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

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  And those I loved must suffer for it now.

  “I’m sorry.” This was quieter still. My father’s eyes softened on me, uncertain, but there was no forgiveness there. “Gannet isn’t your enemy. But I am.”

  “That’s not true,” Lista began, but Jurnus held up a hand, silencing her. He had cooled, but there was still fury in his face.

  “You should go back. The imposter is only hours away. We don’t need you making it any easier for her to get into the city.” He pointed above us to the stone my temper had split. He was hurt, his body and his pride, and he was terrified. I saw myself as he had seen me, possessed.

  Tears burned my eyes, but still I choked on Theba’s laughter, thick as an extra tongue in my mouth, as I climbed out of the chamber and into the ruins. Only when I gulped fresh air again did I feel her retreat fully, sated for the moment with my distress. It was dark and I could move quickly through the silent ruins. I knew where I wanted to go now, and I knew I wanted Gannet to follow me.

  The nearer I got to the palace the more urgent the activity. Soldiers worked by touch alone, not daring to light their preparations for the imminent threat of the imposter’s army. The innocents, those who could not fight, were nowhere to be seen now, secreted below. But I didn’t go down. I went up.

  The terrace felt as familiar to me as it had the first time I had walked there, compelled then, too, by Theba. It was empty save for the ghostly rustlings of plants that no longer were, those that had grown here in another time and haunted it still. I walked to the edge, staring out across the dark desert as though the hardness of my gaze could will the sun to rise. Save for the fires of the Ambarian encampments, the dark was unyielding. It was not an unpleasant blackness but rather the sort for keeping secrets in, for restful quiet.

  I deserved no rest.

  I wanted more of the spectral beauty of the city-that-was, but the moon was new, a cold witness, and my dark sight didn’t see the past. I stood there, wanting, for what might have been an hour or an instant before I heard footfalls on the stair I had ascended, and then on the terrace itself behind me. No one could have approached without my being aware, but he made no attempts to disguise his presence. Gannet.

  “They are worried about you.”

  “They should run from me. Steal out of this city. When I meet the imposter, I’ll kill her and this will be over.”

  Gannet moved to stand beside me, not close enough to touch, not near enough even for his cloak to brush my skirts when the wind shifted.

  “You know that won’t be the end of it, Eiren.” He looked away from me, maybe seeing something that I had not, maybe searching, as I had done, for something more.

  “Well, then I’ll find this weapon, kill myself when I’m done with her. And if I can’t, I’ll find someone else willing to do it.”

  He knew my guilt, knew that he could say nothing to change its course.

  But he tried anyway, because he loved me.

  “An icon cannot resist their nature. I never told you that it would be easy, that accepting who you are would mean you liked it. That there wouldn’t be things you wished were otherwise.”

  He had empathized with me from the first, had judged himself, and had in turn been a harsh judge of me because of something we had both failed to do: resign ourselves to our fate.

  “What would you resist, if you could?” I asked quietly, maintaining the distance between us but feeling as though the wind would snatch my whisper and he would hear it still.

  He took a long time to answer, his face and mind as guarded and remote as they had been on the day we had met.

  “Before I met you, nothing.” His voice was heavy and tight, like trying to carry a full jug of wine with only one finger. “Now, everything.”

  He braced himself against the stone, fine hands splayed as though his words required physical support. I admired his fingers, the pale crescents on his nails moons, neither rising nor falling, but holding steady between the worlds. That was where he stood, always, where I could not join him.

  But I kept trying.

  I closed the distance between us and laid my hand over his. Mine was much smaller and a little darker, like a gradient of twilight. After a second Gannet’s hand turned over, smooth palm pressed to mine, fingers threading through. My heart beat faster, a flutter of moth wings in my belly as his thumb traced the hollow of soft flesh between my own thumb and forefinger.

  “I would ask you what kind of life that’s meant to be, wanting everything and having nothing. But I don’t suppose we’re meant to have any kind of life at all.” I didn’t look at him as I spoke, eyes closing at his touch. I wanted to see less, feel more. If I could have shrouded my ears I would have, to better appreciate his touch.

  “You misunderstand me,” Gannet answered, but there was nothing of the lecturer in his tone. “There are things I’ve accepted about my life that I can’t wish for you. I want you to have more. I want—”

  He stopped and I thought that he would leave me again, distance himself from the temptation, the uncertainty.

  But that was not what he did.

  Where Gannet’s words had failed him, his hands did not. The one that held mine drew me near, the other snaked around my back. There was only a little tenderness in the movement, our bodies crushed quickly together. His mouth pressed to mine, easier work than words, tongue darting behind lips I had unwittingly parted. I could feel the shape of him, the sudden fire that stirred in me in answer to a question he hadn’t asked.

  It was yes. Yes.

  Gannet let go of my hand to lower his, gathering folds of my dress as he lifted me against him. A scholar’s hands he might have had, brushing coolly against my thighs, but he betrayed a warrior’s strength in his urgency to have me closer, and closer still. I swayed against him like a dune reshaped in a strong wind. My hands glided up to his hairline as his pressed forward, hesitating at the thin garments that preserved my modesty until I shifted to allow him greater access. Even as his fingers moved within me and my sighs turned to sounds of encouragement, my own hands found the bindings of his mask, the knots I wished to unravel for him even as his fingers freed something deep inside me. But while I had given him permission, he made no such utterance, no motion. A single finger slipped beneath one of the straps, restless, but not yet moving to free him from this particular bond. Not without permission.

  Gannet drew back, only a little, enough for me to see his face. A hand relaxed against my hip and another alighted gently against my inner thigh as he braced me against the low wall of the terrace balcony. His mouth and eyes were unreadable, but there was the trace of something—was it fear?—in the flare of his nostrils below the mask.

  “Do it,” he said softly, and now I could hear the trepidation in his voice. But there was something else, too, a resolve as firm as stone, immutable as the cold surface of the mask itself.

  Now it was my turn to hesitate. The single finger that rested against his scalp, under the binding, did not stir. How was it I feared this intimacy, but not the other?

  Gannet’s hand was firm on my bare hip, but his lips were soft and light as he bent to brush them against mine.

  “Please,” he said aloud as he drew back again, eyes locked on mine. New moon or not, his were shining with a fierce light. In my head, I heard him clearer still. I want you to see me as I really am.

  The blood that had pumped hotly to every part of me only a moment ago seemed to still, as if the whole of my world was held in a single beat of my heart.

  I already do.

  The knot was simple, the work of only a few seconds. My trembling hands moved to his temples, cradling the crude rim of the mask even as I withdrew it. There were no clouds to obscure the stars, which seemed to shine all the brighter as I lowered the mask and Gannet’s features leaped into focus.

  His eyes seemed so large without it, depthless, framed in pale sockets touched just a little with the blue of sleeplessness. His countenance was softer without lines of iron to
harden it, and younger, so much younger. A long brow sloped down to a nose that was a touch severe, and below it, a mouth I knew, a mouth seeming far more ready for a grin without such a weight above it.

  But Gannet didn’t smile, and I could see now as well as sense his uncertainty at being so exposed. And his hope.

  The mask I lowered to my lap, free hand smoothing his youthful cheek, a finger sliding down his serious nose. I leaned forward, kissing the bridge of it, his brow, the soft swells of his eyes when he closed them. I felt his shiver of pleasure in his hands, still flush against my skin.

  “Thank you,” I said softly, unsure of what code he had broken, but certain that this was a gift.

  “No,” he insisted hoarsely, catching my mouth with his, “thank you.”

  And now there was nothing between us. Gannet’s kisses deepened with surprising ferocity. Again he lifted me, drawing away from the terrace to a close circle of low stone benches, smoothed with age. He bent over me, and between us we made quick work of the folds of cloth that kept us apart. Without thinking I used a hand to guide him inside of me, a gasp of pain hastening to a song of pleasure. We moved together, lips meeting and parting again to wander over flesh, my hands tangling in his hair even as his found anchor at my hips. Here was something he had chosen, a path that had not been laid down before him but one he knew all the same. And I knew it, too. I knew the way that it would end, and still I held on and on, hoping that we could walk the path forever.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We dozed together on the terrace with none but the moon to witness our tender gestures, the kisses planted in secret hollows, limbs waking to join again when a little sleep was had. Sometime later Gannet rose and retrieved the mask, but when he went to replace it, I stayed his hand, taking it from him and fitting it to his features only after I had kissed again the eyes and brow and cheeks it would cover. We shared the memory of his mother, when she had put the mask on him for the very first time, and I knew that it had been too long since it was done in love.

  It was a gesture that brought us back to the world we belonged to, the urgent, immediate present that demanded so much of us. The imposter was coming. Our work was undone. I wanted to resist, to remain lying there with my body and heart bared to the stars and the man I loved. But the sun would rise and with it, every horror, every unrealized fear, if we did not find what we sought. I hastened back into my clothes and Gannet did, too.

  He looked at me, and though his mask was firmly in place, he did not draw the cloak about him again. Even darkly clad he seemed less imposing without it. Something about him had changed, or something in me as I looked upon him.

  He met my eyes, his a storm of tenderness and resolve.

  “What happened, with Najat?”

  He had slept through it all. Our flight, her death, the vision of Ji in the temple. I had almost forgotten the last vision, given what happened after, but I was shocked to find the details falling lucidly into place in my mind.

  “She gave us both a gift, before she died,” I said, marveling at the clarity of what I had seen. Rather than try to explain, I reached out to hold Gannet’s hand, sharing the full picture of the last vision with him. It was my memory now, and I was able to share it as I hadn’t been able to before.

  “Maybe this was the place hidden beneath the river,” he mused aloud, and I nodded.

  “I’m sure they were sent to recover the weapon. We need to get back there,” I continued. “Najat said that the imposter has promised them true death. Never to return as icons.”

  “And who would defy even an imposter when she possesses the power to kill gods,” he murmured. I nodded grimly. We had to reach it first.

  A sudden battering crack of stone against stone sent us both sprawling in the accompanying quake. The bombardment continued, and I scrambled to my feet to see great missiles, cobbled together from desert rock and ruin, launched deep into the city from just within the collapsed walls that had surrounded Re’Kether.

  The imposter was here, and with her, a force that vastly outnumbered our own.

  I saw half a stone head, the wind-worn visage of an ancient god, hurtling toward us, and I threw my hands up. The projectile shattered instantly, shards falling harmlessly against the terrace floor, sand roughly kissing our faces. I seized Gannet’s arm and pulled him toward the stair and down. I wasn’t sure that it would be any safer on the ground, but we needed to move, to find my family, to find the weapon, to do more than simply witness our own destruction.

  When we reached a corridor that had been partially blasted open to a courtyard where centuries-dry fountains whipped only sand onto the stone, Gannet squeezed my fingers before releasing me. For all the urgency of battle, I felt lit up from within at his touch, that the glow of my skin or the fierce flame in my belly and heart would rival not only the sun when it rose, but outshine that glaring tyrant at its zenith.

  “The golems, Eiren.” His eyes sought a deeper darkness within the ruined palace, his thoughts obscured from me. “We need them.”

  And I need to find them. He didn’t need to say it; I knew, just as I knew I needed the next vision.

  “Eiren!”

  It was Jurnus, flanked by several soldiers, shouting from the courtyard. The sharpness of my eyes in the dark showed that all were bloodied, but whole.

  Gannet had made up his mind. He kissed my hand when I wanted him to kiss my lips and stole away into the ruins. I told myself that the unsteadiness I felt in my legs was only from the crash of another rockfall in the city’s center. This palace had stood for centuries, inhabited by ghosts only, and the imposter’s army would bring it down around me, around us all, if they didn’t get what they wanted. Jurnus was racing up to me now, face flaming.

  “What are you doing here? Where is he going?”

  I blanched, clutching at my collar, wondering if my skin bore some guilty mark of Gannet’s attentions. It was the right of brothers to rage over their sisters in the midst of war, was it not? Gannet had been quick, and Jurnus’s sight at night was not so keen as ours. How could he know? Did I seem changed as much on the outside as I felt from within?

  “He’s going to find the golems,” I replied. “And I need to find the weapon.”

  “It’s too late for that!” Jurnus said sharply. I noted now that he favored his right side. Deflated though he was, my brother’s eyes were wild. I put my hands on either of his shoulders, gazing tenderly at him even as distant screams wedded with the sounds of exploding stone outside the palace. I smelled fire.

  “I’m sorry, Jurnus. For disappointing you. For frightening you. But I need to go—there is still time.”

  “You’re wrong,” he answered, manic laughter bubbling beneath his words even as he stumbled back. The blood in my veins crept coldly toward my heart, sluggish with fear.

  “What happened, Jurnus?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  We moved quickly into the streets, where the corpses of several Ambarian soldiers were crumpled. My brother stooped with some difficulty to collect the sword of one of the fallen, and his compatriots retrieved the weapons of the others. Even I could see that the swords were finer than most our forces carried, and it was a wonder these men had been bested at all. If Gannet couldn’t deliver on his promise, if I couldn’t make sense enough of what I’d seen, our people wouldn’t survive to see the end of this, whatever it would be.

  We didn’t go far. I could hear the sounds of battle, distant but growing closer, and for a moment the bombardment had stopped. Perhaps our forces had reached their machinery. Perhaps they merely gathered more ammunition.

  We crept low, hugging the shadows as we approached one of the city’s many ancient places of worship. I could see it in another time, ghostly lanterns hung to welcome supplicants at all hours, the scent of brazier smoke and sweat at every door. High above us, we had the perfect view of a temple edifice, remarkably intact, and my eyes at night were sharp enough to see what Jurnus wanted me to, without needing to g
o any nearer.

  Strung up between the broken, pockmarked bodies of two unrecognizable stone figures, another figure was suspended, naked and limp in death. Najat looked small as a child, her skin pale in the starlight, her eyes open, sightless, never to rest. They had not cleaned the wound in her chest, and blood had congealed thickly down her breast and belly, terminating between her legs. When I had fled and my family, too, they must’ve come back through. They must’ve taken her body. They’d had orders, and they’d followed them.

  “Morainn said you would want to see this. That you would know what it meant.”

  Najat might have moved against me when given the opportunity, yet she had vowed to do what I’d never been brave enough to do: to die. But death had come for her too soon; even now a babe somewhere could be squalling, lungs filled with the breath that would sustain the icon, the prison that would house her again.

  And the imposter had done this, for me. To show me that she had power. Not the power of the gods, but mortal power, always to take. To use. To discard. Najat had been tasked with bringing me to the imposter. She had failed.

  Najat would not be the first to die.

  “Take me to our father,” I said to Jurnus.

  “I understand what you can do now, Eiren. I’m not afraid anymore. You should fight with us. We need you.”

  “Just take me to our father.”

  Jurnus hardened at my words, unreadable but for the furtive questing of his heart. It didn’t matter what he said; he wanted to use me as much as Theba did. I remembered, what felt a thousand years ago on the day that I had met him, Gannet telling me that I was no tool. I knew his words now for what they were: the first of the many lies he’d told me, and to himself.

  Around us, the city wavered between new and old in my sight. I heard the babbling of fountains and children at play, a chorus of screams, the groans of the dying. Cook fires, herbs growing richly in pots outside rotted doors, and streets that welcomed only sand mingled in my nose with the scents of long-undisturbed ruins disturbed anew, of fires running rampant, their colors wild and angry and growing closer. At one point, there was an explosive flare before us, an Ambarian soldier silhouetted in the wild blaze of fire oil. Without thinking, I threw my hands out, upsetting the earth beneath his feet and sending the figure tumbling.