pang and power

by Saintcrowe, Val

  Feteran sighed. “Perhaps not. But… what are you suggesting? That we should change the minds of the people of the realm? That’s… so many people… it’s surely impossible.”

  “Difficult,” said Eithan. “But if it were impossible, I wouldn’t bring it up. It’s made more difficult by the fact that we likely don’t have long. I have heard that King Timon is frail and fading. He may not live long.”

  “No, he likely won’t,” said Feteran, and he actually sounded regretful about this, as if he would miss the king.

  “So, not only do we need to change the minds of a large group of people about you,” said Eithan, “but we need to do it quickly.”

  “That does sound difficult,” said Feteran.

  “You need to make a grand gesture,” said Eithan. “You need to do something huge.”

  “What if he killed the gods?” said Nicce.

  Eithan turned to look at her. “The people worship the gods. They wouldn’t like that.”

  “Nor do I know how to kill the gods,” said Feteran. “Nor would I put myself in that kind of danger.”

  Nicce fell quiet, thinking this over.

  “No, we need to come up with something else,” said Eithan. He turned to Nicce. “But we will come to that, I promise you, love. It’s a separate issue, but I know how important it is to you. We’ll do it, and you, Feteran.” He turned back to the man. “Will help.”

  “Yes, fine, we’ve agreed about this already,” said Feteran. “What grand gesture should I make?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Eithan. “But I’ll think of something. Give me time.”

  “You said we didn’t have time,” said Feteran.

  “I work well under pressure,” said Eithan, giving him a smile.

  “He does,” said Nicce, and she couldn’t help the admiring undercurrent in her voice.

  Eithan looked at her, and her heart stopped.

  Sun and bones, but they were good together, weren’t they?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Eithan spent the afternoon on a walk by himself, trying to think. It wasn’t easy coming up with an idea. Having an idea, that was usually easy. It would simply pop into his head unbidden, usually when he was least expecting it.

  When he wanted to come up with an idea, he tended to attempt to artificially recreate this process by positing the idea to himself and then refusing to actively think about anything. He theorized that his brain became bored without anything else to occupy it and went to work on the idea subconsciously by default.

  Of course, sometimes it didn’t work. Sometimes he came up with a brilliant idea that had to do with something else that he’d been pondering.

  However, during his walk, he had no ideas at all.

  Not about Feteran or the people of Rabia or about killing the gods or about the undercurrent that was now rushing beneath every interaction he had with Nicce.

  He went back to the keep for dinner and he talked to the others and smiled. Jonas’s youngest child was there, and she was especially adorable.

  Then he went out into the courtyard and started doing some drills with his sword. Sometimes physical exercise helped. He theorized it got blood moving in his body, and maybe blood helped his brain work better. He didn’t know.

  This time, he only thought about how it was strange that his hair grew but his body didn’t change. After all that time in the dungeons with no exercise, he should have lost muscle mass, but he hadn’t. He was frozen in some ways, not in others, and he couldn’t make sense of it.

  He puzzled over that for too long and when he heard someone saying his name in a soft voice, he was startled. The hair raised up on the back of his neck and he reacted by turning and bringing up his weapon.

  It was Pati, and she backed away, alarmed. “Sorry!”

  He sighed, relaxing and sheathing his sword. “I’m the one who should apologize. I’m a little jumpy.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, stepping closer to him. The moon was only a sliver in the sky overhead, but it shone down on both of them with brilliant silvery light. For some reason, it made Eithan think of the light inside Ciaska, and he shivered. Why were the gods connected with aspects of nature if they were made from things in another realm where there didn’t seem to be moons or suns or earth? So many things didn’t make sense to him.

  “I haven’t seen you since you found us, I don’t think,” said Eithan. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine.” She clasped her hands together in front of herself and gave him a smile.

  “Well, good,” he said.

  Suddenly, there was a movement in the shadows. Eithan turned in that direction, hand on his sword again. Then he realized it was only Philo. He’d seen Philo at dinner several times, spoken to him, embraced him. Philo had seemed better than he used to be but still jumpy and nervous.

  Now, Philo scurried to the door, casting worried glances at Eithan and Pati, as if he were frightened of what they might do to him.

  “It’s all right, Philo,” called Eithan.

  Philo froze at his voice, hunching in on himself as if he wanted to make himself disappear.

  Eithan sighed.

  “I asked him to help me,” said Pati. “He was horrified. He said no. I couldn’t bring myself to speak about it with the others.”

  Eithan turned back to her. “What do you need help with?”

  Pati took a deep breath. “I know you used to do it. You did it to my mother, she says. Well, or Absalom did, but I couldn’t ask him. I know how badly he hated doing it to my mother, so—”

  “You’re talking about bleeding out,” said Eithan. “Why?” Then it dawned on him. “You want to be changed.”

  “Yes,” said Pati, nodding. “Especially now that Nicce is here and I would be able to walk in the sun. There would be no consequences.”

  “Gods,” said Eithan, looking her over.

  “I could wait,” said Pati. “But Lian seems to have stopped aging around the same age as I am, and I don’t want to look older than him.”

  Eithan’s shoulders sagged. “I can’t.”

  “No, don’t say that.” She reached out for him, but then hesitated before touching him. “Please, let’s talk before you make a decision.”

  “You want to be ageless like Lian, who you’re in a secret relationship with, and your mother doesn’t approve of it,” said Eithan. “I can’t interfere in this. It’s irreversible, what you’re asking. Your mother—”

  “You’re not afraid of her, are you? All the other knights flinch every time she speaks to them, but you don’t, at least not the few times I’ve seen you talk to her. You changed so many girls that you don’t still carry guilt about it.”

  Eithan looked at his feet. “That’s not true.”

  “So, you are afraid of her?”

  Eithan sighed. “What if we went and spoke to your mother about this?”

  “That’s a ridiculous idea,” said Pati.

  “Well, those are my terms,” said Eithan. “If you want me to change you, to bite you and drain all your blood and turn you into an ageless, cold creature, then we must inform your mother first.”

  Pati let out an indignant sound.

  “Have you talked this over with Lian?” said Eithan. “Does he know that you want to live eternally with him?”

  Pati shrugged. “I’ve mentioned it.”

  “You are very young. What if you and Lian quarrel and things end, and you are permanently altered?”

  “I don’t think that will happen,” said Pati.

  “Of course you don’t, but it could,” said Eithan.

  “If it does,” said Pati, “then I will have a very long time to find someone else to love, won’t I?”

  Eithan chuckled to himself, but this reassured him in some way. She wanted it not for love, not exactly, but for herself. That was better. He surveyed her. “I will defend you to your mother, all right? And if she is determined against it, that doesn’t mean I won’t do it. Still, we must tell her.
”

  Pati groaned. “You’re… I hate you.”

  Eithan raised his eyebrows. “Has anyone ever told you that if you go asking favors, you’re better to flatter the one who will give them to you?”

  She scoffed.

  “Those are the terms, Pati.”

  “Fine,” she said, drawing herself. “Well, then, let’s go and find my mother.”

  “Now?” said Eithan.

  “Now,” she said and stalked across the courtyard, only pausing to look back at him and say, “Aren’t you coming along?”

  He shrugged and followed.

  * * *

  “Oh, I thought you’d be off getting Eithan drunk again,” said Nicce to Absalom, who was at the doorway to her bedchamber.

  “No, not tonight,” said Absalom. “I’m not sure where he is.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly. “May I come in?”

  “Of course. You don’t have to ask.” She remembered that he had come to her bedchamber often enough when they were plotting against Ciaska.

  Absalom shut the door. “Don’t tell him I was here. He told me not to talk to you.”

  She stiffened. “What’s this about?”

  Absalom went over to her bed and ran a finger over the footboard. “I thought maybe you could use a friend, Nicce. Do you have anyone to talk to?”

  “About what? There’s nothing to talk about.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Besides I have Eithan.”

  “And who do you talk to about Eithan?” Absalom raised his eyebrows at her. “By the way, I like your hair.”

  She touched it self-consciously. “It was just… there were a lot of tangles.”

  “It suits you,” said Absalom. “It makes your eyes look enormous. Lovely, really.”

  “Thank you.” She blushed. “Why do you want to talk about Eithan? What did he say to you?”

  “Very little,” said Absalom. “But if he’s being horrible to you, I want to know, so that I can kick him until he changes his ways. Eithan is very dear to me, but he has his faults.”

  “He’s not horrible, no.” She shook her head intently. “I promise.”

  Absalom shrugged. “All right.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “You…” Absalom sat down on the bed. “If you have concerns about what sort of child that Eithan would father, you have only to look at Jonas’s offspring, or at Lian, and you must see that there is nothing at all wrong with them. They are perfectly normal. Lian is, of course, half-god, but he doesn’t seem… whatever she did to us, Ciaksa, when she changed us, it doesn’t seem to transmit anything to the next generation. At least, nothing that we’ve noticed.”

  Nicce just stared at him. “Eithan talked to you about this?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  Nicce’s shoulders slumped. “You gave him the… barrier thing.” She blushed again, because that meant Absalom had intimate knowledge of her and Eithan in bed together, and that was dreadful. But Eithan obviously hadn’t explained it all to Absalom, because this was the least of her concerns. “I’m not concerned about our children being… of course, I’m not worried about that. He obviously didn’t tell you much.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not much of an inducement for me to stay out of something,” said Absalom.

  “If you must know, it’s about me,” she said. “I have no desire to be a mother, that is all.”

  “Oh,” said Absalom, shrugging. “Perfectly reasonable, if you ask me.”

  “That is, I mean, I’ve never really given it much thought,” said Nicce. “I really only thought about it once, a long time ago, with this fisherman named Zed. We had a sort of… scare, and then I was very relieved, and I thought that I would make an awful mother.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” said Absalom.

  “Zed said that too,” said Nicce. “But really, when have I ever done anything motherly?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You killed Ciaska for us, didn’t you? That was a very protective, selfless sort of gesture, I thought. Rather like a great mother bear or a lioness or—”

  “All right, stop it. I really don’t need you to do that.” She glared at him, and then she couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Truly, I’ve never had time to contemplate children. There have been many, many distractions, and I’ve always been trying to accomplish one thing or another. So, I don’t know. He brought it up, and I said I wasn’t ready, but I didn’t say no. I mean, maybe he thinks I said no.”

  “You just said you had no desire to be a mother.”

  Her shoulders slumped.

  “You don’t have to have children,” said Absalom. “I personally have no desire to—”

  “You have Lian.”

  “True,” said Absalom, nodding. He opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it.

  “What?” she said.

  “I… I’m beginning to wonder if this issue between the two of you has anything to do with children at all,” he said.

  “Who says there’s an issue?” She twisted her fingers together. “Did Eithan say there was an issue?”

  “No, Eithan said everything was fine,” said Absalom.

  “But he talked to you about it.”

  “Well, to be fair, he inquired about the wine from the Nightmare Court, and the topic came up. I don’t think he had any intention of confiding in me.”

  “And yet, you’ve decided to get involved and make everything worse.”

  “Probably,” said Absalom, winking at her.

  She gave him a withering look.

  “So, to be clear, you do want Eithan’s babies, but just not anytime soon?”

  “That’s reasonable, don’t you think? I mean, we’re trying to kill the gods. It would be a very stupid time to get pregnant.”

  “Mmm.” Absalom nodded. “All of the gods? Every single god?”

  She sighed. “We can do it. I can do it.”

  Absalom pointedly didn’t meet her gaze.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You’re mad. Stark raving insane. No wonder Eithan feels inadequate and thinks he’s broken and must retire to a quiet life. Because your idea of a nonquiet life is—”

  “I’m not insane.” But she was blushing. “I’ve always had this feeling, Absalom, like I was meant for something important.”

  “Well, maybe that was just the killing of the one god. You know, the important, enormous thing you already did. That’s not enough to satisfy you?”

  She opened her mouth to answer and couldn’t find words. She gestured with her hands, groping for it. “It’s like an itch,” she said finally. “No, not exactly, but nagging in that way. Just a feeling, one that never goes away, that there’s something I’m meant to be doing, something more. I thought that after I killed Ciaska, that there would be some… relief. Maybe not forever, but for a moment, at least?” She stared at him, afraid to see how he would respond.

  He regarded her for a long moment. “Oh, perhaps that’s the nature of everything. The moment you have something you thought you wanted, you want something else. That’s the way I feel about women, in fact.”

  She laughed. “I suppose. But this… it’s very intense. I used to think I wanted to be normal, but then I realized that I would never be normal, that I was never meant to be normal, and what Eithan wants…”

  “Do you feel that way about men, too?” said Absalom. “Is Eithan not—”

  “He is enough for me.” She clenched her hands in fists. “Gods, he said something like that too. But it’s stupid. I love him. Of course I do. What man could top him? What man could possibly be more than Sir Eithan Draig?”

  “Have you said that to him lately?”

  She sighed. “You’re saying he’s fragile.”

  “He says he went crazy in the dungeons. You rescued him. He’s insecure, yes.”

  “So, he doesn’t want babies?”

  “Is h
e pushing you for that?”

  “Well, no, but… I feel as though he just gave up on it because he’s afraid that I’d…” She sighed. “He’s insecure.”

  Absalom got up from the bed. “My work here is done.”

  She laughed. “Thank you. I needed this. I think otherwise, I might have driven myself crazy with guilt, trying to determine what I’d done to him.”

  “I thought there was no issue.”

  “Stop gloating.”

  “Simply because I do not fixate on my own flaws, like—oh, I suppose you and Eithan are made for each other in that regard.”

  “But I should fix my flaws, shouldn’t I?”

  “If you can,” said Absalom. “If not, work around them. Ignore them.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “Yes,” said Absalom. “And on that note, I’ll take my leave of you.” He started for the door. And then he paused, turning back to her. “Oh. One other thing. Is Eithan really truly going to try to make Feteran king? Because when I spoke to him, I thought I discouraged him.”

  “He thinks that we need to make the people of Rabia love Feteran, and that Feteran needs to make some grand gesture that makes him a hero in their eyes.”

  Absalom blinked several times. “Oh, that sounds like Eithan.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?” She couldn’t help herself from smiling. “He’s very brilliant, my…” She sighed. “There should be a name for what we are.”

  “Sweethearts? Lovers?”

  She wrinkled up her nose. “I don’t like either of those.”

  “Well, perhaps you should just marry him,” said Absalom.

  She chewed on her bottom lip thoughtfully. Then, she shook that off. “Do you think it would be possible to turn the people against the gods?”

  “What?” said Absalom. “This is quite the change in subject.”

  “It’s only that I was thinking that if we could make that work, it makes everything so tidy. Feteran, the fearless god-killer, just as he is in the stories—”

  “The people don’t think he’s the same Feteran from the stories,” said Absalom.

  “But he is,” said Nicce. “Hmm, maybe that’s the first thing to do. Remind the people of that story. Because in Feteran’s story, he’s a hero who rises up against the gods. In one version, he steals the knowledge of planting seeds from Aitho, and in another version, it’s fire from Sullo. He brings the people fire.”