up,” says Malwina. “But…I mean, if you can do it with a two-hour jump, then…why not a nine-day one?”
Sigrud frowns for a moment, then stares at her when he realizes what she’s intending. “You mean to…to send me back through time?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Basically.”
“To before I ever left to come here?”
“Yes.”
“But then…will what just happened now…will that have happened?”
She seesaws a hand in the air. “Ehh. Kind of. It gets squishy. We’re basically manipulating a loophole in the rules here, one that only affects your time. I can see how it all adds up, and I’ll retain these memories, but explaining it to you…I mean, it’s not like you’ve understood anything else I’ve said when I’ve talked about this, right? The main thing here is that there’s a previous instance where we can receive you in Bulikov—but it’ll be four days ago, meaning five days from when I send you back. Five days to get to Bulikov—do you hear me?”
“But…could this go wrong?”
“Oh, absolutely,” says Malwina. “It’s a violation of the universal order to rewrite the past, even slightly. I can’t do it. No one can, theoretically. It’s bad enough that we just did a couple of hours—so nine days could, perhaps, have some giant universal ramifications.” She shrugs. “But then, if we’re talking about our enemy killing the last living Divinity, we’re already kind of dealing with giant universal ramifications—aren’t we?”
“Could I die?” asks Sigrud.
“Normally I’d say you’d certainly die,” she says. She looks him over again like she’s not at all pleased with what she’s seeing. “But you seem preternaturally talented at survival, Mr. Sigrud. You’ve survived our enemy not once, but twice. You entered his domain and walked away with but a fever. And you’ve resisted all the manipulations I’ve done. I think you’ll survive. And if you do survive, meet me on the Solda Bridge five evenings from when I send you back. I’ll have more to say to you there.” She steps toward him. “Are you ready?”
He steps back, wary. “You’re going to do it now?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Do…Do I need to get anything from my boat?” he asks.
“No, because you won’t have ever had your boat when I send you back. Do I need to write this all down for you?”
“Wait—why not just send me back to a time when I could…I don’t know, kill our enemy, or save Shara?”
“What, send you back weeks, months, or years? Listen, I’m already screwing with the fundamentals of reality enough with this little trick. I’ll have to package all these aborted moments into a sort of temporal side loop that can…Well. Suffice to say, I’m unwilling to push it that far, okay?”
Sigrud scowls. “Fine. Just do it already, whatever it is you’re going to do!”
“All right. I’ve never done this before, so you might…see some things, or re-experience them.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things that have already happened. It shouldn’t be a problem. It’s likely they’ll be from a past so long ago even you can’t alter them. Now…”—her eyes turn fogged and silvery again—“hold on.”
She reaches out and touches his brow, and then…
Things…
Blur.
Sigrud was in an automobile wreck once, long ago, during his operational days. A Continental hood ferreted him out and plowed a truck into Sigrud’s auto, sending it rolling down a riverbank with Sigrud inside. This particular hood had intended to kill Sigrud, but succeeded only in dislocating his shoulder—an injury Sigrud would later pay back, and then some.
But what Sigrud remembers of that moment—the world spinning around him, gravity losing all meaning, the lights and structure of the world churning outside the shattered windows—is a lot like what he experiences now, as Malwina Gogacz warps his past for him, pushing him out of the present and into a handful of seconds nine days ago….
Sigrud sees images flashing—but like the outside world during the auto wreck, they’re muddy and swirling.
He sees himself as a child, himself as a young man, himself sobbing in Slondheim. Snow and ice and the ruins of Bulikov. They’re all there, floating in the murky past, distant but unchanging. He can’t access them. They are beyond him. He knows, in some deep, wordless fashion, that they have already happened.
We float upon a sea of moments, he thinks. And never are we truly free of them.
Then one moment seems to stretch. Then blur. Then it…
Water. Mist. A woman walking across a pier.
Sigrud recognizes this moment instantly.
No, no, he thinks. No, I don’t wish to see this.
The woman is walking over to a man, who sits fishing on the pier.
Not this. Not this….
He tries to shut his eyes, but he cannot.
Eighteen years ago. After Bulikov, but before Voortyashtan. During the days when he’d first returned home and met his family in the Dreyling Republics. The first time he’d seen them in more than twenty years.
Sitting on the little pier, holding a thin, reedy fishing pole, his line drifting in the water. There was bait on the hook, a single sardine, but he didn’t need it, really. Sigrud hadn’t actually come there to fish, but rather to be alone. He hadn’t even brought a bucket for his catches.
She walked up the pier behind him. He didn’t turn to look, but he smelled the oil in her hair, and the scent of the horse she rode down the hill. She did not smell as he remembered her, so many years ago, and for some reason that wounded him.
“Sigrud,” said Hild quietly. “How long have you been out here?”
He looked over his shoulder at his wife. He’d seen her since he returned, of course, but each time they met it had been stifling and muted. They’d slept in different beds, and had not even mentioned the idea of sharing one again. But she was still beautiful. Somewhat plumper, and older, and more care-worn, but still the woman he first met in the marshes that day many years ago, her blue eyes crinkled with concentration, muddy fingers gripping the frog-spear in her hand with all the artistry of a conductor holding a baton. Frog hunting was an art, and Hild had always been a virtuoso at it.
“A while,” he told her. He turned back to look at the waters. “No catches yet.”
She walked to stand behind him, looking down on him. “This is the fourth day you’ve spent fishing. And yet you’ve caught very little.”
“Perhaps my skills have faded.”
“If so, you’re not making much progress in relearning them.”
Sigrud pulled his line back in, looked at the sardine, and tossed it back out into the waters.
“Carin has been asking about you,” Hild said. “She saw you only the one time. She wants to see
you again. She doesn’t say so, but I can tell. Will you please come up to the house?”
Sigrud said nothing.
“It’s her right, Sigrud. It’s her right to see her father.”
“Is it?” he said. “Could I be said to be her father?”
“What do you mean?”
He was silent.
“Please,” she said. “Please, say something.”
“I…I feel that when she looks at me, she is seeing something that I am not,” said Sigrud. “Something I perhaps cannot be anymore.”
“That’s not true. You’ve changed, of course you’ve changed, but you’re still you.”
Sigrud glowered into the water, watching his line rise and fall.
“Signe will be coming back from Ghaladesh in three days,” said Hild. “She remembers you even more than Carin does. And she has had a hard time of it. Will you be there to greet her, at least? Will you be there for her?”
“I…will try,” he said reluctantly.
Hild was quiet. Then she walked around to his side, and she crouched and leaned forward so he could not avoid looking at her. He warily met her gaze, feeling as if she were reading in his scars all the secret doubts he’d had since his return.
“Do you remember how we met, my husband?” Hild demanded. “Do you remember what I said to you, that first thing I ever said to you?”
Sigrud looked into her face for a moment. Then he dropped his eyes and started pulling the line back in.
“No,” he said.
Hild sat next to him for a few seconds longer. Then she stood and walked away, and she was gone.
It was a lie, of course. Of course he remembered what she’d said to him when they’d first met—he barging into the marshes to ask her what she was doing, and she barking at him, “You’re going to scare all the fucking frogs away, you damned fool!” And he, of course, having still been something of a prince in those days, had never been spoken to like that, and was awestruck by this muddy, fierce creature with the long, slender spear.
Why had he lied? Why had he told her he’d forgotten? It had been a mystery at the time—but as the past whirls about him, Sigrud thinks he knows.
It’s the same as the reason why he did not go to meet Signe when she first came to see him, why he let her wait for him in the house for hours and hours while he hunted for elk outside, why he evaded her and the rest of his family with furtive desperation.
Because he was afraid. He was afraid to try to be decent, because he felt sure that he would fail.
The moment falls away from him. The world turns, more and more.
And then…
Air strikes him. Hard.
Sigrud gasps. He feels like he’s plummeting down, but he’s not—he’s walking along the side of a road, the ground sloping away to his left, and he’s wearing a very heavy pack on his back. He tries to reorient himself, tries to deal with this sudden change in…well, everything. But he can’t, and he topples sideways into the brush, branches scratching at his face and hands before he crashes to the ground.
He lies there for a moment, looking up at the pale morning sky. He takes a breath in—apparently he forgot to breathe at some point during the whole ordeal—and then he slowly sits up.
He looks around himself. He’s back in the southern Continent, he can tell that just by glancing around. But the abruptness of the change is so powerful, so impossibly strange, that it makes him nauseous.
All the world could be rewritten in a moment, he thinks. All of it. All of…
He turns sideways and vomits into the brush. It’s porridge, mostly, and the convulsions make his ribs hurt—his side isn’t nearly as healed up as when he met Malwina. From these two things, he can guess where he is—and when he is.
He stands, staggers back down the road, and sees the white gate to Ivanya’s ranch just ahead.
I am where I was when I went to go get the auto, he thinks. I was going to get the auto and drive it to Ahanashtan, where I would meet Ivanya’s man….But I remember the sea, and the ship, and Malwina.
He rubs his eyes, presses the heels of his palms to his forehead. “Did it really happen?” he asks, his voice hoarse. “Did it really ever happen?”
It feels like it was real. It feels realer than real, if that could even make sense. He can remember the crunch of bones under his feet, the drip of water in the Salim, and Malwina’s fogged, silvery eyes….
Sigrud walks toward the white gates. How will I explain this to Ivanya and Taty? I’m not even sure if I can explain it to myself.
As he walks through the gates, that moment of the past he saw burns in his mind. The woman and the girl, alone in the house, waiting for him. A queer shame floods his belly as he walks back toward Ivanya’s ranch house, where another woman and another girl await him.
Will I fail you as well?
Somewhere in the dark—in the darkness behind all things, under all things—the boy feels things shift.
The world flexes, stretches, and snaps back into place, just for an instant. Someone has just moved things, bent things, and now is trying to quickly put it all back in order.
When he is in his purest state, Nokov has no face, and certainly no mouth—but if he did, he would be frowning with his right now.
What was that?
He probes at the edges of the world, feeling the distortions.
Dilations. Contractions. Dangling tumefactions drifting through reality. Distended veins running through space and time. He closes in on the disturbance….
The east, in the physical realm. Far to the east. Very far, in fact. There’s been movement there. No, not just movement—a tremendous, tremendous violation: the past has been reset, and a gap hangs in the air—as if a mortal was ripped out of reality and stuffed into somewhere else.
But why would one of his siblings go there? To wander so far from the Continent that birthed them would diminish their influence, make them close to mortal. And there’s nothing out there except…
Nokov freezes.
No.
No, no, no, no…
Panicking, he searches for any unexpected apparition, the abrupt manifestation of a mortal mind or body. He finds these are much easier to track than the movements of his siblings, as they, being just as Divine as he is, can slip through the walls and crawlspaces in reality with hardly a ripple. But mortals and other things of the physical realm…Well, that’s like trying to stuff a mango down the sink.
It’s easy to locate the destination in his mind. Another rippling in Ahanashtan, of course—right under his nose. Right where the Dreyling almost certainly went when he slipped out of Nokov’s own domain.
He’s moving.
He focuses, speaks to the darkness, forces it to calcify into windows and avenues and channels, cutting it up like a cheesemonger does curds, until the vast blackness has coalesced into tiny little windows into reality.
He finds her shadow rapidly. He’s been there so often, to her rooms in Ahanashtan. Sometimes to watch her sleep, though she doesn’t know it—at least, he thinks she doesn’t.
Kavitha Mishra. The one mortal who’s ever helped him willingly.
He stares down at her, watching her quietly breathe in her slumber.
He wonders, sometimes—if she had been his sister, his Divine sibling, would she have sought him out? Would she have saved him? Perhaps not if she’d been his sister—his siblings, he knows, were as weak and ignorant as he was—but what if she’d been some other part of his family?
What if she’d been his mother? Would she have come to his rescue? Would she have saved him, as no one else did?
He watches her as she sleeps. He’s acted as her commander for so long that it’s become harder and harder to maintain his detachment from her. She is, after all, the only other person he really has in this world.
And he does not wish to do what he knows he’s about to do. He does not wish to ask her to do this.
Then a sudden, stabbing memory.
Trapped
in that ship, trapped for years in that tiny box. And in the window, a face: Vinya Komayd, smiling wickedly.
You will come to love me, child, she said. You will have to, eventually. For I will be the only thing you know. For years and years.
He shudders. It’s not the same. I don’t just care for Mishra because she’s the only person I have. I don’t.
He doesn’t want to say that he’s alone. To acknowledge that you are alone is to be truly alone. And he’s stronger than that now. He’s evolved beyond those miserable, terrified days of his childhood, abandoned and forgotten.
We must all become stronger. He swallows, lifts his hand, and plunges it into his dark chest. He shuts his eyes, feeling for it. We must all become more than we are. I must…He feels it, and pulls it out. And she must as well.
In his hand is a black pearl, a tiny, perfect piece of himself. A piece that, if ingested by a mortal, will make them something…more.
They will be a piece of him. His seneschal.
He takes a breath and says, “Mishra.”
In the Divine days it was the purpose of the gods to shape the reality of the world’s citizens.
The gods are gone. But this need remains.
Now it is the task of governments to tell their citizens what reality is, to define it for them. For citizens are, by and large, wholly incapable of doing this for themselves.
—MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS VINYA KOMAYD, LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER ANTA DOONIJESH, 1713
Ivanya Restroyka cocks an eyebrow as she takes an enormous drag from her cigarette. “So,” she says slowly. “You’ve…already been there, you say.”
“I know it sounds mad,” Sigrud says.
Taty and Ivanya say nothing. They just watch him. His rickety wooden chair creaks as he leans forward, rubbing his face. He’s done this many times before—returning to tell a case officer a wild story about what happened on the front lines—but it seems peculiarly difficult to pull it off right now. Probably because this story is particularly wild.
And particularly dangerous. It was impossible to explain his almost immediate return without referencing the Divine—which meant discussing Malwina, which then meant revealing Shara’s involvement with the Divine to Taty. He didn’t tell the girl everything, of course—he certainly didn’t tell her that Nokov was targeting Continental orphans who were secretly Divine, or the girl’s own extreme similarity to Malwina—but he had to tell her something.
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