Svayyah closed the distance between them with a single lash of her muscular body. In the brief moment that passed before their bodies met, Shingrayu rattled off another spell.
Svayyah wrapped her serpentine body around Shingrayu’s, and the first touch sent a nettling ripple through her veins. The touch of the other naga was painful to her. Scales stood out from her flesh, and the ridge of long spines on her back leaped to attention. A painful cramp raced up the entire length of her body and slammed into her jaw.
But she felt it coming, and before it got there, she opened her mouth wide again. Perhaps confident that his shocking grasp would fend her off, Shingrayu left his all too vulnerable neck open. Svayyah’s fangs pressed down, and the lightning touch of his spell clamped her jaws closed like a vise. She bit so deeply into Shingrayu’s neck that she felt her teeth come together. She couldn’t swallow, and couldn’t release the hot mouthful of flesh. The blood in the water, like black-red smoke in the air of the surface world, burned her eyes and filled her nose so she could neither see nor smell. The sound of her own blood whooshing through veiiis and arteries as clamped tight as her jaw drowned out all other sounds.
Holding her breath, Svayyah writhed against Shingrayu as though they were mating. The series of cramps that wrapped her ever tighter around her adversary threatened to snap every bone in her body, and Svayyah steeled herself against that certainty. A loud snap, then the second and third, came to her not through her ears but through her scales. She thought at first that her bones had begun to break under Shingrayu’s magic, but there was no pain.
It wasn’t her bones that were breaking.
The effect of Shingrayu’s spell fled all at once. Svayyah uncoiled, out of control, like a string from around a child’s toy. She floated away from Shingrayu and spat the mouthful of his throat out into the water between them. She coughed and shuddered, just trying to breathe.
Shingrayu drifted limp, but his eyes were open. He blinked and opened his mouth to speak. He had something to say, but couldn’t get the words out. His lips twitched. Intelligence and intent left his eyes first, then the life itself fled.
Svayyah continued to gasp for a breath as the other water nagas circled closer.
“Svayyah says that this is a great work this dista’ssara does,” Zaeliira said. “Does that make this human a great being? Does it make it senthissa’ssa?”
Does it? Svayyah thought.
She turned to Devorast, who’s expression had not changed at all. She felt a sense of inevitability from him. It wasn’t that he knew she would kill Shingrayu, but something elsesomething that depended in no way on what she did, what Shingrayu did, or what any of the naja’ssara did.
“Are you, Ivar Devorast?” she managed to whisper through a throat still struggling open. “Is Ivar Devorast a teacher worthy of emulating?”
“Well?” Zaeliira pressed.
Svayyah turned to her kin and said, “If he builds it.”
She had spoken like a human, and had done it on purpose. The phrasing was not lost on Zaeliira at least.
“Very well,” said the aged water naga. “Let this dista’ssara build its great work. If it succeeds, it will have proven itself senthissa’ssa. Do the naja’ssara of the Nagaflow and Nagawater agree? All of like mind on this?”
Each of the other five nagas signaled their agreement and one by one swam off to their own business. Zaeliira and Svayyah shared a look, then she too swam off at her own slow pace.
Svayyah looked at Devorast in his bubble and shook her head. He had done precisely what he should have, and Svayyah found herself wholly unable to believe it.
He hadn’t said a thing the whole time.
13
1 °Ches, the Yearofthe Sword (1365 DR) Third Quarter, Innarlith
How did you” Phyrea began, then quickly chose from two possible endings to that question”find me?”
Devorast stepped closer to her, but stopped more than her arm’s length away. He’d been sitting in one of the uncomfortable old chairs that came with the rented flat, waiting for her in the dark. In the light of the candle she’d lit before she knew he was sitting there, his skin looked softer than she knew it to be, but his eyes were no less guarded, no more forthcoming.
“Osorkon,” he said. His voice sounded different, softer too, but that couldn’t have been the candlelight.
“The ransar?” she asked. She didn’t really care how he’d found her, but a chill ran down her spine at the revelation that the ransar knew of what she thought of as her hiding place. Of all the conversations, of all the things she hoped would pass between them that night, the wheres and whys and hows of the things Osorkon knew about her was of the least interest. “How did he?”
Phyrea stopped when Devorast moved even closer to her. He smelled of the dry earth, the poison sea, and the bitter wind.
“Is that it?” she asked, her voice below even a whisper, but she knew he heard her. “Is that how you can do this to me? Is that your secret? Are you an elemental? Some creature of all the forces of natureearth, air, fire, water… the Astral ether itself?”
He reached out a hand and though her mind wanted her body to flinch away, she found herself leaning forward. When the tip of his finger found the lace of her bodice she fell half a step closer to him. “What are you?” she asked.
He raised his other hand and began to unlace her bodice. Phyrea’s knees shook, then her hips, then her shoulders. Her hands had been shaking already. She found it difficult to breathe in, but exhaled in throaty gasps.
“I’m all I ever needed to be, and all you ever need from me,” Devorast said. “A man.”
“No,” she said, even while wishing it was true. “That can’t be. That can’t be all.”
The stiff leather bodice fell away.
“I’ve said things about you,” Phyrea told him as he put his hand to the side of her face. His palm was warm and rough. “I’ve hurt you.”
He kissed her on the cheek, and she leaned against him. She put her hands on his forearms. The thin tunic he wore was made of rough material, cheap peasant clothes.
“I poison people against you,” she told him as his tongue played on her ear. Her body quivered at his touch. She couldn’t quite breathe. “I hurt you on purpose.”
“No, you don’t,” he whispered, then kissed her on the mouth.
She tried to melt into him, tried her best to disappear into his embrace, but couldn’t.
“If you tell me to stop, I’ll stop,” she said when their lips finally parted. “If you demand my obedience, you’ll have it. If you want me as your wife, your harlot, your slave, or your mistress, you will have me. I will remake myself to whatever standards you impose. I will erase myself if that’s what you wish. I’ll cut myself. I’ll kill myself. I’ll-“
“Do none of those things,” he said into the skin of her neck. “You don’t need to do anything to satisfy me, the same way I’ll never do anything simply to satisfy you.”
Tears streamed from her eyes.
“I can’t have you, can I?” she asked.
“Not the way you mean,” was his answer.
She cried while he held her for a little while, and she only stopped when she realized that in that time, she hadn’t heard one of the voices, or seen a single apparition. She hadn’t wanted to hurt herself, though she’d offered to.
“I have to destroy you,” she told him even as she let him carry her to her bed. “This world is too small for you.”
He moved to kiss her again, but she stopped him.
