“The rest of the family?” I frowned. They had hinted at this before, when they altered my own sigil. “So that’s it. What do the blood sigils really do? Allow Dekarta to read our thoughts? Burn out our brains if we refuse to obey?”
“No, nothing so dramatic. There are some protective spells built in for highbloods, to guard against assassins and the like, but among the family they simply compel loyalty. No one who wears a sigil can act against the interests of the family head. If not for measures like that, Scimina would have found a way to undermine or kill Dekarta long ago.”
The leafroll smelled too good. I bit off a piece, making myself chew slowly as I mulled over Sieh’s words. The fish was strange—some local species, similar to but not the same as the speckled ui usually used. Still good. I was ravenous, but I knew better than to bolt my food after days without.
“The Stone of Earth is used in the succession ritual. Someone—an Arameri, by Itempas’s own decree—must wield its power to transfer the master sigil.”
“An Arameri.” Another puzzle piece slipped into place. “Anyone in Sky can do this? Everyone, down to the lowliest servant?”
Sieh nodded slowly. I noticed he did not blink when he was intent on something. A minor slip.
“Any Arameri, however distant from the Central Family. For just one moment, that person becomes one of the Three.”
It was obvious in his wording. That person. For one moment.
It would be like striking a match, I imagined, having that much power course through mortal flesh. A bright flare, perhaps a few seconds of steady flame. And then…
“Then that person dies,” I said.
Sieh gave me his unchildlike smile. “Yes.”
Clever, so clever, my Arameri foremothers. By forcing all relatives however distant to serve here, they had in place a virtual army of people who could be sacrificed to wield the Stone. Even if each used it only for a moment, the Arameri—the highbloods, at least, who would die last—could still approximate the power of a goddess for a considerable time.
“So Dekarta means for me to be that mortal,” I said. “Why?”
“The head of this clan must have the strength to kill even loved ones.” Sieh shrugged. “It’s easy to sentence a servant to die, but what about a friend? A husband?”
“Relad and Scimina barely knew I was alive before Dekarta brought me here. Why did he choose me?”
“That, only he knows.”
I was growing angry again, but this was a frustrated, directionless sort of anger. I’d thought the Enefadeh had all the answers. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Why in the Maelstrom would you use me, anyhow?” I asked, annoyed. “Doesn’t that put Enefa’s soul too close to the very people who would destroy it if they could?”
Sieh rubbed his nose, abruptly looking abashed. “Ah… well… that was my idea. It’s always easier to hide something right under a person’s nose, you see? And Dekarta’s love for Kinneth was well known; we thought that would make you safe. No one expected him to kill her—certainly not after twenty years. All of us were caught off guard by that.”
I made myself take another bite of the leafroll, chewing on more than its fragrant wrapping. No one had expected my mother’s death. And yet, some part of me—the still-grieving, angry part of me—felt they should have known. They should have warned her. They should have prevented it.
“But listen.” Sieh leaned forward. “The Stone is what’s left of Enefa’s body. Because you possess Enefa’s soul, you can wield the Stone’s power in ways that no one but Enefa herself could do. If you held the Stone, Yeine, you could change the shape of the universe. You could set us free like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Then die.”
Sieh lowered his eyes, his enthusiasm fading. “That wasn’t the original plan,” he said, “but yes.”
I finished the leafroll and looked at the rest of the plate without enthusiasm. My appetite had vanished. But anger—slow-building and fierce, almost as hot as my anger over my mother’s murder—was beginning to take its place.
“You mean for me to lose the contest, too,” I said softly.
“Well… yes.”
“What will you offer me? If I accept this alliance?”
He grew very still. “Protection for your land through the war that would follow our release. And favor forever after our victory. We keep our vows, Yeine, believe me.”
I believed him. And the eternal blessing of four gods was indeed a powerful temptation. That would guarantee safety and prosperity for Darr, if we could get through this time of trial. The Enefadeh knew my heart well.
But then, they thought they already knew my soul.
“I want that and one thing more,” I said. “I’ll do as you wish, Sieh, even if it costs me my life. Revenge against my mother’s killer is worth that. I’ll take up the Stone and use it to set you free, and die. But not as some humbled, beaten sacrifice.” I glared at him. “I want to win this contest.”
His lovely green eyes went wide.
“Yeine,” he began, “that’s impossible. Dekarta and Relad and Scimina… they’re all against you. You haven’t got a chance.”
“You’re the instigator of this whole plot, aren’t you? Surely the god of mischief can think of a way.”
“Mischief, not politics!”
“You should go and tell the others my terms.” I made myself pick up the fork and eat some relish.
Sieh stared at me, then finally let out a shaky laugh. “I don’t believe this. You’re crazier than Naha.” He got to his feet and rubbed a hand over his hair. “You—gods.” He seemed not to notice the strangeness of his oath. “I’ll talk to them.”
I inclined my head formally. “I shall await your answer.”
Muttering in his strange language, Sieh summoned his yellow ball and left through the bedroom wall.
They would accept, of course. Whether I won or lost, they would get the freedom they wanted—unless, of course, I chose not to give it to them. So they would do whatever it took to keep me agreeable.
Reaching for another leafroll, I concentrated on chewing slowly so that my ill-used stomach would not rebel. It was important that I recover quickly. I would need my strength in the time to come.
15
Hatred
I SEE MY LAND BELOW ME. It passes underneath, as if I am flying. High ridges and misty, tangled valleys. Occasional fields, even rarer towns and cities. Darr is so green. I saw many lands as I traveled across High North and Senm on the way to Sky, and none of them seemed half as green as my beautiful Darr. Now I know why.
I slept again. When I woke, Sieh still had not returned, and it was night. I did not expect an answer from the Enefadeh anytime soon. I had probably annoyed them by my refusal to trudge obediently to death. If I were them, I would keep me waiting awhile.
Almost as soon as I woke, there was a knock at the door. When I went to answer, a bony-faced servant boy stood very straight and said, with painful formality, “Lady Yeine. I bear a message.”
Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I nodded permission for him to continue, and he said, “Your grandsire requests your presence.”
And suddenly I was very, very awake.
The audience chamber was empty this time. Just me and Dekarta. I knelt as I had that first afternoon, and laid my knife on the floor as was customary. I did not, to my own surprise, contemplate using it to kill him. Much as I hated him, his blood was not what I wanted.
“Well,” he said from his throne. His voice sounded softer than before, though that may have been a trick of perception on my part. “Have you enjoyed your week as an Arameri, Granddaughter?”
Had it been only a week?
“No, Grandfather,” I said. “I have not.”
He uttered a single laugh. “But now, perhaps, you understand us better. What do you think?”
This I had not expected. I looked at him from where I knelt, and wondered what he was up to.
“I think
,” I said slowly, “the same thing that I thought before I came here: that the Arameri are evil. All that has changed is that now I believe most of you are mad as well.”
He grinned, wide and partially toothless. “Kinneth said much the same thing to me once. She included herself, however.”
I resisted the immediate urge to deny this. “Maybe that’s why she left. Maybe, if I stay long enough, I’ll become as evil and mad as the rest of you.”
“Maybe.” There was a curious gentleness in the way he said this that threw me. I could never read his face. Too many lines.
Silence rose between us for the next several breaths. It plateaued; stalled; broke.
“Tell me why you killed my mother,” I said.
His smile faded. “I am not one of the Enefadeh, Granddaughter. You cannot command answers from me.”
Heat washed through me, followed by cold. I rose slowly to my feet. “You loved her. If you had hated her, feared her, that I could have understood. But you loved her.”
He nodded. “I loved her.”
“She was crying when she died. We had to wet her eyelids to get them open—”
“You will be silent.”
In the empty chamber, his voice echoed. The edge of it sawed against my temper like a dull knife.
“And you love her still, you hateful old bastard.” I stepped forward, leaving my knife on the floor. I did not trust myself with it anymore. I moved toward my grandfather’s highbacked not-throne, and he drew himself up, perhaps in anger, perhaps in fear. “You love her and mourn her; it’s your own fault and you mourn her, and you want her back. Don’t you? But if Itempas is listening, if he cares at all about order and righteousness or any of the things the priests say, then I pray to him now that you keep loving her. That way you’ll feel her loss the way I do. You’ll feel that agony until you die, and I pray that’s a long, long time from now!”
By this point I stood before Dekarta, bent down, my hands on the armrests of his chair. I was close enough to see the color of his eyes at last—a blue so pale that it was barely a color at all. He was a small, frail man now, whatever he’d been in his prime. If I blew hard, I might break his bones.
But I did not touch him. Dekarta did not deserve mere physical pain any more than he deserved a swift death.
“Such hate,” he whispered. Then, to my shock, he smiled. It looked like a death rictus. “Perhaps you are more like her than I thought.”
I stood up straight and told myself that I was not drawing back.
“Very well,” said Dekarta, as if we’d just exchanged pleasant small talk. “We should get down to business, Granddaughter. In seven days’ time, on the night of the fourteenth, there will be a ball here in Sky. It will be in your honor, to celebrate your elevation to heir, and some of the most noteworthy citizens of the world will join us as guests. Is there anyone in particular you’d like invited?”
I stared at him and heard an entirely different conversation. In seven days the most noteworthy citizens in the world will gather to watch you die. Every mote of intuition in my body understood: the succession ceremony.
His question hovered unanswered in the air between us.
“No,” I said softly. “No one.”
Dekarta inclined his head. “Then you are dismissed, Granddaughter.”
I stared at him for a long moment. I might never again have the chance to speak with him like this, in private. He had not told me why he’d killed my mother, but there were other secrets that he might be willing to divulge. He might even know the secret of how I might save myself.
But in the long silence I could think of no questions to ask, no way to get at those secrets. So at last I picked up my knife and walked out of the room, and tried not to feel a sense of shame as the guards closed the door behind me.
This turned out to be the start of a very bad night.
I stepped inside my apartment and found that I had visitors.
Kurue had appropriated the chair, where she sat with her fingers steepled, a hard look in her eyes. Sieh, perched on the edge of my parlor’s couch, sat with his knees drawn up and his eyes downcast. Zhakkarn stood sentinel near the window, impassive as ever. Nahadoth—
I felt his presence behind me an instant before he put his hand through my chest.
“Tell me,” he said into my ear, “why I should not kill you.”
I stared at the hand through my chest. There was no blood, and as far as I could tell there was no wound. I fumbled for his hand and found that it was immaterial, like a shadow. My fingers passed through his flesh and waggled in the translucence of his fist. It did not hurt exactly, but it felt as though I’d plunged my fingers into an icy stream. There was a deep, aching coldness between my breasts.
He could withdraw his hand and tear out my heart. He could leave his hand in place but make it tangible, and kill me as surely as if he’d punched through blood and bone.
“Nahadoth,” Kurue said in a warning tone.
Sieh jumped up and came to my side, his eyes wide and frightened. “Please don’t kill her. Please.”
“She’s one of them,” he hissed in my ear. His breath was cold as well, making the flesh of my neck prickle in goose bumps. “Just another Arameri convinced of her own superiority. We made her, Sieh, and she dares to command us? She has no right to carry my sister’s soul.” His hand curled into a claw, and suddenly I realized it was not my flesh that he meant to damage.
Your body has grown used to containing two souls, Zhakkarn had said. It might not survive having only one again.
But at that realization, completely to my own surprise, I burst into laughter.
“Do it,” I said. I could hardly breathe for laughing, though that might’ve been some effect of Nahadoth’s hand. “I never wanted this thing in me in the first place. If you want it, take it!”
“Yeine!” Sieh clutched my arm. “That could kill you!”
“What difference does it make? You want to kill me anyway. So does Dekarta—he’s got it all planned, seven days from now. My only real choice lies in how I die. This is as good as any other method, isn’t it?”
“Let’s find out,” Nahadoth said.
Kurue sat forward. “Wait, what did she—”
Nahadoth drew his hand back. It seemed to take effort; the arm moved through my flesh slowly, as if through clay. I could not be more certain because I was shrieking at the top of my lungs. Instinctively I lunged forward, trying to escape the pain, and in retrospect this made things worse. But I could not think, all my reason having been subsumed by agony. It felt as though I was being torn apart—as, of course, I was.
But then something happened.
Above, a sky out of nightmare. I could not say if it was day or night. Both sun and moon were visible, but it was hard to say which was which. The moon was huge and cancerously yellow. The sun was a bloody distortion, nowhere near round. There was a single cloud in the sky and it was black—not dark gray with rain but black, like a drifting hole in the sky. And then I realized it was a hole, because something fell through—
Tiny figures, struggling. One of them was white and blazing, the other black and smoking; as they tumbled, I could see fire and hear cracks like thunder all around them. They fell and fell and smashed into the earth nearby. The ground shook, a great cloud of dust and debris kicked up from the impact; nothing human could have survived such a fall, but I knew they were not—
I ran. All around me were bodies—not dead, I understood with the certainty of a dream, but dying. The grass was dry and dessicated, crackling beneath my bare feet. Enefa was dead. Everything was dying. Leaves fell around me like heavy snow. Ahead, just through the trees—
“Is this what you want? Is it?” Inhuman fury in that voice, echoing through the forest shadows. Following it came a scream of such agony as I have never imagined—
I ran through the trees and stopped at the edge of a crater and saw—
O Goddess, I saw—
“Yeine.” A hand sla
pped my face lightly. “Yeine!”
My eyes were open. I blinked because they were dry. I was on my knees on the floor. Sieh crouched before me, his eyes wide with concern. Kurue and Zhakkarn were watching, too, Kurue looking worried and Zhakkarn soldier-still.
I did not think. I swung around and looked at Nahadoth, who stood with one hand—the one that had been in my body—still raised. He stared down at me, and I realized he somehow knew what I had seen.
“I don’t understand.” Kurue rose from the desk chair. Her hand, on the chair’s back, tightened. “It’s been twenty years. The soul should be able to survive extraction by now.”
“No one has ever put a god’s soul into a mortal,” said Zhakkarn. “We knew there was a risk.”
“Not of this!” Kurue pointed at me almost accusingly. “Will the soul even be usable now, contaminated with this mortal filth?”
“Be silent!” Sieh snapped, whipping around to glare at her. His voice dropped suddenly, a young man’s again; instant puberty. “How dare you? I have told you time and again—mortals are as much Enefa’s creations as we ourselves.”
“Leftovers,” Kurue retorted. “Weak and cowardly and too stupid to look beyond themselves for more than five minutes. Yet you and Naha will insist on putting your trust in them—”
Sieh rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. Tell me, Kurue, which of your proud, god-only plans has gotten us free?”
Kurue turned away in resentful silence.
I barely saw all this. Nahadoth and I were still staring at each other.
“Yeine.” Sieh’s small, soft hand touched my cheek, coaxing my head around to face him. His voice had returned to a childish treble. “Are you all right?”
“What happened?” I asked.
“We’re not certain.”
I sighed and pulled away from him, trying to get to my feet. My body felt hollowed out, stuffed with cotton. I slipped and settled onto my knees again, and cursed.
“Yeine—”
“If you’re going to lie to me again, don’t bother.”
The Inheritance Trilogy Page 15
