“I can give you a taste of him,” he whispered in my ear. His breath was hot on my neck; all over my body my skin crawled. “I could ride you all day—”
“Let go of me right now.” I gritted the command through my teeth and prayed it would work.
His hands released me, but he did not move away. I danced away instead, and hated myself for it when I turned to face his smile. It was cold, that smile, which made the whole situation somehow worse. He wanted me—I could see that plainly enough now—but sex was the least of it. My fear and disgust pleased him, as had my pain when he’d bruised my arms.
And worst of all, I saw him relish the moment when I realized he had not lied. I had forgotten: night was the time not just of seducers but rapists; not just passion but violence. This creature was my taste of the Nightlord. Bright Itempas help me if I were ever insane enough to want more.
“Naha.” Scimina’s voice made me jump and spin. She stood beside the couch, one hand on her hip, smiling at me. How long had she been there, watching? “You’re being rude to my guest. I’m sorry, Cousin; I should have shortened his leash.”
I was feeling anything but gracious. “I haven’t the patience for these games, Scimina,” I snapped, too angry and, yes, frightened to be tactful. “State your business and let’s be done.”
Scimina lifted an eyebrow, amused by my rudeness. She smiled over at Nahadoth—no, Naha, I decided. The god’s name did not fit this creature. He went to stand beside her, his back to me. She grazed the knuckles of one hand along his nearer arm and smiled. “Made your heart race a bit, did he? Our Naha can have that effect on the inexperienced. You’re welcome to borrow him, by the way. As you’ve seen, he’s nothing if not exciting.”
I ignored this—but I did not miss the way Naha looked at her, beyond her line of sight. She was a fool to take that thing into her bed.
And I was a fool to keep standing there. “Good day, Scimina.”
“I thought you might be interested in a rumor I heard,” Scimina said to my back. “It concerns your homeland.”
I paused, Ras Onchi’s warning suddenly ringing in my mind.
“Your promotion has won your land new enemies, Cousin. Some of Darr’s neighbors find you more threatening than even Relad or I. I suppose that’s understandable—we were born to this, and have no antiquated ethnic loyalties.”
I turned back, slowly. “You are Amn.”
“But Amn superiority is accepted the world over; there is nothing surprising about us. You, however, are from a race that has never been more than savages, no matter how prettily we dress you.”
I could not ask her outright about the war petition. But perhaps—“What are you saying? That someone may attack Darr simply because I’ve been claimed by the Arameri?”
“No. I’m saying someone may attack Darr because you still think like a Darren, though you now have access to Arameri power.”
My order to my assigned nations, I realized. So that was the excuse she meant to use. I had forced them to resume trade with Darr. Of course it would be seen as favoritism—and those who saw it as such would be completely right. How could I not help my people with my new power and wealth? What kind of woman would I be if I thought only of myself?
An Arameri woman, whispered a little, ugly voice in the back of my mind.
Naha had moved to embrace Scimina from behind, the picture of an amorous lover. Scimina absently stroked his arms while he gazed murder at the back of her head.
“Don’t feel bad, Cousin,” Scimina said. “It wouldn’t have mattered what you did, really. Some people would’ve always hated you, simply because you don’t fit their image of a ruler. It’s a shame you didn’t take anything after Kinneth, other than those eyes of yours.” She closed her eyes, leaning back against Naha’s body, the picture of contentment. “Of course the fact that you are Darre doesn’t help. You went through their warrior initiation, yes? Since your mother wasn’t Darre, who sponsored you?”
“My grandmother,” I answered quietly. It did not surprise me that Scimina knew that much of the Darre’s customs. Anyone could learn that by opening a book.
Scimina sighed and glanced back at Naha. To my surprise, he did not change his expression, and to my greater surprise, she smiled at the pure hate in his eyes.
“Do you know what happens in the Darre ceremony?” she asked him conversationally. “They were quite the warriors once, and matriarchal. We forced them to stop conquering their neighbors and treating their men like chattel, but like most of these darkling races, they cling to their little traditions in secret.”
“I know what they once did,” Naha said. “Capture a youth of an enemy tribe, circumcise him, nurse him back to health, then use him for pleasure.”
I had schooled my face to blankness. Scimina laughed at this, lifting a lock of Naha’s hair to her lips while she watched me.
“Things have changed,” she said. “Now the Darre aren’t permitted to kidnap and mutilate their boys. Now a girl just survives alone in the forest for a month, and then comes home to be deflowered by some man her sponsor has chosen. Still barbaric, and something we stop whenever we hear about it, but it happens, especially among the women of their upper class. And the part they think they’ve hidden from us is this: the girl must either defeat him in public combat and therefore control the encounter, or be defeated—and learn how it feels to submit to an enemy.”
“I would like that,” Naha whispered. Scimina laughed again, slapping his arm playfully.
“How predictable. Be silent now.” Her eyes slid to me, sidelong. “The ritual seems the same in principle, does it not? But so much has changed. Now Darre men no longer fear women—or respect them.”
It was a statement, not a question; I knew better than to answer.
“Really, when you consider it, the earlier ritual was the more civilized. That ritual taught a young warrior not only how to survive but also how to respect an enemy, how to nurture. Many girls later married their captives, didn’t they? So they even learned to love. The ritual now… well, what does it teach you? I cannot help but wonder.”
It taught me to do whatever was necessary to get what I wanted, you evil bitch.
I did not answer, and after a moment Scimina sighed.
“So,” she said, “there are new alliances being formed on Darr’s borders, meant to counter Darr’s perceived new strength. Since Darr in fact has no new strength, that means the entire region is becoming unstable. Hard to say what will happen under circumstances like that.”
My fingers itched for a sharpened stone. “Is that a threat?”
“Please, Cousin. I’m merely passing the information along. We Arameri must look out for one another.”
“I appreciate your concern.” I turned to leave, before my temper slipped any further. But this time it was Naha’s voice that stopped me.
“Did you win?” he asked. “At your warrior initiation? Did you beat your opponent, or did he rape you in front of a crowd of spectators?”
I knew better than to answer. I really did. But I answered anyway.
“I won,” I said, “after a fashion.”
“Oh?”
If I closed my eyes, I would see it. Six years had passed since that night, but the smell of the fire, of old furs and blood, of my own reek after a month living rough, was still vivid in my mind.
“Most sponsors choose a man who is a poor warrior,” I said softly. “Easy for a girl barely out of childhood to defeat. But I was to be ennu, and there were doubts about me because I was half Amn. Half Arameri. So my grandmother chose the strongest of our male warriors instead.”
I had not been expected to win. Endurance would have been sufficient to be marked as a warrior; as Scimina had guessed, many things had changed for us. But endurance was not sufficient to be ennu. No one would follow me if I let some man use me in public and then crow about it all over town. I needed to win.
“He defeated you,” Naha said. He breathed the words, hungry for my pai
n.
I looked at him, and he blinked. I wonder what he saw in my eyes in that moment.
“I put on a good show,” I said. “Enough to satisfy the requirements of the ritual. Then I stabbed him in the head with a stone knife I had hidden in my sleeve.”
The council had been upset about that, especially once it became clear I had not conceived. Bad enough I had killed a man, but to also lose his seed and the strength it might have given future Darre daughters? For a while victory had made things worse for me. She is no true Darre, went the whispers. There is too much death in her.
I had not meant to kill him, truly. But in the end, we were warriors, and those who valued my Arameri murderousness had outnumbered my doubters. They made me ennu two years later.
The look on Scimina’s face was thoughtful, measuring. Naha, however, was sober, his eyes showing some darker emotion that I could not name. If I had to put a word to it, it might have been bitterness. But that was not so surprising, was it? I was not so Darre as, and so much more Arameri than, I seemed. It was something I had always hated about myself.
“He’s begun to wear a single face for you, hasn’t he?” Naha asked. I knew at once who “he” was. “That’s how it starts. His voice grows deeper or his lips fuller; his eyes change their shape. Soon he’s something out of your sweetest dreams, saying all the right things, touching all the right places.” He pressed his face into Scimina’s hair, as if seeking comfort. “Then it’s only a matter of time.”
I left, goaded by fear and guilt and a creeping, hateful sense that no matter how Arameri I was, it was not enough to help me survive this place. Not Arameri enough by far. That is when I went to Viraine, and that is what led me to the library and the secret of my two souls, and that is how I ended up here, dead.
14
The Walking Dead
WE CURED YOUR FATHER,” said Sieh. “That was your mother’s price. In exchange she allowed us to use her unborn child as the vessel for Enefa’s soul.”
I closed my eyes.
He took a deep breath in my silence. “Our souls are no different from yours. We expected Enefa’s to travel onward after she died, in the usual manner. But when Itempas… When Itempas killed Enefa, he kept something. A piece of her.” It was difficult to catch, but he was rushing his words ever so slightly. Distantly I considered soothing him. “Without that piece, all life in the universe would have died. Everything Enefa created—everything except Nahadoth and Itempas himself. It is the last vestige of her power. Mortals call it the Stone of Earth.”
Against my closed eyelids images formed. A small, ugly lump of bruise-dark flesh. An apricotstone. My mother’s silver necklace.
“With the Stone still in this world, the soul was trapped here, too. Without a body it drifted, lost; we only discovered what had happened centuries later. By the time we found it the soul had been battered, eroded, like a sail left on a mast through a storm. The only way to restore it was to house it again in flesh.” He sighed. “I will admit the thought of nurturing Enefa’s soul in the body of an Arameri child was appealing on many levels.”
I nodded. That I could certainly understand.
“If we can restore the soul to health,” Sieh said, “then there is a chance it can be used to free us. The thing that subdues us in this world, trapping us in flesh and binding us to the Arameri, is the Stone. Itempas took it not to preserve life, but so that he could use Enefa’s power against Nahadoth—two of the Three against one. But he could not wield it himself; the Three are all too different from one another. Only Enefa’s children can use Enefa’s power. A godling like me, or a mortal. In the war, it was both—some of my siblings, and one Itempan priestess.”
“Shahar Arameri,” I said.
The bed moved slightly with his nod. Zhakkarn was a silent, watching presence. I drew Zhakkarn’s face with my mind, matching it against the face I’d seen in the library. Zhakkarn’s face was framed like Enefa’s, with the same sharp jaw and high cheekbones. It was in all three of them, I realized, though they didn’t look like siblings or even members of the same race. All of Enefa’s children had kept some feature, some tribute, to their mother’s looks. Kurue had the same frank, dissecting gaze. Sieh’s eyes were the same jade color.
Like mine.
“Shahar Arameri.” Sieh sighed. “As a mortal, she could wield only a fraction of the Stone’s true power. Yet she was the one who struck the deciding blow. Nahadoth would have avenged Enefa that day, if not for her.”
“Nahadoth says you want my life.”
Zhakkarn’s voice, with a hint of irritation: “He told you that?”
Sieh’s voice, equally irritated, though at Zhakkarn: “He can only defy his own nature for so long.”
“Is it true?” I asked.
Sieh was silent for so long that I opened my eyes. He winced at the look on my face; I did not care. I was through with evasions and riddles. I was not Enefa. I did not have to love him.
Zhakkarn unfolded her arms, a subtle threat. “You haven’t agreed to ally with us. You could give this information to Dekarta.”
I gave her the same look that I had Sieh. “Why,” I said, enunciating each word carefully, “would I possibly betray you to him?”
Zhakkarn’s eyes flicked over to Sieh. Sieh smiled, though there was little humor in it. “I told her you’d say that. You do have one advocate among us, Yeine, however little you might believe it.”
I said nothing. Zhakkarn was still glaring at me, and I knew better than to look away from a challenge. It was a pointless challenge on both sides—she would have no choice but to tell me if I commanded her, and I would never earn her trust merely by my words. But my whole world had just been shattered, and I knew of no other way to learn what I needed to know.
“My mother sold me to you,” I said, mostly to Zhakkarn. “She was desperate, and perhaps I would even make the same choice in her position, but she still did it and at the moment I am not feeling well-inclined towards any Arameri. You and your kind are gods; it doesn’t surprise me that you would play with mortal lives like pieces in a game of nikkim. But I expect better of human beings.”
“You were made in our image,” she said coldly.
An unpleasantly astute point.
There were times to fight, and times to retreat. Enefa’s soul inside me changed everything. It made the Arameri my enemies in a far more fundamental way, because Enefa had been Itempas’s enemy and they were his servants. Yet it did not automatically make the Enefadeh my allies. I was not actually Enefa, after all.
Sieh sighed to break the silence. “You need to eat,” he said, and got up. He left my bedroom; I heard the apartment door open and close.
I had slept nearly three days. My angry declaration that I would leave had been a bluff; my hands were shaking, and I did not trust my ability to walk far if I tried. I looked down at my unsteady hand and thought sourly that if the Enefadeh had infected me with a goddess’s soul, the least they could have done was give me a stronger body in the process.
“Sieh loves you,” said Zhakkarn.
I put my hand on the bed so it would no longer shake. “I know.”
“No, you don’t.” The sharpness in Zhakkarn’s voice made me look up. She was still angry, and I realized now that it had nothing to do with the alliance. She was angry about how I’d treated Sieh.
“What would you do, if you were me?” I asked. “Surrounded by secrets, with your life dependent on the answers?”
“I would do as you have done.” That surprised me. “I would use every possible advantage I had to gain as much information as I could, and I would not apologize for doing so. But I am not the mother Sieh has missed for so long.”
I could tell already that I was going to become very, very sick of being compared to a goddess.
“Neither am I,” I snapped.
“Sieh knows that. And yet he loves you.” Zhakkarn sighed. “He is a child.”
“He’s older than you, isn’t he?”
&nbs
p; “Age means nothing to us. What matters is staying true to one’s nature. Sieh has devoted himself fully to the path of childhood. It is a difficult one.”
I could imagine, though it made no sense to me. Enefa’s soul seemed to bring me no special insight into the tribulations of godhood.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. I felt weary, though that might’ve been the hunger. “Shall I cuddle him to my breast when he comes back, and tell him everything will be all right? Should I do the same for you?”
“You should not hurt him again,” she said, and vanished.
I gazed at the spot where she had stood for a long while. I was still staring at it when Sieh returned, setting a platter in front of me.
“The servants here don’t ask questions,” he said. “Safer that way. So T’vril didn’t know you’d been unwell until I showed up and asked for food. He’s tearing a strip out of the servants assigned to you right now.”
The platter held a Darren feast. Maash paste and fish rolled in callena leaves, with a side of fire-toasted golden peppers. A shallow boat of serry relish and thin, crisp-curled slices of meat. In my land it would’ve been the heart of a particular species of sloth; this was probably beef. And a true treasure: a whole roasted gran banana. My favorite dessert, though how T’vril had found that out I would never know.
I picked up a leafroll, and my hand trembled with more than hunger.
“Dekarta doesn’t mean for you to win the contest,” Sieh said softly. “That isn’t why he’s brought you here. He intends for you to choose between Relad and Scimina.”
I looked sharply at him, and recalled the conversation I’d overheard between Relad and Scimina in the solarium. Was this what Scimina had meant? “Choose between them?”
“The Arameri ritual of succession. To become the next head of the family, one of the heirs must transfer the master sigil—the mark Dekarta wears—from Dekarta’s brow to his own. Or her own. The master sigil outranks all the rest; whoever wears it has absolute power over us, the rest of the family, and the world.”
The Inheritance Trilogy Page 14
