The Kingdom of Gods (44 page)

I wondered if she’d had this conversation with Itempas. “Except she made mortalkind complete, unlike us.”

She shook her head again, the soft curls of her hair wafting gently as if in a breeze. “Gods are just as complete as mortals. Nahadoth isn’t wholly dark. Father isn’t wholly light.” She paused, her eyes narrowing at me. “
You
haven’t been a true child since the universe was young. And for that matter, the War in part began because Enefa — the preserver of balance —
lost
her balance. She loved one of her brothers more than the other, and that broke them all.”

I stiffened. “How
dare
you blame her! You don’t know anything about it —”

“I know what he told me. I know what I’ve learned, from books and legends and conversations with godlings who were there when the whole mess began, who watched from the sidelines and tried to think how to stop it, and wept as they realized they could not. You were too close, Sieh; you were hip-deep in the carnage. You decided Itempas was to blame without ever asking
why
.”

“He killed my mother! Who cares why?”

“His siblings abandoned him. Only for a brief time, but solitude is his antithesis; it weakened him. Then Shahar Arameri murdered his son, and that drove him over the edge. In this case, the ‘why’ matters a great deal, I think.”

I laughed, bitter, sick with guilt and trying to hide my shock. Solitude?
Solitude?
I had never known that — No, none of that mattered. It could not matter. “A mortal! Why in the Maelstrom’s name would he mourn a single mortal so powerfully?”

“Because he loves his children.” I flinched. Glee was glaring at me, her eyes plainly visible in the dim room. Neither of us had bothered to put on a light, because the light from the street lanterns was more than enough to see by. “Because he’s a good father, and good fathers do not stop loving if their children are merely mortal. Or if those children hate them.”

I stared at her and found myself trembling. “He didn’t love us when he fought us in the War.”

Glee folded her hands in front of her, steepling her fingers. She’d been spending too much time with Ahad. “From what I understand, your side was winning until Shahar Arameri used the Stone of Earth. Weren’t you?”

“What the hells does that matter?”

“You tell me.”

And of course I thought back to the worst days of my life. Shahar had not been the first to use the Stone. I had sensed a godling’s controlling hand first, sending searing power — the power of life and death itself — in a terrible wave across the battlefield of earth. Dozens of my siblings had fallen in that attack. It had nearly caught me, too. That had been the first warning that the tide was turning. Until then, the taste of triumph had
been thick in my mouth. Who had that godling been? One of Tempa’s loyalists; he’d had his own, same as Nahadoth. Whoever it was had died trying to wield the power of Enefa.

Then Shahar had gotten the Stone, and she hadn’t bothered attacking mere godlings. She went straight for Nahadoth, whom she hated most because he had taken Itempas from her. I remembered watching him fall. I had screamed and wept and known then that it was my fault. All of it.

“He … didn’t have to …” I whispered. “Itempas. If he was so sorry, he could have just —”

“That isn’t his nature. Order is cause and effect, action and reaction. When attacked, he fights back.”

I heard her shift to get comfortable in the chair. I heard this, because I could not look at her anymore, with her fine dark skin and too-keen eyes. She was not as obviously alien as Shinda had been, all those centuries ago. She could hide among mortalkind more easily because her peculiar heritage did not immediately announce itself and because the last thing anyone noticed about a six-foot-tall black woman was the aura of magic. There was something about her that made me think she was quite capable of defending herself, too — and I sensed Itempas’s hand in that. Action and reaction.
This
mortal child would not die so easily; her father had made sure of that.

Our
father.

“Many things triggered the War,” said Glee, speaking softly. “Shahar Arameri’s madness, Itempas’s grief, Enefa’s jealousy, Nahadoth’s carelessness. No one person is to blame.” She lifted her chin belligerently. “However much you might like to believe otherwise.”

I stayed silent.

Itempas had never been like Nahadoth. Naha plucked lovers from the mass of mortality like flowers from a meadow, and he discarded them as easily when they wilted or a more interesting flower came along. Oh, he loved them, in his own erratic way, but steadfastness was not his nature.

Not so Itempas. He did not love easily — but when he did, he loved forever. He had turned to Shahar Arameri, his high priestess, when Nahadoth and Enefa stopped wanting him. They’d never stopped loving him, of course; they’d just loved each other a little more. But to Itempas, it must have felt like the darkest of hells. Shahar had offered her love, and he had accepted it, because he was a creature of logic, and
something
was better than
nothing
. And because he had chosen to love her and please her, he had bent his own rules enough to give her a son. Then he’d loved that son and stayed with his mortal family for ten years. He could have easily been content with them for the remainder of their mortal lives. An eyeblink in a god’s eternity. No great matter.

He had left them only because Naha and Nefa had convinced him that the mortals would be better off without him. And Naha and Nefa had done that only because someone had lied to them.

Just a harmless trick
, I had thought then. It harmed only the mortals, and then only a little. Shahar had status and wealth, and mortals were adaptable. They did not need him.

Just a harmless trick.

No one person is to blame
, Itempas’s daughter had said.

I closed my mouth against the taste of old, ground-in guilt.

In my silence, Glee spoke again. “As for what kind of man he is now …” I thought she shrugged. “He’s stubborn, and proud, and infuriating. The kind of man who will move the earth and skies to get what he wants. Or to protect those he cares for.”

Yes. I remembered that man. How minute of a change was sanity to insanity and back? Not much, across the expanse of time.

“I want to see him,” I whispered.

She was silent for a moment. “I will not allow you to harm him.”

“I don’t want to harm him, damn it —” Though I had, I remembered, on one of the last occasions I’d seen him. She must have heard about that. I grimaced. “I won’t do anything this time, I promise.”

“The promise of a trickster.”

I forced myself to take a deep breath against my own temper, releasing that held breath rather than the furious words in my thoughts. It was not right, the way I thought of her. Mortal. Inferior. It was not right that I struggled to respect her. She was as much a child of the Three as I.

“There’s no promise I can offer that you’ll trust,” I said, and was relieved that my voice stayed soft. “You shouldn’t, really. I only
have
to keep promises to children. And honestly, I don’t know if even that applies anymore. Everything I am has changed.” I leaned my head back on the window and gazed out at the night-lit city below.

Nahadoth could hear any words spoken at night, if he wanted.

“Please let me see him,” I said again.

She watched me steadily. “You should know that his magic
works only in certain circumstances. It’s not powerful enough to stop whatever’s happened to you — not in his current form.”

“I know. And I know you have to keep him safe. Do what you have to do. But if it’s possible …”

I could see her, very faintly, beyond my reflection. She nodded to herself slowly, as if I’d passed some sort of test. “It’s possible. I can’t promise anything, of course; he may not want to see
you
. But I’ll speak to him.” She paused. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Ahad.”

Surprised, I glanced at her. My senses were not so dull that I couldn’t still distinguish scents, and the faint whiff of Ahad — cheroots and bitterness and emotions like long-clotted blood — clung to her like stale perfume. It was a few days old, but she had been in his presence, close to him, touching him. “I thought you had a thing with him.”

She had the grace to look abashed. “I find him attractive, I suppose. That’s not ‘a thing.’

” I shook my head, bemused. “I’m still amazed that he had enough of a soul to be made into a complete and separate being. I don’t know what you see in him.”

“You don’t know him,” she said, with a hint of sharpness that told me there was more to the “thing” than she was letting on. “He does not reveal himself to you. He loved you once; you can hurt him as no one else can. What you think of him, and what he truly is, are very different things.”

I rocked back a little, surprised at her vehemence. “Well, clearly you don’t trust him —”

She flicked a hand impatiently, dismissively. Gods, she was so much like Itempas that it hurt. “I’m not a fool. It may be a long
time before he sheds the habits of his former life. Until then, I’m cautious with him.”

I was tempted to warn her further: she needed to be more than cautious with Ahad. He had been created from the substance of Nahadoth in his darkest hour, nurtured on suffering and refined by hate. He liked to hurt people. I don’t think even he realized what a monster he was.

But that impatient little flick had been a warning for
me
. She wasn’t interested in whatever I had to say about Ahad. Clearly she intended to judge him for herself. I couldn’t really blame her; I wasn’t exactly unbiased.

I wasn’t tired, but clearly Glee was. She fell silent after that, and I turned back to the window to let her sleep. Presently her breathing evened out, providing a slow and curiously soothing background noise for my thoughts. The people in the common room had finally shut up. There was no one but me and the city.

And Nahadoth, appearing silently in the window reflection behind me.

I was not surprised to see him. I smiled at the pale glimmer of his face, not turning from the window. “It’s been a while.”

The change to his face was minute; a slight drawing together of those fine, perfect brows. I chuckled, guessing his thoughts. A while; two years. Barely noticeable, to a god. I’d taken longer naps. “Every passing moment shortens my life, Naha. Of course I feel it more now.”

“Yes.” He fell silent again, thinking his unfathomable thoughts. He didn’t look well, I decided, though this had nothing to do with his actual appearance, which was magnificent.
But that was just his usual mask. Beneath that mask, which I could just barely perceive, he felt … strange. Off. A storm whose winds had faltered at the touch of colder, quelling air. He was unhappy — very much so.

“When you see Itempas,” he said at last, “ask him to help you.”

At this I swung around on the windowsill, frowning. “You’re not serious.”

“Yeine can do nothing to erase your mortality. I can neither cure nor preserve you. I meant it, Sieh, when I said I would not lose you.”

“There’s nothing he can
do
, Naha. He’s got less magic than me!”

“Yeine and I have discussed the matter. We will grant him a single day’s parole if he will agree to help you.”

My mouth fell open. It took me several tries to speak. “He’s endured barely a century of mortality. Do you really think we can trust him?”

“If he attempts to escape or attack us, I will kill his demon.”

I flinched. “Glee?” I glanced at her. She had fallen asleep in the chair, her head slumped to one side. Either she was a heavy sleeper, an excellent faker, or Naha was keeping her asleep. Most likely the latter, given the subject of our conversation.

She had tried to help me.

“Are we Arameri now?” I asked. My voice was harsher than usual in the dimness, deep and rough. I kept forgetting that it was not a child’s voice. “Are we willing to pervert love itself to get what we want?”

“Yes.”
I knew he meant it by the fact that the room’s temperature suddenly dropped ten degrees. “The Arameri are wise in
one respect, Sieh: they show no mercy to their enemies. I will not risk unleashing Itempas’s madness again. He lives only because the mortal realm cannot exist without him and because Yeine has pleaded for his life. I permitted him to keep his daughter only for this purpose. Demon, beloved … she is a weapon, and I mean to use her.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You regretted what you did to the demons, Naha. Have you forgotten that? They are our children, too, you said —”

He stepped closer, reaching for my face. “You are the only child who matters to me now.”

I recoiled and struck his hand away. His eyes widened in surprise. “What the hells kind of father are you? You always say things like that, treat some of us better than others. Gods, Naha! How twisted is that?”

Silence fell, and in it my soul shriveled. Not in fear. It was simply that I knew, or had known, precisely why he did not love all his children equally. Differentiation, variation, appreciation of the unique: this was part of what he was. His children were not the same, so his feelings toward each were not the same. He loved us all, but differently. And because he did this, because he did not pretend that love was fair or equal, mortals could mate for an afternoon or for the rest of their lives. Mothers could tell their twins or triplets apart. Children could have crushes and outgrow them; elders could remain devoted to their spouses long after beauty had gone. The mortal heart was fickle. Naha made it so. And because of this, they were free to love as they wished, and not solely by the dictates of instinct or power or tradition.