The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

There was a bitterness in his tone that I had not heard before. It felt oddly comforting in comparison with my own mood, so I sat down on the steps beside him, near his legs. Together we watched the celebration in silence for a long while. After a time I felt his hand touch my hair, stroking it, and that comforted me further still. Whatever form he took, he was still the same Sieh.

“They grow and change so fast,” he said softly, his eyes on a group of dancers near the musicians. “Sometimes I hate them for that.”

I glanced up at him in surprise; this was a strange mood indeed for him. “You gods are the ones who made us this way, aren’t you?”

He glanced at me, and for a jarring, painful instant I saw confusion on his face. Enefa. He had spoken as if I was Enefa.

Then the confusion passed, and he shared with me a small, sad smile. “Sorry,” he said.

I could not feel bitter about it, given the sorrow in his face. “I do seem to look like her.”

“That’s not it.” He sighed. “It’s just that sometimes—well, it feels like she died only yesterday.”

The Gods’ War had occurred over two thousand years before, by most scholars’ reckonings. I turned away from Sieh and sighed, too, at the width of the gulf between us.

“You’re not like her,” he said. “Not really.”

I didn’t want to talk about Enefa, but I said nothing. I drew up my knees and rested my chin on them. Sieh resumed stroking my hair, petting me like a cat.

“She was reserved like you, but that’s the only similarity. She was… cooler than you. Slower to anger— although she had the same kind of temper as you, I think, magnificent when it finally blew. We tried hard not to anger her.”

“You sound like you were afraid of her.”

“Of course. How could we not be?”

I frowned in confusion. “She was your mother.”

Sieh hesitated, and in it I heard an echo of my earlier thoughts about the gulf between us. “It’s… difficult to explain.”

I hated that gulf. I wanted to breach it, though I had no idea if it was even possible. So I said, “Try.”

His hand paused on my hair, and then he chuckled, his voice warm. “I’m glad you’re not one of my worshippers. You’d drive me mad with your demands.”

“Would you even bother answering any prayers that I made?” I could not help smiling at the idea.

“Oh, of course. But I might sneak a salamander into your bed to get back at you.”

I laughed, which surprised me. It was the first time all day that I’d felt human. It didn’t last long as laughs went, but when it passed, I felt better. On impulse, I shifted to lean against his legs, putting my head on his knee. His hand never left my hair.

“I needed no mother’s milk when I was born.” Sieh spoke slowly, but I did not sense a lie this time. I think it was just difficult for him to find the right words. “There was no need to protect me from danger or sing me lullabies. I could hear the songs between the stars, and I was more dangerous to the worlds I visited than they could ever be to me. And yet, compared to the Three, I was weak. Like them in many ways, but obviously inferior. Naha was the one who convinced her to let me live and see what I might become.”

I frowned. “She was going to… kill you?”

“Yes.” He chuckled at my shock. “She killed things all the time, Yeine. She was death as well as life, the twilight along with the dawn. Everyone forgets that.”

I turned to stare at him, which made him draw his hand back from my hair. There was something in that gesture—something regretful and hesitant, not befitting a god at all—that suddenly angered me. It was there in his every word. However incomprehensible relationships between gods might be, he had been a child and Enefa his mother, and he had loved her with any child’s abandon. Yet she had almost killed him, as a breeder culls a defective foal.

Or as a mother smothers a dangerous infant…

No. That had been entirely different.

“I’m beginning to dislike this Enefa,” I said.

Sieh started in surprise, stared at me for a long second, then burst out laughing. It was infectious, though nonsensical; humor born of pain. I smiled as well.

“Thank you,” Sieh said, still chuckling. “I hate taking this form; it always makes me maudlin.”

“Be a child again.” I liked him better that way.

“Can’t.” He gestured toward the barrier. “This takes too much of my strength.”

“Ah.” I wondered suddenly which was the default state for him: the child? Or this world-weary adult who slipped out whenever he let his guard down? Or something else altogether? But that seemed too intimate and possibly painful a question to ask, so I did not. We fell silent awhile longer, watching the servants dance.

“What will you do?” Sieh asked.

I lay my head back on his knee and said nothing.

Sieh sighed. “If I knew how to help you, I would. You know that, don’t you?”

The words warmed me more than I’d expected. I smiled. “Yes. I know, though I can’t say I understand it. I’m just a mortal like the rest of them, Sieh.”

“Not like the rest.”

“Yes.” I looked at him. “However… different I might be—” I did not like saying it aloud. No one stood near enough to us to overhear, but it seemed foolish to take chances. “You said it yourself. Even if I lived to be a hundred, my life would still be only an eyeblink of yours. I should be nothing to you, like these others.” I nodded toward the throng.

He laughed softly; the bitterness had returned. “Oh, Yeine. You really don’t understand. If mortals were truly nothing to us, our lives would be so much easier. And so would yours.”

I could say nothing to that. So I fell silent, and he did, too, and around us the servants celebrated on.

* * *

It was nearly midnight by the time I finally left the centeryard. The party was still in full swing, but T’vril left with me and walked me to my quarters. He’d been drinking, though not nearly as much as some I’d seen. “Unlike them, I have to be clearheaded in the morning,” he said, when I pointed this out.

At the door of my apartment we stopped. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it.

“You didn’t enjoy yourself,” he said. “I saw: you didn’t dance all evening. Did you even have a glass of wine?”

“No. But it did help.” I groped for the right words. “I won’t deny a part of me spent the whole time thinking, I’m wasting one-sixth of my remaining life.” I smiled; T’vril grimaced. “But to spend that time surrounded by so much joy… it did make me feel better.”

There was such compassion in his eyes. I found myself wondering, again, why he helped me. I supposed it made a difference that he had some fellow feeling for me, perhaps even liked me. It was touching to think so, and perhaps that was why I reached up to cup his cheek. He blinked in surprise, but he did not draw back. That pleased me, too, and so I yielded to impulse.

“I’m probably not pretty by your standards,” I ventured. His cheek felt slightly scratchy under my fingers, and I remembered that men of the island peoples tended to grow beards. I found the idea exotic and intriguing.

A half-dozen thoughts flickered across T’vril’s face in the span of a breath, then settled with his slow smile. “Well, I’m not by yours, either,” he said. “I’ve seen those showhorses you Darre call men.”

I chuckled, abruptly nervous. “And we are, of course, relatives…”

“This is Sky, Cousin.” Amazing how that explained everything.

I opened the door to my apartment, then took his hand and pulled him inside.

He was strangely gentle—or perhaps it only seemed strange to me because I had little experience to compare him against. I was surprised to find that he was even paler beneath his clothing, and his shoulders were covered in faint spots, like those of a leopard but smaller and random. He felt normal enough against me, lean and strong, and I liked the sounds that he made. He did try to give me pleasure, but I was too tense, too aware of my own loneliness and fear, so there were no stormwinds for me. I did not mind so much.