The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I frowned. “Why just him?”

“Itempas attends the ceremony,” said Zhakkarn. While I gaped at her, trying to shape my mind around the idea of the Skyfather here, right here, coming here, Zhakkarn went on. “He makes his greetings personally to the new Arameri ruler. Then he offers Nahadoth freedom, though only if he serves Itempas. Thus far, Naha has refused, but Itempas knows it is in his nature to change his mind. He will keep asking.”

I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the lingering sense of reverence that a lifetime of training had inculcated in me. The Skyfather, at the succession ceremony. At every succession ceremony. He would be there to see me die. He would put his blessing on it.

Monstrous. All my life, I had worshipped him.

To distract myself from my own whirling thoughts, I pinched the bridge of my nose with my fingers. “So who was the sacrifice last time? Some other hapless relative dragged into the family nightmare?”

“No, no,” said Sieh. He got up, stretched again, then bent double and began to stand on his hands, wobbling alarmingly. He spoke in between puffing breaths. “An Arameri clan head… must be willing to kill… every person in this palace… if Itempas should require it. To prove themselves, usually… the prospective head must… sacrifice someone close.”

I considered this. “So I was chosen because neither Relad nor Scimina is close to anyone?”

Sieh wobbled too much, tumbled to the ground, then rolled upright at once, examining his nails as if the fall hadn’t happened. “Well, I suppose. No one’s really sure why Dekarta chose you. But for Dekarta himself, the sacrifice was Ygreth.”

The name teased my memory with familiarity, though I could not immediately place it with a face. “Ygreth?”

Sieh looked at me in surprise. “His wife. Your maternal grandmother. Kinneth didn’t tell you?”

22. Such Rage

Are you still angry with me?

No.

That was quick.

Anger is pointless.

I disagree. I think anger can be very powerful under the right circumstances. Let me tell you a story to illustrate. Once upon a time there was a little girl whose father murdered her mother.

How awful.

Yes, you understand that sort of betrayal. The little girl was very young at the time, so the truth was hidden from her. Perhaps she was told her mother abandoned the family. Perhaps her mother vanished; in their world, such things happened. But the little girl was very clever, and she had loved her mother dearly. She pretended to believe the lies, but in reality, she bided her time.

When she was older, wiser, she began to ask questions—but not of her father, or anyone else who claimed to care for her. These could not be trusted. She asked her slaves, who hated her already. She asked an innocent young scrivener who was smitten with her, brilliant and easy to manipulate. She asked her enemies, the heretics, whom her family had persecuted for generations. None of them had any reason to lie, and between them all she pieced together the truth. Then she set all her mind and heart and formidable will on vengeance… because that is what a daughter does when her mother has been murdered.

Ah, I see. But I wonder; did the little girl love her father?

I wonder that, too. Once, certainly, she must have; children cannot help loving. But what of later? Can love turn to hate so easily, so completely? Or did she weep inside even as she set herself against him? I do not know these things. But I do know that she set in motion a series of events that would shake the world even after her death, and inflict her vengeance on all humankind, not just her father. Because in the end, we are all complicit.

All of you? That seems a bit extreme.

Yes. Yes, it is. But I hope she gets what she wants.

* * *

This, then, was the Arameri succession: a successor was chosen by the family head. If she was the sole successor, she would be required to convince her most cherished person to willingly die on her behalf, wielding the Stone and transferring the master sigil to her brow. If there was more than one successor, they competed to force the designated sacrifice to choose one or the other. My mother had been sole heir; whom would she have been forced to kill, had she not abdicated? Perhaps she had cultivated Viraine as a lover for more than one reason. Perhaps she could have convinced Dekarta himself to die for her. Perhaps this was why she had never come back after her marriage, after my conception.

So many pieces had fallen into place. More yet floated, indistinct. I could feel how close I was to understanding it all, but would I have time? There was the rest of the night, the next day, and another whole night and day beyond that. Then the ball, and the ceremony, and the end.

More than enough time, I decided.

“You can’t,” Sieh said again urgently, trotting along beside me. “Yeine, Naha needs to heal, just as I did. He can’t do that with mortal eyes shaping him—”

“I won’t look at him, then.”

“It’s not that simple! When he’s weak, he’s more dangerous than ever; he has trouble controlling himself. You shouldn’t—” His voice dropped an octave suddenly, breaking like that of a youth in puberty, and he cursed under his breath and stopped. I walked on, and was not surprised when I heard him stamp the floor behind me and shout, “You are the stubbornest, most infuriating mortal I’ve ever had to put up with!”

“Thank you,” I called back. There was a curve up ahead; I stopped before rounding it. “Go and rest in my room,” I said. “I’ll read you a story when I get back.”

What he snarled in reply, in his own tongue, needed no translation. But the walls did not fall in, and I did not turn into a frog, so he couldn’t have been that angry.

Zhakkarn had told me where to find Nahadoth. She had looked at me for a long time before saying it, reading my face with eyes that had assessed a warrior’s determination since the dawn of time. That she’d told me was a compliment—or a warning. Determination could easily become obsession. I did not care.

In the middle of the lowermost residential level, Zhakkarn had said, Nahadoth had an apartment. The palace was perpetually shadowed here by its own bulk, and in the center there would be no windows. All the Enefadeh had dwellings on that level, for those unpleasant occasions when they needed to sleep and eat and otherwise care for their semimortal bodies. Zhakkarn had not mentioned why they’d chosen such an unpleasant location, but I thought I knew. Down there, just above the oubliette, they could be closer to Enefa’s Stone than to Itempas’s usurped sky. Perhaps the lingering feel of her presence was a comfort, given that they suffered so much in her name.

The level was silent when I stepped out of the lift alcove. None of the palace’s mortal complement lived here—not that I blamed them. Who would want the Nightlord for a neighbor? Unsurprisingly, the level seemed unusually gloomy; the palace walls did not glow so brightly here. Nahadoth’s brooding presence permeated the whole level.

But when I rounded the last curve, I was briefly blinded by a flash of unexpected brightness. In the afterimage of that flash I had seen a woman, bronze-skinned and silver-haired, almost as tall as Zhakkarn and sternly beautiful, kneeling in the corridor as if to pray. The light had come from the wings on her back, covered in mirror-bright feathers of overlapping precious metals. I had seen her once before, this woman, in a dream—

Then I blinked my watering eyes and looked again, and the light was gone. In its place, heavyset, plain Kurue was laboriously climbing to her feet, glaring at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, for the interruption of whatever meditations a goddess required. “But I need to speak with Nahadoth.”