Roh sighed.
“I can write whatever I like,” Taigan said to Matasa. “And you are a little fool if you think there is one version of history. Events are static, but interpretations, well… Interpretations go on forever.”
“Who else did you write about in your book?” Roh asked, trying to move the topic away from historical interpretations.
“The usual people.”
“Did you write about Lilia in that book?”
“Of course. Why do you think it’s banned in Dhai? Both of your little countries? On page three hundred and thirty-six, I call her a petulant, brain-eating–”
“And you mention how you threw her off a cliff?”
“Ah,” Taigan said, pleased, “you did read it!”
“You should not speak that name,” Matasa said nervously. “Her name is–”
“I’m a hundred and twenty-three years old,” Roh said coolly, “I will speak whatever name I please.”
“I’m fairly sure it’s one hundred and eighteen,” Taigan said.
Roh waved a hand at him. “You and your clever nattering.”
“I learned from the Dhai,” Taigan said. “The very best natterers in all the known worlds.”
“That woman committed great violence,” Matasa said.
“She made the best choice out of a series of bad choices,” Roh said carefully.
“One cannot commit violence and be Dhai,” Matasa said. “You didn’t, grandfather.”
Taigan snorted and cocked his head at Roh and parroted Matasa’s warbling tone. “Indeed, one cannot do such a thing and still be Dhai, Rohinmey.”
“Could you go ask about freshening this tea?” Roh asked Matasa.
“Of course, grandfather,” she said, and got up, leaving the two of them.
“If you say you are not a murderer enough times,” Taigan said, “does it become truth?”
“No,” Roh said. “But it’s a good story. For the ones who come after.”
“A terrible story,” Taigan said. “It gives them an impractical ideal to uphold.”
Roh shifted in his seat. “My heart’s bad,” he said. “My knees are bad. My guts are bad. Old and bad. If I feel anything anymore, half of it is that, the other half made up.”
Taigan shrugged. “As you like.”
The ascension of the new Kai took place four days later, in the old Sanctuary of Oma’s Temple. The Temple gardens had been removed to make room for more quarters and offices, and the skin of the temple had been sliced open to make it possible to expand the Sanctuary. Roh sat near one of the new entryways built into the temple’s skin and saw that it still oozed fluid at the edges.
Roh didn’t feel well for most of the ceremony, but he noted there were a few things that stayed the same, including the copious amounts of drinking, afterward. He was eager to get home, but Matasa insisted they enjoy Dhai Sorai hospitality a few days longer. Taigan, though, bid them farewell immediately after.
“Where are you headed next?” Roh asked.
“East,” Taigan said. “I would like to die in the east. Something new, you know? Death will be my last great adventure.”
Matasa stayed up to enjoy the festivities, but Roh went to his room on the second floor. “I just need a bit of a rest,” he said.
But once he was settled, the bed disagreed with him, and his bones ached, and he needed air. Roh took up his cane and went back into the corridor. He placed his hand on the skin of the temple. It was still warm under his fingers. But no voice greeted him. The beast slumbered.
With everyone downstairs celebrating, he was alone as he started out onto the plateau. As in his youth, there were no guards, no locked doors.
As a child, he had not realized how much living there was, between childhood and death. He didn’t believe he could be a fighter and a farmer in one lifetime. He had had no conception of what it was to believe so dearly in a thing and find that survival forced you to give it up. He had not thought he could love, or be loved, so fiercely. He had not believed he would survive what came for him, and he had not wanted it. He had wanted to make his own fate.
And he had.
He looked forward to going home. This was not the country he remembered, for better or worse. As he rambled across the plateau, following a path toward a great stand of fruit trees, a cool wind blew through the trees, sending orange and yellow leaves spinning across his feet. After a few minutes he broke into a little stand of trees. A few of them stood in neat rows. Others were worn and twisted, and he saw the charred remains of a few massive stumps, mostly gobbled up again by the soil. From their bodies grew new trees. Underfoot were overripe apples, most wormy and soft.
Bees and flies and biting things buzzed about. But above, the moon’s light that cut through the canopy and dappled the grass was very beautiful. He walked deeper into the old orchard. He realized this must have been one of the orchards that were burned out when the Dhai began their retreat to Oma’s temple in the face of the Tai Mora. It must have been a very young orchard then.
He pressed his hands to one of the old survivors, a tree that was now over a hundred years old, just like him. It felt warm and familiar beneath his fingers. He had not been in the country when the rout happened, but he imagined they had thought they burned everything behind them, and nothing would remain. But some trees had survived and thrived.
The walk had made him tired, so he found a toppled tree and sat with his back against it. He tossed a few of the overripe apples into the woods, to dissuade the biting bugs, and pulled his cane into his lap. The sound of the wind mingled with the sound of the Fire River.
A crackling sound came from the other side of the orchard. The wind moved the tree branches. His fingers tingled, and he realized he was very tired. Something about the orchard was very familiar. Something about it tugged at him. His chest began to ache again, and he rubbed at it. Winced.
“Oh, Oma,” he muttered. He chuckled, wincing again as the pain increased. “I did not escape my fate, Li,” he said. “I made it, didn’t I?”
The pain in his chest grew worse. He bowled over. Darkness bloomed at the edges of his vision. The smell of apples and fresh grass filled his nostrils.
After all he had done, all the choices he had made; after running so far and so fast from this fate, there was only this: dying an old man in an orchard, under an empty sky.
And it was enough.
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 149
