and she read voraciously, often to the point of forgetting to sleep. Her gifts were so prodigious that Kellhus made her an Imperial Adviser at the tender age of twelve, after which she became a continual presence in her mother's entourage: pale, emaciated, decked in absurd gowns of her own design and manufacture.
'It's hard not to pity her,' Mimara said, her gaze flat with memories, 'even as you marvel…'
'What do people say?'
'Say?'
'About her… peculiarities. What do they think caused them?' Few things inspired more malicious speculation than deformities. Conriya even had a law-back before the New Empire, anyway-rendering misshapened children the property of the King. Apparently the court diviners thought a careful reading of their deformations could reveal much about the future.
'They say my stepfather's seed is too heavy for mortal women to bear,' Mimara said. 'He took other wives, 'Zikas' they call them, after the small bowls they pass out for libations on the Day of Ascension. But of those who became pregnant, none carried to term-either that or they died… Only Mother.'
Achamian could only nod, his thoughts roiling. Kellhus had to have known this, he realized. From the very beginning he had known Esmenet possessed the strength to survive him and his progeny. And so he had set out to conquer her womb as one more tool-one more weapon — in his unceasing war of word, insight, and passion.
You needed her, so you took…
Regarding her sister Serwa, Mimara said very little, save that she was cold and arrogant.
'She's the Grandmistress of the Swayali, now. Grandmistress! I don't think Mother ever forgave Kellhus for sending her away… I saw very little of her, and when I did my teeth fairly cracked for envy. Studying with the Sisters! Attaining the only thing I truly desired!'
Inrilatas, on the other hand, she discussed for quite some time, partly because Esmenet had sought to involve her in the boy's upbringing. According to Mimara, none of her siblings possessed more of their father's gifts-or more of their mother's all too human weaknesses. Speaking long before any infant should. Never forgetting. And seeing deeper, far deeper, than any human could… or should.
His subsequent madness, she said, was inevitable. He was perpetually at a loss, perpetually overwhelmed by the presence of others. Unlike his father, he could only see the brute truths, the facts and lies that compelled the course of lives, but these were quite enough.
'He would look into my eyes and say impossible things… hateful things…'
'How do you mean?'
'He told me once that I punished mother not to avenge my slavery, but because… because…'
'Because what?'
'Because I was broken inside,' she said, her lips set in a grim and brittle line. 'Because I had suffered so much so long that kindness had become the only cruelty I could not endure-kindness! — and so suffering would be all I… all I would ever know…'
She trailed, turned her face away to swat at the tears clotting her eyes.
'So I told him,' she continued, avoiding Achamian's gaze. 'I told him that I had never known kindness because everything-everything! — I had been given had been just another way to take-to steal! 'You cannot stroke a beaten dog,' he replied, 'because it sees only the raised hand…' A beaten dog! Can you believe it? What kind of little boy calls his grown sister a beaten dog?'
A Dunyain, the old Wizard thought in unspoken reply.
She must have glimpsed something of his sorrow in his eyes: the outrage in her expression, which had been helpless in the face of memory, turned in sudden fury upon him.
'You pity me?' she cried, as if her pain were something with its own outrage and volition. 'Pity?'
'Don't, Mimara. Don't do this…'
'Do what? What? '
'Make Inrilatas true.'
This smacked the fury from her expression. She stared at him speechless, her body jerking as her legs carried her thoughtlessly forward, her eyes wide with a kind of desolate horror.
'What about the others?' the old Wizard asked, snipping all memory of her outburst from his tone. The best way to retrieve a conversation from disaster, he often found, was to speak as if the disaster had never happened. 'I know there's more-the twins. Tell me about them.'
She marched in silence for a time, collecting herself, Achamian supposed. The footing had become even more treacherous: a stream had gullied the forest floor, cutting away the loam beneath the feet of several massive elms so that roots hung in tentacled sheets to their right. Achamian could see the rest of the party below, picking their way under a toppled giant with the same haste that was taking such a toll on the Hags. He glimpsed Cleric behind the Captain, white and bald and obviously not human. Even from a distance, his Mark blotted out his inhuman physical beauty, stained him with gut-wrenching ugliness.
The stream glittered, a ribbon of liquid obsidian in the gloom. The air smelled of clay and cold rot.
'They were the only ones, really…' she finally said. 'The twins. I was there, you know… there from the beginning with them. I saw them drawn squalling from Mother's womb…' She paused to watch her booted feet pick steps across the ground. 'I think that was the only moment I truly… truly loved her.'
'You've never stopped loving her,' Achamian said. 'You wouldn't care to hate her otherwise.'
Anger shrouded her eyes once again, but to her credit she managed to purge it from her voice. She was trying, the old Wizard realized. She wanted to trust him. Even more, she wanted to understand what he saw when he looked upon her-perhaps too desperately. 'What do you mean?'
'No love is simple, Mimara.' Something hooked his voice while saying this, something like weak eyes and a burning throat. 'At least no love worth the name.'
'But…'
'But nothing,' he said. 'Far too many of us confuse complexity for impurity-or even pollution. Far too many of us mourn what we should celebrate as a result. Life is unruly, Mimara. Only tyrants and fools think otherwise.'
She frowned in a mock here-we-go-again manner. 'Ajencis?' she asked, her eyes bright and teasing.
'No… Just wisdom. Not everything I say is borrowed, you know!'
She walked in silence for a time, her smile fading into a look of puzzled concentration. Achamian paced her in silence.
She resumed her account, describing the Imperial twins, Kelmomas and Samarmas. The latter was indeed an idiot, as Achamian had heard. But according to Mimara, the Imperial Physicians had feared both children were idiots in the beginning. Apparently the two infants would simply stare into each other's eyes, day after day, month after month, then year after year. If separated, they ceased to eat, as if they shared but one appetite between the two of them. It was only after Esmenet contracted a celebrated physician from Conriya that their two souls were finally pried apart and the idiocy of Samarmas was revealed.
'It was a wonder,' Mimara exclaimed, as if reliving the memories of their cure in a rush. 'To be so… so strange, and then to waken as, well, beautiful little boys, normal in all respects.'
'You were fond of them.'
'How could I not be? They were innocents born into a labyrinth-a place devious beyond compare. The others could never see it, no matter how much they complained and clucked, they could never see the Andiamine Heights for what it was.'
'And what was that?'
'A prison. A carnival. And a temple, a temple most of all. One where sins were counted according to harms endured rather than inflicted. It was no place for children! I told Mother as much, told her to take the twins to one of the Refuge Estates, some place where they could grow in the light of the sun, where things were… were…'
They had stooped to make their way beneath the fallen tree he'd seen earlier, so he supposed she had trailed to better concentrate. The limbs of the giant had folded and snapped, either bending back or prying deep into the earth. Dead leaves hung in rasping sheets. Finding passage was no easy task.
'Where things were what?' he asked when it became apparent she did not care to continue.
'Simple,' she said dully.
Achamian smiled in his wise old teacher way. The thought occurred to him that she had sought to protect the memory of her own childhood as much as the innocence of her two little brothers. But he said nothing. People rarely appreciate alternative, self-serving interpretations of their conduct-especially when suffering ruled the balance of
