only one facet of a shuwt journey. Taelin tried to bend it, to get it back on track, to take away Sena’s influence.
“What about my baby?” asked Taelin. “Aviv bought his way out. I’m going to find him.”
“I thought you were going to go to Stonehold and start that church you’ve been talking about,” said Sena.
“Yeah. I probably will. Aviv would never marry me anyway. Not now.” She pulled the black chitinous derringer from the wall and slipped it into her pocket.
“I heard you were in the hospital—” said Sena.
“Oh. Yes. I had some complications. Everything’s fine now.” Taelin smiled. “My father wants me out of the house for good. He’s giving me a stack of money.”
“What will you do with it?” asked Sena.
Taelin laughed. “I want to help people. I want to keep the faces on the street corners bathed and warm and fed. I want to do something right for a change.”
“I know,” said Sena. She leaned forward and kissed Taelin who was sobbing. The witch’s lips burned against hers like battery terminals. Then Sena gave her a friendly hug.
“You’re going to do great things in the north,” Sena said.
“Thanks for believing in me.”
“You’re going to do incredible things. Things you never thought you would.”
When Taelin released from the hug, she found herself standing on a Pandragonian zeppelin. A cold wind struck her in the face. She was flying north. Every minute, it seemed, the temperature dropped.
The airship moored at West Gate, over Isca City. Taelin went down a rusting lift that squealed inside the fortress walls.
There, amid the steaming reek of sewer fumes and trash that tumbled out of Gunnymead Square, Taelin hailed a cab. When she got in, the driver greeted her in Trade. He offered her a tiny bottle of Pink Nymph Whisky. She’d never heard of the brand but she bought three because she had plenty of money and because she was nervous to be in a strange town.
“Yes it is,” said Sena, who was sitting in the cab with her.
“No, it’s not. My driver. The chemiostatic car I rented got stuck in the mud. I had to walk. I had to fight through freezing rain…”
“No. You arrived in West Gate, warm and dry. You took a cab all the way to Lampfire Hills.”
“No! I walked in the
“Aviv would have taken me to that horrible tiny island in the middle of nowhere and forced me to have his babies.”
Sena’s face looked like a ceiling. White and square like the shape above her hospital bed. The doctor was gone. The soft white straps around her wrists prevented her from wiping her eyes. She needed to wipe her eyes. Her whole face was wet.
“I’m not lying! It happened! It happened! I saw Nenuln. She talked to me in a cloud of light! She’s real! She’s real! She’s real! And I’ll prove she is. I’ll go to Stonehold where they
“I’ll buy a bing-gun if I have to. I’ll come back here for you! I’ve had lovers who taught me how to shoot! I’m a deadeye!
“And then you know what? When I go north … I’m going be queen someday!”
* * *
TAELIN sat in her bed, in her stateroom, on the
Sena smelled delicious. In one hand the witch held a glass of water, in the other a lustrous purple-brown pill. Perfect, like a baby grape.
“I’m not taking it.” Taelin coughed.
“It’s your antipsychotic,” said Sena. “You haven’t been taking them. That’s the problem. You need to take it.”
Taelin wanted to die.
“You’re not a bad person.” Sena held out the pill.
“Yes I am.” Taelin tried not to think about anything.
“You’re just sick, Taelin.”
Taelin couldn’t tell if any of this was real. She didn’t care. She just wanted to sleep. She reached out and ate the pill without water and shook her finger at Sena. “You don’t know me. You think your book and your holomorphy let you know me. But you don’t know me.”
“I’m going to take you with me now,” said Sena. “While the tincture still has you loosened up.”
“Where?” Taelin still felt the drug in her head.
“We’re going to Soth,” said Sena. “We’ll be gone just a little while.”
Taelin blinked as Sena started talking. She felt so strange and cold and sticky. She heard voices. Thousands of voices. An icy electric buzz filled the air.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Sena. “I’m pulling holojoules down into our equation.”
“Holojoules?” Taelin watched the light from her stateroom window turn to molasses. “Don’t you need blood?”
“Yes. I drew blood. I’ve drawn plenty of blood.” Then Sena shifted back to the Unknown Tongue and a force reached in through Taelin’s mouth and yanked her breath out of her chest like a rag on the end of a hook.
Taelin gasped and fell forward. The impact with her mattress punched clean through, an explosion of white, and jettisoned her out of the zeppelin where she found herself unable to scream. The world came up at her, threatening to bury her at high velocity in an oval patch of blue sand. But the fabric of the world stretched like burlap, in every direction, opening coarse pores.
Taelin fell through.
Daylight vaporized. She found herself in darkness. A cold, damp, cracked surface pressed her hands. She inhaled, choked on dead air.
A woman’s voice spoke. It was not a language she was familiar with. The tone behind it sounded hard and cold, like the surface under her fingertips.
A hand gripped her by the elbow and pulled her to her feet.
PART TWO
If I were a god, I’d make myself believe.
—YACOB SKIE
CHAPTER
34
Taelin stood up. Behind the disembodied, flinty voice that came out of the darkness, she could hear the rattle of a metal buckle. Someone was fastening? Unfastening. Now they were rummaging in a sack.
A bit of brown smudged the darkness. It looked like a filtered glow seeping through fabric. Taelin began to
