The Dread Goddess--Book of Icons--Volume Two

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  I felt myself slipping again, not into the sweet dream this time, but into darkness. They were already blaming exhaustion, stress, hunger, and thirst, their thoughts like flies settling on my still face.

  But it was fear that drove me down, fear that held me there until the blackness eclipsed their thoughts and mine, too.

  Chapter Ten

  I woke, alone, in a dimly lit chamber, a cool pillow beneath my cheek. Braziers burned low in the four corners, illuminating richly patterned walls and casting a burnished glow over the sheer covering someone had draped over my legs. There were no windows, and it made sense: if there was safety to be had in the ruins, it would be underground. I felt as though my head were in several pieces, my thoughts out of order or missing completely. There was little sense to be made of what I had seen in the courtyard, an impression of Re’Kether as it had been. That I had slipped so easily into the vision was another complication I didn’t need. I wasn’t given more than a moment to regain my bearings, though, for my mother was slipping into the room already. She was carrying a tray laden with a pitcher, a squat cup, and several covered dishes. I wanted to ask about Gannet, but her arrival proved more tantalizing for my curiosity.

  “Is it really you?” I asked, my eyes fixed on her face for all the smells emanating from the tray made my body tremble with hunger. She gave me a look so familiar it hurt.

  “I don’t need to ask you that,” she chastised, sitting down on the bed’s edge and placing the tray between us. “And your presence here is far more unlikely.”

  I nodded slowly, but I couldn’t maintain eye contact. I poured myself a cup of water and drained it an instant later, then poured another and forced myself to sip this time. Without asking, my mother lifted the lid of the dish nearest to me, revealing meat stewed in a thick, aromatic broth. There was bread and pickled vegetables, too, and currants in a syrup so sweet it made my teeth ache. I ate some of everything before speaking, burning my tongue in my haste but not caring in the slightest. It tasted wonderful. It tasted of home.

  As my hunger ebbed my curiosity grew. I considered why I had needed to ask my mother if she was really there, and decided I wanted her to know. The test felt like something that had happened years ago, longer even than the last time she and I had been together.

  “Did you dream about me, while I was away?” I asked, studying her expression, memorizing every new line worried around her eyes, the hairs newly grayed at her temples.

  “Often.”

  She wasn’t looking at me, nor at the dishes of food I was slowly emptying. Her eyes were focused out, beyond, as though this room had a window only she could see through.

  “I saw you, a few months ago,” I went on. “It was like a dream, but it wasn’t a dream.”

  Now she looked at me. I could hardly blink for the intensity of her gaze, fixing me like an insect in amber.

  “What do you mean?”

  I managed to shrug, looking down into the cup I had drained.

  “I felt sure it wasn’t real, what I saw, but I didn’t think I’d get the chance to ask you, either,” I admitted. “I visited places in Ambar…that weren’t anywhere. You and I were underground, sitting at a pool’s edge. We talked.”

  My mother’s brow furrowed.

  “This is the farthest I have come from home, Eiren. What you saw was not me,” she insisted, though I felt she wasn’t being entirely truthful with me. I began to dig without even realizing that I was doing it, seeing my face reflected murkily back at me as it had been that day in the cavern.

  “Stop that.” My mother’s voice was sharp, edged with fright. She didn’t remember it, not really, or had only a shade of memory, as she had been a shade of herself. I was sorry to have invaded her trust but was strangely let down, too. I had felt a connection during my test, and I had wanted some part of it to be true, at least.

  “It felt very real,” I offered as an explanation—an apology. So many things in Ambar had felt real, more real even than what I had known before. The genuine tenor of Morainn’s laugh. The heat of Gannet’s touch and the fire in mine. My independence. My power.

  “What happened to you, when you were away?” she asked, though I heard a different question, quiet as a breath, and one she feared the answer to even more.

  What changed you?

  I stood up. My head felt clearer than it had since we’d emerged from the pool in the bathhouse, and time was short. I didn’t even know how long I had been unconscious.

  “I want to tell you. I will tell you. But first, I need to know that Gannet is safe. He’s a…friend.”

  She noted the pause as I struggled to put a word to what Gannet was to me. If war hadn’t aged my mother, this homecoming would. She rose, as well, but with less confidence.

  “He hasn’t been harmed. He’s been cooperative. Now I can see why.”

  Here was a look of a different kind, and my cheeks grew hot.

  “It isn’t that,” I insisted, grateful, not for the first time, that my mother didn’t possess my gifts. Had I told her a lie? I certainly hadn’t given her the truth.

  “I’ll take you to him. Dress first, Eiren.” Her smile was tense, but only briefly. She didn’t wait for the soil and worries of the road to be scrubbed away before taking two steps forward to embrace me, finally. Her touch was light and tight at the same time, and she smelled just as I remembered: of the scented oil she dabbed behind her ears, of her favorite tea, of clothes stored folded with dried herbs.

  How hadn’t I missed her more?

  She stepped outside to give me the privacy to do as she had asked. There was an herbal salve and a rough cloth, the familiar odor leading me by the nose into memory. I scrubbed underneath my arms, my belly and neck, between my legs, remembered my mother’s hands at this steady work when I was a child and all limbs and giggles. When I dressed, the familiar tug of light silk slipping down my back was achingly familiar, too. The dress was one of my mother’s, too big for me, but as heartening as the food had been. I had worn beautiful things in my youth, and in Ambar, but my mother’s dress didn’t need elaborate embroidery to tell a story.

  The corridor beyond was more suffocating even than the cramped chamber had been. We were underground, but I could see now that this place had not always been there. Behind where my mother stood rubble was piled, the ancient glaze of roof tiles glowing dully in the light of the lone torch she carried. I felt as though I were in a warren, a rough waste for rats to scurry. Just as I had in the square, I could see how things might once have been: rather than the uneven stone above, there would have been broad fabric canopies to offer shade and filter the light to soft reds, blues, and yellows. I half-feared I would be transported again but wanted it, too, powerfully curious about the world before.

  Mother beckoned wordlessly for me to follow her down the dark path, her torch illuminating rotting timber, broken mosaic. She shielded the flame when we passed areas where its light might be seen, where the collapse had been only partial, and the moonlight provided a white-blue flood of light.

  But she wasn’t quiet for long.

  “I remember his face,” she said, drawing my attention from our surroundings. “What you can see of it.”

  I nodded. “He was my guide, my teacher, on the way to their capitol.”

  “He was with the final assault. He captured and enslaved you.”

  “Yes,” I answered quietly, not looking at her, but ahead, at what appeared to be a pair of shoes forgotten against a cracked wall. They weren’t shoes but the severed feet of a broken statue, the rest of which had no doubt been crushed under the weight of stone that had dumped from the street above when this part of the city had been swallowed up. I bent to examine the fine toes, the perfectly carved nails. I thought of the story of the sandal maker’s daughters. She had taught me that story, and so many others. Was it a real one, as others had proved to be?

  Did she know she had birthed a myth, as well as reared one?

  Gannet was being held in a sma
ll room that was miraculously preserved, stone latticework all over, the like of which I would have expected to see in Jhosch. He could be seen from all angles and was afforded no privacy: there was more light here, and the numerous torches afforded me not only a view of him but also several guards standing watch, a chamber pot, and an untouched bucket of water within. I was not surprised to find my brother among those tasked to guard him, but the excessive number of armed individuals outside the chamber included my sister Lista, as well. This I could not have anticipated.

  “Eiren!” she exclaimed, breaking from the group and running to embrace me. Her joy and relief were staggering, as real as the press of the sword at her side, the tiny, interlocking plates of cured leather she wore from shoulder to hip.

  “Do you know him? He hasn’t spoken more than four words to any of us,” Lista rattled, pulling back to look me in the face. Hers was bereft of the paints I would have expected her to take up again, but her eyes sparkled and her cheeks were touched with the sun’s blush. She’d never looked more beautiful.

  Before I could answer her, Jurnus was there, answering for me.

  “Of course she knows him. Why did you bring him with you, Eiren? What does he want?”

  “He wants to see her,” Lista insisted, and my lips snapped shut again, mouth full of words they wouldn’t give me the space to speak. “It’s all he’s asked for. No water, even.”

  “A man thirsts for more than water,” my mother said, chiming in with another knowing look.

  “Eiren would never betray us,” Jurnus countered, but his eyes had clouded. He looked at me. “Would you?”

  “Of course she wouldn’t!” Lista exclaimed, her eyes flicking through the detail of a latticework stone flower to appraise their captive once again. My irritation mounted, skin crawling with heat and the insect-swarm pricking of annoyance. “Even if he is handsome. What parts of him you can see, anyway.”

  “Enough,” I hissed, my voice like the stomp of a foot. My outburst shocked them into silence, three pairs of eyes looking on me as though I were a stranger.

  “Allow me to speak with him, please,” I added more softly, though these were not the meek and yielding tones that they knew. I was not that Eiren, not any longer.

  I didn’t even want to be her.

  My siblings and my mother stood aside, and I advanced into the room where Gannet sat, his arms hanging over his knees as he attempted to find a comfortable position on the rough stone floor. It had once boasted a sumptuous carpet, thick enough to cover his hands to the wrist. I could see it and the sunlight, too, a memory that floated before me as real as a reflection. I shook my head as though to clear it, and he was already getting to his feet, his expression for an instant that of unguarded relief at seeing me.

  “Very hospitable, your family.”

  I rolled my eyes. “They have little reason to offer hospitality to the enemy, which, as far as they’re concerned, you are.”

  My response created a careful distance between my family and me, and only because I knew they watched and listened did I show any restraint in reaching out to him. His wounds had been cleaned and were, as I’d initially suspected, superficial.

  “We’ve lost so much time,” I whispered, quelling panic. As I spoke, a plan formulated in my mind. “And the city is in ruins. But I had a vision in the courtyard, of Re’Kether as it was. If I could have another one, maybe I could find what we’re looking for. It’s bound to be ancient.”

  Gannet’s lips curled, and I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or troubled.

  “Can you trust any visions you might have?”

  “It’s better than nothing,” I snapped, because I heard what he wasn’t saying: could I trust that I wasn’t being manipulated by Theba? “And it isn’t only that. There’s a ghost of the ancient city all around us, everywhere that I look, like a projection of light. I see ruined buildings made whole again, clean streets and trees heavy with fruit where there is only sand and crumbled stone. Do you see anything?”

  I could see his answer in his tightened lips even before he spoke.

  “No, Eiren. I see only what is in front of me.”

  While we were speaking, my brother and sister edged their way into the room, my mother a wary shadow behind them. Though Gannet had no weapons, they still regarded him as though he might strike at any moment, a feral animal cornered.

  “Gannet, this is my mother and one of my sisters, Lista,” I said, grateful for a mundane interruption.

  “We’ve met.” My mother’s voice was icy. In her mind she was bound to a horse again on the road to Jarl. To her it felt like only yesterday. For me it may as well have been a lifetime ago.

  “You don’t have anything to fear from me,” Gannet said carefully. “I’m here to help Eiren.”

  “Why?” Jurnus asked, hanging back despite Gannet’s assertions. Gannet cast a knowing look at me, and my shoulders slouched in dread. I had to tell them. I had so much to tell them.

  “Eiren, what is happening?” This from Lista, without pretense or pressure.

  “It’s a story I only want to tell once,” I began, hoping to delay for just a little longer. But even as I trailed off, Esbat, Anise, and my father appeared, as though summoned by my anxiety. Father’s face broke into a wide grin despite our awkward circumstances, and he crossed the room to embrace me where the others had not. He was over-warm, having regained some of the weight he’d lost in the desert, and his hands were callused with work. Unlike my brother and all three of my sisters, he wore no armor, carried no weapon.

  “Eiren was about to tell us how she came to be here,” my mother intoned, her words a warning: there was no excuse not to speak the truth now.

  It would be easier to show them.

  Gannet’s encouragement was plain, but I neither wanted nor needed it. My breath trembled, a palsy in my throat. There wasn’t air enough in the world to tell what I needed to tell.

  “The Ambarians took me because they believe that I am the icon, the physical embodiment, of a goddess.” Panic stirred the bile in my gut to a froth. “Of Theba.”

  Even Jurnus, who had been the least attentive to my mother’s stories and more heedless still at prayer, gave me an uncertain look. But if I had expected shock, outrage, or fear, I felt none of them. If anything, overwhelmingly, I experienced their doubt.

  “And you believe them?” Anise asked, even her level head shaking in disbelief.

  “I didn’t at first, but now I do,” I answered, knowing they were in the place that I had been, on the barge with Gannet in the dark. Disbelieving.

  “Eiren, you are no monster. They must have lied to you, tricked you,” my mother began. I felt my temper rising at the catalog of obedience, dutifulness, and sacrifice she carried in her memories of me. Eiren would never have felt this way, so it must have been Theba. But were these feelings of resentment all her? Or did a part of me appreciate the past few months? I had been a captive, but I had been freer in more ways than I could ever have anticipated.

  “I am Theba. I have seen and done things that I can’t ever tell you about for shame of them. I am only here because I ran away from her power, but I know now that I can’t.”

  My cheeks flared with feeling, my lips flushed purple-black and raw, still, from thirst. Esbat crossed to me, lifted a cool hand to my face in a sisterly touch whose gentleness hardly registered with me. I pushed her away.

  “Have they poisoned your body as well as your mind?” she asked, hurt. “You are home now, Eiren. They cannot hurt you. They cannot make you tell their lies.”

  My eyes cut from the shock on her face to Gannet, to the grim, knowing line of his mouth. He’d been right. It wasn’t just easier to show them but was the only way they would understand.

  I took a step back, refusing to meet the crush of their eyes, walling myself away. Their surprise and alarm, their uncertain impressions of the daughter and sister who stood before them, could not touch me. I was mutable as water, deadly as fire.

 
I knew I had the power to control the conflagration now. Having given in before, I instinctively knew to rein in the desire that followed the flame: to consume, to destroy, to render all to faceless ash.

  So, when I reached within myself, not as deeply as I might once have needed to do, only my hand caught fire. I experienced a perverse, satisfying warmth in the act, my blazing fingertips reflected in the wide-eyed shock of my family. Experiencing their impression of what they witnessed hurt me more than the fire I had conjured.

  “This is nothing compared with what I can do,” I said for emphasis. “I can set fire to an entire city. I’ve tried. I can read a man’s darkest heart, force him to act against his own will. I have. I am venerated. I am feared. By everyone.”

  After a moment, the flames were snuffed out, leaving my fingertips waxy and warm. No one spoke, and rather than encountering the risk of flooding my mind with the tidal swell of their emotions, I walled myself against them, stones of indifference damming me up.

  “I didn’t think what it would mean to return, but now I know. I don’t belong here with you, not anymore.”

  As they had circled me once, the last time we had all been together, the day that I was taken, they circled me again now. And maybe it even felt the same for them, to support me no matter what my choices were, regardless of their limited understanding of them. But it would never be the same for me, never again. Though dwarfed by nearly everyone in my family, I saw Gannet through the wedge of their bodies and held back the tears I wanted desperately to shed. He waited until they had held me long enough to feel comfortable letting go before he spoke, an outsider attempting to find his way in.

  “Eiren and I did not come here by accident. The force that comes from the north is seeking something within the city, and we must find it first,” Gannet said, holding my eyes. “We must have access to your maps, your scouting reports. We need to know the movements of the Ambarian patrols, what parts of the city are safe, and where we can expect to encounter resistance.”