The Kingdom of Gods

She looks so much like Enefa, I think, the first time I see her.

Not this moment, as she stands trembling in the lift alcove, her heartbeat so loud that it drums against my ears. This is not really the first time I’ve seen her. I have checked in on our investment now and again over the years, sneaking out of the palace on moonless nights. (Nahadoth is the one our masters fear most during those hours, not me.) I first met her when she was an infant. I crept in through the nursery window and perched on the railing of her crib to watch her. She watched me back, unusually quiet and solemn even then. Where other infants were fascinated by the world around them, she was constantly preoccupied by the second soul nestled against her own. I waited for her to go mad, and felt pity, but nothing more.

I next visited when she was two, toddling after her mother with great determination. Not mad yet. Again when she was five; I watched her sit at her father’s knee, listening raptly to his tales of the gods. Still not mad. When she was nine, I watched her mourn her father. By that point, it had become clear that she was not, and would never go, insane. Yet there was no doubt that Enefa’s soul affected her. Aside from her looks, there was the way she killed. I watched her climb out from beneath the corpse of her first man, panting and covered in filth, with a bloody stone knife in her hand. Though she was only thirteen years old, I felt no horror from her—which I should have, her heart’s fluctuations amplified by her double souls. There was only satisfaction in her face, and a very familiar coldness at her core. The warriors’ council women, who had expected to see her suffer, looked at each other in unease. Beyond the circle of older women, in the shadows, her watching mother smiled.

I fell in love with her then, just a little.

So now I drag her through my dead spaces, which I have never shown to another mortal, and it is to the corporeal core of my soul that I take her. (I would take her to my realm, show her my true soul, if I could.) I love her wonder as she walks among my little toy worlds. She tells me they are beautiful. I will cry when she dies for us.

Then Naha finds her. Pathetic, isn’t it? We two gods, the oldest and most powerful beings in the mortal realm, both besotted by a sweaty, angry little mortal girl. It is more than her looks. More than her ferocity, her instant maternal devotion, the speed with which she lunges to strike. She is more than Enefa, for Enefa never loved me so much, nor was Enefa so passionate in life and death. The old soul has been improved, somehow, by the new.

She chooses Nahadoth. I do not mind so much. She loves me, too, in her way. I am grateful.

And when it all ends and the miracle has occurred and she is a goddess (again), I weep. I am happy. But still so very alone.

1

There will be no tricks in this tale. I tell you this so that you can relax. You’ll listen more closely if you aren’t flinching every other instant, waiting for the pratfall. You will not reach the end and suddenly learn I have been talking to my other soul or making a lullaby of my life for someone’s unborn brat. I find such things disingenuous, so I will simply tell the tale as I lived it.

But wait, that’s not a real beginning. Time is an irritation, but it provides structure. Should I tell this in the mortal fashion? All right, then, linear. Slooooow. You require context.

Beginnings. They are not always what they seem. Nature is cycles, patterns, repetition—but of what we believe, of the beginning I understand, there was once only Maelstrom, the unknowable. Over a span of uncountable aeons, as none of us were here yet to count, It churned forth endless substances and concepts and creatures. Some of those must have been glorious, because even today the Maelstrom spins forth new life with regular randomness, and many of those creations are indeed beautiful and wondrous. But most of them last only an eyeblink or two before the Maelstrom rips them apart again, or they die of instant old age, or they collapse in on themselves and become tiny Maelstroms in turn. These are absorbed back into the greater cacophony.

But one day the Maelstrom made something that did not die. Indeed, this thing was remarkably like Itself—wild, churning, eternal, ever changing. Yet this new thing was ordered enough to think, and feel, and dedicate itself to its own survival. In token of which, the first thing it did was get the hells away from the Maelstrom.

But this new creature faced a terrible dilemma, because away from the Maelstrom there was nothing. No people, no places, no spaces, no darkness, no dimension, no EXISTENCE.

A bit much for even a god to endure. So this being—whom we shall call Nahadoth because that is a pretty name, and whom we shall label male for the sake of convenience if not completeness—promptly set out to create an existence, which he did by going mad and tearing himself apart.

This was remarkably effective. And thus Nahadoth found himself accompanied by a formless immensity of separate substance. Purpose and structure began to cohere around it simply as a side effect of the mass’s presence, but only so much of that could occur spontaneously. Much like the Maelstrom, it churned and howled and thundered; unlike the Maelstrom, it was not in any way alive.

It was, however, the earliest form of the universe and the gods’ realm that envelops it. This was a wonder—but Nahadoth likely did not notice, because he was a gibbering lunatic. So let us return to the Maelstrom.

I like to believe that It is aware. Eventually It must have noticed Its child’s loneliness and distress. So presently, It spat out another entity that was aware and that also managed to escape the havoc of its birth. This new one—who has always and only been male—named himself Bright Itempas, because he was an arrogant, self-absorbed son of a demon even then. And because Itempas is also a gigantic screaming twit, he attacked Nahadoth, who… well. Naha very likely did not make a good conversation partner at the time. Not that they talked at all, in those days before speech.

So they fought, and fought, and fought times a few million jillion nillion, until suddenly one or the other of them got tired of the whole thing and proposed a truce. Both of them claim to have done this, so I cannot tell which one is joking. And then, because they had to do something if they weren’t fighting and because they were the only living beings in the universe after all, they became lovers. Somewhere between all this—the fighting or the lovemaking, not so very different for those two—they had a powerful effect on the shapeless mass of substance that Nahadoth had given birth to. It gained more function, more structure. And all was well for another Really Long Time.

Then along came the Third, a she-creature named Enefa, who should have settled things because usually three of anything is better, more stable, than two. For a while this was the case. In fact, EXISTENCE became the universe, and the beings soon became a family, because it was Enefa’s nature to give meaning to anything she touched. I was the first of their many, many children.

So there we were: a universe, a father and a mother and a Naha, and a few hundred children. And our grandparent, I suppose—the Maelstrom, if one can count It as such given that It would destroy us all if we did not take care. And the mortals, when Enefa finally created them. I suppose those were like pets—part of the family and yet not really—to be indulged and disciplined and loved and kept safe in the finest of cages, on the gentlest of leashes. We only killed them when we had to.

Things went wrong for a while, but at the time that this all began, there had been some improvement. My mother was dead, but she got better. My father and I had been imprisoned, but we’d won our way free. My other father was still a murdering, betraying bastard, though, and nothing would ever change that, no matter how much penance he served—which meant that the Three could never be whole again, no matter that all three of them lived and were for the most part sane. This left a grating, aching void in our family, which was only tolerable because we had already endured far worse.

That is when my mother decided to take things into her own hands.

I followed Yeine one day, when she went to the mortal realm and shaped herself into flesh and appeared in the musty inn room that Itempas had rented. They spoke there, exchanging inanities and warnings while I lurked incorporeal in a pocket of silence, spying. Yeine might have noticed me; my tricks rarely worked on her. If so, she did not care that I watched. I wish I knew what that meant.

Because there came the dreaded moment in which she looked at him, really looked at him, and said, “You’ve changed.”

And he said, “Not enough.”

And she said, “What do you fear?” To which he said nothing, of course, because it is not his nature to admit such things.

So she said, “You’re stronger now. She must have been good for you.”

The room filled with his anger, though his expression did not change. “Yes. She was.”

There was a moment of tension between them, in which I hoped. Yeine is the best of us, full of good, solid mortal common sense and her own generous measure of pride. Surely she would not succumb! But then the moment passed and she sighed and looked ashamed and said, “It was… wrong of us. To take her from you.”

That was all it took, that acknowledgment. In the eternity of silence that followed, he forgave her. I knew it as a mortal creature knows the sun has risen. And then he forgave himself—for what, I cannot be sure and dare not guess. Yet that, too, was a palpable change. He suddenly stood a little taller, grew calmer, let down the guard of arrogance he’d kept up since she arrived. She saw the walls fall—and behind them, the him that used to be. The Itempas who’d once won over her resentful predecessor, tamed wild Nahadoth, disciplined a fractious litter of child-gods, and crafted from whole cloth time and gravity and all the other amazing things that made life possible and so interesting. It isn’t hard to love that version of him. I know.

So I do not blame her, not really. For betraying me.

But it hurt so much to watch as she went to him and touched his lips with her fingers. There was a look of dazzlement on her face as she beheld the brilliance of his true self. (She yielded so easily. When had she become so weak? Damn her. Damn her to her own misty hells.)

She frowned a little and said, “I don’t know why I came here.”

“One lover has never been enough for any of us,” said Itempas, smiling a sad little smile, as if he knew how unworthy he was of her desire. Despite this, he took her shoulders and pulled her close and their lips touched and their essences blended and I hated them, I hated them, I despised them both, how dare he take her from me, how dare she love him when I had not forgiven him, how dare they both leave Naha alone when he’d suffered so much, how could they? I hated them and I loved them and gods how I wanted to be with them, why couldn’t I just be one of them, it wasn’t fair—

—no. No. Whining was pointless. It didn’t even make me feel better. Because the Three could never be Four, and even when the Three were reduced to two, a godling could never replace a god, and any heartbreak that I felt in that moment was purely my own damned fault for wanting what I could not have.

When I could bear their happiness no more, I fled. To a place that matched the Maelstrom in my heart. To the only place within the mortal realm I have ever called home. To my own personal hell… called Sky.

I was sitting corporeal at the top of the Nowhere Stair, sulking, when the children found me. Total chance, that. Mortals think we plan everything.

They were a matched set. Six years old—I am good at gauging ages in mortals—bright-eyed, quick-minded, like children who have had good food and space to run and pleasures to stimulate the soul. The boy was dark-haired and -eyed and -skinned, tall for his age, solemn. The girl was blonde and green-eyed and pale, intent. Pretty, both of them. Richly dressed. And little tyrants, as Arameri tended to be at that age.

“You will assist us,” said the girl in a haughty tone.

Inadvertently I glanced at their foreheads, my belly clenched for the jerk of the chains, the painful slap of the magic they’d once used to control us. Then I remembered the chains were gone, though the habit of straining against them apparently remained. Galling. The marks on their heads were circular, denoting fullbloods, but the circles themselves were mere outlines, not filled in. Just a few looping, overlapping rings of command, aimed not at us but at reality in general. Protection, tracking, all the usual spells of safety. Nothing to force obedience, theirs or anyone else’s.

I stared at the girl, torn between amazement and amusement. She had no idea who—or what—I was, that much was clear. The boy, who looked less certain, looked from her to me and said nothing.

“Arameri brats on the loose,” I drawled. My smile seemed to reassure the boy, infuriate the girl. “Someone’s going to get in trouble for letting you two run into me down here.”

At this they both looked apprehensive, and I realized the problem: they were lost. We were in the underpalace, those levels beneath Sky’s bulk that sat in perpetual shadow and had once been the demesne of the palace’s lowblood servants—though clearly that was no longer the case. A thick layer of dust coated the floors and decorative moldings all around us, and aside from the two in front of me, there was no scent of mortals anywhere nearby. How long had they been wandering down here alone? They looked tired and frazzled and depleted by despair.

Which they covered with belligerence. “You will instruct us in how we might reach the overpalace,” said the girl, “or guide us there.” She thought a moment, then lifted her chin and added, “Do this now, or it will not go well with you!”

I couldn’t help it: I laughed. It was just too perfect, her fumbling attempt at hauteur, their extremely poor luck in meeting me, all of it. Once upon a time, little girls like her had made my life a hell, ordering me about and giggling when I contorted myself to obey. I had lived in terror of Arameri tantrums. Now I was free to see this one as she truly was: just a frightened creature parroting the mannerisms of her parents, with no more notion of how to ask for what she wanted than how to fly.

And sure enough, when I laughed, she scowled and put her hands on her hips and poked out her bottom lip in a way that I have always adored—in children. (In adults it is infuriating, and I kill them for it.) Her brother, who had seemed sweeter-natured, was beginning to glower, too. Delightful. I have always been partial to brats.

“You have to do what we say!” said the girl, stamping her foot. “You will help us!”

I wiped away a tear and sat back against the stair wall, exhaling as the laughter finally passed. “You will find your own damn way home,” I said, still grinning, “and count yourselves lucky that you’re too cute to kill.”

That shut them up, and they stared at me with more curiosity than fear. Then the boy, who I had already begun to suspect was the smarter if not the stronger of the two, narrowed his eyes at me.

“You don’t have a mark,” he said, pointing at my forehead. The girl started in surprise.

“Why, no, I don’t,” I said. “Imagine that.”

“You aren’t… Arameri, then?” His face screwed up, as if he had found himself speaking gibberish. You curtain apple jump, then?

“No, I’m not.”

“Are you a new servant?” asked the girl, seduced out of anger by her own curiosity. “Just come to Sky from outside?”

I put my arms behind my head, stretching my feet out in front of me. “I’m not a servant at all, actually.”

“You’re dressed like one,” said the boy, pointing.

I looked at myself in surprise and realized I had manifested the same clothing I’d usually worn during my imprisonment: loose pants (good for running), shoes with a hole in one toe, and a plain loose shirt, all white. Ah, yes—in Sky, servants wore white every day. Highbloods wore it only for special occasions, preferring brighter colors otherwise. The two in front of me had both been dressed in deep emerald green, which matched the girl’s eyes and complemented the boy’s nicely.

“Oh,” I said, annoyed that I’d inadvertently fallen prey to old habit. “Well, I’m not a servant. Take my word for it.”

“You aren’t with the Teman delegation,” said the boy, speaking slowly while his eyes belied his racing thoughts. “Datennay was the only child with them, and they left three days ago, anyway. And they dressed like Temans. Metal bits and twisty hair.”

“I’m not Teman, either.” I grinned again, waiting to see how they handled that one.

“You look Teman,” said the girl, clearly not believing me. She pointed at my head. “Your hair barely has any curl, and your eyes are sharp and flat at the corners, and your skin is browner than Deka’s.”

I glanced at the boy, who looked uncomfortable at this comparison. I could see why. Though he bore a fullblood’s circle on his brow, it was painfully obvious that someone had brought non-Amn delicacies to the banquet of his recent heritage. If I hadn’t known it was impossible, I would have guessed he was some variety of High Norther. He had Amn features, with their long-stretched facial lines, but his hair was blacker than Nahadoth’s void and as straight as windblown grass, and he was indeed a rich all-over brown that had nothing to do with a suntan. I had seen infants like him drowned or head-staved or tossed off the Pier, or marked as lowbloods and given over to servants to raise. Never had one been given a fullblood mark.

The girl had no hint of the foreign about her—no, wait. It was there, just subtle. A fullness to her lips, the angle of her cheekbones, and her hair was a more brassy than sunlit gold. To Amn eyes, these would just be interesting idiosyncracies, a touch of the exotic without all the unpleasant political baggage. If not for her brother’s existence, no one would have ever guessed that she was not pure-blooded, either.

I glanced at the boy again and saw the warning-sign wariness in his eyes. Yes, of course. They would have already begun to make his life hell.

While I pondered this, the children fell to whispering, debating whether I looked more of this or that or some other mortal race. I could hear every word of it, but out of politeness I pretended not to. Finally the boy stage-whispered, “I don’t think he’s Teman at all,” in a tone that let me know he suspected what I really was.

With eerie unity they faced me again.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a servant or not, or Teman or not,” said the girl. “We’re fullbloods, and that means you have to do what we say.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.

“Yes, it does!”

I yawned and closed my eyes. “Make me.”

They fell silent again, and I felt their consternation. I could have pitied them, but I was having too much fun. Finally, I felt a stir of air and warmth nearby, and I opened my eyes to find that the boy had sat down beside me.

“Why won’t you help us?” he asked, his voice soft with honest concern, and I nearly flinched beneath the onslaught of his big dark eyes. “We’ve been down here all day, and we ate our sandwiches already, and we don’t know the way back.”

Damnation. I’m partial to cuteness, too. “All right,” I said, relenting. “Where are you trying to go?”

The boy brightened. “To the World Tree’s heart!” Then his excitement flagged. “Or at least, that was where we were trying to go. Now we just want to go back to our rooms.”

“A sad end to a grand adventure,” I said, “but you wouldn’t have found what you were looking for anyhow. The World Tree was created by Yeine, the Mother of Life; its heart is her heart. Even if you found the chunk of wood that exists at the Tree’s core, it would mean nothing.”

“Oh,” said the boy, slumping more. “We don’t know how to find her.”

“I do,” I said, and then it was my turn to sag, as I remembered what had driven me to Sky. Were they still together, she and Itempas? He was mortal, with merely mortal endurance, but she could renew his strength again and again for as long as she liked. How I hated her. (Not really. Yes, really. Not really.)

“I do,” I said again, “but that wouldn’t help you. She’s busy with other matters these days. Not much time for me or any of her children.”

“Oh, is she your mother?” The boy looked surprised. “That sounds like our mother. She never has time for us. Is your mother the family head, too?”

“Yes, in a way. Though she’s also new to the family, which makes for a certain awkwardness.” I sighed again, and the sound echoed within the Nowhere Stair, which descended into shadows at our feet. Back when I and the other Enefadeh had built this version of Sky, we had created this spiral staircase that led to nothing, twenty feet down to dead-end against a wall. It had been a long day spent listening to bickering architects. We’d gotten bored.

“It’s a bit like having a stepmother,” I said. “Do you know what that is?”

The boy looked thoughtful. The girl sat down beside him. “Like Lady Meull, of Agru,” she said to the boy. “Remember our genealogy lessons? She’s married to the duke now, but the duke’s children came from his first wife. His first wife is the mother. Lady Meull is the stepmother.” She looked at me for confirmation. “Like that, right?”

“Yes, yes, like that,” I said, though I neither knew nor cared who Lady Meull was. “Yeine is our queen, sort of, as well as our mother.”

“And you don’t like her?” Too much knowing in both the children’s eyes as they asked that question. The usual Arameri pattern, then, parents raising children who would grow up to plot their painful deaths. The signs were all there.

“No,” I said softly. “I love her.” Because I did, even when I hated her. “More than light and darkness and life. She is the mother of my soul.”

“So, then…” The girl was frowning. “Why are you sad?”

“Because love is not enough.” I fell silent for an instant, stunned as realization moved through me. Yes, here was truth, which they had helped me find. Mortal children are very wise, though it takes a careful listener or a god to understand this. “My mother loves me, and at least one of my fathers loves me, and I love them, but that just isn’t enough, not anymore. I need something more.” I groaned and drew up my knees, pressing my forehead against them. Comforting flesh and bone, as familiar as a security blanket. “But what? What? I don’t understand why everything feels so wrong. Something is changing in me.”

I must have seemed mad to them, and perhaps I was. All children are a little mad. I felt them look at each other. “Um,” said the girl. “You said one of your fathers?”

I sighed. “Yes. I have two. One of them has always been there when I needed him. I have cried for him and killed for him.” Where was he now, while his siblings turned to each other? He was not like Itempas—he accepted change—but that did not make him immune to pain. Was he unhappy? If I went to him, would he confide in me? Need me?

It troubled me that I wondered this.

“The other father…” I drew a deep breath and raised my head, propping my folded arms on my knees instead. “Well, he and I never had the best relationship. Too different, you see. He’s the firm disciplinarian type, and I am a brat.” I glanced at them and smiled. “Rather like you two, actually.”

They grinned back, accepting the title with honor. “We don’t have any fathers,” said the girl.

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “Someone had to make you.” Mortals had not yet mastered the art of making little mortals by themselves.

“Nobody important,” said the boy, waving a hand dismissively. I guessed he had seen a similar gesture from his mother. “Mother needed heirs and didn’t want to marry, so she chose someone she deemed suitable and had us.”

“Huh.” Not entirely surprising; the Arameri had never lacked for pragmatism. “Well, you can have mine, the second one. I don’t want him.”

The girl giggled. “He’s your father! He can’t be ours.”

She probably prayed to the Father of All every night. “Of course he can be. Though I don’t know if you’d like him any more than I do. He’s a bit of a bastard. We had a falling-out some time ago, and he disowned me, even though he was in the wrong. Good riddance.”

The girl frowned. “But don’t you miss him?”

I opened my mouth to say of course I don’t and then realized that I did. “Demonshit,” I muttered.

They gasped and giggled appropriately at this gutter talk. “Maybe you should go see him,” said the boy.

“I don’t think so.”

His small face screwed up into an affronted frown. “That’s silly. Of course you should. He probably misses you.”

I frowned, too taken aback by this idea to reject it out of hand. “What?”

“Well, isn’t that what fathers do?” He had no idea what fathers did. “Love you, even if you don’t love them? Miss you when you go away?”

I sat there silent, more troubled than I should have been. Seeing this, the boy reached out, hesitating, and touched my hand. I looked down at him in surprise.

“Maybe you should be happy,” he said. “When things are bad, change is good, right? Change means things will get better.”

I stared at him, this Arameri child who did not at all look Arameri and would probably die before his majority because of it, and I felt the knot of frustration within me ease.

“An Arameri optimist,” I said. “Where did you come from?”

To my surprise, both of them bristled. I realized at once that I had struck a nerve, and then realized which nerve when the girl lifted her chin. “He comes from right here in Sky, just like me.”

The boy lowered his eyes, and I heard the whisper of taunts around him, some in childish lilt and some deepened by adult malice: where did you come from did a barbarian leave you here by mistake maybe a demon dropped you off on its way to the hells because gods know you don’t belong here.

I saw how the words had scored his soul. He had made me feel better; he deserved something in recompense for that. I touched his shoulder and sent my blessing into him, making the words just words and making him stronger against them and putting a few choice retorts at the tip of his tongue for the next time. He blinked in surprise and smiled shyly. I smiled back.

The girl relaxed once it became clear that I meant her brother no harm. I willed a blessing to her, too, though she hardly needed it.

“I’m Shahar,” she said, and then she sighed and unleashed her last and greatest weapon: politeness. “Will you please tell us how to get home?”

Ugh, what a name! The poor girl. But I had to admit, it suited her. “Fine, fine. Here.” I looked into her eyes and made her know the palace’s layout as well as I had learned it over the generations that I had lived within its walls. (Not the dead spaces, though. Those were mine.)

The girl flinched, her eyes narrowing suddenly at mine. I had probably slipped into my cat shape a little. Mortals tended to notice the eyes, though that was never the only thing that changed about me. I put them back to nice round mortal pupils, and she relaxed. Then gasped as she realized she knew the way home.

“That’s a nice trick,” she said. “But what the scriveners do is prettier.”

A scrivener would have broken your head open if they’d tried what I just did, I almost retorted, but didn’t because she was mortal and mortals have always liked flash over substance and because it didn’t matter, anyway. Then the girl surprised me further, drawing herself up and bowing from the waist. “I thank you, sir,” she said. And while I stared at her, marveling at the novelty of Arameri thanks, she adopted that haughty tone she’d tried to use before. It really didn’t suit her; hopefully she would figure that out soon. “May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?”

“I am Sieh.” No hint of recognition in either of them. I stifled a sigh.

She nodded and gestured to her brother. “This is Dekarta.”

Just as bad. I shook my head and got to my feet. “Well, I’ve wasted enough time,” I said, “and you two should be getting back.” Outside the palace, I could feel the sun setting. For a moment I closed my eyes, waiting for the familiar, delicious vibration of my father’s return to the world, but of course there was nothing. I felt fleeting disappointment.

The children jumped up in unison. “Do you come here to play often?” asked the boy, just a shade too eagerly.

“Such lonely little cubs,” I said, and laughed. “Has no one taught you not to talk to strangers?”

Of course no one had. They looked at each other in that freakish speaking-without-words-or-magic thing that twins do, and the boy swallowed and said to me, “You should come back. If you do, we’ll play with you.”

“Will you, now?” It had been a long time since I’d played. Too long. I was forgetting who I was amid all this worrying. Better to leave the worry behind, stop caring about what mattered, and do what felt good. Like all children, I was easy to seduce.

“All right, then,” I said. “Assuming, of course, that your mother doesn’t forbid it”—which guaranteed that they would never tell her—“I’ll come back to this place on the same day, at the same time, next year.”

They looked horrified and exclaimed in unison, “Next year?”

“The time will pass before you know it,” I said, stretching to my toes. “Like a breeze through a meadow on a light spring day.”

It would be interesting to see them again, I told myself, because they were still young and would not become as foul as the rest of the Arameri for some while. And, because I had already grown to love them a little, I mourned, for the day they became true Arameri would most likely be the day I killed them. But until then, I would enjoy their innocence while it lasted.

I stepped between worlds and away.

The next year I stretched and climbed out of my nest and stepped across space again, and appeared at the top of the Nowhere Stair. It was early yet, so I amused myself conjuring little moons and chasing them up and down the steps. I was winded and sweaty when the children arrived and spied me.

“We know what you are,” blurted Deka, who had grown an inch.

“Do you, now? Whoops—” The moon I’d been playing with made a bid to escape, shooting toward the children because they stood between it and the corridor. I sent it home before it could put a hole in either of them. Then I grinned and flopped onto the floor, my legs splayed so as to take up as much space as possible, and caught my breath.

Deka crouched beside me. “Why are you out of breath?”

“Mortal realm, mortal rules,” I said, waving a hand in a vague circle. “I have lungs, I breathe, the universe is satisfied, hee-ho.”

“But you don’t sleep, do you? I read that godlings don’t sleep. Or eat.”

“I can if I want to. Sleeping and eating aren’t that interesting, so I generally don’t. But it looks a bit odd to forgo breathing—makes mortals very anxious. So I do that much.”

He poked me in the shoulder. I stared at him.

“I was seeing if you were real,” he said. “The book said you could look like anything.”

“Well, yes, but all of those things are real,” I replied.

“The book said you could be fire.”

I laughed. “Which would also be real.”

He poked me again, a shy grin spreading across his face. I liked his smile. “But I couldn’t do this to fire.” He poked me a third time.

“Watch it,” I said, giving him A Look. But it wasn’t serious, and he could tell, so he poked me again. With that I leapt on him, tickling, because I cannot resist an invitation to play. So we wrestled and he squealed and struggled to get free and complained that he would pee if I kept it up, and then he got a hand free and started tickling me back, and it actually did tickle awfully, so I curled up to escape him. It was like being drunk, like being in one of Yeine’s newborn heavens, so sweet and so perfect and so much delicious fun. I love being a god!

But a hint of sour washed across my tongue. When I lifted my head, I saw that Deka’s sister stood where he had left her, shifting from foot to foot and trying not to look like she yearned to join us. Ah, yes—someone had already told her that girls had to be dignified while boys could be rowdy, and she had foolishly listened to that advice. (One of many reasons I’d settled on a male form myself. Mortals said fewer stupid things to boys.)

“I think your sister’s feeling left out, Dekarta,” I said, and she blushed and fidgeted more. “What shall we do about it?”

“Tickle her, too!” Dekarta cried. Shahar threw him a glare, but he only giggled, too giddy with play-pleasure to be repressed so easily. I had a fleeting urge to lick his hair, but it passed.

“I’m not feeling left out,” she said.

I petted Dekarta to settle him and to satisfy my grooming urge, and considered what to do about Shahar. “I don’t think tickling would suit her,” I said at last. “Let’s find a game we can all play. What about, hmm… jumping on clouds?”

Shahar’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Jumping on clouds. Like jumping on a bed but better. I can show you. It’s fun, as long as you don’t fall through a hole. I’ll catch you if you do—don’t worry.”

Deka sat up. “You can’t do that. I’ve been reading books about magic and gods. You’re the god of childhood. You can only do things children do.”

I laughed, pulling him into a headlock, which he squealed and struggled to get free of, though he didn’t struggle all that hard. “Almost anything can be done for play,” I said. “If it’s play, I have power over it.”

He looked surprised, going still in my arms. I knew then that he had read the family records, because during my captivity, I had never once explained to the Arameri the full implications of my nature. They had thought I was the weakest of the Enefadeh. In truth, with Naha swallowed into mortal flesh every morning, I had been the strongest. Keeping the Arameri from realizing this had been one of my best tricks ever.

“Then let’s go cloud jumping!” Deka said.

Shahar looked eager, too, as I offered her my hand. But just as she reached for my hand, she hesitated. A familiar wariness came into her eyes.

“L-Lord Sieh,” she said, and grimaced. I did, too. I hated titles, so pretentious. “The book about you—”

“They wrote a book about me?” I was delighted.

“Yes. It said…” She lowered her eyes, then remembered that she was Arameri and looked up, visibly steeling herself. “It said you liked to kill people, back when you lived here. You would do tricks on them, sometimes funny tricks… but sometimes people would die.”

Still funny, I thought, but perhaps this was not the time to say such things aloud. “It’s true,” I said, guessing her question. “I must’ve killed, oh, a few dozen Arameri over the years.” Oh, but there had been that incident with the puppies. A few hundred, then.

She stiffened, and Deka did, too, so much that I let him go. Headlocks are no fun when they’re real. “Why?” asked Shahar.

I shrugged. “Sometimes they were in the way. Sometimes to prove a point. Sometimes just because I felt like it.”

Shahar scowled. I had seen that look on a thousand of her ancestors’ faces, and it always annoyed me. “Those are bad reasons to kill people.”

I laughed—but I had to force it. “Of course they’re bad reasons,” I said. “But how better to remind mortals that keeping a god as a slave is a bad idea?”

Her frown faltered a little, then returned in force. “The book said you killed babies. Babies didn’t do anything bad to you!”

I had forgotten the babies. And now my good mood was broken, so I sat up and glared at her. Deka drew back, looking from one to the other of us anxiously. “No,” I snapped at Shahar, “but I am the god of all children, little girl, and if I deem it fitting to take the lives of some of my chosen, then who the hells are you to question that?”

“I’m a child, too,” she said, jutting her chin forward. “But you’re not my god—Bright Itempas is.”

I rolled my eyes. “Bright Itempas is a coward.”

She inhaled, her face turning red. “He is not! That’s—”

“He is! He murdered my mother and abused my father—and killed more than a few of his own children, I’ll thank you to know! Do you think the blood is any thicker on my hands than on his? Or for that matter, on your own?”

She flinched, darting a look at her brother for support. “I’ve never killed anyone.”

“Yet. But it doesn’t matter, because everything you do is stained with blood.” I rose to a crouch, leaning forward until my face was inches from hers. To her credit, she did not shrink away, glaring back at me—but frowning. Listening. So I told her. “All your family’s power, all your riches, do you think they come from nowhere? Do you think you deserve them, because you’re smarter or holier or whatever they teach this family’s spawn these days? Yes, I killed babies. Because their mothers and fathers had no problem killing the babies of other mortals, who were heretics or who dared to protest stupid laws or who just didn’t breathe the way you Arameri liked!”

Appropriately, I ran out of breath at that point and had to stop, panting for air. Lungs were useful for putting mortals at ease but still inconvenient. Just as well, though. Both children had fallen silent, staring at me in a kind of horrified awe, and belatedly I realized I had been ranting. Sulking, I sat down on a step and turned my back on them, hoping that my anger would pass soon. I liked them—even Shahar, irritating as she was. I didn’t want to kill them yet.

“You… you think we’re bad,” she said after a long moment. There were tears in her voice. “You think I’m bad.”

I sighed. “I think your family’s bad, and I think they’re going to raise you to be just like them.” Or else they would kill her or drive her out of the family. I’d seen it happen too many times before.

“I’m not going to be bad.” She sniffed behind me. Deka, who was still within the range of my eyesight, looked up and inhaled, so I guessed that she was full-out crying now.

“You won’t be able to help it,” I said, resting my chin on my drawn-up knees. “It’s your nature.”

“It isn’t!” She stamped a foot on the floor. “My tutors say mortals aren’t like gods! We don’t have natures. We can all be what we want to be.”

“Right, right.” And I could be one of the Three.

Sudden agony shot through me, firing upward from the small of my back, and I yelped and jumped and rolled halfway down the steps before I regained control of myself. Sitting up, I clutched my back, willing the pain to stop and marveling that it did so only reluctantly.

“You kicked me,” I said in wonder, looking up the steps at her.

Deka had covered his mouth with both hands, his eyes wide; of the two of them, only he seemed to have realized that they were about to die. Shahar, fists clenched and legs braced and hair wild and eyes blazing, did not care. She looked ready to march down the steps and kick me again.

“I will be what I want to be,” she declared. “I’m going to be head of the family one day! What I say I’ll do, I’ll do. I am going to be good!”

I got to my feet. I wasn’t angry, in truth. It is the nature of children to squabble. Indeed, I was glad to see that Shahar was still herself under all the airs and silks; she was beautiful that way, furious and half mad, and for a fleeting instant I understood what Itempas had seen in her foremother.

But I did not believe her words. And that put me in an altogether darker mood as I went back up the steps, my jaw set and tight.

“Let’s play a game, then,” I said, and smiled.

Deka got to his feet, looking torn between fear and a desire to defend his sister; he hovered where he was, uncertain. There was no fear in Shahar’s eyes, though some of her anger faded into wariness. She wasn’t stupid. Mortals always knew to be careful when I smiled a certain way.

I stopped in front of her and held out a hand. In it, a knife appeared. Because I was Yeine’s son, I made it a Darre knife, the kind they gave to their daughters when they first learned to take lives in the hunt. Six inches straight and silvery, with a handle of filigreed bone.

“What is this?” she asked, frowning at it.

“What’s it look like? Take it.”

After a moment she did, holding it awkwardly and with visible distaste. Too barbaric for her Amn sensibilities. I nodded my approval, then beckoned to Dekarta, who was studying me with those lovely dark eyes of his. Remembering one of my other names, no doubt: Trickster. He did not come at my gesture.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said to him, making my smile more innocent, less frightening. “It’s your sister who kicked me, not you, right?”

Reason worked where charm had not. He came to me, and I took him by the shoulders. He was not as tall as I, so I hunkered down to peer into his face. “You’re really very pretty,” I said, and he blinked in surprise, the tension going out of him. Utterly disarmed by a compliment. He probably didn’t get them often, poor thing. “In the north, you know, you’d be ideal. Darre mothers would already be haggling for the chance to marry you to their daughters. It’s only here among the Amn that your looks are something to be ashamed of. I wish they could see you grown up; you would have broken hearts.”

“What do you mean, ‘would have’?” asked Shahar, but I ignored her.

Deka was staring at me, entranced in the way of any hunter’s prey. I could have eaten him up.

I cupped his face in my hands and kissed him. He shivered, though it had been only a fleeting press of lips. I’d held back the force of myself because he was only a child, after all. Still, when I pulled back, I saw his eyes had glazed over; blotches of color warmed his cheeks. He didn’t move even when I slid my hands down and wrapped them around his throat.

Shahar went very still, her eyes wide and, finally, frightened. I glanced over at her and smiled again.

“I think you’re just like any other Arameri,” I said softly. “I think you’ll want to kill me rather than let me murder your brother, because that’s the good and decent thing to do. But I’m a god, and you know a knife can’t stop me. It’ll just piss me off. Then I’ll kill him and you.” She twitched, her eyes darting from mine to Deka’s throat and back. I smiled and found my teeth had grown sharp. I never did this deliberately. “So I think you’ll let him die rather than risk yourself. What do you think?”

I almost pitied her as she stood there breathing hard, her face still damp from her earlier tears. Deka’s throat worked beneath my fingers; he had finally realized the danger. Wisely, though, he held still. Some predators are excited by movement.

“Don’t hurt him,” she blurted. “Please. Please, I don’t—”

I hissed at her, and she shut up, going pale. “Don’t beg,” I snapped. “It’s beneath you. Are you Arameri or not?”

She fell silent, hitching once, and then—slowly—I saw the change come over her. The hardening of her eyes and will. She lowered the knife to her side, but I saw her hand tighten on its hilt.

“What will you give me?” she asked. “If I choose?”

I stared at her, incredulous. Then I burst out laughing. “That’s my girl! Bargaining for your brother’s life! Perfect. But you seem to have forgotten, Shahar, that that’s not one of your options. The choice is very simple: your life or his—”

“No,” she said. “That’s not what you’re making me choose. You’re making me choose between being bad and, and being myself. You’re trying to make me bad. That’s not fair!”

I froze, my fingers loosening on Dekarta’s throat. In the Maelstrom’s unknowable name. I could feel it now, the subtle lessening of my power, the greasy nausea at the pit of my belly. Across all the facets of existence that I spanned, I diminished. It was worse now that she had pointed it out, because the very fact that she understood what I had done made the harm greater. Knowledge was power.

“Demonshit,” I muttered, and grimaced ruefully. “You’re right. Forcing a child to choose between death and murder—there’s no way innocence can survive something like that intact.” I thought a moment, then scowled and shook my head. “But innocence never lasts long, especially for Arameri children. Perhaps I’m doing you a favor by making you face the choice early.”

She shook her head, resolute. “You’re not doing me a favor; you’re cheating. Either I let Deka die, or I try to save him and die, too? It’s not fair. I can’t win this game, no matter what I do. You better do something to make up for it.” She did not look at her brother. He was the prize in this game, and she knew it. I would have to revise my opinion of her intelligence. “So… I want you to give me something.”

Deka blurted, “Just let him kill me, Shar; then at least you’ll live—”

“Shut up!” She snapped it before I would have. But she closed her eyes in the process. Couldn’t look at him and keep herself cold. When she looked back at me, her face was hard again. “And you don’t have to kill Deka, if I… if I take that knife and use it on you. Just kill me. That’ll make it fair, too. Him or me, like you said. Either he lives or I do.”

I considered this, wondering if there was some trick in it. I could see nothing untoward, so finally I nodded. “Very well. But you must choose, Shahar. Stand by while I kill him, or attack me, save him, and die yourself. And what would you have of me, as compensation for your innocence?”

At this she faltered, uncertain.

“A wish,” said Dekarta.

I blinked at him, too surprised to chastise him for talking. “What?”

He swallowed, his throat flexing in my hands. “You grant one wish, anything in your power, for… for whichever one of us survives.” He took a shaky breath. “In compensation for taking our innocence.”

I leaned close to glare into his eyes, and he swallowed again. “If you dare wish that I become your family’s slave again—”

“No, we wouldn’t,” blurted Shahar. “You can still kill me—or… or Deka—if you don’t like the wish. Okay?”

It made sense. “Very well,” I said. “The bargain is made. Now choose, damn you. I don’t feel like being—”

She lunged forward and shoved the knife into my back so fast that she almost blurred. It hurt, as all damage to the body does, for Enefa in her wisdom had long ago established that flesh and pain went hand in hand. While I froze, gasping, Shahar let go of the knife and grabbed Dekarta instead, yanking him out of my grasp. “Run!” she cried, pushing him away from the Nowhere Stair toward the corridors.

He stumbled a step away and then, stupidly, turned back to her, his face slack with shock. “I thought you would pick… you should have…”

She made a sound of utter frustration while I sagged to my knees and struggled to breathe around the hole in my lung. “I said I would be good,” she said fiercely, and I would have laughed in pure admiration if I’d been able. “You’re my brother! Now go! Hurry, before he—”

“Wait,” I croaked. There was blood in my mouth and throat. I coughed and fumbled behind me with one hand, trying to reach the knife. She’d put it high in my back, partially through my heart. Amazing girl.

“Shahar, come with me!” Deka grabbed her hands. “We’ll go to the scriveners—”

“Don’t be stupid. They can’t fight a god! You have to—”

“Wait,” I said again, having finally coughed out enough blood to clear my throat. I spat more into the puddle between my hands and still couldn’t reach the knife. But I could talk, softly and with effort. “I won’t hurt either of you.”

“You’re lying,” said Shahar. “You’re a trickster.”

“No trick.” Very carefully I took a breath. Needed it to talk. “Changed my mind. Not going to kill… either of you.”

Silence. My lung was trying to heal, but the knife was in the way. It would work its way free in a few minutes if I couldn’t reach it, but those minutes would be messy and uncomfortable.

“Why?” asked Dekarta finally. “Why did you change your mind?”

“Pull this… mortalfucking knife, and I’ll tell you.”

“It’s a trick—” Shahar began, but Dekarta stepped forward. Bracing a hand on my shoulder, he took hold of the knife hilt and yanked it free. I exhaled in relief, though that almost started me coughing again.

“Thank you,” I said pointedly to Dekarta. When I glared at Shahar, she tensed and took a step back, then stopped and inhaled, her lips pressed tightly together. Ready for me to kill her.

“Oh, enough with the martyrdom,” I said wearily. “It’s lovely, just lovely, that you two are all ready to die for each other, but it’s also pretty sickening, and I’d rather not throw up more than blood right now.”

Dekarta had not taken his hand from my shoulder, and I realized why when he leaned to the side to peer at my face. His eyes widened. “You weakened yourself,” he said. “Making Shahar choose… It hurt you, too.”

Far more than the knife had done, though I had no intention of telling them that. I could have willed the knife out of my flesh or transported myself away from it, if I had been at my best. Shaking off his hand, I got to my feet, but I had to cough one or two times more before I felt back to normal. As an afterthought, I sent away the blood from my clothing and the floor.

“I destroyed some of her childhood,” I said, sighing as I turned to her. “Stupid of me, really. Never wise to play adult games with children. But, well, you pissed me off.”

Shahar said nothing, her face hollow with relief, and my stomach did an extra turn at this proof of the harm I’d done her. But I felt better when Dekarta moved to her side, and his hand snaked out to take hers. She looked at him, and he gazed back. Unconditional love: childhood’s greatest magic.

With this to strengthen her, Shahar faced me again. “Why did you change your mind?”

There had been no reason. I was a creature of impulse. “I think because you were willing to die for him,” I said. “I’ve seen Arameri sacrifice themselves many times—but rarely by choice. It intrigued me.”

They frowned, not really understanding, and I shrugged. I didn’t understand it, either.

“So, then, I owe you a wish,” I said.

They looked at each other again, their expressions mirrors of consternation, and I groaned. “You have no idea what you want to wish for, do you?”

“No,” said Shahar, ducking her eyes.

“Come back in another year,” said Dekarta, quickly. “That’s more than enough time for us to decide. You can do that, can’t you? We’ll…” He hesitated. “We’ll even play with you again. But no more games like this one.”

I laughed, shaking my head. “No, they’re not much fun, are they? Fine, then. I’ll be back in a year. You’d better be ready.”

As they nodded, I took myself away to lick my wounds and recover my strength. And to wonder, with dawning surprise, what I’d gotten myself into.

2

As always when I was troubled, I sought out my father, Nahadoth.

He was not difficult to find. Amid the vastness of the gods’ realm, he was like a massive, drifting storm, terrifying for those in his path and cathartic in his wake. From any direction, one could look into the distance and there he was, defying logic as a matter of course. Almost as noticeable were the lesser presences that drifted nearby, drawn toward all that heavy, dark glory even though it might destroy them. I beheld my siblings in all their variety and sparkling beauty, elontid and mnasat and even a few of my fellow niwwah. Many lay prostrate before our dark father or strained toward the black unlight that was his core, their souls open for the most fleeting droplets of his approval. He played favorites, though, and many of them had served Itempas. They would be waiting a long time.

For me, however, there was welcome on the wind as I traveled through the storm’s outermost currents. The layered walls of his presence shifted aside, each in a different direction, to admit me. I caught the looks of envy from my less-favored siblings and gave them glares of contempt in return, staring down the stronger ones until they turned away. Craven, useless creatures. Where had they been when Naha needed them? Let them beg his forgiveness for another two thousand years.

As I passed through the last shiver, I found myself taking corporeal form. A good sign, that; when he was in a foul mood, he abandoned form altogether and forced any visitors to do the same. Better still, there was light: a night sky overhead, dominated by a dozen pale moons all drifting in different orbits and waxing and waning and shifting from red through gold through blue. Beneath it, a stark landscape, deceptively flat and still, broken here and there by line-sketched trees and curving shapes too attenuated to qualify as hills. My feet touched ground made of tiny mirrored pebbles that jumped and rattled and vibrated like frenzied living things. They sent a delicious buzz through my soles. The trees and hills were made of the glittering pebbles, too—and the sky and moons, for all I knew. Nahadoth was fond of playing with expectations.

And beneath the sky’s cool kaleidoscope, shaping himself in an aimless sort of way, my father. I went to him and knelt, watching and worshipping, as his shape blurred through several forms and his limbs twisted in ways that had nothing to do with grace, though occasionally he grew graceful by accident. He did not acknowledge my presence, though of course he knew I was there. Finally he finished, and fell, purposefully, onto a couchlike throne that formed itself as I watched. At this, I rose and went to stand beside him. He did not look at me, his face turned toward the moons and shifting only slightly now, mostly just reacting to the colors of the sky. His eyes were shut, only the long dark lashes remaining the same as the flesh around them changed.

“My loyal one,” he said. The pebbles hummed with the low reverberations of his voice. “Have you come to comfort me?”

I opened my mouth to say yes—and then paused, startled, as I realized this was not true. Nahadoth glanced at me, laughed softly and not without cruelty, and widened his couch. He knew me too well. Shamed, I climbed up beside him, nestling into the drifting curve of his body. He petted my hair and back, though I was not in the cat’s shape. I enjoyed the caresses anyhow.

“I hate them,” I said. “And I don’t.”

“Because you know, as I do, that some things are inevitable.”

I groaned and flung an arm over my eyes dramatically, though this only served to press the image into my thoughts: Yeine and Itempas straining together, gazing at each other in mutual surprise and delight. What would be next? Naha and Itempas? All three of them together, which existence had not seen since the demons’ time? I lowered my arm and looked at Nahadoth and saw the same sober contemplation on his face. Inevitable. I bared my teeth and let them grow cat-sharp and sat up to glare at him.

“You want that selfish, thickheaded bastard! Don’t you?”

“I have always wanted him, Sieh. Hatred does not exclude desire.”

He meant the time before Enefa’s birth, when he and Itempas had gone from enemies to lovers. But I chose to interpret his words more immediately, manifesting claws and digging them into the drifting expanse of him.

“Think of what he did to you,” I said, flexing and sheathing. I could not hurt him—would not even if I could—but there were many ways to communicate frustration. “To us! Naha, I know you will change, must change, but you need not change this way! Why go back to what was before?”

“Which before?” That made me pause in confusion, and he sighed and rolled onto his back, adopting a face that sent its own wordless message: white-skinned and black-eyed and emotionless, like a mask. The mask he had worn for the Arameri during our incarceration.

“The past is gone,” he said. “Mortality made me cling to it, though that is not my nature, and it damaged me. To return to myself, I must reject it. I have had Itempas as an enemy; that holds no more appeal for me. And there is an undeniable truth here, Sieh: we have no one but each other, he and I and Yeine.”

At this I slumped on him in misery. He was right, of course; I had no right to ask him to endure again the hells of loneliness he had suffered in the time before Itempas. And he would not, because he had Yeine and their love was a powerful, special thing—but so had been his love with Itempas, once. And when all Three had been together… How could I, who had never known such fulfillment, begrudge him?

He would not be alone, whispered a small, furious voice in my most secret heart. He would have me!

But I knew all too well how little a godling had to offer a god.

Cold white fingers touched my cheek, my chin, my chest. “You are more troubled by this than you should be,” said Nahadoth. “What is wrong?”

I burst into frustrated tears. “I don’t know.”

“Shhhh. Shhhh.” She—Nahadoth had changed already, adapting to me because she knew I preferred women for some things—sat up, pulling me into her lap, and held me against her shoulder while I wept and hitched fitfully. This made me stronger, as she had known it would, and when the squall passed and nature had been served, I drew a deep breath.

“I don’t know,” I said again, calm now. “Nothing is right anymore. I don’t understand the feeling, but it’s troubled me for some while now. It makes no sense.”

She frowned. “This is not about Itempas.”

“No.” Reluctantly I lifted my head from her soft breast and reached up to touch her more rounded face. “Something is changing in me, Naha. I feel it like a vise gripping my soul, tightening slowly, but I don’t know who holds it or turns it, nor how to wriggle free. Soon I might break.”

Naha frowned and began to shift back toward male. It was a warning; she was not as quick to anger as he was. He was male most of the time these days. “Something has caused this.” His eyes glinted with sudden suspicion. “You went back to the mortal realm. To Sky.”

Damnation. We were all, we Enefadeh, still sensitive to the stench of that place. No doubt I would have Zhakkarn on my doorstep soon, demanding to know what madness had afflicted me.

“That had nothing to do with it, either,” I said, scowling at his overprotectiveness. “I just played with some mortal children.”

“Arameri children.” Oh, gods, the moons were going dark, one by one, and the mirror-pebbles had begun to rattle ominously. The air smelled of ice and the acrid sting of dark matter. Where was Yeine when I needed her? She could always calm his temper.

“Yes, Naha, and they had no power to harm me or even to command me as they once did. And I felt the wrongness before I went there.” It had been why I’d followed Yeine, feeling restless and angry and in search of excuses for both. “They were just children!”

His eyes turned to black pits, and suddenly I was truly afraid. “You love them.”

I went very still, wondering which was the greater blasphemy: Yeine loving Itempas, or me loving our slavemasters?

He had never hurt me in all the aeons of my life, I reminded myself. Not intentionally.

“Just children, Naha,” I said again, speaking softly. But I couldn’t deny his words. I loved them. Was that why I had decided not to kill Shahar, breaking the rules of my own game? I hung my head in shame. “I’m sorry.”

After a long, frightening moment, he sighed. “Some things are inevitable.”

He sounded so disappointed that my heart broke. “I—” I hitched again, and for a moment hated myself for being the child I was.

“Hush now. No more crying.” With a soft sigh, he rose, holding me against his shoulder effortlessly. “I want to know something.”

The couch dissolved back into the shivering bits of mirror, and the landscape vanished with it. Darkness enclosed us, cold and moving, and when it resolved, I gasped and clutched at him, for we had traveled via his will into the blistering chasm at the edge of the gods’ realm, which contained—insofar as the unknowable could be contained—the Maelstrom. The monster Itself lay below, far below, a swirling miasma of light and sound and matter and concept and emotion and moment. I could hear Its thought-numbing roar echoing off the wall of torn stars that kept the rest of reality relatively safe from Its ravenings. I felt my form tear as well, unable to maintain coherence under the onslaught of image-thought-music. I abandoned it quickly. Flesh was a liability in this place.

“Naha…” He still held me against him, yet I had to shout to be heard. “What are we doing here?”

Nahadoth had become something like the Maelstrom, churning and raw and formless, singing a simpler echo of Its toneless songs. He did not answer at first, but he had no sense of time in this state. I schooled myself to patience; he would remember me eventually.

After a time he said, “I have felt something different here, too.”

I frowned in confusion. “What, in the Maelstrom?” How he could comprehend anything of this morass was beyond me—quite literally. In my younger, stupider days, I had dared to play in this chasm, risking everything to see how deeply I could dive, how close I could get to the source of all things. I could go deeper than all my siblings, but the Three could go deeper still.

“Yes,” Nahadoth said at length. “I wonder…”

He began to move downward, toward the chasm. Too stunned to protest at first, I finally realized he was actually taking me in. “Naha!” I struggled, but his grip was steel and gravity. “Naha, damn you, do you want me dead? Just kill me yourself, if so!”

He stopped, and I kept shouting at him, hoping reason would somehow penetrate his strange thoughts. Eventually it did, and to my immense relief, he began to ascend.

“I could have kept you safe,” he said with a hint of reproof.

Yes, until you lost yourself in the madness and forgot I was there. But I was not a complete fool. I said instead, “Why were you taking me there anyhow?”

“There is a resonance.”

“What?”

The chasm and the roar vanished. I blinked. We stood in the mortal realm, on a branch of the World Tree, facing the unearthly white glow of Sky. It was nighttime, of course, with a full moon, and the stars had shifted fractionally. A year had passed. It was the night before I was to meet the twins a third time.

“There is a resonance,” Nahadoth said again. He was a darker blotch against the Tree’s bark. “You, and the Maelstrom. The future or the past, I cannot tell which.”

I frowned. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has it ever happened before?”

“No.”

“Naha…” I swallowed my frustration. He did not think as lesser beings did. It was necessary to move in spirals and leaps to follow him. “Will it hurt me? I suppose that’s all that matters.”

He shrugged as if he did not care, though his brows had furrowed. He wore his Sky face again. This close to the palace where we had both endured so many hells, I did not like it as much.

“I will speak to Yeine,” he said.

I shoved my hands into my pockets and hunched my shoulders, kicking at a spot of moss on the bark beneath my feet. “And Itempas?”

To my relief, Nahadoth uttered a dry, malicious laugh. “Inevitable is not the same as immediate, Sieh—and love does not mandate forgiveness.” With that he turned away, his shadows already blending with those of the Tree and the night horizon. “Remember that, with your Arameri pets.”

Then he was gone. The clouds above the world wavered for an instant with his passing, and then reality became still.

Troubled beyond words, I became a cat and climbed the branch to a knot the size of a building, around which clustered several smaller branches that were dotted with the Tree’s triangle-shaped leaves and silvery flowers. There I curled up, surrounded by Yeine’s comforting scent, to await the next day. And I wondered—with no surcease since I no longer had to sleep—why my insides felt hollow and shaky with dread.

With time to kill before the meeting, I amused myself—if one can call it amusing—by wandering the palace in the hours before dawn. I started in the underpalace, which had so often been a haven for me in the old days, and discovered that it had indeed been entirely abandoned. Not just the lowest levels, which had always been empty (save the apartments I and the other Enefadeh had inhabited), but all of it: the servants’ kitchens and dining halls, the nurseries and schoolrooms, the sewing salons and haircutters’. All the parts of Sky dedicated to the lowbloods who made up the bulk of its population. By the look of things, no one had been in the underpalace to do more than sweep in years. No wonder Shahar and Dekarta had been so frightened that first day.

On the overpalace levels, at least, there were servants about. None of them saw me as they went about their duties, and I didn’t even bother to shape myself an Amn form or hide in a pocket of silence. This was because even though there were servants, there weren’t many of them—not nearly as many as there had been in my slave days. It was a simple matter to step around a curve of corridor when I heard one walking toward me, or spring up to cling to the ceiling if I was caught between two. (Useful fact: mortals rarely look up.) Only once was I forced to use magic, and that not even my own; faced with an inescapable convergence of servants who would surely spot me otherwise, I stepped into one of the lift alcoves, where some long-dead scrivener’s activation bounced me up to another level. Criminally easy.

It should not have been so easy for me to stroll about, I mused as I continued to do so. I had reached the highblood levels by this point, where I did have to be a bit more careful. There were fewer servants here, but more guards, wearing the ugliest white livery I’d ever seen—and swords, and crossbows, and hidden daggers, if my fleshly eyes did not deceive me. There had always been guards in Sky, a small army of them, but they had taken pains to remain unobtrusive in the days when I’d lived here. They had dressed the same as the servants and had never worn weapons that could be seen. The Arameri preferred to believe that guards were unnecessary, and they hadn’t been, in truth, back then. Any significant threat to the palace’s highbloods would have forced us Enefadeh to transport ourselves to the site of danger, and that would’ve been the end of it.

So, I considered as I stepped through a wall to avoid an unusually attentive guard, it seemed the Arameri had been forced to protect themselves more conventionally. Understandable—but how did that account for the diminished number of servants?

A mystery. I resolved to find out, if I could.

Stepping through another wall, I found myself in a room that held a familiar scent. Following it—and tiptoeing past the nurse dozing on the sitting room couch—I found Shahar, asleep in a good-sized four-poster bed. Her perfect blonde curls spread prettily over half a dozen pillows, though I stifled a laugh at her face: mouth open, cheek mashed on one folded arm, and a line of drool down that arm forming a puddle on the pillow. She was snoring quite loudly and did not stir when I went over to examine her toy shelf.

One could learn a great deal about a child from her play. Naturally I ignored the toys on the highest shelves; she would want her favorites within easy reach. On the lower shelves, someone had been cleaning the things and keeping them in good order, so it was hard to spot the most worn of the items. Scents revealed much, however, and three things in particular drew me closer. The first was a large stuffed bird of some sort. I touched my tongue to it and tasted a toddler’s love, fading now. The second was a spyglass, light but solidly made so as to withstand being dropped by clumsy hands. Perhaps she used it to look down at the city or up at the stars. It had an air of wonder that made me smile.

The third item, which made me stop short, was a scepter.

It was beautiful, intricate, a graceful, twisting rod marbled with bright jewel tones down its length. A work of art. Not made of glass, though it appeared to be; glass would have been too fragile to give to a child. No, this was tinted daystone, the same substance as the palace’s walls—very difficult to shatter, among its other unique properties. (I knew that very well, since I and my siblings had created it.) Which was why, centuries ago, a family head had commissioned this and other such scepters from his First Scrivener, and had given it to the Arameri heir as a toy. To learn the feel of power, he had said. And since then, many little Arameri boys and girls had been given a scepter on their third birthday, which most of them promptly used to whack pets, other children, and servants into painful obedience.

The last time I had seen one of these scepters, it had been a modified, adult version of the thing on Shahar’s shelf. Fitted with a knife blade, the better to cut my skin to ribbons. The perversion of a child’s toy had made each slice burn like acid.

I glanced back at Shahar—fair Shahar, heir Shahar, someday Lady Shahar Arameri. A very few Arameri children would not have used the scepter, but Shahar, I felt certain, was not so gentle. She would have wielded it with glee at least once. Deka had probably been her first victim. Had her brother’s cry of pain cured her of the taste for sadism? So many Arameri learned to treasure the suffering of their loved ones.

I contemplated killing her.

I thought about it for a long time.

Then I turned and stepped through the wall into the adjoining room.

A suite, yes; that, too, was traditional for Arameri twins. Side-by-side apartments, connected by a door in the bedroom, ostensibly so that the children could sleep together or apart as they desired. More than one set of Arameri twins had been reduced to a singlet thanks to such doors. So easy for the stronger twin to creep into the weaker one’s room unnoticed, in the dark of the night while the nurses slept.

Deka’s room was darker than Shahar’s, as it was positioned on the side of the palace that did not get moonlight. It would get less sunlight, too, I realized, for through the window-wall I could see one of the massive, curling limbs of the World Tree stretching into the distance against the night horizon. Its spars and branches and million, million leaves did not completely obscure the view, but any sunlight that came in would be dappled, unsteady. Tainted, by Itempan standards.

There were other indicators of Deka’s less-favored status: fewer toys on the shelves, not as many pillows on the bed. I went to the bed and gazed down at him, thoughtful. He was curled on his side, neat and quiet even in rest. His nurse had done his long black hair in several plaits, perhaps in an awkward bid to give it some curl. I bent and ran my finger along one plait’s smooth, rippling length.

“Shall I make you heir?” I whispered. He did not wake, and I got no answer.

Moving away, I was surprised to realize none of the toys on his shelves tasted of love. Then I understood when I came to the small bookcase, which practically reeked of it. Over a dozen books and scrolls bore the stamp of childish delight. I ran my fingers along their spines, absorbing their mortal magic. Maps of faraway lands, tales of adventure and discovery. Mysteries of the natural world—of which Deka probably experienced little, stuck here in Sky. Myths and fancies.

I closed my eyes and lifted my fingers to my lips, breathing the scent and sighing. I could not make a child with such a soul heir. It would be the same as destroying him myself.

I moved on.

Through the walls, underneath a closet, over a jutting spar of the World Tree that had nearly filled one of the dead spaces, and I found myself in the chambers of the Arameri head.

The bedroom alone was as big as both the children’s apartments combined. Large, square bed at the center, positioned atop a wide circular rug made from the skin of some white-furred animal I could not recall ever having hunted. Austere, by the standards of the heads I had known: no pearls sewn into the coverlet, no Darren blackwood or Kenti hand carving or Shuti-Narekh cloudcloth. What little other furniture there was had been positioned about the edges of the vast room, out of the way. A woman who did not like impediments in any part of her life.

The Lady Arameri herself was austere. She lay curled on her side, much like her son, though that was as far as the similarity went. Blonde hair, surprisingly cut short. The style framed her angular face well, I decided, but it was not at all the usual Amn thing. Beautiful, icy-pale face, though severe even in sleep. Younger than I’d expected: late thirties at a guess. Young enough that Shahar would come of age long before she was elderly. Did she intend for Shahar’s children to be the true heirs, then? Perhaps this contest was not as foregone as it seemed.

I looked around, thoughtful. No father, the children had said, which meant the lady had no husband in the formal sense. Did she deny herself lovers, too, then? I bent to inhale her scent, opening my mouth slightly for a better taste, and there it was, oh, yes. The scent of another was embedded deep in her hair and skin, and even into the mattress. A single lover of some duration—months, perhaps years. Love, then? It was not unheard of. I would hunt amid the palace denizens to see if I could find the match to that lilting scent.

The lady’s apartment told me nothing about her as I visited its other chambers: a substantial library (containing nothing interesting), a private chapel complete with Itempan altar, a personal garden (too manicured to have been cared for by anything but a professional gardener), a public parlor and a private one. The bath alone showed signs of extravagance: no mere tub here but a pool wide and deep enough to swim, with separate adjoining chambers for washing and dressing. I found her toilet in another chamber, behind a crystal panel, and laughed. The seat had been inscribed with sigils for warmth and softness. I could not resist; I changed them to ice-cold hardness. Hopefully I could arrange to be around to hear her shout when she discovered them.

By the time I finished exploring, the eastern sky was growing light with the coming dawn. So with a sigh I left Lady Arameri’s chambers, returned to the Nowhere Stair, and lay down at the bottom to wait.

It seemed an age before the children arrived, their small feet striking a determined cadence as they came through the silent corridors. They did not see me at first, and exclaimed in dismay—then, of course, they came down the steps and found me. “You were hiding!” Shahar accused.

I had arranged myself on the floor, with my legs propped up against the wall. Smiling at her upside down, I said, “Talking to strangers again. Will you two never learn?”

Dekarta came over to crouch beside me. “Are you a stranger to us, Sieh? Even still?” He reached out and poked my shoulder again, as he had done before he learned I was dangerous. He smiled shyly and blushed as he did it. Had he forgiven me, then? Mortals were so fickle. I poked him back and he giggled.

“I don’t think so,” I said, “but you lot are the ones who worship propriety. The way I see it, a stranger feels like a stranger; a friend feels like a friend. Simple.”

To my surprise, Shahar crouched as well, her small face solemn. “Would you mind, then?” she asked with a peculiar sort of intent that made me frown at her. “Being our friend?”

I understood all at once. The wish they’d earned from me. I’d expected them to choose something simple, like toys that never broke or baubles from another realm or wings to fly. But they were clever, my little Arameri pets. They would not be bribed by paltry material treasures or fleeting frivolities. They wanted something of real worth.

Greedy, presumptuous, insolent, arrogant brats.

I flipped myself off the wall with an awkward, ugly movement that no mortal could have easily replicated. It startled the children and they fell back with wide eyes, sensing my anger. On my hands and toes, I glared at them. “You want what?”

“Your friendship,” said Deka. His voice was firm, but his eyes looked uncertain; he kept glancing at his sister. “We want you to be our friend. And we’ll be yours.”

“For how long?”

They looked surprised. “For as long as friendship lasts,” said Shahar. “Life, I guess, or until one of us does something to break it. We can swear a blood oath to make it official.”

“Swear a—” The words came out as a bestial growl. I could feel my hair turning black, my toes curling under. “How dare you?”

Shahar, damn her and all her forbears, looked innocently confused. I wanted to tear her throat out for not understanding. “What? It’s just friendship.”

“The friendship of a god.” If I’d had a tail, it would have lashed. “If I did this, I would be obligated to play with you and enjoy your company. After you grow up, I’d have to look you up every once in a while to see how you’re doing. I’d have to care about the inanities of your life. At least try to help you when you’re in trouble. My gods, do you realize I don’t even offer my worshippers that much? I should kill you both for this!”

But to my surprise, before I could, Deka sat forward and put his hand on mine. He flinched as he did it, because my hand was no longer fully human; the fingers had shortened, and the nails were in the process of becoming retractable. I kept the fur off by an effort of will. But Deka kept his hand there and looked at me with more compassion than I’d ever dreamt of seeing on an Arameri’s face. All the swirling magic inside me went still.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re sorry.”

Now two Arameri had apologized to me. Had that ever happened when I’d been a slave? Not even Yeine had said those words, and she had hurt me terribly once during her mortal years. But Deka continued, compounding the miracle. “I didn’t think. You were a prisoner here once—we read about it. They made you act like a friend then, didn’t they?” He looked over at Shahar, whose expression showed the same dawning understanding. “Some of the old Arameri would punish him if he wasn’t nice enough. We can’t be like them.”

My desire to kill them flicked away, like a snuffed candle.

“You… didn’t know,” I said. I spoke slowly, reluctantly, forcing my voice back into the boyish higher registers where it belonged. “It’s obvious you don’t mean… what I think you meant by it.” A backhanded route to servitude. Unearned blessings. I moved my nails back into place and sat up, smoothing my hair.

“We thought you would like it,” Deka said, looking so crestfallen that I abruptly felt guilty for my anger. “I thought… we thought…”

Yes, of course, it would have been his idea; he was the dreamer of the two.

“We thought we were almost friends anyway, right? And you didn’t seem to mind coming to see us. So we thought, if we asked to be friends, you would see we weren’t the bad Arameri you think we are. You would see we weren’t selfish or mean, and maybe”—he faltered, lowering his eyes—“maybe then you would keep coming back.”

Children could not lie to me. It was an aspect of my nature; they could lie, but I would know. Neither Deka nor his sister were lying. I didn’t believe them anyway—didn’t want to believe them, didn’t trust the part of my own soul that tried to believe them. It was never safe to trust Arameri, even small ones.

Yet they meant it. They wanted my friendship, not out of greed but out of loneliness. They truly wanted me for myself. How long had it been since anyone had wanted me? Even my own parents?

In the end, I am as easy to seduce as any child.

I lowered my head, trembling a little, folding my arms across my chest so they would not notice. “Um. Well. If you really want to… to be friends, then… I guess I could do that.”

They brightened at once, scooching closer on their knees. “You mean it?” asked Deka.

I shrugged, pretending nonchalance, and flashed my famous grin. “Can’t hurt, can it? You’re just mortals.” Blood-brother to mortals. I shook my head and laughed, wondering why I’d been so frightened by something so trivial. “Did you bring a knife?”

Shahar rolled her eyes with queenly exasperation. “You can make one, can’t you?”

“I was just asking, gods.” I raised a hand and made a knife, just like the one she’d used to stab me the previous year. Her smile faded and she drew back a little at the sight of it, and I realized that was not the best choice. Closing my hand about the knife, I changed it. When I opened my hand again, the knife was curved and graceful, with a handle of lacquered steel. Shahar would not know, but it was a replica of the knife Zhakkarn had made for Yeine during her time in Sky.

She relaxed when she saw the change, and I felt better at the grateful look on her face. I had not been fair to her; I would try harder to be so in the future.

“Friendships can transcend childhood,” I said softly when Shahar took the knife. She paused, looking at me in surprise. “They can. If the friends continue to trust each other as they grow older and change.”

“That’s easy,” said Deka, giggling.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

His grin faded. Shahar, though—yes, here was something she understood innately. She had already begun to realize what it meant to be Arameri. I would not have her for much longer.

I reached up to touch her cheek for a moment, and she blinked. But then I smiled, and she smiled back, as shy as Deka for an instant.

Sighing, I held out my hands, palms up. “Do it, then.”

Shahar took my nearer hand, raising the knife, and then frowned. “Do I cut the finger? Or across the palm?”

“The finger,” said Deka. “That was how Datennay said you do blood oaths.”

“Datennay is an idiot,” Shahar said with the reflexiveness of an old argument.

“The palm,” I said, more to shut them up than to take any real stance.

“Won’t that bleed a lot? And hurt?”

“That’s the idea. What good is an oath if it doesn’t cost you something to make?”

She grimaced, but then nodded and set the blade against my skin. The cut she made was so shallow that it tickled and did not make me bleed at all. I laughed. “Harder. I’m not a mortal, you know.”

She threw me an annoyed look, then sliced once across the palm, swift and hard. I ignored the flash of pain. Refreshing. The wound tried to close immediately, but a little concentration kept the blood welling.

“You do me, I do you,” Shahar said, giving the knife to Dekarta.

He took the knife and her hands and was not at all hesitant or shy about cutting his sister. Her jaw flexed, but she did not cry out. Nor did he when she made the cuts for him.

I inhaled the scent of their blood, familiar despite three generations removed from the last Arameri I had known. “Friends,” I said.

Shahar looked at her brother, and he gazed back at her, and then they both looked at me. “Friends,” they said together. They took each other’s hands first, then mine.

Then—

Wait. What?

They held my hands, tight. It hurt. And why were both children crying out, their hair whipping in the wind? Where had the wind—

I didn’t hear you. Speak louder.

This made no sense, our hands were sealed, sealed together, I could not let them go—

Yes, I am the Trickster. Who calls…?

They were screaming, the children were screaming, both of them had risen off the floor, only I held them down and why was there a grin on my face? Why—

Silence.

3

I slept, and while I did, I dreamt. I did not remember some of these dreams for a long time. I was aware of very little, in fact, aside from

something

being

wrong

and perhaps a little bit of

wait

I

thought

what.

Vague awareness, in other words. A most unpleasant state for any god. None of us is all knowing, all seeing—that is mortal nonsense—but we know a lot and see quite a bit. We are used to a near-constant infusion of information by means of senses no mortal possesses, but for a time there was nothing. Instead, I slept.

Suddenly, though, in the depths of the silence and vagueness, I heard a voice. It called my name, my soul, with a fullness and strength that I had not heard in several mortal lifetimes. Familiar pulling sensation. Unpleasant. I was comfortable, so I rolled over and tried to ignore it at first, but it pricked me awake, slapped me in the back to prod me forward, then shoved. I slid through an aperture in a wall of matter, like being born—or like entering the mortal realm, which was pretty much the same thing. I emerged naked and slippery with magic, my form reflexively solidifying itself for protection against the soul-devouring ethers that had once been Nahadoth’s digestive fluids, in the time before time. My mind dragged itself out of stupor at last.

Someone had called my name.

“What do you want?” I said—or tried to say, though the words emerged from my lips as an unintelligible growl. Long before mortals had achieved a form worthy of imitation, I had taken the likeness of a creature that loved mischief and cruelty in equal measure, as quintessential an encapsulation of my nature as my child shape. I still tended to default to it, though I preferred the child shape these days. More fine control and nuance. But I had not been fully conscious when I took form in the mortal realm, and so I had become the cat.

Yet that shape was clumsy when I tried to rise, and something about it… felt wrong. I wasted no time trying to understand it, simply became the boy instead—or tried to. The change did not go as it should have. It took real effort, and my flesh remolded itself with molasses-slow reluctance. By the time I had clothed myself in human skin, I was exhausted. I flopped where I had materialized, panting and shaking and wondering what in the infinite hells was wrong with me.

“Sieh?”

The voice that had summoned me from the vague place. Female. Familiar and yet not. Puzzled, I tried to lift my head and turn to face the voice’s owner, and found to my amazement that I could not. I had no strength.

“It is you. My gods, I never imagined…” Soft hands touched my shoulders, pulled at me. I groaned softly as she rolled me onto my side. Something pulled at my head, painful. Why the hells was I cold? I was never cold.

“By the endless Bright! This is…”

She touched my face. I turned toward her hand instinctively, nuzzling, and she gasped, jerking away. Then she stroked me again and did not pull away when I pressed against her this time.

“Sh-Shahar,” I said. My voice was too loud and sounded wrong. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and stared at her, buglike. “Shahar?”

She was Shahar. I was certain of it. But something had happened to her. Her face was longer, the bones finer, the nose bridge higher. Her hair, which had been shoulder length when I’d last seen her—a moment ago? The day before?—now tumbled around her body, disheveled as if she’d just woken from sleep. Waist length at least, maybe longer.

Mortal hair did not grow so quickly, and not even Arameri would waste magic on something so trivial. Not these days, anyhow. Yet when I tried to find the nearby stars to know how much time had passed, what came back to me was only a blank, unintelligible rumble, like the jabbering of memory-worms.

“Cold,” I murmured. Shahar got up and went away. An instant later, something covered me, warm and thick with the scents of her body and bird feathers. It should not have warmed me, any more than my body should have been cold to begin with, but I felt better. By this point I could move a little, so I curled up under it gratefully.

“Sieh…” She sounded like she was regaining her composure after a deep shock. Her hand fell on my shoulder again, comforting. “Not that I’m not glad to see you”—she did not sound glad, not at all—“but if you were ever going to come back, why now? Why here, like this? This… gods. Unbelievable.”

Why now? I had no idea, since I had no idea what now meant. Of then, I remembered less thoughts than impressions: holding her hand, holding Deka’s hand. Light, wind, something out of control. Shahar’s face, wide-eyed with panic, mouth open and—

Screaming. She had been screaming.

Some of my strength had returned. I used it to reach for her knee, which was a few inches from my face. My fingers slid over smooth, hot skin to reach thin, fine cloth—a sleep shift. She gasped and jerked away. “You’re freezing!”

“I’m cold.” So cold that I could feel the room’s moisture beginning to cling to my skin, wherever the blanket didn’t cover it. I pulled my head under the blanket, or tried to. That pulling sensation again. It held my head in place, though I could move somewhat against its tension. “Demonshit! What is that?”

“Your hair,” said Shahar.

I froze, staring up at her.

She pushed at my arm, then pulled up a lock of hair for me to see. Loose-waved, dark brown, thick, and longer than her arm. Feet long. I couldn’t move because I was half tangled in it.

“I didn’t tell my hair to get that long,” I said. It was a whisper.

“Well, tell it to get short again. Or quit flopping about so I can get you loose.” She flipped up the blanket and started gathering my hair, tugging and finger combing. When she turned me onto my side, my head was freed. I’d been lying on the bulk of it.

My hair should not have grown. Her hair should not have grown. “Tell me what’s happened,” I said as she shifted me about like an oversized doll. “How much time has passed since we took the oath?”

“Took the oath?” She stared down at me, an incredulous look on her face. “Is that all you remember? My gods, Sieh, you broke the oath almost the instant you made it—”

I cursed in three mortal languages, loudly, to cut her off. “Just tell me how much time has passed!”

Fury reddened her cheeks, though the pale light around us—Sky’s glowing walls—made this difficult to see. “Eight years.”

Impossible. “I would have remembered eight years.”

I should have understood the anger in her voice as she snapped, “Well, that’s how long it’s been. Not my fault if you don’t remember it. I suppose you must have so many important things to do, you gods, that mortal years pass like breaths for you.”

They did, but we were aware of the breaths. I wanted to know more, like why she sounded so angry and hurt. Those things called to me like the sting of broken innocence, and they felt important. But they also felt like the sorts of things that needed to be softened with silence before they were brought forth sharp, so I pushed them aside and asked, “Why am I so weak?”

“How should I know?”

“Where was I? While I was gone?”

“Sieh”—she let out a hard exhalation—“I don’t know. I haven’t seen you once since the day eight years ago when you and I and Deka agreed to become friends. You tried to kill us and disappeared.”

“Tried—I didn’t try to kill you.” Her face hardened further, full of hate. That meant I had tried to kill her, or at least she believed I had. “I didn’t intend to. Shahar—” I reached for her again, instinctive this time. I could pull strength from mortal children if I had to, but when I touched her knee again, there was only a trickle of what I needed. Of course; eight years. She would be sixteen now—not yet a woman, but close. I whimpered in frustration and pulled away.

“I remember nothing from that moment until now,” I said, to take my mind off fear. “I took your hands and then I was here. Something is wrong.”

“Obviously.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers and let out a heavy sigh. “Hopefully your arrival didn’t trip the boundary scripts in the walls, or there will be a dozen guards breaking down the door in a minute. I’m going to have to think of some way to explain your presence.” She paused, frowning at me hopefully. “Or can you leave? That would really be the easiest solution.”

Yes, good for me and for her. It was obvious she didn’t want me here. I didn’t want to be here, either, weak and heavy and wrong-feeling like this. I wanted to be with, with, wait, was that—Oh, no.

“No,” I whispered, and when she sighed in exasperation, I realized she thought I’d been responding to her question. I made a heroic effort and grabbed her hand as tight as I could, startling her. “No. Shahar, how did you bring me here? Did you use scrivening, or—or did you command it somehow?”

“I didn’t bring you here. You just showed up.”

“No, you made me come, I felt it, you pulled me out of him—” And oh demons, oh hells, I could feel him coming. His fury made the whole mortal realm throb like an open wound. How could she not feel it? I shook her hand in lieu of shouting at her. “You pulled me out of him and he’s going to kill you if you don’t tell me right now what you did!”

“Who—” she began. And then she froze, her eyes going wide, because even she could feel it now. Of course she could, because he was in the room with us, taking shape as the glowing walls went suddenly dark and the air trembled and hushed in reverence.

“Sieh,” said the Lord of Night.

I closed my eyes and prayed Shahar would stay silent.

“Here,” I said. An instant later he was beside me, the drifting dark of his cloak settling around him as he knelt. Chilly fingers touched my face, and I fought the urge to laugh at my own obtuseness. I should have realized at once why I was so cold.

He turned my face from side to side, examining me with more than eyes. I permitted this, because he was my father and it was his right to be concerned, but then I caught his hand. It solidified beneath my touch, and strength flowed into me from the limitless furnace of his soul. I exhaled in relief. “Naha. Tell me.”

“We found you adrift, like a soul with no home. Damaged. Yeine attempted to heal you and could not. I took you into myself to do the same.”

And Nahadoth’s womb was a cold, dark place. “I don’t feel healed.”

“You aren’t. I could not find a cure for your condition, nor could I preserve you.” His voice, usually inflectionless, turned bitter. It was Itempas’s gift to halt the progression of processes that depended on time; Nahadoth lacked this power entirely. “The best I could do was keep you safe while Yeine sought a cure. But you were taken from me. I had no idea where you had gone… at first.”

And then his dark, dark eyes lifted to settle on Shahar. She flinched, quite reasonably.

I had no reason to want to save her, other than my own childish sense of honor. I had taken her innocence; I owed her. And however wrong it seemed to have gone, I had taken an oath to be her friend. So I sat up carefully—not into his line of sight, because that was never safe, but enough to get his attention. “Naha, whatever she did, she didn’t do it intentionally.”

“Her intentions do not matter,” he said very softly. He did not look away from her. “When you were pulled from me, it felt much like the days of our incarceration. A summons that could be neither ignored nor denied.”

Shahar made a soft sound, not quite a whimper, and Nahadoth’s expression turned sharp and hungry. I did not blame him for his anger, but Shahar was not like the Arameri of old; she had not been raised to know the ways of gods. She did not realize that her fear could spur him to attack, because night was the time of predators and she was acting too much like prey.

Before I could think of some way to distract him, the worst occurred: she spoke.

“L-Lord Nahadoth,” she said. Her voice shook, and he leaned closer to her, his breath quickening and the room growing darker. Demonshit. But then, to my surprise, she drew a deep breath and her fear receded. “Lord Nahadoth,” she said again. “I assure you, I did nothing to… to summon Lord Sieh here. I was thinking of him, yes….” She glanced at me, her expression suddenly bleak, which confused me. “I spoke his name. But not because I wanted him here—quite the opposite. I was angry. It was a curse.”

I stared at her. A curse? But her shift of mood had done what I could not; Naha exhaled and sat back.

“A curse is much like a prayer,” he said, thoughtful. “If you knew his nature well enough…”

“A prayer wouldn’t have snatched me from your void,” I said, looking down at myself. The length of my limbs was obscene. My palms were half again as large as they had been! I was meant to have small, clever child fingers, not these monstrous paws. “And it couldn’t have done this to me. Nothing should have done this.” Now that Naha had renewed my strength, I could correct the error. I willed myself back to normal.

“Stop.” Nahadoth’s will clamped down on mine like a vise before I could begin the shaping. I froze, startled. “It is no longer safe for you to alter your form.”

“No longer safe?”

He sighed. “You do not understand.” So he looked into my eyes and made me know what he and Yeine had come to realize in the eight years since everything had gone wrong.

There is a line between god and mortal that has nothing to do with immortality. It is material: a matter of substance, composition, flexibility. This was what ultimately made the demons weaker than us, though some of them had all our power: they could cross this line, become godstuff, but it took great effort, and they could not do it for long. It was not their natural state. Other mortals could not cross the line at all. They were locked to their flesh, aging as it aged, drawing strength from its strength and growing weak with its failure. They could not shape it or the world around them, save with the crude power of their hands and wits.

The problem, Nahadoth willed me to know, was that I was no longer quite like a god. The substance of me was somewhere between godstuff and mortality—but I was becoming more mortal as time passed. I could still shape myself if I wished, as I had done when I arrived as the cat. But it would not go easily. There might be pain, damage to my flesh, permanent distortion. And there would come a day, perhaps today, perhaps another, when I would no longer be able to shape myself at all. If I tried then, I would die.

I stared at him and felt truly afraid.

“What are you saying?” I whispered, though he had said nothing. Mortal figure of speech. “Naha, what are you saying?”

“You are becoming mortal.”

I was breathing harder. I had not willed myself to breathe harder. Or tremble, or sweat, or grow larger, or mature into manhood. My body was doing all that on its own. My body: alien, tainted, out of control.

“I’m going to die,” I said. My mouth was dry. “Naha, growing older defies my nature. If I stay like this, if I keep aging, if I trip and fall hard enough, I’ll die the way mortals do.”

“We will find a way to heal you—”

My fists clenched. “Don’t lie to me!”

Naha’s mask cracked, replaced by sorrow. I remembered ten million nights in his lap, begging him for stories. His beautiful lies, I had called them. He had held me and told me of wonders real and imagined, and I had been so happy to never grow up. So that he could keep lying to me forever.

“You will grow older,” he said. “As you leave childhood behind, you will grow weaker. You will begin to require sustenance and rest as mortals do, and your awareness of things beyond mortal senses will fade. You will become… fragile. And, yes, if nothing is done, you will die.”

I could not bear the softness of his voice, no matter how hard the words. He was always so soft, always yielding, always tolerant of change. I did not want him to tolerate this.

I threw off the blanket and got to my feet—awkwardly, as my limbs were longer than I was used to and I had too much hair—and stumbled over to Shahar’s windows. I put my hands on the glass and leaned on it with all my weight. Mortals rarely did this, I had observed during my centuries in Sky. Even though they knew that Sky’s glass was reinforced by magic and inhumanly precise engineering, they could not rid themselves of the fear that just once, the glass might break or the pane come loose. I braced my feet and shoved. I needed something in my presence to be unmoving and strong.

Something touched my shoulder and I turned fast, irrationally aching for hard sunset eyes and harder brown arms and brick-wall flexibility. But it was only the mortal, Shahar. I glared at her, furious that she wasn’t who I wanted, and thought of batting her aside. It was somehow her fault this had happened to me. Maybe killing her would free me.

If she had looked at me with compassion or pity, I would have done it. There was none of that in her face, though—just resentment and reluctance, nothing at all comforting. She was Arameri. That wasn’t something they did.

Itempas had failed me, but Itempas’s chosen had been magnificently predictable for two thousand years. I yanked her closer and locked my arms around her, so tight that it couldn’t have been comfortable for her. She turned her face away and her cheek pressed against my shoulder. She did not bend, though—didn’t speak, didn’t return my embrace. So I held her and trembled and ground my teeth together so that I would not simply start screaming. I glared at Nahadoth through the screen of her curls.

He gazed back at me, still and rueful. He knew full well why I had turned away from him, and he forgave me for it. I hated him for that, just as I’d hated Yeine for loving Itempas and just as I hated Itempas for going mad and not being here when I needed him. And I hated all three of them for squandering each other’s love when I would give anything, anything, to have that for myself.

“Go away,” I whispered through Shahar’s hair. “Please.”

“It isn’t safe for you here.”

I laughed bitterly, guessing his intent. “If I’m to have only a few more decades of life, Naha, I won’t spend them asleep inside you. Thanks.”

His expression tightened. He was not immune to pain, and I supposed I was driving the knives in deeper than usual. “You have enemies.”

I sighed. “I can take care of myself.”

“I will not lose you, Sieh. Not to death, and not to despair.”

“Get out!” I clutched Shahar like a teddy bear and shut my eyes, shouting, “Get out, demons take you, go away and leave me the hells alone!”

There was an instant of silence. Then I felt him go. The walls resumed their glow; the room felt suddenly looser, airy. Shahar relaxed, minutely, against me. But not all the way.

I kept her against me anyway because I was feeling selfish and I did not want to care what she wanted. But I was older now, more mature whether I wanted to be or not, so after a moment I stopped thinking solely about myself. She stepped back when I let her go, and there was a distinctly wary look in her eyes.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

I laughed, leaning back against the glass. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to stay here?”

I groaned and put my hands on my head, tangling my fingers in all my unwanted hair. “I don’t know, Shahar. I can’t think right now. This is a bit much, all right?”

She sighed. I felt her come to stand beside me at the window, radiating thought. “You can sleep in Deka’s room for tonight. In the morning I’ll speak with Mother.”

I was so soul-numb that this did not bother me nearly as much as it should have. “Fine,” I said. “Whatever. I’ll try not to wake him as I pace the floors and cry.”

There was a moment’s silence. That did not catch my attention so much as the ripple of hurt that rode in the silence’s wake. “Deka isn’t here. You’ll have the room to yourself.”

I looked at her, frowning. “Where is he?” Then it occurred to me: Arameri. “Dead?”

“No.” She didn’t look at me and her expression didn’t change, but her voice went sharp and contemptuous of my assumption. “He’s at the Litaria. The scriveners’ college? In training.”

I raised both eyebrows. “I didn’t know he wanted to become a scrivener.”

“He didn’t.”

Then I understood. Arameri, yes. When there was more than one potential heir, the family head did not have to pit them against one another in a battle to the death. She could keep both alive if she put one in a clearly subordinate position. “He’s meant to be your First Scrivener, then.”

She shrugged. “If he’s good enough. There’s no guarantee. He’ll prove himself if he can, when he comes back. If he comes back.”

There was something more here, I realized. It intrigued me enough to forget my own troubles for a moment, so I turned to her, frowning. “Scrivener training lasts years,” I said. “Ten or fifteen, usually.”

She turned to face me, and I flinched at the look in her eyes. “Yes. Deka has been in training for the past eight years.”

Oh, no. “Eight years ago…”

“Eight years ago,” she said in that same clipped, edged tone, “you and I and Deka took an oath of friendship. Immediately upon which you unleashed a flare of magic so powerful that it destroyed the Nowhere Stair and much of the underpalace—and then you vanished, leaving Deka and me buried in the rubble with more bones broken than whole.”

I stared at her, horrified. She narrowed her eyes, searching my face, and a flicker of consternation diluted her anger. “You didn’t know.”

“No.”

“How could you not know?”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember anything after we joined hands, Shahar. But… you and Deka were wise to ask for my friendship; it should have made you safe from me for all time. I don’t understand what happened.”

She nodded slowly. “They pulled us out of the debris and patched us up, good as new. But I had to tell Mother about you. She was furious that we’d concealed something so important. And the heir’s life had been threatened, which meant someone had to be held accountable.” She folded her arms, holding her shoulders ever-so-slightly stiff. “Deka had fewer injuries than I. Our fullblood relatives started to hint that Deka—only Deka, never me—might have done something to antagonize you. They didn’t come right out and accuse him of plotting to use a godling as a murder weapon, but…”

I closed my eyes, understanding at last why she had cursed my name. I had stolen her innocence first and then her brother. She would never trust me again.

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it was wholly inadequate.

She shrugged again. “Not your fault. I see now that what happened was an accident.”

She turned away then, pacing across her room to the door that adjoined her suite to the one that had been Dekarta’s. Opening it, she turned back to look at me, expectant.

I stayed by the window, seeing the signs clearly now. Her face was impassive, cool, but she had not completely mastered herself yet. Fury smoldered in her, banked for now, but slow burning. She was patient. Focused. I would think this a good thing, if I hadn’t seen it before.

“You don’t blame me,” I said, “though I’ll wager you did, until tonight. But you still blame someone. Who?”

I expected her to dissemble. “My mother,” she said.

“You said she was pressured into sending Deka away.”

Shahar shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” She said nothing for a moment more, then lowered her eyes. “Deka… I haven’t heard from him since he left. He returns my letters unopened.”

Even with my senses as muddled as they were, I could feel the raw wound in her soul where a twin brother had been. A wound like that demanded redress.

She sighed. “Come on.”

I took a step toward her and stopped, startled as I realized something. Arameri heads and heirs had loathed one another since the Bright’s dawning. Unavoidable, given circumstances: two souls with the strength to rule the world were rarely good at sharing or even cohabitating, for that matter. That was why the family’s heads had been as ruthless about controlling their heirs as they were about controlling the world.

My eyes flicked to Shahar’s odd, incomplete blood sigil. None of the controlling words were there. She was free to act against her mother, even plot to kill her, if she wanted.

She saw my look and smiled. “My old friend,” she said. “You were right about me, you know, all those years ago. Some things are my nature. Inescapable.”

I crossed the room to stand beside her on the threshold. I was surprised to find myself uncertain as I considered her. I should have felt vindicated to hear her plans of vengeance. I should have said, and meant it, You’ll do worse before you’re done.

But I had tasted her childish soul, and there had been something in it that did not fit the cold avenger she seemed to have become. She had loved her brother, enough to sacrifice herself for him. She had sincerely yearned to be a good person.

“No,” I said. She blinked. “You’re different from the rest of them. I don’t know why. You shouldn’t be. But you are.”

Her jaw flexed. “Your influence, maybe. As gods go, you’ve had a greater impact on my life than Bright Itempas ever could.”

“That should’ve made you worse, actually.” I smiled a little, though I did not feel like it. “I’m selfish and cruel and capricious, Shahar. I’ve never been a good boy.”

She lifted an eyebrow, and her eyes flicked down. I wore nothing but my ridiculously long hair, which fell to my ankles now that I was standing. (My nails, however, had kept to my preferred length. Partial mortality, partial growth? I would live in dread of my first manicure.) I thought Shahar was looking at my chest, but my body was longer now, taller. Belatedly I realized her gaze had settled lower.

“You’re not a boy at all anymore,” she said.

My face went hot, though I did not know why. Bodies were just bodies, penises were just penises, yet she had somehow made me feel keenly uncomfortable with mine. I could think of nothing to say in reply.

After a moment, she sighed. “Do you want food?”

“No…” I began, but then my belly churned in that odd, clenching way that I had not felt in several mortal generations. I had not forgotten what it meant. I sighed. “But I will by morning.”

“I’ll have a double tray brought up. Will you sleep?”

I shook my head. “Too much on my mind, even if I was exhausted. Which I’m not.” Yet.

She sighed. “I see.”

Suddenly I realized she was exhausted, her face lined and paler than usual. My time sense was returning—murky, sluggish, but functional—so I understood it had been well past midnight when she’d summoned me. Cursed me. Had she been pacing the floor herself, her mind cluttered with troubles? What had caused her to remember me, however hatefully, after all this time? Did I want to know?

“Does our oath stand, Shahar?” I asked softly. “I didn’t mean to harm you.”

She frowned. “Do you want it to stand? I seem to recall you were less than thrilled by the idea of two mortal friends.”

I licked my lips, wondering why I was so uneasy. Nervous. She made me nervous. “I think perhaps… I could use friends, under the circumstances.”

She blinked, then smiled with one side of her mouth. Unlike her earlier smiles, this one was genuine and free of bitterness. It made me see how lonely she was without her brother—and how young. Not so far removed, after all, from the child she had been.

Then she stepped forward, putting her hands on my chest, and kissed me. It was light, friendly, just a warm press of her lips for an instant, but it rang through me like a crystal bell. She stepped back and I stared at her. I couldn’t help it.

“Friends, then,” she said. “Good night.”

I nodded mutely, then went into Deka’s room. She shut the door behind me, and I slumped back against it, feeling alone and very strange.

4

I didn’t sleep that night, though I could have. The urge was there, itchy. I imagined the craving for sleep as a parasite feeding on my strength, just waiting for me to grow weak so that it could take over my body. I had liked sleep, once, before it became a threat.

But I did not like boredom, either, and there was a great deal of that in the hours after I left Shahar. I could only ponder my troubling condition for so long. The only way to vent my frustration was to do something, anything, so I got up from the chair and wandered about Deka’s room, peering into the drawers and under the bed. His books were too simple to interest me, except one of riddles that actually contained a few I hadn’t heard before. But I read it in half an hour and then was bored again.

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored child—and though I had become a bored adolescent, that old mortal adage still rang true. So as the small hours stretched into slightly longer hours, I finally got up and opened a wall. That much, at least, I could do without expending any of my remaining strength; all it took was a word. When the daystone had finished rolling aside to make room for me, I went through the resulting opening into the dead spaces beyond.

Roaming my old territory put me in a better mood. Not everything was the same as it had been, of course. The World Tree had grown both around and through Sky, filling some of its old corridors and dead spaces with branchwood and forcing me to make frequent detours. This, I knew, had been Yeine’s intent, for without the Enefadeh, and more importantly without the constant empowering presence of the Stone of Earth, Sky needed the Tree’s support. Its architecture broke too many of Itempas’s laws for the mortal realm; only magic kept it in the sky and not smashed on the ground.

So down seventeen levels, around a swirling rise of linked globules that only resembled a tunnel in dreams, and underneath an arched branch spur, I found what I’d sought: my orrery. I moved carefully between the protective traps I’d set, out of habit stepping around the patches of moonstone that lined the floor. It looked like daystone—mortals had never been able to tell the difference—but on cloudy, new-moon nights, the pieces of moonstone transformed, opening into one of Nahadoth’s favorite hells. I had made it as a little treat for our masters, to remind them of the price to be paid for enslaving their gods, and we had all seeded it through the palace. They had blamed—and punished—Nahadoth for it, but he’d thanked me afterward, assuring me the pain was worth it.

But when I spoke atadie and the orrery opened, I stopped on its threshold, my mouth falling open.

Where there should have been more than forty globes floating through the air, all turning around the bright yellow sphere at the orrery’s center, there were only four still floating. Four, counting the sun sphere. The rest lay scattered about the floor and against the walls, corpses in the aftermath of a systemic carnage. The Seven Sisters, identical small goldenworlds I had collected after searching billions of stars, lay strewn about the edges of the room. And the rest—Zispe, Lakruam, Amanaiasenre, the Scales, Motherspinner with its six child moons linked by a web of rings, and oh, Vaz, my handsome giant. That one, once a massive stark-white sphere I had barely been able to get my arms around, had hit the floor hard, splitting down the middle. I went to the nearer of the shattered halves and picked it up, moaning as I knelt. Its core was exposed, cold, still. Planets were resilient things, far more than most mortal creatures, but there was no way I could repair this. Even if I’d had the magic left to spare.

“No,” I whispered, clutching the hemisphere to myself and rocking over it. I couldn’t even weep. I felt as dead as Vaz inside. Nahadoth’s words had not driven home the horror of my condition, but this? This I could not deny.

A hand touched my shoulder, and so great was my misery that I did not care who it was.

“I’m sorry, Sieh.” Yeine. Her voice, a soft contralto, had deepened further with grief. I felt her kneel beside me, her warmth radiant against my skin. For once, I took no comfort in her presence.

“My fault,” I whispered. I had always meant to disperse the orrery, returning its worlds to their homes when I’d tired of them. Only I never had, because I was a selfish brat. And when I’d been incarcerated in mortal form, desperate to feel like a god because my Arameri masters treated me like a thing, I had brought the orrery here despite the danger that they might be discovered. I had spent strength I didn’t have, killing my mortal body more than once, to keep the orrery alive. And now, after all that, I hadn’t even noticed that I’d failed them.

Yeine sighed and looped her arms around my shoulders, pressing her face to my hair for a moment. “Death comes to all, in time.”

But this had been too soon. My orrery should have lasted a sun’s lifetime. I drew a deep breath and set the hemisphere down, turning to look up at her. Her face did not show the shock that I knew she felt at the sight of my older shape. I was grateful for that, because she could have flinched at my withered beauty, but of course that was not her way. She still loved me, would always love me, even if I could no longer be her little boy. I lowered my eyes, ashamed that I had ever begrudged Itempas her affection.

“There are some survivors,” I said softly. “They…” I drew a deep breath. What would I do without them? I would truly be alone then… but I would do what was right. They deserved that, these truest friends of mine. “Will you help them, Yeine? Please?”

“Of course.” She closed her eyes. One by one, the planets that still floated about the sun sphere, and a couple of the ones on the floor, vanished. I followed with her as best I could, watching her carefully deposit each where I had found it: this one spinning around a bright golden sun, which was delighted to have it back; that one near twin suns that sang in harmony; that one in the heart of a stellar nursery, surrounded by howling infant planets and hissing, cranky magnetars, where it sighed and resigned itself to the noise.

But when Yeine reached for the sun sphere, En, it fought her. Surprised, we both opened our eyes back in the orrery to find that En had shed its ordinary yellow kickball disguise. It had begun to spin and burn, expending itself in a dangerous way given that I could not replenish it. At this rate, it would fail and die like the rest in minutes.

“What the hells are you doing?” I demanded of it. “Quit that; you’re being rude.”

It responded by darting out of its place and whisking over to boot me in the stomach. I oofed in surprise, wrapping my arms around it inadvertently, and felt its outrage. How dare I try to send it away? It was older than many of my siblings. Had it not always been there when I needed it? It would not be sent away like some disgraced servant.

I touched its hot, pale-yellow surface, trying not to cry. “I can’t take care of you anymore,” I said. “Don’t you understand? If you stay with me, you’ll die.”

It would die, then. Did not care it would die did not care.

“Stubborn ball of hot air!” I shouted, but then Yeine touched my hand where it rested on En’s curve. When she did, En glowed brighter; she was feeding it as I could not.

“A true friend,” she said gently, with only a hint of censure, “is something to be treasured.”

“Not to death,” I said, looking up at her for support. “Yeine, please; it’s crazy. Send it away.”

“Shall I deny its wishes, Sieh? Force it to do what you want? Am I Itempas now?”

And at that I faltered, silent, because of course she knew of my earlier anger. Perhaps she had even known I was there, spying on her with Itempas until I’d flounced off. I hunched, ashamed of myself and then ashamed that I felt ashamed.

“You use force when it suits you,” I muttered, trying to cover the shame with sullenness.

“And when I must, yes. But it doesn’t suit me now.”

“I don’t want more death on my conscience,” I said, both to her and to En. “Please, En. I couldn’t bear to lose you. Please!”

En—the demonshitting, lightfarting gasbag—responded by turning red and bloating with each passing second. Gathering itself to explode, as if that was somehow better than starving to death! I groaned.

Yeine rolled her eyes. “A tantrum. I suppose that’s to be expected, given your influence, but really…” She shook her head and sat back on her knees, looking around thoughtfully. For an instant her eyes darkened, from their usual faded green to something deep and shadowed, like a thick, wet forest, and then suddenly the orrery chamber was empty. All my dead toys vanished. En, too, for which I felt sudden regret.

“I’ll keep the rest safe for you,” she said, reaching up to smooth a hand over my hair as she had always done. I closed my eyes and relaxed into the comfort of familiarity, pretending for a moment that I was still small and all was well. “Until the day you can reclaim them and send them home yourself.”

I exhaled, grateful despite the bitterness her words triggered in me. It hurt her to make dead things live again; it went against her nature, a perversion of the cycle Enefa had designed at the beginning of life. She did not do it often, and we never asked it of her. But… I licked my lips. “Yeine… this thing that’s happening to me…”

She sighed, looking troubled, and belatedly I realized there was no need to ask. If she’d had the power to reverse my transformation into a mortal, she would have used it, no matter what harm it did her. But what did it mean, then, that the goddess who had supreme power over mortality could not erase mine?

“If I were older,” she said, and I felt guilty for making her doubt herself. She lowered her eyes, looking small and vulnerable, like the mortal girl she resembled. “If I knew myself better, perhaps I would be able to find some solution.”

I sighed and shifted to lie on my side, putting my head in her lap after awkwardly pushing my hair out of the way. “This may be beyond all of us. Nothing like it has ever happened before. It’s pointless to rail against what you can’t stop.” I scowled. “That would make you Itempas.”

“Nahadoth is unhappy,” she said.

I suspected she wanted to change the subject. I sighed. “Nahadoth is overprotective.”

She stroked my hair again, then lifted the tangled mass and began to finger comb it. I closed my eyes, soothed by the rhythmic movements.

“Nahadoth loves you,” she said. “When we first found you in this… condition… he tried so hard to restore you that it damaged him. And yet…” She paused, her tension suddenly prickling the air between us.

I frowned, both at her description of Nahadoth’s behavior and at her hesitation. “What?”

She sighed. “I’m not certain you can be any more reasonable about this than Naha.”

“What, Yeine?” But then I understood, and as she had predicted, I grew unreasonably angry. “Oh gods and demons, no, no you don’t. You want to talk to Itempas.”

“Resisting change is his nature, Sieh. He may be able to do what Nahadoth could not: stabilize you until I find a cure. Or if we joined again, as Three—”

“No! You’d have to set him free for that!”

“Yes. For your sake.”

I sat up, scowling. “I. Don’t. Care.”

“I know. Neither does Nahadoth, to my surprise.”

“Naha—” I blinked. “What?”

“He is willing to do anything to save you. Anything, that is, except the one thing that might actually work.” Abruptly she was angry, too. “When I asked, he said he would rather let you die.”

“Good! He knows I would rather die than ask for that bastard’s help! Yeine”—I shook my head but forced the words out—“I understand why you’re drawn to him, even though I hate it. Love him if you must, but don’t ask the same of me!”

She glared back, but I did not back down, and after a moment, she sighed and looked away. Because I was right, and she knew it. She was still so young, so mortal. She knew the story, but she had not been there to see what Itempas had done to Nahadoth, or to the rest of us Enefadeh. She lived with the aftermath—as did we all, as would every living thing in the universe, forever and ever—but that was entirely different from knowing firsthand.

“You’re as bad as Nahadoth,” she said at last, more troubled than angry. “I’m not asking you to forgive. We all know there’s no forgiving what he did, the past can’t be rewritten, but someday you’re going to have to move on. Do what’s necessary for the world, and for yourselves.”

“Staying angry is necessary for me,” I said petulantly, though I forced myself to take a deep breath. I did not want to be angry with her. “One day, maybe, I’ll move on. Not now.”

She shook her head, but then took me by the shoulders and guided me down so that my head lay in her lap again. I had no choice but to relax, which I wanted to do, anyway, so I sighed and closed my eyes.

“It’s irrelevant in any case,” she said, still sounding a bit testy. “We can’t find him.”

I did not want to talk about him, either, but I dredged up interest. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. But he’s been missing for several years now. When we seek his presence in the mortal realm, we feel nothing, find nothing. We aren’t worried… yet.”

I considered this but could offer no answer. Even together, the Three were not omniscient, and Yeine and Nahadoth alone were not the Three. If Itempas had found some scrivener to craft an obscuration for him… But why would he do that?

For the same reason he does anything else, I decided. Because he’s an ass.

“I don’t,” Yeine said softly after a while. I frowned in confusion. She sighed and stroked my hair again. “Love him, I mean.”

So many unspokens in her words. Not yet the most obvious among them, and perhaps a bit of not ever, because I am not Enefa, though I did not believe that. She was too drawn to him already. Most relevant was not until you love him, too, which I could live with.

“Right.” I sighed, weary again. “Right. I don’t love him, either.”

We both fell silent at that, for a long while. Eventually she began to touch my hair here and there, causing the excess length to fall away. I closed my eyes, grateful for her attention, and wondered how many more times I would be privileged to experience it before I died.

“Do you remember?” I asked. “The last day of your mortal life. You asked me what would happen when you died.”

Her hands went still for a moment. “You said you didn’t know. Death wasn’t something you’d thought much about.”

I closed my eyes, my throat tightening for no reason I could fathom. “I lied.”

Her voice was too gentle. “I know.”

She finished my hair and gathered the shed length of it in one hand. I felt the flick of her will, and then she put her hand in front of my face to show me what she’d done. My hair had become a thin woven cord short enough to loop about my neck, and threaded onto this cord was a small, yellow-white marble. A different size and substance, but I would recognize its soul anywhere: En.

I sat up, surprised and pleased, lifting the necklace to grin at my old friend. (It did not like being smaller. It missed being a kickball, bouncy and fat. Did it have to be this puny, rigid shape just because I wasn’t a child anymore? Surely adult mortals liked to kick balls sometimes. I stroked it to still its whining.) Then I touched my shorter hair and found that she’d reshaped that, too, giving me a style that suited the older lines of my face.

I looked up at her. “You’ve made me very pretty—thank you. Did you play with dolls as a mortal girl?”

“I was Darre. Dolls were for boys.” She got to her feet, unnecessarily dusting off her clothes, and looked around the now-empty chamber. “I don’t like you being here, Sieh. In Sky.”

I shrugged. “This place is as good as any other.” Nahadoth had been right about that. I couldn’t leave the mortal realm in my condition; too much of the gods’ realm was inimical to flesh. Naha could have kept me safe by taking me into himself, but I would not tolerate that again.

“This place has Arameri.”

Resisting the urge to bat at the marble on its cord, I slipped it over my head and let it settle under my shirt instead. (En liked that, being near my heart.) “I’m not a slave anymore, Yeine. They’re no threat to me now.” She shot me a look of such disgust that I recoiled. “What?”

“Arameri are always a threat.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really, daughter of Kinneth?”

At this she looked truly annoyed, her eyes turning a yellowy, acid peridot. “They cling to power by a thread, Sieh. Only their scriveners and armies allow them to keep control—mortal magic, mortal strength, both of which can be subverted. What do you think they’ll do, now that they have a god in their power again?”

“I can’t see how a weak, dying god will do them much good. I can’t even take another form safely. I’m pathetic.” She opened her mouth to protest again, and I sighed to interrupt her. “I will be careful. I promise. But truly, Yeine, I have more important concerns right now.”

She sobered. “Yes.” After another moment’s silence, she uttered a heavy sigh and turned away. “See that you are careful, Sieh. A mortal lifetime may seem like nothing to you….” She paused, blinked, and smiled to herself. “To me, too, I suppose. But don’t squander it. I mean to use every moment of yours to try and find a cure.”

I nodded. So lucky I was to have such devoted, determined parents. Two out of three of them, anyhow.

“I will see you again when I know more,” she said. She leaned forward to pull me into an embrace. I was still sitting on my knees; I did not rise as she did this. If I had, I would have been taller than her, and that did not feel at all right.

Then she vanished, and I sat alone in the empty orrery for a long time.

Judging by the angle of the sun, it was well into the afternoon when I returned to Dekarta’s room. I didn’t care about that for long, however, because as I stepped through the hole in the wall, I found that I had visitors. They rose to greet me as I stopped in surprise.

Shahar, more demure than I had ever seen her, stood near the door to her own room. She was dressed in what passed for daily wear among fullbloods: a long gown of honey-lattice, bright blue satin slippers, and a cloak, with her hair tucked and looped into an elaborate chignon. Beside Shahar stood a woman whose demeanor immediately cried steward to me. She stood the tallest of the three women in the room, broad-shouldered and handsome and marvelously direct in her gaze, with a churning avalanche of thick, coily black hair falling about her shoulders and back. Yet despite her commanding presence, she was not as well dressed as the other two, and her mark was only that of a quarterblood. She kept silent and looked through me with her hands behind her back, in the posture of detached attention that all her successful predecessors had mastered.

Between these two stood a third woman: the most high Lady Arameri herself, head of the family and ruler of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, resplendent in a deep red shawl-collared gown. Then to my further shock, all three women dropped to one knee—the steward smoothly, the lady and her heir somewhat less so. At the sight of their bowed heads, I couldn’t help laughing.

“Well!” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Now this is a welcome. I had no idea I was so important. Have you actually been waiting here all day for me to come back?”

“It’s no less a welcome than we would offer to any god,” said the lady. Her voice was low, surprisingly like Yeine’s. She looked older awake, with a ruler’s troubles and her own personality influencing the lines of her face, but she was still beautiful in a chilly, powerful way. And she was not afraid of me at all.

“Yes, yes, I know,” I said, going to stand before her. I had not bothered to conjure or steal clothing for myself, which put certain parts of me right at the lady’s eye level, should she choose to look up. Could I needle her into doing so? “Very diplomatic, Lady Arameri, given that half my family wants to kill you and the other half couldn’t care less if the first half did. I assume Shahar told you everything?”

She didn’t take the bait, damn her, keeping her gaze downcast. “Yes. My condolences on your loss of immortality, Lord Sieh.”

Bitch. I scowled and folded my arms. “It’s not lost; it’s just mislaid for a while, and I am still a god whether I live forever or die tomorrow.” But now I sounded petulant. She was manipulating me, and I was a fool for letting her do it. I went to the windows, turning my back on them to hide my annoyance. “Oh, get up. I hate pointless formality, or false humility, whichever this is. What’s your name, and what do you want?”

There was a whisper of cloth as they rose. “I am Remath Arameri,” the lady said, “and I want only to welcome you back to Sky—as an honored guest, of course. We will extend you every courtesy, and I have already set the scrivener corps to the task of researching your… condition. There may be little we mortals can do that the gods haven’t already attempted, but if we learn anything, we will share it with you, naturally.”

“Naturally,” I said, “since if you can figure out how it happened to me, you might be able to do it to any god who threatens you.”

I was pleased that she did not attempt to deny it. “I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t try, Lord Sieh.”

“Yes, yes.” I frowned as something she’d mentioned caught my attention. “Scrivener corps? You mean the First Scrivener and his assistants?”

“The mortal world has changed since you last spent time among us, Lord Sieh,” she said. A nice touch, that, making my centuries of slavery sound like a vacation. “As you might imagine, the loss of the Enefadeh—of your magic—was a great blow to our efforts to maintain order and prosperity in the world. It became necessary that we assume greater control over all the scriveners that the Litaria produces.”

“So you have an army of scriveners, in other words. To go with your more conventional army?” I hadn’t paid attention to the mortal realm since T’vril’s death, but I knew he’d been working on that.

“The Hundred Thousand Legions.” She did not smile—I got the impression she didn’t do that often—but there was a hint of wry irony in her voice. “There aren’t really a hundred thousand, of course. It just sounds impressive that way.”

“Of course.” I had forgotten what a pain it was, dealing with Arameri family heads. “So what do you really want? Because I highly doubt you’re actually glad to have me here.”

She did not dissemble, either, which I liked. “I’m neither glad nor displeased, Lord Sieh—though, yes, your presence does serve several useful purposes to the family.” There was a pause, perhaps while she waited to see my reaction. I did wonder why the Arameri could possibly want me around, but I imagined that would become clear soon enough. “To that end, I have informed Morad, our palace steward, to ensure that all your material needs are met while you’re here.”

“It would be my honor and pleasure, Lord Sieh.” This from the black-haired woman. “We could begin with a wardrobe.”

I snorted in amusement, liking her already. “Of course.”

Remath continued. “I have also informed my daughter Shahar that you are now her primary responsibility. For the duration of your time here in Sky, she is to obey you as she would me and see to your comfort at any cost.”

Wait. I frowned, turning back to Remath at last. The expression on Remath’s face—or rather, the intent lack of expression—made it clear that she knew full well what she had just done. The shocked look that Shahar threw at her back confirmed it.

“Let me be sure I understand you,” I said slowly. “You’re offering me your daughter to do with as I please.” I glanced at Shahar again, who was beginning to look murderous. “What if it pleases me to kill her?”

“I would prefer that you not do so, naturally.” Remath delivered this with sculptured calm. “A good heir represents a substantial investment of time and energy. But she is Arameri, Lord Sieh, and our fundamental mission has not changed since the days of our founding Matriarch. We rule by the grace of the gods; therefore, we serve the gods in all things.”

Shahar threw me a look more raw than anything I’d seen since her childhood, full of betrayal and bitterness and helpless fury. Ah—now that was the Shahar I remembered. Not that this was as terrible as she seemed to think; our oath meant she had nothing to fear from me. Had she told Remath about that? Was Remath counting on a childhood promise to keep her heir safe?

No. I had lived among the Arameri for a hundred generations. I had seen how they raised their children with careful, calculated neglect; that was why Shahar and Dekarta had been left to wander the palace as children. They believed any Arameri stupid enough to die in a childhood accident was too stupid to rule. And I had also seen, again and again, how Arameri heads found ways to test their heirs’ strength, even at the cost of their heirs’ souls.

This, however… I felt my fists clench and had to work hard not to become the cat. Too dangerous, and a waste of magic.

“How dare you.” It came out a snarl, anyway. “You think I’m some petty, simpleminded mortal, delighting in the chance to turn the tables? You think I need someone else’s humiliation to know my own worth? You think I’m like you?”

Remath lifted an eyebrow. “Given that mortals are made in the gods’ image, no, I think we are like you.” That infuriated me into silence. “But very well; if it doesn’t please you to use Shahar, then don’t. Tell her what will please you. She’ll see it done.”

“And is this to take precedence over my other duties, Mother?” Shahar’s voice was as cool as Remath’s, though higher pitched; they sounded much alike. But the fury in her eyes could have melted glass.

Remath glanced over her shoulder and seemed pleased by her daughter’s anger. She nodded once, as if to herself. “Yes, until I inform you otherwise. Morad, please make certain Shahar’s secretary is informed.” Morad murmured a polite affirmative, while Remath kept watching Shahar. “Have you any questions, Daughter?”

“No, Mother,” Shahar replied quietly. “You’ve made your wishes quite clear.”

“Excellent.” In what I considered a brave gesture, Remath turned her back on her daughter and faced me again. “One more thing, Lord Sieh. Rumors are inevitable, but I would advise that you not make your presence—or rather, your nature—known during your time here. I’m sure you can imagine what sort of attention that would draw.”

Yes, every scrivener and godphile in the palace would drive me to distraction with questions and worship and requests for blessings. And since this was Sky, there would also be the inevitable highbloods who wanted a little godly assistance with whatever schemes they had going, and a few who might try to harm or exploit me to gain prestige for themselves, and… I ground my teeth. “Obviously it would make sense for me to keep a low profile.”

“It would, yes.” She inclined her head—not the bow of a mortal to a god, but a respectful gesture between equals. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Was she insulting me by not bothering to show reverence, or was she paying me the compliment of honesty? Damn, I couldn’t figure this woman out at all. “I’ll take my leave of you now, Lord Sieh.”

“Wait,” I said, stepping closer so that I could look her in the eye. She was taller than me, which I liked; it made me feel more my old self. And she was at least wary of me, I saw when I stood closer. I liked that, too.

“Do you mean me harm, Remath? Say you don’t. Promise it.”

She looked surprised. “Of course I don’t. I’ll swear any oath you like on that.”

I smiled, showing all my teeth, and for the barest instant I did smell fear in her. Not much, but even an Arameri is still human, and humans are still animals, and animals know a predator when one draws near.

“Cross your heart, Remath,” I said. “Hope to die. Stick a needle in your eye.”

She lifted an eyebrow at my nonsense. But the words of a god have power, regardless of what language we speak, and I was not quite mortal yet. She felt my intent, despite the silly words.

“Cross my heart,” she replied gravely, and inclined her head. Then she turned and swept out, perhaps before she could reveal more fear, and certainly before I could say anything else. I stuck my tongue out at her back as she left.

“Well.” Morad drew a deep breath, turning to regard me. “I believe I can find suitable garments for your size, though a proper fitting with the tailor would make things easier. Would you be willing to stand for that, Lord Sieh?”

I folded my arms and conjured clothing for myself. A small and petty gesture, and a waste of magic. The slight widening of her eyes was gratifying, though I pretended nonchalance as I said, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to work with a tailor, too. Never been much for keeping up with fashion.” Then I wouldn’t need to expend more magic.

She bowed—deeply and respectfully, I was pleased to see. “As for your quarters, my lord, I—”

“Leave us,” snapped Shahar, to my surprise.

After the slightest of startled pauses, Morad closed her mouth. “Yes, lady.” With a measured but brisk stride, she, too, left. Shahar and I gazed at each other in silence until we heard the door of Dekarta’s apartment shut. Shahar closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath as if for strength.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I expected her to be sad. When she opened her eyes, however, the fury was still burning. Coldly. “Will you help me kill her?”

I rocked back on my heels in surprise and slid hands into my pockets. (I always made clothes with pockets.) Considering for a moment, I said, “I could kill her for you right now, if you want. Better to do it while I still have magic to spare.” I paused, reading the telltale signs in her posture. “But are you sure?”

She almost said yes. I could see that, too. And I was willing to do it, if she asked. It had never been my way to kill mortals before the Gods’ War, but my enslavement had changed everything. Arameri weren’t ordinary mortals, anyway. Killing them was a treat.

“No,” she said at last. Not reluctantly. There was no hint of squeamishness in her—but then, I had been the one to teach her to kill, long ago. She sighed in frustration. “I’m not strong enough to take her place, not yet. I have only a few allies among the nobles, and some of my fullblood relatives….” She grimaced. “No. I’m not ready.”

I nodded slowly. “You think she knows that?”

“Better than I do.” Shahar sighed and slumped into a nearby chair, putting her head in her hands. “It’s always like this with her, no matter what I do. No matter how well I prove myself. She thinks I’m not strong enough to be her heir.”

I sat down on the edge of a beautifully worked wooden desk. My butt settled more heavily than I intended, partly because my butt was bigger now and partly because I was feeling a little winded. Why? Then I remembered: the clothing I’d conjured.

“That’s standard for Arameri,” I said to distract myself. “I can’t remember how many times I saw family heads put their children through all manner of hells to make sure they were worthy.” Fleetingly I wondered what the Arameri did for a succession ceremony now, since the Stone of Earth no longer existed and there was no need for a life to be spent in its inheritance. Remath’s master sigil, I’d noticed, had been the standard kind, complete with the old commanding language even though it was now useless. Clearly they maintained at least a few of the old traditions, however unnecessarily. “Well, it should be easy enough to prove you’re not weak. Just order the annihilation of a country or something.”

Shahar threw me a scathing look. “You think the slaughter of innocent mortals is funny?”

“No, it’s horrific, and I will hear their screams in my soul for the rest of existence,” I said in my coldest tone. She flinched. “But if you’re afraid of being seen as weak, then you have limited options. Either do something to prove your strength—and in Arameri terms, strength means ruthlessness—or quit now and tell your mother to make someone else heir. Which she should do, in my opinion, if she’s right and you aren’t strong enough. The whole world will be better off if you never inherit.”

Shahar stared at me for a moment. Hurt, I realized, because I’d been deliberately cruel. But I’d also told the truth, however unpleasant she might find it. I’d seen the carnage that resulted when a weak or foolish Arameri took over the family. Better for the world and for Shahar, because otherwise her relatives would eat her alive.

She rose from the chair and began to pace, folding her arms and nibbling her bottom lip in a way that I might have found endearing on another day and under better circumstances.

“What I don’t understand is why your mother wants me here,” I said. I stretched out my offensively long legs and glared down at them. “I’m not even a good figurehead, if that’s what she’s thinking. My magic is dying; anyone who looks at me can see that something’s wrong. And she wants me to keep my godhood secret anyhow. This makes no sense.”

Shahar sighed, stopping her pacing and rubbing her eyes. “She wants to improve relations between the Arameri and the gods. It’s a project her father began—mostly because you stopped visiting Sky when her grandfather, T’vril Arameri, died. She’s been sending gifts to the city’s godlings, inviting them to events and so on. Sometimes they actually show up.” She shrugged. “I’m told she even courted one as a potential husband. He didn’t accept, though. They say that’s why she never married; after being turned down by a god, she couldn’t settle for anything less without being seen as weak.”

“Really?” I grinned at the idea of cold Remath trying to win one of my siblings’ love. Some of them might have been amused enough to allow a seduction. Which one had she propositioned? Dima, maybe; he would mount anything that held still long enough. Or Ellere, who could match any Arameri for hauteur and preferred stiff types like Remath—

“Yes. And I suspect that’s why she tried to give me to you.” I blinked in surprise, and Shahar smiled thinly. “Well, you’re too young for her tastes. But not mine.”

I leapt to my feet, taking several quick steps back from her. “That’s insane!”

She stared at me, surprised by my vehemence. “Insane?” Her jaw tightened. “I see. I had no idea you found me so repellent.”

I groaned. “Shahar, I’m the god of childhood. Would you please think about that for a moment?”

She frowned. “Children are perfectly capable of marriage.”

“Yes. And some of them even have children themselves. But childhood doesn’t last long under those conditions.” I shuddered before I could stop myself, folding my arms over my chest to match her posture. Paltry, inadequate protection. Impossible not to think of groping hands, grunting breaths. So many of Shahar’s forbears had loved having a pretty, indestructible, never-aging boy around—

Gods, I was going to be sick. I leaned against the desk, trembling and panting.

“Sieh?” Shahar had drawn near, and now she touched me, her hand warm against my back. “Sieh, what’s wrong?”

“What do you do for fun?” I took deep breaths.

“What?”

“Fun, damn you! Do you do anything but scheme in your spare time, or do you actually have a life?”

She glowered at me, and her petulance made me feel just a little better. I turned and grabbed her hand and dragged her across the room, onto Deka’s modestly sized bed. She gasped and tried to pull free of me. “What the hells are you doing?”

“Jumping on the bed.” I didn’t take my shoes off. Worked better with them on. I stood awkwardly in the soft middle of the mattress and hauled her up with me.

“What?”

“You’re supposed to try and keep me happy, right?” I took her by the shoulders. “Come on, Shahar. It’s only been eight years. You used to love trying new things, remember? I offered to take you cloud jumping once and you leapt at the chance, until you remembered that I was a baby-killing monster.” I grinned, and she blinked, outrage fading as she remembered that day. “You kicked me down the stairs so hard I actually got bruises!”

She uttered a weak, uncertain laugh. “I’d forgotten about that. Kicking you.”

I nodded. “It felt good, didn’t it? You didn’t care that I was a god, that I might get angry and hurt you. You did what you wanted, damn the consequences.”

Yes, at last, the old light was in her eyes. She was older, wiser, she would never do something so foolish today—but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to. The impulse was there, buried but not dead. That was enough.

“Now try it again,” I said. “Do something fun.” I bounced a little on the bed’s soft, springy surface. She yelped and stumbled, trying to get her footing—but she laughed. I grinned, the nausea gone already. “Don’t think! Just do what feels good!”

I jumped, really jumped this time, and the force of my landing nearly threw her off the bed. She shrieked in terror and excitement and sheer giddy release, and finally jumped in self-defense, wobbling badly because my jumping had thrown her off. I laughed and grabbed her and made her jump with me, as high as I could go without using magic. She cried out again when we actually got within arm’s reach of the room’s arched ceiling. Then we came down fast and hard, and something in Deka’s bed groaned in protest and I took us up again and she was laughing, laughing, her face alight, and on impulse I pulled her close and we overbalanced and went sideways and I had to use magic to make sure we landed safely on our backs, but that was fine because suddenly magic was easy again and I felt so good that I laughed and kissed her.

I truly hadn’t meant anything by it. Jumping felt good and laughing felt good and she felt good and kissing her felt good. Her mouth was soft and warm, her breath a tickle against my upper lip. I smiled as I let it end and sat up.

But before I could, her hands gripped the cloth at the back of my shirt, pulling me down again. I started as her mouth found mine again, more delicious sweetness like flower nectar; then her tongue slipped between my lips. Now the sweetness turned to honey, thick and golden, sliding down my throat in a slow caress, spreading molten through my body. She shifted a little to press her small breasts against my chest. (Wait, little girls didn’t have breasts, did they?) Oh, gods, her hands on my back felt so good, I hadn’t liked a mortal this much in ages, could it be the love that Remath schemed for? No, I loved Shahar already, had loved her since childhood, oh yes oh yes oh yes. Exquisite mortal, here is my soul; I want you to know it.

We parted then, her gasping and jerking away, me letting out a slow, trembling sigh.

“Wh-what…” She put a hand to her mouth, her green eyes wide and so clear in the afternoon sunlight that I could count every spoke of her irises. “Sieh, what—”

I cupped her cheek, sighing languidly. “That was me.” I closed my eyes, relaxing into the moment. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

I didn’t feel like explaining, so I didn’t. I just rolled onto my back and let myself drift. Thankfully, she said nothing for a long while, lying still beside me.

Such moments of peace never last, so I didn’t mind when she finally spoke. “It’s your antithesis, isn’t it? Marriage, things like that. Anything to do with adulthood.”

I yawned. “Duh.”

“Just talking about it made you sick.”

“No. Finding out that I’m dying and worrying about my orrery and talking about marriage made me sick. If I’m already strong, a little thing like that can’t hurt me.”

“Your orrery?” I felt the bed shift as she sat up on her elbows, her breath tickling my face.

“Nothing important. It’s gone now.”

“Oh.” She was silent a moment longer. “But how do you keep yourself from thinking about things like dying?”

I opened my eyes. She was on her side now, head propped on her fist. Her hair had come partially loose from its swept-up chignon, and her eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them. She looked thoroughly rumpled and a bit naughty, not at all the poised and controlled family heir.

“How do you keep yourself from thinking about death?” I touched her nose with a fingertip. “You mortals have to live with that fear all the time, don’t you? If you can do it, I can, too.” I would have to, or I would die even sooner. But I did not say this aloud; it would have spoiled the mood.

“I see.” She lifted a hand, hesitated, and then yielded to impulse, resting it on my chest. I couldn’t purr in this form, but I could sigh in pleasure and arch a little beneath her hand, which I did. “So… what was that, just now?”

“Why, Lady Shahar, I believe it’s called a kiss in Senmite. In Teman it’s umishday, and in Oubi it’s—”

She swatted my chest hard enough to sting, then blanched as she realized what she’d done, then got over it. Her cheeks had gone that blotchy pink that either meant sickness or strong emotion in Amn; I guessed she was feeling shy. “What I mean is, why did you do it?”

“Why did you kiss me last night?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. It felt right.”

“Same for me.” I yawned again. “Damn. I think I need to sleep.”

She sat up, though she did not immediately leave the bed. Her back was to me, so I could see the tension in her shoulders. I thought she was going to ask another question, and perhaps she meant to. But what she said instead was, “I’m glad you came back, Sieh. Really. And I’m glad… what happened that day wasn’t…” She drew a deep breath. “I hated you for a long time.”

I folded my hands under my head, sighing. “You probably still hate me a little, Shahar. I took your brother from you.”

“No. Mother did that.” But she did not sound wholly certain, and I knew the mortal heart was not always logical.

“Wounds need time to heal,” I said, thinking of my own.

“Maybe so.” After another moment, she stood with a sigh. “I’ll be in my room.”

She left. I was tempted to lie there awhile longer and fight the urge to sleep, but there are times to be childish and times when wisdom takes precedence. Sighing, I rolled over and curled up, giving in.

5

Above mortals are the gods, and above us is the unknowable, which we call Maelstrom. For some reason It likes the number three. Three are Its children, the great gods who made the rest of us, who named themselves and encompass existence. Three also are the rankings of us lesser gods—though that is only because we killed the fourth.

First came the niwwah, the Balancers, among whose ranks I am honored to be counted. We were born of the Three’s earliest efforts at intercourse, for they had other ways of lovemaking long before reproduction had anything to do with it. They did not know how to be parents then, so they did many things wrong, but it was long ago and most of us have forgiven them for it.

We are called Balancers not because we balance anything, mind, but because each of us has two of the Three as parents in what we have come to realize is a balanced combination: Nahadoth and Enefa in my case, Itempas and Enefa in others. We do not like each other much, Nahadoth’s children and our half siblings who belong to Itempas, but we do love each other. So it goes with family.

Next are the elontid, the Imbalancers. Again, this name is not because they take any active role in the maintenance or destruction of existence, but because they were born of imbalance. We did not know at first that certain mixes among us are dangerous. Nahadoth and Itempas, first and foremost—Enefa made them able to breed together, but they are both too similar and too different to do so easily. (Gender has nothing to do with this difficulty, mind you; that is only a game for us, an affectation, like names and flesh. We employ such things because you need them, not because we do.) On the rare occasions that Naha and Tempa bear children together, the results are always powerful, and always frightening. Only a few have lived to adulthood: Ral the Dragon, Ia the Negation, and Lil the Hunger. Also counted among the elontid are those born of unions between gods and godlings, reflecting the inequity of the merging that created them. They are gods of things that ebb and wane, like the tides, fashion, lust and liking.

Nothing is wrong with them, I must emphasize, though some among my fellow niwwah treat them as pitiable creatures. This is a mistake; they are merely different.

Third we count the mnasat: those children we godlings have produced among ourselves. Here there is weakness, in the relative sense of things, for even the mnasat can destroy a world if pressed. Countless numbers have been born over the aeons, but most are culled in their first few centuries—caught in the cross fire of the Three’s endless battling and copulating, or dragged into the Maelstrom by accident, or lost through any of the other legion hazards that might befall a young god. The War in particular decimated their ranks—and I will admit that I took my share of their lives. Why shouldn’t I have, if they were so foolish as to interfere in the concerns of their betters? Yet there were a few whom I could not kill, and who proved themselves worthy through that trial-by-apocalypse. The mnasat have shown us by the harsh example of their deaths that it is living true, not mere strength, which dictates matters among us. Those who submitted to their natures gained power to match even the strongest of us niwwah—and those who forgot themselves, no matter how much innate power they possessed, fell.

There is another lesson in this: life cannot exist without death. Even among gods there are winners and losers, eaters and eaten. I have never hesitated to kill my fellow immortals, but I sometimes mourn the necessity.

The demons were the fourth ranking of us, if you’re wondering. But there is no point in speaking of them.

I awakened with a rude snarfle and a groan. Dreams. I had forgotten those, a plague of mortal flesh. Bad enough mortals wasted so much of their lives insensible, but Enefa had also given them dreams to teach them about themselves and their universe. Few of them ever listened to the lessons—a total waste of creation in my eyes—but thanks to that, I would have to endure these mind-farts every time I slept. Lovely.

It was late in the night, nowhere near morning. Though I had been asleep for only three or four hours, I felt no further urge to rest, perhaps because I wasn’t yet fully mortal. So what to do with the hours until Shahar was awake to entertain me?

I got up and went roaming again in the palace, this time not bothering to conceal myself. The servants and guards said nothing when I passed them, despite my nondescript clothing and unmarked forehead, but I felt their eyes on my back. What had Morad, or whoever served as the captain of the guard now, told them about me? There was no flavor of adoration or revulsion to their stares. Just curiosity—and wariness.

I went into the underpalace first, to the Nowhere Stair. Which no longer existed, to my shock.

In its place was an open atrium. Three levels of wide circular balconies ringed a space that had been reworked with sculptures and potted plants of the sort that needed little care. (At least it wasn’t dusty anymore. The Arameri no longer neglected the underpalace, having realized it could hide secrets.) The atrium lacked the intentionally carefree feel of most Sky architecture, and I could see where the edges of each balcony had been too-hastily molded by the scriveners, leaving them uneven and not as smooth as they should have been. Servants had cleaned up the rubble, but signs of the disaster were still there, for one who knew how to see.

I crouched at the edge of one of the balconies, bracing one hand on the thin railing, and touched the rough daystone of the floor. Echoes still reverberated in the stone—not echoes of sound, since those had long since moved on, but echoes of event. I closed my eyes and saw again what the stone had witnessed.

The Nowhere Stair. At the bottom of it, three children holding hands. (I marveled at how small Shahar had been then; already I had grown used to her older shape.) I watched the mortals’ faces change from smiles to alarm, felt the rising rush of wind, saw their hair and clothing begin to whip about as if they’d been caught in a tornado. They screamed as their feet rose from the floor; then they flipped entirely, twisting upside down. Only I did not budge, my feet seemingly rooted to the ground. Only their grip on each other and me held them down.

And the look on my face! In the memory, I stood with mouth slack, eyes distant and confused, brow ever-so-slightly furrowed and head cocked, as if I heard something no one else could, and whatever I heard had obliterated my wits.

Then my body blurred, flesh interspersing with white lines. My mouth opened and the stone beneath my fingertips gave one last microscopic shiver as a concussion of force tore loose from my throat. The Nowhere Stair shattered like glass, as did all the daystone around it and beneath it and above it. What saved the children was that the energy blasted outward in a spherical wave; they fell amid the rubble, bleeding and still, but not much of the rubble landed on them.

And when the dust cleared, I had vanished.

Taking my fingers off the stone, I frowned to myself. Then I said to the mortal who had hovered somewhere behind me, watching for the past ten minutes, “What do you want?”

He came forward, preceded by the familiar mingled scent of books and chemical phials and incense; by that I knew what he was before he ever spoke. “My apologies, Lord Sieh. I did not mean to disturb you.”

I rose, dusting off my hands, and turned to take his measure. An island man of late middle years, with salt-sprinkled red hair and a lined saturnine face that showed a hint of beard stubble. There was a fullblood mark on his brow, but he didn’t look Arameri or even Amn. And fullbloods rarely smelled of hard work. An adoptee, then.

“You the First Scrivener?” I asked.

He nodded, obviously torn between fascination and unease. Finally he offered me an awkward bow—not deep enough to be properly respectful but too deep for the kind of disdain a devout Itempan should have shown. I laughed, remembering Viraine’s cool, nuanced poise, and then sobered as I remembered why Viraine had been so good at things like that.

“Forgive me,” the man said again. “But the servants passed word that you were abroad in the palace, and… I thought… well, it seems natural that you would come to the scene of the crime, so to speak.”

“Mmm.” I slipped my hands into my pockets, trying very hard not to feel uneasy in his presence. These were not the old days. He had no power over me. “It’s late, First Scrivener, or early. Don’t you Itempans believe in a full night’s rest before your dawn prayers?”

He blinked; then his surprise faded into amusement. “They do, but I’m not Itempan, Lord Sieh. And I wanted to meet you, which necessitated staying up late, or so my research suggested. You were known to be decidedly nocturnal during your”—his confidence faltered again—“time here.”

I stared at him. “How can you not be Itempan?” All scriveners were Itempan priests. The Order gave anyone with a knack for magic a single choice: join or die.

“About—hmm—fifty years ago? The Litaria petitioned the Nobles’ Consortium for independence from the Order of Itempas. The Litaria is a secular body now. Scriveners may devote themselves to whichever god, or gods, they wish.” He paused, then smiled again. “As long as we serve the Arameri, regardless.”

I looked him up and down, opened my mouth a little to get a better taste of his scent, and was stymied. “So which god do you honor?” He certainly wasn’t one of mine.

“I honor all the gods. But in terms of spirituality, I prefer to worship at the altars of knowledge and artistry.” He made an apologetic little gesture with his hand, as if he worried about hurting my feelings, but I had begun to grin.

“An atheist!” I put my hands on my hips, delighted. “I haven’t seen one of you since before the War. I thought the Arameri wiped all of you out.”

“As well as they did all the other gods’ worshippers, Lord Sieh, yes.” I laughed at this, which seemed to hearten him. “Heresy is actually rather fashionable among the commonfolk, though here in Sky I am more circumspect about it, of course. And the, ah, polite term for people like me is primortalist.”

“Ugh, what a mouthful.”

“Unfortunately, yes. It means ‘mortals first’—neither an accurate nor complete representation of our philosophy, but as I said, there are worse terms. We believe in the gods, naturally.” He nodded to me. “But as the Interdiction has shown us, the gods function perfectly well whether we believe in them or not, so why devote all that energy to a pointless purpose? Why not believe most fervently in mortalkind and its potential? We, certainly, could benefit from a little dedication and discipline.”

“I agree wholeheartedly!” And if I didn’t miss my guess, there were probably a few of my siblings involved in his mortal-worshipping movement. But I refrained from pointing this out, lest it disturb him. “What’s your name?”

He bowed again, more easily this time. “Shevir, Lord Sieh.”

I waved a hand. “I make the Arameri call me ‘lord.’ It’s just Sieh.”

He looked uneasy. “Er, well—”

“Arameri is a state of mind. I’ve known some adoptees who fit right into this family. You, sir, are a die among the jacks.” I smiled to let him know that had been meant as a compliment, and he relaxed. “Remath told you all about me, then?”

“The Lady Arameri informed me of your… condition, yes. I and my staff, including those in the city below, are already hard at work trying to determine what might have caused the change. We’ll inform Lady Remath at once if we find anything.”

“Thank you.” I refrained from pointing out that telling Remath wouldn’t do me any good unless Remath chose to pass the information along. He probably knew that and was just letting me know where his loyalties lay. Mortals first. “Were you here in Sky, eight years ago?”

“Yes.” He came to stand beside me, staring avidly at my profile, my posture, everything. Studying me. Knowing his beliefs, I did not mind for once. “I was head of the healing squadron then; it was I and my colleagues who treated Lord Dekarta and Lady Shahar after their injury. I was promoted to First Scrivener for saving their lives.” He hesitated. “The previous First Scrivener was removed from office for failing to realize that a god had visited Sky.”

I rolled my eyes. “There is no scrivening magic that can detect a god’s presence if we don’t want to be detected.” I had never wanted to be detected.

“The lady was informed of this.” He was smiling thinly, not bitter at least. I supposed there was no point in laying blame.

“If you were here back then, you—or your predecessor—would have conducted an investigation.”

“Yes.” He straightened as if giving a report. “The incident occurred in early afternoon. There was a tremor throughout the palace, and all of the boundary scripts sounded an alarm, indicating unauthorized active magic within the palace’s walls. Guards and service staff arrived to find this.” He gestured at the atrium. The debris had been removed, but that changed nothing; it was painfully clear to anyone who had seen it before that the atrium was really just an enormous sunken pit. “No one knew what had happened until three days later, when first Dekarta, then Shahar awakened.”

More than enough time for rumors to gain traction and ruin Deka’s life. Poor boy, and his sister, too.

“What sort of magic was it?” I asked. Scriveners loved to classify and categorize magic, which somehow helped them grasp it with their unmagical mortal minds. There might be something in their convoluted logic that would help me understand.

“Unknown, Lord—” He caught himself. “Unknown.”

“Unknown?”

“Nothing like it has been observed in the mortal realm, at least not within recorded history. The Litaria’s best scholars have confirmed this. We even consulted several of the friendlier godlings of the city; they weren’t able to explain it, either. If you don’t know—” He shut his mouth with an audible snap, in palpable frustration. He had plainly hoped I would have more answers.

I understood entirely. Sighing, I straightened. “I didn’t intend to hurt them. Nothing that happened makes any sense.”

“The children’s hands were bloody,” Shevir said, his tone neutral. “Both hands, cut in the same way, inflicted on each other to judge by the angles and depth. Some of my colleagues believed they may have attempted some sort of ritual….”

I scowled. “The only ritual involved was one that children the world over have enacted to seal promises.” I lifted my hand, gazing at my own smooth, unscarred palms. “If that could cause what happened, there would be a great many dead children lying about.”

He spread his hands in that apologetic gesture again. “You must understand, we were desperate to come up with some explanation.”

I considered this and hoisted myself up onto the railing, reveling in the ability to kick my feet at last. This seemed to make Shevir very uncomfortable, probably because the drop into the atrium was far enough to kill a mortal. Then I remembered that I was becoming mortal, and with a heavy sigh, I dropped back to the floor.

“So you decided one of the children—Deka—had summoned me, annoyed me, and I blew them to the hells in retaliation.”

“I didn’t believe that.” Shevir grew sober. “But certain parties would not be put off, and ultimately Dekarta was sent to the Litaria. To learn better control of his innate talents, his mother announced.”

“Exile,” I said softly. “A punishment for getting Shahar hurt.”

“Yes.”

“What’s he like now? Deka.”

Shevir shook his head. “No one here has seen him since he left, Lord Sieh. He doesn’t come home at holidays or vacation breaks. I’m told he’s doing well at the Litaria; ironically, he turned out to have a genuine talent for the art. But… well… rumor has it that he and Lady Shahar hate each other now.” I frowned, and Shevir shrugged. “I can’t say I blame him, really. Children don’t see things the way we do.”

I glanced at Shevir; he was lost in thought and hadn’t noticed the irony of talking about childhood to me. He was right, though. The gentle Deka I’d known would not have understood that he was being sent away for reasons that had very little to do with Shahar being injured. He would have drawn his own conclusions about why the friendship oath had gone wrong and why he’d been separated from his beloved sister. Self-blame would have been only the beginning.

But why had Remath even bothered exiling him? In the old days, the family had been quick to kill any member who’d transgressed in some way or another. They should have been even quicker with Deka, who broke the Arameri mold in so many ways.

Sighing heavily, I straightened and turned away from the atrium railing. “Nothing in Sky has ever made sense. I don’t know why I keep coming here, really. You’d think being trapped in this hell for centuries would’ve been enough for me.”

Shevir shrugged. “I can’t speak for gods, but any mortal who spends enough time in a place grows… acclimated. One’s sense of what is normal shifts, even if that place is filled with unpleasantness, until separation feels wrong.”

I frowned at this. Shevir caught my look and smiled. “Married seventeen years. Happily, I might add.”

“Oh.” This reminded me, perversely, of the previous night’s conversation with Shahar. “Tell me more about her,” I said.

I hadn’t specified the “her,” but of course Shevir was as good at parsing language as any scrivener. “Lady Shahar is very bright, very mature for her age, and very dedicated to her duties. I’ve heard most of the other fullbloods express confidence in her ability to rule after her mother—”

“No, no,” I said, scowling. “None of that. I want to know…” Suddenly I was uncertain. Why was I asking him about this? But I had to know. “About her. Who are her friends? How did she handle Deka’s exile? What do you think of her?”

At this flood of questions, Shevir raised his eyebrows. Suddenly I realized two horrifying things: first, that I was developing a dangerous attraction to Shahar, and second, that I had just revealed it.

“Ah… well… she’s very private,” Shevir began awkwardly.

It was too late, but I waved a hand and tried to repair the damage I’d done. “Never mind,” I said, grimacing. “These are mortal affairs, irrelevant. All I should concentrate on now is finding the cure for whatever’s happened to me.”

“Yes.” Shevir seemed relieved to change the subject. “Er, to that end… the reason I sought you out was to ask if you might be willing to provide some samples for us. My fellow scriveners—that is, of the palace contingent—thought we might share this information with the previts in Shadow and the Litaria.”

I frowned at this, unpleasantly recalling other First Scriveners and other examinations and other samples over the centuries. “To try and figure out what’s changed in me?”

“Yes. We have information on your, ah, prior tenure….” He shook his head and finally stopped trying to be tactful. “When you were a slave here, immortal but trapped in mortal flesh. Your present state appears to be very different. I’d like to compare the two.”

I scowled. “Why? To tell me that I’m going to die? I know that already.”

“Determining how you’re turning mortal may give us some insight into what caused it,” he said, speaking briskly now that he was in his element. “And perhaps how to reverse it. I would never presume that mortal arts can surpass godly power, but every bit of knowledge we can gather might be useful.”

I sighed. “Very well. You’ll want my blood, I presume?” Mortals were forever after our blood.

“And anything else you would be willing to give. Hair, nail parings, a bit of flesh, saliva. I’ll want to record your current measurements, too—height and weight and so forth.”

I could not help growing curious at this. “How could that possibly matter?”

“Well, for one thing, you appear to be no more than sixteen years old to my eye. The same age as Lady Shahar and Lord Dekarta, now—but initially, I understand, you looked significantly older than both of them. Approximately ten years to their eight. If you had merely aged eight years in the intervening time—”

I caught my breath, understanding at last. I had grown up before, hundreds of times; I knew the pattern that my body normally followed. I should have been heavier, taller, more finished, with a deeper voice. Eighteen years old, not sixteen. “Shahar and Dekarta,” I breathed. “My aging has slowed to match theirs.”

Shevir nodded, looking pleased at my reaction. “You do seem rather thin, so perhaps you lacked nourishment while you were… away… and this stunted your growth. More likely, however—”

I nodded absently, quickly, because he was right. How had such a crucial detail escaped me?

Because it is the sort of thing only a mortal would notice.

I had suspected that my condition was somehow linked to the friendship oath I’d taken with Shahar and Dekarta. Now I knew: their mortality had infected me, like a disease. But what kind of disease slowed its progress to match that of other victims? There was something purposeful about that sort of change. Something intentional.

But whose intent, and for what purpose?

“Let’s go to your laboratory, Scrivener Shevir,” I said, speaking softly as my mind raced with inferences and implications. “I believe I can give you those samples right now.”

I was getting hungry by the time I left Shevir’s laboratory, just after dawn. It wasn’t bad yet—not the sort of raw, precarious ache I’d known a few times during my slave years, whenever my masters had starved me—but it made me irritable, because it was more proof of my oncoming mortality. Would I starve to death if I ignored it now? Could I still sustain myself with games and disobedience, as I normally did? I was tempted to find out. Then again, I considered as I rubbed my upper arm, where a bandage and healing script concealed the divot of flesh Shevir had taken from me, there was no point in making myself suffer unnecessarily. As a mortal, there would be pain enough in my life, whether I sought it out or not.

Noise and commotion distracted me from grimness. I stepped quickly to the side of a corridor as six guardsmen ran by, hands on their weapons. One of them carried a messaging sphere, and through this I heard the speaker—their captain, I assumed—issuing rapid commands in a low tone. Something about “clear the north-seven corridors” and “forecourt,” and most clearly, “Tell Morad’s people to bring something for the smell.”

I could no more resist such temptation than I could Shahar’s summons—maybe less so. So I hummed a little ditty and slid my hands into my pockets and skipped as I headed down a different corridor. When the guards were out of sight, I opened a wall and tore off running.

I was almost thwarted by the Tree, which had grown through one of the most useful junctures in the dead spaces, and by my stupid, infuriatingly lanky body, which could no longer squeeze through the tighter passages. I knew plenty of alternate routes but still arrived at the courtyard late and out of breath. (That annoyed me, too. I was going to have to make my mortal body stronger, or it would be completely useless at this rate.)

It was worth it, however, for what I saw.

Sky’s forecourt had been designed by my late sister, Kurue, who had understood two key elements of the mortal psyche: they hate being reminded of their own insignificance, yet they simultaneously and instinctively expect their leaders to be overwhelmingly dominant. This was why visitors were confronted with magnificence at four cardinal points as they arrived on the Vertical Gate. To the north was Sky’s vaulted, cavernous entryway, taller than many buildings in the city below. To the east and west lay the twin lobes of the Garden of the Hundred Thousand, a mosaic of ordered flower beds each crowned by an exotic tree. Beyond these one could see a branch of the World Tree, wild and miles vast, spreading a million leaves against the blue sky. Kurue had never planned for the Tree, but it was a testament to her skill that it looked like she had. For those who dared to look south, there was nothing. Only the lonely Pier and an otherwise unimpeded view of the landscape and very, very distant horizon.

Now the forecourt had been defiled by something hideous. As I emerged from the garden via the servants’ ground entrance, no one noticed me. Soldiers were all over the place, disorganized, in a panic. I saw the captain of the guard on one side of the gate mosaic, shouting at the coach driver to take the coach away, away, away for the Father’s sake, take it to the ground station at the cargo gate and let no one touch it.

I ignored all this as I walked forward through the hubbub, my eyes on twin lumps on the ground. Someone had had the sense to lay them on a square of cloth, but that barely contained the mess. Pieces of the lumps spilled and scattered every which way, not helped at all by soldiers who stumbled around retching even as they tried to scrape everything back onto the cloth. As I got close enough to get a good look at the mess—flesh gone gelatinous, so rotten the only thing solid in it was spongy bone—the captain turned and spotted me. He was warrior enough to drop his hand to the sword at his side, but sensible enough to avoid drawing it as he realized who I must be. He cursed swiftly, then caught himself and threw a quick glance to be sure his men weren’t looking before he bowed quickly. Not a subtle man.

“Sir,” he said carefully, though I could see he would rather have used my lord. He was no Itempan, either, though his forehead bore an Arameri mark. He held up a hand, and I stopped a few feet from the outermost edges of the foulness. “Please, it’s dangerous.”

“I don’t think the maggots are likely to attack, do you?” My joke fell flat because there were no maggots. It was easy to see that what lay on the blanket were the remains of two very, very dead mortals, but that peculiarity did puzzle me. And the smell was wrong. I stepped closer, opening my mouth a little, though the last thing I wanted was a better taste of it. I had never liked carrion. But that taste gave me nothing but ammonia and sulfur and all the usual flavors of death.

“Arameri, I take it?” I crouched for a better look. I could not make out marks on their foreheads, or their faces at all for that matter, which were oddly blackened and featureless. Almost flat. “Who were they? These look long-enough dead that I might’ve known them.”

Stiffly, the captain said, “They are—we believe—Lord Nevra and Lady Criscina, second cousins of Lady Remath. Fullbloods. And they died—we believe—last night.”

“What?”

He didn’t repeat himself, though he did stir from his pose in order to kick over a globule of Nevra. Or Criscina. The soldiers had by now managed to get all the scattered bits onto the cloth and were wrapping it carefully for transport. I could see smears along the ground between the Vertical Gate and the cloth. They had brought the bodies up to Sky in the coach, but they hadn’t bothered to wrap them first? That made no sense… unless they hadn’t realized the couple inside were dead before they’d opened the door.

I went over to the captain, who stiffened again at my approach, but held firm. I was surprised to see a lowbloods’ simple bar symbol on his forehead, though it was also hollowed out at the center in the manner of all the blood sigils I’d seen, except Remath’s. It was rare for lowbloods to achieve high rank within Sky. That meant this man either had a powerful patron—not a parent, or he wouldn’t be a lowblood—or he was very competent. I hoped the latter.

“I must admit I pay little attention to mortals once they’re dead,” I said, keeping my voice low. “No fun, corpses. But I was under the impression it normally took them a few months, if not years, to reach this state.”

“Normally, yes,” he said tersely.

“Then what caused this?”

His jaw flexed. “Please forgive me, sir, but I am under orders to keep this matter private. This family matter.” Which meant that Remath had ordered his silence, and nothing short of my dangling him off the Pier would make him talk. Perhaps not even that; he seemed the stubborn type.

I rolled my eyes. “You know as well as I do that only magic could cause such a horror. A scrivener’s activation gone wrong, or perhaps they aggravated one of my siblings.” Though I doubted that. Any godling was capable of such a thing, even the ones with gentler natures, but I could think of no godling who would. We killed; we did not desecrate. We respected death. To do otherwise was an offense to Enefa, and probably Yeine, too.

“I cannot say, sir.”

Stubborn, indeed. “Why did you say it was dangerous?”

He looked hard at me then, to my surprise. Not angrily, though I was pestering him and I knew it. He had the most remarkable gray eyes. Rare in Sky, and almost unheard of among Maroneh, though he looked brown enough to be fully of that race. Probably part Amn, if he was Arameri.

“As you said, my lord.” He spoke softly but emphatically. “Only magic could have done such a thing. This magic works on contact.”

He lifted his chin in the direction of the bodies’ faces, which were still visible as the soldiers worked to wrap the loose limbs. I peered closer and realized that what I had taken for just more decay was something different. The blackness of their faces was not rot, but char. Not faces at all, in fact: each of the dead mortals wore some sort of mask over their features. The masks had burned so badly as to fuse with the flesh, leaving only eyes and a line of jaw of the original faces.

Then the soldiers were done bundling. Six of them set off, carrying the bodies slowly between them. As they reached the palace entrance, a phalanx of servants emerged, carrying cleaning implements and censers. They would cleanse the forecourt of its taint quickly so that no highblood would know such horror had ever lain here.

“I must make my report to the Lady Arameri,” said the captain, turning.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

The captain paused, looking wary, and by that I guessed he’d heard something of my reputation. I grinned.

“No singsongs, I promise,” I said. “No games or tricks. You’ve done nothing to offend me, so you have nothing to fear.”

He relaxed minutely. “Wrath Arameri.”

Definitely Maroneh, with a name like that. “Well, Captain Wrath, since you’re going to tell the lady I turned up here, anyway, you might also tell her that I’d be happy to assist in determining the cause of… this.” I gestured vaguely at the place where the corpses had lain.

He frowned again. “Why?”

“Boredom.” I shrugged. “Curiosity killed the cat. I’m too old to play with toys now.”

A flicker of confusion crossed his face, but he nodded. “I will convey your message, sir.” He turned on his heel and left, heading into the palace, but he paused on the steps and bowed as a slim, white-clad figure appeared in the entryway. Shahar.

I followed him more slowly, nodding to the servants out of habit (which seemed to startle them) and stopping at the foot of the wide steps. Shahar wore a simple morning robe of plush white fur, and a forbidding expression that made me hunch sheepishly, out of long habit.

“I awoke to find you missing,” she said, “and since I’m now judged on how well I serve your needs”—oh, marvelous, just the lightest glaze of venom on those words; she was very good—“it became imperative that I find you before completing any of my other, many, duties. I was at a loss, however, until I was informed of this incident. I knew you would be wherever there was trouble.”

I flashed her my most winning smile, which made her eyes even colder. Perhaps I was too old for that to work anymore. “You could simply have called me,” I said. “Like you did two nights ago.”

She blinked, distracted from her own anger so easily that I knew she wasn’t that upset. “Do you think that would work?”

I shrugged, though I was less nonchalant about it than I let her see. “We’re going to have to try it sometime, I suppose.”

“Yes.” She let out a deep sigh, but then her eyes drifted to the servants now assiduously attacking the soiled area around the Vertical Gate. One of them was even cleaning the gate itself, though carefully, using a clear solution and taking great pains not to step on any of the black tiles.

“You knew them?” I asked. Softly, in case she’d cared for them.

“Of course,” she said. “Neither was any threat to me.” As near a declaration of friendship as it got with this family. “They managed our shipping concerns in High North and on the islands. They were competent. Sensible. Brother and sister, like—” Deka and me, I suspected she would have said. “A great loss to the family. Again.”

By the bleakness of her expression, I realized suddenly that she was not surprised by the manner of their deaths. And her wording had been another clue, as had Wrath’s warning.

“I’m hungry,” I said. “Take me somewhere with food and eat with me.”

She glared. “Is that a command?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not forcing you to obey it, so no.”

“There are many kinds of force,” she said, her gaze as hard as stone. “If you tell my mother—”

I groaned in exasperation. “I’m not a tattletale! I’m just hungry!” I stepped closer. “And I want to talk about this somewhere private.”

She blinked, then flushed—as well she should have, because she should’ve caught my hints. Would have, if her pride hadn’t interfered. “Ah.” She hesitated, then looked around the forecourt as if it were full of eyes. It usually was, one way or another. “Meet me at the cupola of the library in half an hour. I’ll have food brought.” With that she turned away in a swirl of fur and whiteness, her shoes clicking briskly on the daystone as she walked.

I watched her walk away, amused until I realized my eyes were lingering on the slight curves of her hips and their even slighter sway, thanks to her stiff, haughty walk. That unnerved me so badly that I stumbled as I backed down the steps. Though there were only servants to see me—and they were carefully not looking, probably on Morad’s orders—I still quickly righted myself and slipped into the garden as a cover, pretending to look at the boring trees and flowers with great fascination. In truth, however, I was shaking.

Nothing to be done for it. Shevir had gauged my age at sixteen, and I knew full well what that age meant for mortal boys. How long before I found myself curled in a sweating knot, furiously caressing myself? And now I knew whose name I would groan when the moment struck.

Gods. How I hated adolescence.

Nothing to be done for it, I told myself again, and opened a hole in the ground.

It did not take long to reach the library. I emerged between two of the massive old bookshelves in a disused corner, then made my way along the stacks until I reached the half-hidden spiral staircase. Kurue had built the library’s cupola as a reward for those palace denizens who loved the written word. They usually found it only by browsing the stacks and sitting quietly for a while, losing themselves in some book or scroll or tablet. It made me obscurely proud that Shahar had found it—and then I grew annoyed at that pride and more annoyed at my annoyance.

But as I reached the top of the staircase, I stopped in surprise. The cupola was already occupied, and not by Shahar.

A man sat on one of its long cushioned benches. Big, blond, dressed in a suggestively martial jacket that would have looked more so if it hadn’t been made out of pearlescent silk. The cupola’s roof was glass, its walls open to the air (though as magically protected from the winds and thinner air as the rest of the palace). A shaft of sunlight made a churning river of the man’s curly hair, and jewels of his jacket buttons, and a sculpture of his face. I knew him at once for Arameri Central Family even without looking at the mark on his brow, because he was too beautiful and too comfortable.

But when he turned to me, I saw the mark and stared, because it was complete. All the scripts I remembered: the contract binding the Enefadeh to the protection and service of Shahar’s direct descendants, the compulsion that forced Arameri to remain loyal to their family head… all of it. But why did only this man, out of all the Central Family, wear the mark in its original form?

“Well, well,” he said, his eyes raking me with the same quick analysis.

“Sorry,” I said uneasily. “Didn’t know anyone was up here. I’ll try someplace else.”

“You’re the godling,” he said, and I stopped in surprise. He smiled thinly. “I think you must remember how difficult it is to keep a secret in this place.”

“I managed, in my day.”

“Indeed you did. And a good thing that was, or you would never have gotten free of us.”

I lifted my chin, feeling annoyed and belligerent. “Is that really a good thing in the eyes of a fullblood?”

“Yes.” He shifted then, setting aside the large, handsomely bound book that had been in his lap. “I’ve just been reading about you and your fellow Enefadeh, actually, in honor of your arrival. My ancestors really had a monster by the tail, didn’t they? I feel exceedingly fortunate that you were released before I had to deal with you.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to understand my own wariness. “Why don’t I like you?”

The man blinked in surprise, then smiled again with a hint of irony. “Maybe because, if you were still a slave and I your master, you’re the one I would put the shortest leash on.”

I wasn’t sure if that was it, but it didn’t help. I had never trusted mortals who guessed at how dangerous I was. That usually meant they were just as dangerous. “Who are you?”

“My name is Ramina Arameri.”

I nodded, reading the lines of his face and the frame of his bones. “Remath’s brother?” No, that wasn’t quite right.

“Half brother. Her father was the last family head. Mine wasn’t.” He shrugged dismissively. “How could you tell?”

“You look Central Family. You smell like her. And you feel”—I glanced at his forehead—“like power that has been leashed.”

“Ah.” He touched his forehead with a self-deprecating little smile. “This does make it obvious, doesn’t it? True sigils were the norm in your day, I understand.”

“True sigils?” I frowned. “What do they call those trimmed-down ones, then?”

“Theirs are called semisigils. Aside from Remath, I am the only member of the family who currently wears a true sigil.” Ramina looked away, his gaze falling on a flock of birds swirling around a Tree branch in the distance. They took off, gliding away, and he followed their slow, steady flight. “It was given to me when my sister took her place as head of the family.”

I understood then. The true sigil enforced loyalty to the family head at the cost of the wearer’s will. Ramina could no more act against his sister’s interests than he could command the sun to set.

“Demons,” I said, feeling an unexpected pity for him. “Why didn’t she just kill you?”

“Because she hates me, I suppose.” Ramina was still watching the birds; I couldn’t read his expression. “Or loves me. Same effect either way.”

Before I could reply, I heard footsteps on the spiral staircase. We both fell silent as two servants came up, bowing quickly toward Ramina and throwing me uncomfortable looks as they set up a wooden tray and put a large platter of finger foods on it. They left quickly, whereupon I went over to the tray and crammed several items into my mouth. Ramina lifted an eyebrow; I bared my teeth at him. He sniffed a bit and looked away. Good. Bastard.

I was full after only that mouthful, which made me happy because it proved I wasn’t fully mortal yet. So I belched and began licking my fingers, which I hoped would disgust Ramina. Alas, he did not look at me. But a moment later, he glanced toward the steps again as Shahar emerged from the floor entrance. She nodded to me, then spotted Ramina and brightened. “Uncle! What are you doing up here?”

“Plotting to take over the world, obviously,” he said, smiling broadly at her. She went over and hugged him with real affection, which he returned with equal sincerity. “And having a lovely conversation with my new young friend here. Did you come to meet him?”

Shahar sat down beside him, glancing from him to me and back. “Yes, though it’s just as well you’re here. Do you know what’s happened?”

“Happened?”

She sobered. “Nevra and Criscina. They—Soldiers brought the bodies this morning.”

Ramina grimaced, closing his eyes. “How?”

She shook her head. “The masks, again. This time it…” She made a face. “I didn’t see the result, but I smelled it.”

I sat down on a bench opposite them, in the cupola’s shadows, and watched them. The light making an aura of their curls. Their identical looks of sorrow. Yes, it was so obvious I wondered why Remath bothered to try and keep it secret.

Ramina got to his feet and began pacing, his expression ferocious. “Demons and darkness! All the highbloods will be livid, and rightly so. They’ll blame Remath for not finding these bastards.” He stopped abruptly and turned to Shahar, his eyes narrowing. “And you will be in greater danger than ever, Niece, if these attackers have grown that bold. I wouldn’t advise travel for some time.”

She frowned a little at this, but not in a surprised way. No doubt she had been thinking the same thing since the forecourt. “I’m scheduled to go to the Gray this evening, to meet with Lady Hynno.”

The Gray? I wondered.

“Reschedule it.”

“I can’t! I asked for the meeting. If I reschedule, she’ll know something’s wrong, and Mother has decreed that any news of these murders is to remain secret.”

Ramina stopped and looked pointedly at me. I flashed him a winning smile.

Shahar made a sound of exasperation. “She also decreed that I’m to give him whatever he wants.” She glowered at me. “He saw the bodies, anyway.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I would appreciate an explanation to go with those bodies. I take it this sort of thing has happened before?”

Ramina frowned at my forwardness, but Shahar only slumped, not bothering to hide her despair. “Never a fullblood before. But others, yes.”

“Other Arameri?”

“And those who support our interests, sometimes, yes. Always with the masks and always deadly. We’re not even sure how the culprit gets the victims to put the mask on. The effects are different every time, and the masks burn up afterward, as you saw.”

Amazing. In the old days, no one would have dared to kill an Arameri, for fear of the Enefadeh being sent to find and punish the killers. Had the world overcome its fear of the Arameri to that degree in just a few generations? The resilience—and vindictiveness—of mortals would never cease to astound me.

“Who do you think is doing it, then?” I asked. They both threw me irritated looks, and I raised my eyebrows. “Obviously you don’t know, or you would have killed them. But you must suspect someone.”

“No,” said Ramina. He sat down, crossing his legs and tossing his long mane of hair over the back of the seat. He regarded me with active contempt. “If we suspected someone, we would kill them, too.”

I grew annoyed. “You have the masks, however damaged. Have the scriveners forgotten how to craft tracking scripts?”

“This is not the same,” said Shahar. She sat forward, her eyes intent. “This isn’t scrivening. The scriveners have no idea how this, this… false magic works, and…” She hesitated, glancing at Ramina, and sighed. “They can’t stop it. We are helpless against these attacks.”

I yawned. I didn’t time it that way, didn’t do it deliberately to suggest that I didn’t care about their plight, but I saw them both scowl at me, anyway. When I closed my mouth, I glowered back. “What do you want me to say? ‘I’m sorry’? I’m not, and you know it. The rest of the world has had to live with this kind of terror—murders without rhyme or reason, magic that strikes without warning—for centuries. Thanks to you Arameri.” I shrugged. “If some mortal has figured out a way to make you know the same fear, I’m not going to condemn them for it. Hells, you should be glad I’m not cheering them on.”

Ramina’s expression went blank, in that way Arameri think is so inscrutable when it really just means they’re pissed and trying not to show it. Shahar, at least, was honest enough to give me the full force of her anger. “If you hate us so much, you know what to do,” she snapped. “It should be simple enough for you to kill us all. Or”—her lip curled, her tone turning nasty—“ask Nahadoth or Yeine to do it, if you don’t have the strength.”

“Say that again!” I shot to my feet, feeling quite strong enough to slaughter the whole Arameri family because she was being a brat. If she’d been a boy, I would have slugged her one. Boys could beat each other and remain friends, however; between boys and girls the matter was murkier.

“Children,” said Ramina. He spoke in a mild tone, but he was looking at me, palpably tense despite that oh-so-calm face. I appreciated his acknowledgment of my nature. It did help to calm me, which was probably what he’d hoped for.

Shahar looked sulky, but she subsided, and after a moment I, too, sat down, though I was still furious.

“For your information,” I spat, crossing my legs and not sulking, thank you, “what you’re describing isn’t false magic. It’s just better magic.”

“Only the gods’ magic is better than scrivener magic,” Shahar said. I could hear her trying for calm dignity, which immediately made me want to torment her in some way.

“No,” I said. To alleviate the urge to annoy her, I shifted to lie down on the bench, putting my feet up on one of the delicate-looking columns that supported the roof. I wished my feet had been dirty, though I supposed that would only have inconvenienced the servants. “Scrivening is only the best thing you mortals—pardon me, you Amn—have come up with thus far. But just because you haven’t thought of anything better doesn’t mean there can’t be anything better.”

“Yes,” said Ramina with a heavy sigh, “Shevir has already explained this. Scrivening merely approximates the gods’ power, and poorly. It can only capture concepts that are communicated via simple written words. Spoken magic works better, when it works.”

“The only reason it doesn’t work is because mortals don’t say it right.” The bench was surprisingly comfortable. I would try sleeping up here some night, in the open air, beneath the waning moon. It would feel like resting in Nahadoth’s arms. “You get the pronunciation right, and the syntax, but you never master the context. You say the words at night when you should only say them by day. You speak them when we’re on this side of the sun, not that side—all you have to do is consider the seasons, for gods’ sake! But you don’t. You say gevvirh when you really mean das-ankalae, and you take the breviranaenoket out of the…” I glanced at them and realized they weren’t following me at all. “… You say it wrong.”

“There’s no way to say it better,” said Shahar. “There’s no way for a mortal to understand all that… context. You know there isn’t.”

“There’s no way for you to speak as we do, no. But there are other ways to convey information besides speech and writing. Hand signs, body language”—they glanced at each other and I pointed at them—“meaningful looks! What do you think magic is? Communication. We gods call to reality, and reality responds. Some of that is because we made it and it is like limbs, the outflow of our souls, we and existence are one and the same, but the rest…”

I was losing them again. Stupid, padlock-brained creatures. They were smart enough to understand; Enefa had made certain of that. They were just being stubborn. I gave up and sighed, tired of trying to talk to them. If only some of my siblings would come to visit me… but I dared not risk word getting out about my condition. As Nahadoth had said, I had enemies.

“Would you consent to work with Shevir, Lord Sieh?” asked Ramina. “To help him figure out this new magic?”

“No.”

Shahar made a harsh, irritated sound. “Oh, of course not. We’re only giving you a roof over your head and food and—”

“You have given me nothing,” I snapped, turning my head to glare at her. “In case you’ve forgotten, I built the roof. If we’re going to get particular about obligations, Lady Shahar, how about you tell your mother I want two thousand years of back wages? Or offerings, if she prefers; either will keep me in food for the rest of my mortal life.” Her mouth fell open in pure affront. “No? Then shut the hells up!”

Shahar stood so fast that on another world she would have shot into the sky. “I don’t have to take this.” In a flurry of fur and smolder, she went down the steps. I heard the click of her shoes along the library’s floors, and then she was gone.

Feeling rather pleased with myself, I folded my arms beneath my head.

“You enjoyed that,” said Ramina.

“Whatever gave you that impression?” I laughed.

He sighed, sounding bored rather than frustrated. “It might amuse you to bicker with her—in fact, I’m sure it does amuse you—but you have no idea of the pressure she’s under, Lord Sieh. My sister has not been kind to her in the years since you almost killed her and caused her brother to be sent away.”

I flinched, reminded of the debt I owed to Shahar—a reminder that Ramina had no doubt meant to deliver. Uncomfortable now, I took my feet off the column and turned onto my belly, propping myself up on my elbows to face him.

“I understand why Remath sent the boy away,” I said, “though I’m still surprised that she did it. Usually, when there’s more than one prospective heir, the family head pits them against each other.”

“That wasn’t possible in this case,” Ramina said. He had turned his gaze away again, this time toward the vast open landscape on the palace’s other side. I followed his eyes, though I had seen the view a million times myself: patchwork farmland and the sparkling blot of the Eyeglass, a local lake. “Dekarta has no chance of inheriting. He’s safer away from Sky, quite frankly.”

“Because he’s not fully Amn?” I gave him a hard look. “And how, exactly, did that happen, Uncle Ramina?”

He turned back to me, his eyes narrowing, and then he sighed. “Demonshit.”

I grinned. “Did you really lie with your own sister, or did a scrivener handle the fine details with vials and squeeze bulbs?”

Ramina glared at me. “Is tact simply not in your nature, or are you this offensive on purpose?”

“On purpose. But remember that incest isn’t exactly unknown to gods.”

He crossed his legs, which might have been defensiveness or nonchalance. “It was the politic solution. She needed someone she could trust. And we are only half siblings, after all.” He shrugged, then eyed me. “Shahar and Dekarta don’t know.”

“Shahar, you mean. Who’s Deka’s father?”

“I am.” When I laughed, his jaw tightened. “The scriveners were most careful in their tests, Lord Sieh. Believe me. He and Shahar are full siblings, as Amn as I am.”

“Impossible. Or you aren’t as Amn as you think.”

He bristled, elegantly. “I can trace my lineage unbroken back to the first Shahar, Lord Sieh, with no taint of lesser races at any point. The problem, however, is Remath. Her half-Ken grandfather, for one…” He shuddered dramatically. “I suppose we’re lucky the children didn’t turn up redheads on top of everything else. But that wasn’t the only problem.”

“His soul,” I said softly, thinking of Deka’s smile, still shy even after I’d threatened to kill him. “He is a child of earth and dappled shadows, not the bright harsh light of day.”

Ramina looked at me oddly, but I was tired of adapting myself to mortals’ comfort. “If by that you mean he’s too gentle… well, so is Shahar, really. But she at least looks the part.”

“When will he be allowed to return?”

“In theory? When his training is complete, two years from now. In actuality?” Ramina shrugged. “Perhaps never.”

I frowned at this, folding my arms and resting my chin on them. With a heavy sigh, Ramina got to his feet as well. I thought he would leave and was glad for it; I was tired of plodding mortal minds and convoluted mortal relationships. But he stopped at the top of the stairwell, gazing at me for a long moment.

“If you won’t help the scriveners find the source of these attacks,” he said, “will you at least agree to protect Shahar? I feel certain she will be a target for our enemies—or those among our relatives who may use the attacks as a cover for their own plots.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. “She’s my friend, you fool.”

He seemed annoyed, probably because of the “you fool.” “What does that—” He paused, then sighed. “No, I should be grateful. The one thing we Arameri have always lacked is the gods’ friendship. If Shahar has managed to win yours… well, perhaps she has a better chance of surviving to inherit than I’d first thought.”

With that, Ramina left. I still didn’t like him.

6

Sky is boredom. That was the thing I had hated the most about it, back when I’d been a slave. It is a massive palace, each spire of which could house a village; its chambers contain dozens of entertainments. All of these become tedious to the point of torment after two thousand years. Hells, after twenty.

It was quickly becoming obvious that I would not be able to endure Sky for much longer. Which was fine; I needed to be out in the world anyhow, searching for the means to cure myself, if such a thing existed in the mortal realm. But Sky was a necessary staging ground for my efforts at life, allowing me relative safety and comfort in which to consider important logistical questions. Where would I live when I left? How would I live, if my magic would soon desert me? I had no resources, no particular skills, no connections in mortal society. The mortal realm could be dangerous, especially given my new vulnerability. I needed a plan, to face it.

(The irony of my situation did not escape me; it was the nature of all mortal adolescents to experience such anxiety at the prospect of leaving their childhood home for the harsh adult world. Knowing this did not make me feel better.)

I had come to no conclusion by the afternoon, but since I guessed that Shahar might have gotten over her fury with me by this point, I went in search of her.

When I walked into Shahar’s quarters, I found her surrounded by three servants who seemed to be in the middle of dressing her. As I appeared in the parlor doorway, she turned around so fast that her half-done hair whipped loose; I saw a flash of dismay cross one servant’s face before the woman masked it.

“Where in the infinite hells have you been?” Shahar demanded as I leaned against the doorjamb. “The servants said you left the cupola hours ago.”

“Good to see you, too,” I drawled. “What are you getting all polished up for?”

She sighed, submitting once again to the servants’ attentions. “Dinner. I’m meeting with Lady Hynno of the Teman Protectorate’s ruling Triadice, and her pymexe.”

She pronounced the word perfectly, which was fitting, as she’d probably been taught to speak Teman since childhood. The word meant something like “heir,” though with a masculine suffix. “Prince,” then, in Amn parlance, though unless the Temans had rewritten their charter again in the centuries since I’d last paid attention to them, it was not a hereditary role. They chose their leaders from among their brighter young folk, then trained them for a decade or so before actually letting them be in charge of anything. That sort of sensible thinking was why I’d chosen the Temans as my model, back when I’d first crafted a mortal appearance for myself.

Then I noticed the gown they were wrapping around Shahar. Quite literally: the gown seemed to consist of bands of subdued gold cloth, palm wide, being woven over and under other bands until a herringbone pattern had been achieved. The overall effect was very elegant and cleverly emphasized Shahar’s still-developing curves. I whistled, and she threw a wary look at me. “If I didn’t know any better,” I said, “I would think you were courting this prince. But you’re too young, and since when have Arameri married foreigners? So this must be something else.”

She shrugged, turning to gaze at herself in the bedroom mirror; the dress was almost done. They needed to wrap only the bottom few layers around her legs. But how was she going to get out of the thing? Perhaps they would cut it off her.

“The Triadic likes beauty,” she said, “and she controls the tariffs on shipping from High North, so it’s worthwhile to impress her. She’s one of the few nobles who can actually make things difficult for us.” She turned to the side, inspecting her profile; now that the servant had repaired her hair, she looked perfect and knew it. “And Prince Canru is an old childhood friend, so I don’t mind looking nice for him.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Arameri usually didn’t let their children have friends. Though I supposed friends were necessary, now that they had no gods. I went over to the parlor’s couch and flopped onto it, not caring about the servants’ glances. “So your dinner will be business and pleasure, then.”

“Mostly business.” The servants murmured something, and there was a pause as Shahar examined herself. Satisfied, she nodded, and the servants filed out. Once they were gone, Shahar slid on a pair of long, pale yellow gloves. “I mean to ask her about what happened to my cousins, in fact.”

I rolled onto my side to watch her. “Why would she know?”

“Because the Temans are part of a neutral group in the Nobles’ Consortium. They support us, but they also support progressive efforts like a revised tithe system and secular schools. The Order of Itempas can no longer afford to educate children beyond the age of nine, you see—”

“Yes, yes,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I don’t care about the details, Shahar. Just tell me the important part.”

She sighed in exasperation, coming over to the couch to gaze haughtily at me. “I believe Hynno has alliances with those High Norther nobles who consistently vote against the interests of the Arameri in the Consortium,” she said. “And they, I believe, are the source of the attacks on my family.”

“If you think that, then why haven’t you killed them?” Not even a handful of generations ago, her forbears would have done it already.

“Because we don’t know which nations are involved. The core of it is in High North, that much we’re certain of, but that still encompasses two dozen nations. And I suspect some involvement by Senmite nations as well, and even some of the islands.” She sighed, putting her hands on her hips and frowning in consternation. “I want the head of this snake, Sieh, not just its fangs or scales. So I’m taking your advice and issuing a challenge. I’m going to tell them to kill me before I assume leadership of the family, or I will destroy the whole of High North to deal with the threat.”

I rocked back, duly impressed, though a knot of cold anger tightened in my stomach as well. “I see. I assume you’re bluffing in order to lure them out into the open.”

“Of course I am. I’m not even certain we can destroy a continent anymore, and the attempt would certainly exhaust the scrivener corps. Weakening ourselves at a time like this would be foolish.” Looking pleased with herself, Shahar sat down beside me. Her dress made a pleasant harmony of sounds as it flexed with her body, a carefully designed effect of its peculiar construction. It probably cost the treasury of a small nation. “Still, I’ve already spoken with Captain Wrath, and we will coordinate an operation that can put on a suitably threatening display—”

“So you won’t use your ancestors’ methods,” I snapped, “because you still want to be a good Arameri. But you’re not above using their reputation to advance your goals. Do I have that right?”

She stared at me, startled into momentary silence. “What?”

I sat up. “You threaten people with genocide, and then you wonder why they scheme against you. Really, Shahar; I thought you wanted to change things.”

Her face darkened at once. “I would never actually do it, Sieh. Gods, that would make me a monster!”

“And what does it make you to threaten all that they know and love?” She fell silent in confusion and growing anger, and I leaned close so that my breath would caress her cheek. “A monster too cowardly to accept her own hideousness.”

Shahar went pale, though two flaring spots of color rose on her cheeks as fury warred with shock in her eyes. To her credit, however, she did not launch an immediate attack, and she did not move away from me. Her nostrils twitched. One of her hands tightened, then relaxed. She lifted her chin.

“Clearly you aren’t suggesting that I actually inflict some calamity on them,” she said. Her voice was soft. “What, then, do you suggest, Trickster? Let them continue with these assassination attempts until every fullblood is dead?” Her expression tightened further. “Never mind. I don’t know why I’m even asking. You don’t care whether any of us live or die.”

“Why should I?” I gestured around us, at Sky. “It’s not as though there aren’t plenty of Arameri—”

“No, there aren’t!” Her temper broke with an almost palpable force. She shifted to her hands and knees, glowering. “You’ve looked around this place, Sieh. They tell me the underpalace was full, back in your day. They tell me there were once as many Arameri living abroad as there were here in Sky, and we could take our pick from among the best of the family to serve us. These days we’ve actually been adopting people into the family who aren’t related at all! Tell me what that means to you, O eldest of godlings!”

I frowned. What she was saying made no sense. Humans bred like rabbits. There had been thousands of Arameri in the days when I’d been a slave… but she was right. The underpalace should never have been empty. No mostly-Maroneh lowblood should have been able to rise to captain of the guard. And Remath had mated with her own brother—that had never happened in the old days. Incest, certainly, constantly, but never for children. Yet if Remath, herself diluted in some hidden way, sought to concentrate the Central Family’s strengths…

The signs had been there since I’d first returned to Sky, but I hadn’t seen them. I was so used to thinking of the Arameri as powerful and numerous, but in fact they were dwindling. Dying.

“Explain,” I said, inexplicably troubled.

Shahar’s anger faded; she sat down again, her shoulders slumping. “The targeting of highbloods is a recent thing,” she said, “but the attacks were happening for a long time before that. We just didn’t notice until the problem became acute.” Her expression grew sour.

“Lowbloods,” I guessed. Those Arameri least-closely related to the Central Family, lacking in resources or social status to give them greater value to the family head. The servants, the guards. The expendable ones.

“Yes.” She sighed. “It started long ago. Probably a few decades after you and the other Enefadeh broke free. All the collateral lines of the family, the ones we left free to manage businesses or simply bring in new blood—It was subtle at first. Children dying of odd diseases, young wives and husbands turning up infertile, accidents, natural disasters. The lines died out. We apportioned their estates to allies or resumed control of them ourselves.”

I was already shaking my head. “No. Accidents can be arranged, gods know children are easy to kill, but natural disasters, Shahar? That would mean…” Could a scrivener do it? They knew the scripts for wind and rain and sunlight, but storms were demonishly hard to control. Too easy to trigger a tsunami when trying for a flash flood. But the alternative—no. No.

She smiled, following my worst thoughts. “Yes. It could mean that a god has been working to kill us for the past fifty years or more.”

I leapt to my feet, beginning to pace. My mortal skin suddenly felt constricting, choking; I wanted to shed it. “If I wanted to kill the Arameri, I would do it,” I snapped. “I would fill this place with soap bubbles and bury you in bath toys. I would put spiked holes in all the floors and cover them with rugs. I would will every Arameri under twelve to just fall down and die—I can do it, too!” I rounded on her, daring her to challenge me.

But Shahar was still nodding, wearily, her smile gone. “I know, Sieh.”

Her capitulation bothered me. I was not used to seeing her despair. I was not used to regarding any Arameri as helpless or vulnerable, let alone all of them.

“Yeine forbade any of us to retaliate against the Arameri,” I said softly. “She didn’t care about you—she hates you as much as the rest of us do—but she didn’t want war everywhere, and…” The Arameri, foul as they were, had been the best hope for keeping the world from collapsing into chaos. Even Nahadoth had gone along with Yeine, and none of my siblings would defy her.

Would they?

I turned away, going to the window so that Shahar would not see my fear.

She sighed and got to her feet. “I’ve got to go. We’re leaving early so as to fool any potential assassins….” She paused, noticing my stillness at last. “Sieh?”

“Go on,” I said softly. Beyond the window, the sun had begun to set, scattering a crimson spectrum across the sky. Did Itempas feel the end of day, wherever he was, the way Nahadoth had once died with every dawn? Did some part of him quail and gibber into silence, or did he fade slowly, like the bands of color in the sky, until his soul went dark?

At my silence, Shahar headed for the door, and I roused myself enough to think. “Shahar.” I heard her stop. “If something happens, if you’re in danger, call me.”

“We never tested that.”

“It will work.” I felt that instinctively. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. “I don’t care if most of the Arameri die, it’s true. But you are my friend.”

She went still behind me. Surprised? Touched? Once upon a time, I would have been able to taste her emotions on the air. Now I could only guess.

“Get some rest,” she said at last. “I’ll have food sent up. We’ll speak again when I return.” Then she left.

And I leaned back against the window, trembling now that she was gone, left alone to ponder the most terrible of possibilities.

A godling defying a god. It seemed impossible. We were such low things compared to them; they could kill us so easily. Yet we were not powerless. Some among us—myself, once upon a time—were strong enough to challenge them directly, at least for a few moments. And even the least of us could keep secrets and stir up trouble.

One godling’s mischief did not trouble me. But if many of us were involved, conspiring across mortal generations, implementing some complex plan, it was no longer mischief. It was a revolt. One far more dangerous than whatever the northerners planned for the Arameri.

Because if the godlings revolted against the gods, the gods would fight back, as they had done when threatened by the demons long ago. But godlings were not as fragile as demons, and many of us had no vested interest in keeping the mortal realm safe. That would mean a second Gods’ War, worse than the first one.

This had been brewing right under my nose for fifty years, and I hadn’t had a clue.

Beyond me, in silent rebuke, the bloody sky went gradually black.

7

I needed help. But not from Nahadoth or Yeine; I dared not chance their tempers. Not until I knew more.

Who could I trust among my siblings? Zhakkarn, of course, but she was never subtle and would be no help in uncovering a conspiracy. The rest—hells. Most of them I had not spoken to in two thousand years. Before that I had tried to kill some of them. Bridges burned, ashes scattered, ground strewn with salt.

And there was the small problem of my inability to return to the gods’ realm in my current state. That was less of a problem than it seemed, because fortunately the city beneath Sky was teeming with my youngest siblings, those for whom the novelty of the mortal realm had not yet worn off. If I could convince one of them to help me… But which one?

I turned from the window, frustrated, to pace. The walls of Sky had begun to glow again, and I hated them, for they were more proof of my impotence; once upon a time, they would have dimmed, just a bit, in my presence. I was no Nahadoth, but there was more than a little of his darkness in me. Now, as if to mock me, the walls stayed bright, diffusing every shadow—

—shadow.

I stopped. There was one of my siblings, just maybe, who would help me. Not because she liked me; quite the opposite. But secrets were her nature, and that was something we shared. It was always easier to relate to those of my siblings with whom I had something in common. If I appealed to that, would she listen? Or would she kill me?

“No reward without risk,” I murmured to myself, and headed for the apartment door.

I took the lift down to the penultimate level of the underpalace. The corridors here were as quiet as always—and dim, compared to the brighter glow of all the other levels. Yes, this was the place.

For nostalgia’s sake, I touched each door as I passed it, remembering. Here were my sisters’ rooms: Zhakkarn’s with cannon shot embedded in the floor and the walls hung with shields; her hammock of blood-soaked slings and whips. (Very comfortable, I knew from experience, though a little scratchy.) Dear traitor Kurue’s, with pearls and coins scattered over nearly every surface, and books stolen from the library stacked atop the rest. The coins would be tarnishing now.

I avoided my own quarters, for fear of how they would make me feel. How long before I ended up living there again? I steered my thoughts off this path with a heavy hand.

This left the fourth chamber, at the center of the level. The one that had been Nahadoth’s.

It was pitch-black within, but I could still see a little in the dark even without cat’s eyes. The chamber was completely empty. No furnishings, no decorations, no hint that the room had ever been used. Yet every inch of its structure screamed defiance of our onetime jailors: the permanently lightless walls. The ceiling, which dipped toward the center of the room; the floor rose in the same spot, as if some terrible force had sucked the very stone toward itself. The sharp corners, which no other room in Sky had. If I stared hard enough into the dark, I could almost see Nahadoth’s silhouette etched against it and hear his soft, deep voice. Have you come for another story? Greedy child.

It had been cruel of me to push him away. I would pray an apology to him after this.

Reaching into my shirt, I pulled up the necklace of my own woven hair. Tugging En off the cord, I willed it to hover in the space between the floor and ceiling extrusions. To my relief, this worked; En stayed in the air and began turning at once, happily. This reminded it of the orrery, though it was lonely without planets.

“Sorry,” I said, reaching out to stroke its smooth surface with a fingertip. “I’ll give you more planets someday. In the meantime, will you give me light?”

In answer, En flared bright yellow-white for me, a gleeful candle. Suddenly Nahadoth’s chamber became smaller, stark with shadows. My own loomed behind me, a big-headed apparition that seemed to taunt me with the shape of the child I should have been. I ignored it and focused on the task at hand.

“Lady of Secrets,” I said, extending a hand; my shadow did the same. Shaping my fingers just so, I made the profile of a face on the wall and spoke with it. “Shadow in the dark. Nemmer Jru Im, my sister; do you hear me?”

There was a pause. Then, though I did not move, my hand shadow cocked its head.

“Well, this is unexpected,” it said in a woman’s voice. “Big brother Sieh. It’s been some time.”

I added my other hand, working the shadow into the shape of a donkey’s head. I’ve been an ass. “I hear interesting things about you, Nemmer. Will you speak with me?”

“I answered, didn’t I?” The first shadow shifted, impossibly manifesting its own arms and hands, the latter of which were set on its hips. “Though I’ll admit that’s because I’ve heard some very interesting things about you, too. I’m dying to know if they’re true.”

Damn. I might have known. “I’ll tell you every juicy detail, but I want something in return.”

“Do you, now?” I tensed at the wariness in her tone. That she did not trust me was irrelevant; she trusted no one. She did not like me, though, which was another matter entirely. “I’m not certain I’m interested in making any bargains with you, Trickster.”

I nodded; no more than I had expected. “I mean no harm to you, Nemmer. Cross my heart and hope to die.” I heard the bitterness in my own voice and angled my fingers into the shape of an old man’s head. “You did not turn on us in the War. I bear no grudge toward you.”

“That I do not believe,” she said, folding her arms. “Everyone knows you hate the ones who stood by doing nothing as much as the ones who fought for Itempas.”

“Hate is a strong word—”

Her silhouette tossed its head in the universal gesture of rolled eyes. “Resent us, then. Yearn to kill us. Is that more accurate?”

I stopped and dropped my hands with a sigh. The talking shadows remained. “You know my nature, Sister. What do you want from me—maturity?” I wanted to laugh, but I was too soul-weary. “Fine, I’ll say it: I hate you and I wouldn’t have contacted you if I had a choice, and we both know it. Now, will you speak with me, or shall we just tell each other to go to the infinite hells and leave it at that?”

She was silent for a moment. I had time enough to worry: who could I contact if she refused to help me? The other choices were worse. What if—

“All right,” she said at last, and the knot that had been tightening in my belly loosened. “I need time to set things up. Come here, a week from today. Noon.” The location made itself present in my consciousness, as if I had always known it. A house somewhere in the city below Sky. South Root. “Come alone.”

I folded my arms. “Will you be alone?”

“Oh, of course.”

I made the shape of a cat’s head with my hands: ears back, teeth bared. She laughed.

“I don’t care if you believe me. You asked for this meeting, not I. Be there in a week, or not at all.” With that, her shadow leaned down and blew hard. With a surprised flare, En went dark and dropped to the floor. Then Nemmer was gone.

In the dark, I retrieved En, who was quite put out. I murmured soothing words and tucked it back into my shirt, all the while thinking.

If Nemmer knew what had happened to me—and it was her nature to know such things; not even the Three could keep her out of their business, though she wasn’t foolish enough to flaunt that—then when I arrived in a week, I might find her and a group of my least-favorite siblings, some of whom had been waiting for a chance to repay me for the Gods’ War for two thousand years.

But Nemmer had never been one to play the games of our family. I didn’t know why she’d sat out the war. Had she been torn, like so many of our siblings, between our fathers? Had she been one of those working to save the mortal realm, which had nearly been destroyed by our battling? I sighed in frustration, realizing that this was the sort of thing I should have occupied myself with as eldest, not our parents’ sordid dramas. If I had bothered to reconcile with my siblings, perhaps tried to understand their reasons for betraying Nahadoth—

“If I had done that, I would not be who I am.” I sighed into the dark.

Which, ultimately, was why I would risk trusting Nemmer. She, too, was only what her nature made her. She kept her own counsel, gathering secrets and doling out knowledge where she deemed best and making alliances only as it suited her—briefly, if at all. If nothing else, that meant she was not my enemy. Whether she became my friend would be up to me.

On returning to Deka’s room, I was surprised to find that I had visitors again: Morad, the ample-haired palace steward, and another servant, who was busy making the bed and tidying up. Both bowed to me at once, as they would to any Arameri highblood. Then the servant promptly resumed his cleaning duties while Morad looked me up and down with an expression of unconcealed distaste.

Frowning at her scrutiny, I looked at myself—and then, belatedly, realized why the servants had all stared at me on my way to the underpalace. I still wore the clothing I had conjured for myself two days before. It had been nondescript then, but it was filthy now, after all my scrabbling through dusty corridors and Tree-choked dead spaces. And… I sniffed one of my armpits and wrinkled my nose, appalled that I had not noticed. I had not bathed since my return to this world, and apparently my adolescent body had a greater capacity for generating reek than I had done as a child.

“Oh,” I said, smiling sheepishly at Morad. She sighed, though I thought I saw a hint of amusement on her face.

“I’ll run you a bath,” she said, and paused, looking particularly at my head. “And summon a stylist. And the tailor. And a manicurist.”

I touched my stringy, gritty hair with a weak laugh. “I suppose I deserve that.”

“As you like, my lord.” Morad touched the servant, who had almost finished the bed, and murmured something. He nodded and exited the apartment at once. To my surprise, Morad then rolled up her sleeves and finished tucking the sheets. When that was done, she went into the bathroom; a moment later, I heard water run.

Curious, I followed her into the room and watched while she sat on the tub’s edge, testing the water with her fingers. It was even more noticeable with her back turned and all that hair of hers visible in full riot. It was clear that she was not fully Amn; her hair had the kind of tight, small coils that wealthy Amn spent hours and fortunes to achieve, and it was as black as my father’s soul. Her skin was pale enough, but the marks of other were in her features, plain to anyone who looked. It was also plain that she was not ashamed of her mixed blood; she sat as straight and graceful as a queen. She could not have been raised in Sky or any Amn territory; they would have beaten her spirit down with cruel words long before now.

“Maroneh?” I guessed. “You must’ve gotten the hair from them, at least. The rest… Teman, maybe? Uthre, a bit of Ken?”

Morad turned to me, lifting one elegant eyebrow. “Two of my grandparents were part Maroneh, yes. One was Teman, another Min, and there are rumors that my father was actually a half-Tok who pretended to be Senmite to get into the Hunthou Legions. My mother was Amn.”

More proof of the Arameri’s desperation. In the old days, they would barely have acknowledged a woman with such jumbled bloodlines, let alone make her Steward. “Then how…”

She smiled wryly, as if she got such rude questions all the time. “I grew up in southern Senm. When I came of age, I petitioned to come here on the strength of my fourth grandparent—an Arameri highblood.” At my grimace, she nodded. It was an old story. “Grandmama Atri never knew my grandfather’s name. He was passing through town on a journey. Her family had no powerful friends, and she was a pretty girl.” She shrugged, though her smile had faded.

“So you decided to come find Grandpapa the rapist and say hello?”

“He died years ago.” She checked the water once more and stopped the taps. “It was Grandmama’s idea that I come here, actually. There’s not much work in that part of Senm, and if nothing else, her suffering could bring me a better life.” She rose and went to stand pointedly beside the washing area’s bench, picking up the flask that held shampoo.

I got up and undressed, pleased that my nudity didn’t seem to bother her. When I sat down, before I could warn her, she lifted the cord that held En from around my neck and set it on a counter. I was relieved that En tolerated this without protest. It must have been tired after its earlier exertion. Plus, it had always had odd taste in mortals.

“You didn’t have to come here for a better life,” I said, yawning as she wet my hair and began washing it. Sending the message to Nemmer had left me tired, too, and Morad’s fingers were skillful and soothing. “There must be a thousand other places in the world where you could’ve made a living and where you wouldn’t have had to deal with this family’s madness.”

“There were no other places that paid as much,” she said.

I swung around to stare at her. “They pay you?”

She nodded, amused at my reaction, and gently pushed my head back into place so that she could resume work. “Yes. Old Lord T’vril’s doing, actually. As a quarterblood, I can retire in five more years with enough money to take care of my whole family for the rest of my life. I’d say that’s worth dabbling in madness, wouldn’t you?”

I frowned, trying to understand. “They are your family,” I said. “The ones you left behind, in the south. The Arameri are just employers to you?”

Her hands paused. “Well. I’ve been here fifteen years at this point; it’s home now. Some aspects of life in Sky aren’t so terrible, Lord Sieh. I suspect you know that. And… well, there are people I love here, too.”

I knew then. She resumed work in silence, pouring warm water over me and then lathering again, and when she leaned past me to pick up the flask of shampoo, I got a good mouthful of her scent. Daystone and paper and patience, the scents of efficient bureaucracy, and one thing more. A complex scent, layered, familiar, with each element supporting and enriching the other. Dreams. Pragmatism. Discretion. Love.

Remath.

It was my nature to use the keys to a mortal’s soul whenever they fell into my hands. If I had still been myself, the child or the cat, I would have found some way to torment Morad with my knowledge. I might even have made a song of it and sung it everywhere until even her friends found themselves humming the tune. The refrain would have been see wow, you silly cow, how dare you lose your heart.

But though I would always be the child, and the child was a bully, I could not bring myself to do this to her. I was going soft, I supposed, or growing up. So I kept silent.

Presently Morad finished with my hair, whereupon she handed me a soapy sponge and stepped back, plainly unwilling to wash the rest of my body. She had wrapped my hair in a damp towel that was tied like a beehive atop my head, which made me giggle when I finished and stood and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Then my eyes drifted down. I saw the rest of me and fell silent.

It was the same body I had shaped for myself countless times, sometimes deliberately, sometimes in helpless response to moments of weakness. Short for “my age”; I would grow another two or three inches but would never be tall by Amn standards. Thinner than I usually made myself, perhaps from years of not eating while I gradually became mortal within Nahadoth. Long-limbed. Beneath my brown skin, there were bones poking out at every juncture, like blemishes. The muscles that lined them were attenuated and not very strong.

I leaned closer to the mirror, peering at the lines of my face critically. Not very attractive, either, though I knew that would improve. Too disproportionate for now. Too tired-eyed. Shahar was much prettier. And yet she had kissed me, hadn’t she? I traced the outline of my lips with a finger, remembering the feel of her mouth. What had she thought of mine, on hers?

Morad cleared her throat.

Did Shahar ever think of—

“The water will get cold,” Morad said gently. I blinked, blushing, and was abruptly glad I hadn’t made fun of her. I got into the tub, and Morad exited the bathroom to go speak with the tailor, who’d just arrived and announced himself.

When I emerged in a fluffy robe—I looked ridiculous—the tailor measured me, murmuring to himself that I would need looser clothing to conceal my thinness. Then came the manicurist, and the shoemaker, and one or two others whom Morad had somehow summoned, though I hadn’t seen her use magic. By the time it was done, I was exhausted—which Morad thankfully noticed. She dismissed all the craft servants and turned to head for the door herself.

Belatedly it occurred to me that she’d been unbelievably helpful. Who knew how many duties she had as steward, and how many of those had she neglected to see to my comfort? “Thank you,” I blurted as she opened the door.

She paused and looked back at me in surprise, then smiled in such a genuine, generous way that I suddenly knew what Remath saw in her.

Then she was gone. I sat down to eat the meal the servants had left. Afterward, I sprawled naked across Deka’s bed, for once looking forward to sleep so that I could perhaps dream of love and

forget

I stood upon a plain like a vast glass mirror. Mirrors again. I had seen them in Nahadoth’s realm, too. Perhaps there was meaning in this? I would ponder it some other time.

Above me arced the vault of the heavens: an endlessly turning cylinder of clouds and sky, vast and limitless and yet somehow enclosed. Clouds drifted across it from left to right, although the light—from no source I could ascertain—shifted in the opposite direction, waxing light and waning dark in a slow and steady gradient.

The gods’ realm, or a dream manifestation of it. It was an approximation, of course. All my mortal mind could comprehend.

Before me, rising from the plain, a palace lay impossibly on its side. It was silver and black, built in no recognizable mortal architectural style and yet suggesting all of them, a thing of lines and shadow without dimension or definition. An impression, not reality. Below, instead of a reflection, its opposite shone in the mirror: white and gold, more realistic but less imaginative, the same yet different. There was meaning in this, too, but it was obvious: the black palace ascendant, the white palace nothing but an image. The silvery plain reflecting, balancing, and separating both. I sighed, annoyed. Had I already become as tiresomely literal as most mortals? How humiliating.

“Are you afraid?” asked a voice behind me.

I started and began to turn. “No,” the speaker snapped, and such was the force of his command—commanding reality, commanding my flesh—that I froze. Now I was afraid.

“Who are you?” I asked. I didn’t recognize his voice, but that meant nothing. I had dozens of brothers and they could take any shape they chose, especially in this realm.

“Why does that matter?”

“Because I want to know, duh.”

“Why?”

I frowned. “What kind of question is that? We’re family; I want to know which one of my brothers is trying to scare the hells out of me.” And succeeding, though I would never admit such a thing.

“I’m not one of your brothers.”

At this, I frowned in confusion. Only gods could enter the gods’ realm. Was he lying? Or was I simply too mortal to understand what he really meant?

“Should I kill you?” the stranger asked. He was young, I decided, though such judgments meant little in the grand scale of things. He was oddly soft-spoken, too, his voice mild even as he delivered these peculiar not-quite-threats. Was he angry? I thought so, but couldn’t be sure. His tone was all flat emotionlessness edged in cold.

“I don’t know. Should you?” I retorted.

“I’ve been contemplating the matter for most of my life.”

“Ah,” I said. “I suppose you and I must have gotten off on the wrong foot from the beginning, then.” That happened sometimes. I’d tried to be a good elder brother for a long time, visiting each of my younger siblings as they were born and helping them through those first, difficult centuries. Some of them I was still friends with. Some of them I’d loathed the instant I’d laid eyes on them, and vice versa.

“From the very beginning, yes.”

I sighed, slipping my hands into my pockets. “Must be a difficult decision, then, or you’d have done it already. Whatever I did to make you angry, either it can’t have been all that bad, or it’s unforgivable.”

“Oh?”

I shrugged. “If it was really bad, you wouldn’t be waffling about whether to kill me. If it was unforgivable, you’d be too angry for revenge to make any difference. There’d be no point in killing me. So which is it?”

“There’s a third option,” he said. “It was unforgivable, but there is a point in killing you.”

“Interesting.” In spite of my unease, I grinned at the conundrum. “And that point is?”

“I don’t simply want vengeance. I require and embody and evolve through it.”

I blinked, sobering, because if vengeance was his nature, then that was another matter entirely. But I did not remember a sibling who was god of vengeance.

“What have I done to earn your wrath?” I asked, troubled now. “And why are you even asking the question? You have to serve your nature.”

“Are you offering to die for me?”

“No, demons take you. If you try to kill me, I’ll try to kill you back. Suicide isn’t my nature. But I want to understand this.”

He sighed and shifted, the movement drawing my eye toward the mirror below our feet. It didn’t help much. The angle of the reflection was such that I could see little beyond feet and legs and a hint of elbow. His hands were in his pockets, too.

“What you have done is unforgivable,” he said, “and yet I must forgive it, because you did not know.”

I frowned, confused. “What does my knowledge have to do with anything? Harm committed unknowingly is still harm.”

“True. But if you had known, Sieh, I’m not certain you would have done it.”

At his use of my name, I grew more confused, because his tone had changed. For an instant, the coldness had broken, and I heard stranger things underneath. Sorrow. Wistfulness? Perhaps a hint of affection. But I did not know this god; I was certain of it.

“Irrelevant,” I said finally, turning my head as much as I could. Beyond a certain point, my neck simply would not bend; it was like trying to turn with two pillows braced on either side of my head. Pillows formed of nothing but solid, unyielding will. I tried to relax. “You can’t base decisions on hypotheticals. It doesn’t matter what I would have done. You know only what I did.” I paused meaningfully. “Perhaps you could tell me.” For once I wasn’t in the mood for games.

Unfortunately, my companion was. “You chose to serve your nature,” he said, ignoring my hint. “Why?”

I wished I could look at him. Sometimes a look is more eloquent than any words. “Why? What the hells—are you kidding?”

“You are the oldest of us and must pretend to be the youngest.”

“I don’t pretend anything. I am what I must be, and I’m damn good at it, thanks.”

“So we are weaker than the mortals, then.” His voice grew soft, almost sad. “Slaves to fate, never to be freed.”

“Shut the hells up,” I snapped. “You don’t know slavery if you think this is the same thing.”

“Isn’t it? Having no choice—”

“You have a choice.” I lifted my gaze to the shifting firmament above. The gradient—night to day, day to night—did not change at a constant rate. Only mortals thought of the sky as a reliable, predictable thing. We gods had to live with Nahadoth and Itempas; we knew better. “You can accept yourself, take control of your nature, make it what you want it to be. Just because you’re the god of vengeance doesn’t mean you have to be some brooding cliché, forever cackling to yourself and totting up what you owe to whom. Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it. Or fight yourself and remain forever incomplete.”

My companion fell silent, perhaps digesting my advice. That was good, because it was clear that I’d done him a disservice, besides whatever wrong he felt I’d committed. I did not remember him; that meant I hadn’t bothered to find him, guide him, after his birth. And he’d needed such guidance, because it was painfully clear that he did not like the hand fate, or the Maelstrom, had dealt him. I didn’t blame him for that; I wouldn’t have wanted to be god of vengeance, either. But he was, and he was going to have to find a way to live with that.

In the mirror, I saw the man behind me step closer, raising a hand. I braced myself to fight—purely on principle, since I already knew there was nothing I could do. It was clear his power superseded what little god-magic I had left, or I would have been able to break his compulsion and turn around.

But his hand touched my hair, to my utter shock. Lingered there a moment, as if memorizing the texture. Then fingers grazed the back of my neck, and I jumped. Was this some kind of threat? But he made no attempt to harm me. His finger traced the knots of spine along the back of my neck, stopping only when my clothing interfered. Then—reluctantly, I thought—his hand pulled away.

“Thank you,” he said at last. “That was something I needed to hear.”

“Sorry I didn’t say it sooner.” I paused. “So are you going to kill me now?”

“Soon.”

“Ah. Good vengeance takes time?”

“Yes.” The coldness had returned to his voice, and this time I recognized it for what it was. Not anger. Resolve.

I sighed. “Sorry, too, to hear that. I think I might’ve liked you.”

“Yes. And I you.”

There was that, at least. “Well, don’t dither too long about it. I’ve only got a few decades left.”

I thought he smiled, which I counted as a victory. “I have already begun.”

“Good for you.” I hoped he didn’t think I was mocking him. It always made me feel good to see the young ones do well, even if that meant they would inevitably threaten me. That was the way of things, after all. Children had to grow up. They did not always become what others wanted. “Do me a favor, though?”

He said nothing, in keeping with his newfound resolve. That was all right. I could be his enemy, if that was what he needed from me. I just didn’t see any point in being an ass about it.

“I don’t belong here anymore.” I gestured around us at the mirrored plain, the palaces, the sky. “Not even in this watered-down dream of reality. Wake me up, will you?”

“All right.”

And suddenly a hand ripped through me from behind. I cried out in surprise and agony, looking down to see my mortal heart clenched in a sharp-nailed hand—

I jerked awake to the sound of my own cry, echoing from the vaulted ceiling.

Glowing vaulted ceiling. It was night. Above me loomed Shahar, who had a hand on my chest and a worried look on her face. I was still sleepy, disoriented. A quick check of my chest verified that my heart was still there. Inadvertently, I looked at Shahar’s chest, thinking muzzily that my dream-enemy might have tried to harm her, too. Her dress lay in cut strips down to her waist, half undone, and she held a loose sleep shift over her breasts with her free arm, which she must have grabbed to cover herself when she’d come into my room. This did nothing to hide the other beautiful parts of her: the gentle sweep of neck into shoulder, the slight curve of her waist. Of her breasts, I could still see one rounded shadow near her elbow.

I reached up to pull her arm out of the way and stopped with my fingers two inches from her arm. It took her a moment to realize. She stared at my reaching hand uncomprehendingly; then her eyes widened and she jerked away.

I lowered my hand. “Sorry,” I muttered.

She glared at me. “You started screaming so loud I could hear you through the adjoining door. I thought something was wrong with you.”

“A dream.”

“Not a pleasant one, obviously.”

“Actually, it wasn’t so bad, ’til the end.” The fear was fading quickly. My dream-companion hadn’t been gentle about it, but he’d chosen an excellent way to send me back to the mortal realm. I felt none of the heartrending sorrow that I might have on realizing that the gods’ realm was now forbidden to me. Instead I was just annoyed. “Little mortalfucking bastard. If I ever get my magic back, I’m going to break every bone in whatever body he manifests. Let him avenge that.”

I paused then, because Shahar was looking at me oddly. “What in every god’s name are you talking about?”

“Nothing. I’m babbling.” I yawned, my jaw cracking with the effort. “Sleep makes me stupid. Never liked it.”

“Mortalfuck,” she said, looking thoughtful. “Is that—” She paused, grimacing, too refined to say the word beyond repeating my term. “Being with a mortal. Is it such an anathema among gods that you use it as a curse?”

I blushed, though it bothered me that I did. I had nothing to be ashamed of. Pushing myself up on my elbows, I said, “No, it’s not anathema at all. Far from it.”

“What, then?”

I tried to seem nonchalant. “It’s just that mortals are dangerous to love. They break easily. In time, they die. It hurts.” I shrugged. “It’s easier, safer, to just use them for pleasure. But that’s hard, too, because it’s impossible for us to take pleasure without giving back something of ourselves. We are not…” I groped for the words in Senmite. “We do not… It isn’t our way. No, it isn’t natural to do things that way, to be nothing but body, contained only within ourselves, so when we are with another, we reach out and the mortal gets inside us—we cannot help it—and then it hurts to push them out, too…” I trailed off, because Shahar was staring at me. I’d been talking faster and faster, the words tumbling together in my effort to convey how it felt. I sighed and forced myself back to human speed. “Being with mortals isn’t anathema, but it’s not good, either. It never ends well. Any god with sense avoids it.”

“I see.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but she sighed. “Well. Give me a moment.” She stepped back into her room, not shutting the door, and I heard her wrestle with the cloth of her dress for a few moments. Then she returned, wearing the sleep shift instead of holding it in front of herself this time. By this point I had sat up, rubbing my face to try and banish the dregs of sleep and the memory of my bloody, torn-out heart. When Shahar sat down on the bed, she did so gingerly, at its edge, out of my arms’ reach. I didn’t blame her for that or the fact that she seemed more relaxed after my speech about avoiding sex.

Still, there was something odd about her manner, something I couldn’t put my finger on. She seemed jittery, tense. I wondered why she hadn’t just stayed in her room and gone to bed, once she’d seen that I wasn’t dying.

“How did your meeting with, ah…” I waved a hand vaguely. Some noble.

She chuckled. “It went well, though that depends on your definition of well.” She sobered, her eyes darkening with a hint of her earlier anger. “You’ll be pleased to know that I did not follow through on my plan to challenge the resistance, per your advice. The message I sent instead—I hope, if I’m right about Lady Hynno—was that I would like to negotiate. Find out more about their demands and determine whether there’s some way that we might meet them. Without throwing the world into chaos, that is.” She glanced at me warily.

“I’m impressed,” I said truthfully. “And surprised. Negotiation—compromise—is usually anathema to Itempans. And you changed your mind because of me?” I laughed a little. There were some good things about being older. People listened to me more.

Shahar sighed, looking away. “We’ll see what happens when my mother hears of it. She already thinks I’m weak; after this, I may not be heir for much longer.” With a heavy sigh, she lay back on the bed, stretching out her arms over her head. I could not help myself; my eyes settled on the very noticeable contrast of her areolae under the sheer shift. They were surprisingly dark, given her pale coloring. Perfect brown circles, with soft little cylinders at their centers—

Useless stupid animal mortaling body. My penis had reacted before I could stop it, jabbing me in the belly and forcing me to sit up from my usual slouch. It hurt, and I felt hot all over, as if I’d come down sick. (I had. It was called adolescence, an evil, evil disease.) But it was not just her flesh that drew me. I could barely see it with my withering senses, but her soul gleamed and whispered like rubbed silk. We have always been vulnerable to true beauty.

I dragged my eyes away from her breasts to find her watching me—watching me watch her? I did not know, but the hunger in me sharpened at the unalarmed, contemplative look in her eyes. I fought the reaction back, but it was difficult. Another symptom of the disease.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, focusing on mundanities. “It takes great strength to compromise, Shahar. More than it does to threaten and destroy, since you must fight your own pride as well as the enemy. You Arameri have never understood this—and you didn’t have to, when you had us at your beck and call. Now, perhaps, you can learn to be true rulers and not merely bullies.”

She rolled onto her belly, which brought her to lie between my legs, propped on her elbows. At this I frowned, growing suspicious, and then wondering at my own unease. She was just a girl testing the waters of womanhood. An older version of I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. She wanted to know if I found her desirable. Did I not owe her the courtesy of an honest response? I lowered my knees and sat back on my elbows so that she could see the evidence of my admiration in the tented sheet and the heat of my gaze. She immediately blushed, averting her eyes. Then she looked at me again, and away again, and eventually looked down at her folded arms, which were fidgeting on the covers.

“I think Mother wants me to marry Canru,” she said. Her words had an air of effort. “The Teman heir I told you about. I think that’s why she’s let me be friends with him. She’s never let anyone else close to me.”

I shrugged. “So marry him.”

She glared at me, forgetting her prudishness. “I don’t want to.”

“Then don’t. Shahar, for the gods’ sakes. You’re the Arameri heir. Do what you damn well please.”

“I can’t. If Mother wants this—” She bit her lower lip and looked away. “We have never sold our sons or daughters into marriage before now, Sieh. We didn’t have to, because we didn’t have anything to gain. We didn’t need alliances or money or land. But now… I think… I think Mother understands that the Temans might prove pivotal, given High North’s increasing restlessness. I think that’s why she’s letting me handle things with Lady Hynno. She’s putting me on display.”

All at once she looked up at me, and there was such ferocity in her expression that it struck me like a blow. Why?

“I want to succeed Mother, Sieh,” she said. “I want to be head after her. Not just because I want power; I know the evil our family’s done to you and to the world. But we’ve done good, too, great good, and I want that to be our legacy. I will do whatever it takes to achieve that.”

I stared at her, taken aback. And mourning. Because what she wanted was impossible. Her childhood promise, to be both a good person and an Arameri, to use her family’s power to make the world better—it was naïveté of the highest order. I had seen others like her, a few, one every handful of generations within Itempas’s chosen family. They were always the brightest lights, the most glorious souls of the whole grimy bunch. The ones I could not hate, because they were special.

But it never lasted, once they gained power. They streaked through life like falling stars across the heavens, brilliant but ephemeral. The power killed the glory, dulled the specialness into despair. It hurt so much to watch their hopes die.

I could say nothing. To let her see my sorrow would start the process early. So I sighed and turned onto my side, pretending boredom, when in fact I was trying hard not to cry.

Her frustration flared like a struck match. She got up on her hands and knees and crawled over to me, bracing her arms on either side of my body so she could glare into my face. “Help me, damn you! You’re supposed to be my friend!”

I stifled a yawn. “What do you want me to do? Tell you to marry a man you don’t love? Tell you not to marry him? This isn’t a bedtime tale, Shahar. People marry people they don’t love all the time, and it isn’t always terrible. He’s already your friend; you could do worse. And if it’s something your mother wants, you don’t have a choice, anyway.”

Her hand, braced on the covers in front of me, trembled. My senses throbbed with the waver of her conflicting yearnings. The child in her wanted to do as she pleased, cling to impossible hopes. The woman in her wanted to make sound decisions, succeed even if it meant sacrifice. The woman would win; that was inevitable. But the child would not go quietly.

With that same trembling hand, she touched my shoulder, pushing until I twisted my torso to face her. Then she leaned down and kissed me.

I permitted it, more out of curiosity than anything else. It was clumsy this time and did not last long. She was off the center of my mouth, covering mostly the bottom lip. I did not share myself with her, and she sat up, frowning.

“Does that make you feel better?” I asked. I honestly wanted to know. Shahar’s expression crumpled. She turned away and lay down behind me, her back to mine. I felt her fighting tears.

Troubled, and worried that I had somehow harmed her, I turned to her and sat up. “What is it that you want?”

“My mother to love me. My brother back. The world not to hate us. Everything.”

I considered this. “Shall I fetch him for you? Deka?”

She tensed, turning over. “Could you do that?”

“I don’t know.” I could not change my shape anymore. Traveling across distances was not so very different, save that it involved changing the shape of reality to make the world smaller. If I could not do one, I might not be able to do the other.

As I watched, however, the eagerness faded from her expression. “No. Deka may not love me anymore.”

I blinked in surprise. “Of course he does.”

“Don’t patronize me, Sieh.”

“I’m not,” I snapped. “I can feel the bond between us, Shahar, as clear as this.” I took a curl of her hair in my fingers and pulled on it, gentle but steady. She made a sound of surprise and I let the curl go; it bounced back prettily. “You both pull at me and at each other. Neither of you likes me very much now, but otherwise nothing has changed between the two of you since those days in the underpalace, years ago. You still love him, and he still loves you just as much. I’m a god, all right? I know.”

I was not strictly telling the truth. It was true that Shahar’s feelings toward me had waned, though they grew stronger with every hour I spent in her presence. Deka’s, however, had grown stronger, too, even with no contact between us for half his lifetime. I didn’t quite know how to interpret that, so I didn’t mention it.

Her eyes went wide at my words—and then welled with tears. She made a quick, abortive sound: buh. As soon as she uttered it, she clapped a hand to her mouth, but her hand was trembling.

I sighed and pulled her against me, her face against my chest. It was only when I did this—only when she felt safe from eyes that might look upon her humanity and judge it a weakness—that she let herself break into deep, racking sobs so loud that they echoed from the walls of the apartment. Her tears were hot, though they cooled rapidly on my skin and as they pattered onto the sheets. Her shoulders heaved against my arms, and as the sobs grew worse, her arms went hard around me, squeezing me as if her life depended on my solidity and stillness. So I gave her both, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing things in the language of creation, letting her know that I loved her, too. For I did, fool that I was.

When her tears finally stopped, I kept stroking her, liking the way her curls went flat and sprang up again as my hand passed, and thinking of nothing. I barely noticed when her arms loosened, her hands coming to stroke my sides and back and hip. I kept thinking of nothing when she eased my shirt up and laid the lightest of kisses on my belly. It tickled; I smiled. Then she sat up to look at me, her eyes red-rimmed but dry, a peculiar intent in her eyes.

When she kissed me this time, it was wholly different. She nudged my lips apart and touched my tongue with her own, sweet and wet and sour. When I did not react, she slid her hands under my shirt, exploring the flat strangeness of a body that was not her own. I liked this until one of her hands went farther down, her fingers tickling hair and cloth at the edge of my pants, and then I caught her wrist. “No,” I said.

She closed her eyes and I felt her aching emptiness. It was not lust. Missing her brother had made her feel alone. “I love you,” she said. Not even an admission, this; it was simply a statement of fact, like the moon is pretty or you’re going to die. “I’ve always loved you, since we were children. I tried not to.”

I nodded, stroking her hand. “I know.”

“I want to choose. If I have to sell myself for power, I want to give myself first. For love. For a friend.”

I sighed, closing my eyes. “Shahar, I told you, it’s not good—”

She scowled and lunged forward and kissed me again. I was stunned silent, the objection dying in my throat. Because this time it was like kissing a god. The quintessence of her came through the opening of my lips and drove itself into my soul before I could stop it. I gasped and inhaled a white shivering sun that pulsed strong and weak but never went out and never blew up. A rocky determination, jumbled but sharp-edged, with the potential to become as solid as bedrock. When I opened my eyes, I was lying back and she was above me, still kissing me, her hands coaxing sighs from me despite my reluctance. I did not stop her because I am supposed to be a child but really I am not and my body was too old to provide me with a child’s defenses against reality. Children do not think about how magnificent it would be to become one with another person. They do not yearn to lose themselves in force and sensation and panting. Children think about consequences, if only to try and avoid them. It takes an adult to abandon such thoughts entirely.

So when her hand slipped into my pants this time, I did not stop her. And I did not protest while she explored me, first with her fingers and then, oh gods, oh yes, her mouth, her mortal husband could have the rest but I would marry her mouth and fingertips. I murmured without thinking and the walls went dark because there was mischief in what we were doing and that gave me strength. Despite this, I lay there helpless in the dark as she learned to make me whimper. She tormented me with this, tasting every part of my body. She even licked En, where it lay on my chest. Greedy thing, it rolled so that she might try its other side, too, but she didn’t notice.

I touched her, too. She liked that lots.

Then she straddled me. There came a moment of lucidity in which I caught her hips and looked up at her and said, “Are you sure—” but she pushed herself down and I cried out because it was so wonderful that it hurt, flesh is not at all a terrible thing, I had forgotten that it could feel good and not just grotesque, it was so nice not to be used. She felt the same as a goddess inside. I whispered this to her and she smiled, rising and falling above me, her mouth open and teeth reflecting the moon, her hair a pale moving shadow. Then we shifted and I was on her, not out of any paltry mortal need on my part to dominate but simply because I liked the sweet mewling sounds she made as I angled my way into her, and also because I was still a god and even a weak god is dangerous to mortals. Matter is such tenuous stuff. So I controlled myself by focusing on her flesh, on her hands stroking my back (inadvertently I purred), on my own clenching tightening quickening excitement, on carrying her only into the good parts of existence and none of the bad ones.

And when she could bear no more, when I knew it was safe to bring her back to herself, when I was sure I could stay corporeal… only then did I let her go, and myself as well.

She fainted. That is normal when one of us mates with a mortal. Only the very extraordinary can touch the divine without being overwhelmed by it. I fetched a damp towel from the bathroom and mopped up the sweat and saliva and so forth, then tucked her against me under the covers so that I could breathe the scent of her hair.

I felt no regret, but I was sad. She was farther from me now, and I was the one who had sent her away.

8

I slept again. This time, though, since Shahar had renewed my godly strength—experimentation and abandon are close enough to childish impulses to suit me—I was able to sleep as gods do, and keep the dreams at bay.

When I woke, Shahar was not beside me, and it was noon. I sat up to find her near the window, wrapped in one of the sheets, her slim form still and shadowed against the bright blue sky.

I hopped up, assessed myself to see whether I needed to piss or shit—not yet, though clearly I needed to brush my teeth—and then went over to her. (I was cold again. Damnation.) When she did not move at my approach, lost in thought, I grinned and leaned close and licked a bare spot on the back of her neck, where her hair had not come completely undone during the previous night.

She jumped and whirled and frowned at me, at which point I belatedly realized that perhaps she was not in a playful mood.

“Hello,” I said, feeling suddenly awkward.

Shahar sighed and relaxed. “Hello.” Then she lowered her eyes and turned back to the window.

I felt very stupid. “Oh, demons. Did I hurt you? That was the first time… I tried to be careful, but—”

She shook her head. “There was no pain. I… could tell you were being careful.”

If she wasn’t hurt, then why did she radiate such an ugly, clotted mix of emotions? I struggled to remember my handful of experiences with mortal women from before the War. Was this sort of behavior normal? I thought it might be. What, then, should a lover say at a time like this? Gods, it had been easier when I was a slave; my rapists had never expected me to give a damn about them afterward.

I sighed and shifted from foot to foot and folded my arms so I would not be so cold. “So… I take it you don’t like what we did.”

She sighed, and if anything, her mood turned darker. “I loved what we did, Sieh.”

I was beginning to feel very tired, and it had nothing to do with my mortality affliction. Something had gone wrong; that was obvious. Would she have liked it better if I had become female for her? I wasn’t sure I could do that anymore, but it was such a small change. I would try, for her sake, if that would help. “What, then? Why do you look like you just lost your best friend?”

“I may have,” she whispered.

I stared at her as she turned back to me. The sheet had slipped off one of her shoulders, and most of her hair was a fright. She looked out of control and out of her element and lost. I remembered her wildness the night before. She had discarded all thought of propriety or position or dignity, and flung herself into the moment with perfect zeal. It had been glorious, but clearly such abandon had cost her something.

Then I noticed, below the hand that held the sheet about herself, her free hand. She held it over her belly, fingering the skin there as if measuring its strength. I had seen ten thousand mortal women make the same gesture, and still I almost missed its meaning. Such things are not normally within my demesne.

Pleased to have finally figured out the problem, I smiled and stepped closer, taking her hand off her belly and coaxing her to open the sheet so that I could step into it. She did so, clumsily adjusting the sheet so that she could hold it around both of us, and I sighed in grateful pleasure at the warmth of her nearness. Then I addressed the unease in her eyes that I thought I understood. Because I was who I was, and I am not always wise, I made it a tease. “Are you planning to kill me?”

She frowned in confusion. I realized for the first time that she was as tall as I was, growing long and lean like a good Amn girl. I slid an arm around her waist and pulled her close, noting that she did not fully relax.

“A child,” I said. I put a hand on her belly as she had done, rubbing circles to tease her. “It would kill me, you know.” Then I remembered my current condition and my amusement faded a little. “Kill me faster, anyway.”

She stiffened, staring at me. “What?”

“I told you already.” Her skin felt good beneath my hands. I bent and kissed her smooth shoulder right on the divot of bone and thought of biting her there as I rode her like a cat. Would she yowl for me? “Childhood cannot survive some things. Sex is fine, between friends.” I smiled on her skin. “Done without consequences. But consequences—like making a child—change everything.”

“Oh, gods. It’s your antithesis.”

I hated that word. Scriveners had come up with it. The word was like them, cold and passionless and precise and overly logical, capturing nothing of what truly made us what we were. “It corrupts my nature, yes. Many things can harm me—I’m just a godling, alas, not a god—but that one is the most sure.” I licked at her neck again, really trying this time, though not holding any great hope of success. Nahadoth had never managed to teach me how to seduce with any real degree of mastery.

“Sieh!” She pushed at me, and when I lifted my head, I saw the horror in her eyes. “I didn’t use any… preventative… when we were together last night. I…” She looked away, trembling. I regretted my teasing when I realized she was genuinely upset, but it made me happy that she cared so much.

I laughed gently, relenting. “It’s all right. My mother Enefa realized the danger long ago. She changed me. Do you understand? No children.”

She did not look reassured—did not feel reassured, her anguish tainting the very air around us. I have siblings who cannot endure mortal emotions. They are sad creatures who haunt the gods’ realm, devouring tales of mortal life and pretending they are not jealous of the rest of us. Shahar would have killed half of them by now.

“Enefa is dead,” she said.

That was more than enough to sober me. “Yes. But not all her works died with her, Shahar, or neither you nor I would be standing here.”

She looked up at me, tense and afraid. “You’re different now, Sieh. You’re not really a god anymore, and mortals—” Her face softened so beautifully. It made me smile, despite the conversation. “Mortals grow up. Sieh, I want you to be sure there’s no child. Can you check somehow? Because… because…” She lowered her eyes, and suddenly it was shame that she felt, sour and bitter on the back of my tongue. Shame, and fear.

“What?”

She drew a deep breath. “I didn’t try to prevent a baby. In fact”—her jaw flexed—“I’ve been to the scriveners. They used a script.” She blushed, but forged ahead. “To make it easier, more likely, for three or four days. And once I, with you, I, I’m supposed to go to them. They have other scripts that they say… Even with a god, fertility magic works the same way.”

Her stammering embarrassment confused me; I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to say at first. And then, like a comet’s icy plume, understanding slashed through me.

“You wanted a child?”

She laughed once, bitter. When she turned back to the window, her eyes were hard and older than they should be, and so perfectly Arameri. Then I knew.

“Your mother.”

Shahar nodded, still not meeting my eyes. “ ‘If we cannot own gods, then perhaps we can become gods,’ she said. The demons of old had great magic despite their mortality. Or, at the very least, we can gain the greatest demon magic: the power to kill gods.”

I stared at her, feeling sick, because I should have known. The Arameri had been trying to get their hands on a demon for decades. I should have seen it in Remath’s quest for a godly lover; I should have realized why she’d been so pleased to have me in Sky. Why she’d tried to give me her daughter.

I shrugged off the sheet and walked away from Shahar, manifesting clothing about myself. Black this time, like my fur when I was a cat. Like my father’s wrath.

“Sieh?” Shahar blurted the words, cursed, dropped the sheet and grabbed for a robe. “Sieh, what are you—”

I stopped and turned back to her, and she froze at the look in my eyes. Or perhaps at my eyes themselves, because I could not become this angry, even in my weakened half-mortal state, without a little of the cat showing.

I would save the claws, however, for Remath.

“Why did you tell me?” I asked, and she went pale. “Did you wait until now for a reason?” Some of my magic had come back to me. I touched the world, found Remath within it. Her audience chamber, surrounded by courtiers and petitioners. “Were you hoping I would kill her in front of witnesses so the other highbloods would think you weren’t involved? Was that what you told yourself so it wouldn’t feel like matricide?”

Her lips turned white as she pressed them together. “How dare you—”

“Because this wasn’t necessary.” I rode over her words with my own, with my grief, and that drove the anger from her face in an instant. “I told you I would kill her for you, if you asked. All I ever wanted was to be able to trust you. If you had given me that, I would have done anything for you.”

She flinched as if I’d struck her. Her eyes welled with tears, but this was not like last night. She stood in the slanting afternoon light of Itempas’s sun, proud despite her nakedness, and the tears did not fall, because Arameri do not cry. Not even when they have broken a god’s heart.

“Deka,” she said at last.

I shook my head, mute, too consumed with my own nature to follow her insane mortal reasoning.

She drew another breath. “I agreed to do this because of Deka. We made a bargain, Mother and I: one night with you, in exchange for him. The scriveners would take care of the rest. But when you said that a child would kill you…” She faltered.

I wanted to believe she had betrayed her mother for my sake. But if that was true, then it meant she had also agreed to sacrifice my love in exchange for her brother.

I remembered the look in her eyes when she’d said she loved me. I remembered the feel of her body, the sound of her sighs. I had tasted her soul and found it sweeter than I could ever have imagined. Nothing in what she’d done with me had been false. But would she have followed through on her desire now, so soon, if not for her mother’s bargain? Would she have done it at all if she hadn’t wanted someone else more than she wanted me?

I turned my back on her.

“Remath has perverted something that should have been pure,” I said. For the first time since I’d joined hands with two bright-eyed mortal children, something of my true self had slipped through the space between worlds to fill me. My voice grew deeper, becoming the man’s tenor that I had not quite achieved physically yet. I could have taken any shape I wanted in that moment; it was not beyond me anymore. But the part of me that hurt was the man, not the child or the cat, and it was the man whose pain needed assuaging. The man was the weakest part of me, but it would do for this purpose.

“Sieh,” she whispered, and then fell silent. Just as well. I was in no mood to listen.

“I cannot protect children from all the evils of the world,” I said. “Suffering is part of childhood, too. But this…” It came out more sibilant than it should have. I fought the change back with a soft snarl. “This, Shahar, is my sin. I should have protected you, from your own nature if nothing else. I have betrayed myself, and someone will die for that.”

With that, I left. Her apartment door shivered into dust before me. When I stepped into the corridor, the daystone groaned and cracked beneath my feet, sending branching faults up the walls. The handful of guards and servants who stood unobtrusively about the corridor tensed in alarm as I strode toward them. Four of them stopped, sensing with whatever rudimentary awareness mortals have that I was not to be trifled with. The fourth, a guard, stepped into my path. I have no idea whether he meant to stop me or whether he was just moving to the other side of the corridor, where there was more room. I do not think at such times; I do what feels good. So I slashed my will across him like claws and he fell in six or seven bloody pieces to the floor. Someone screamed; someone else slipped in the blood; they did not get in my way again. I walked on.

The floors opened and bent around me, forming steps, slopes, a new path. I stepped into the midday brilliance of the corridor that led to Remath’s audience chamber. I walked toward the ornate double doors at the end of the corridor, in front of which stood two Darren women. The warriors of Darr are famous for their skill and wits, which they use to make up for their lack of physical strength. Since the time of our escape, they had been tasked with protecting the Arameri family head, even from other Arameri. But as I came down the hall, spiderwebbing the windows with every step, they looked at each other. There was pride to consider, but stupid Darre do not last long in their culture, and they knew there was no way they could fight me. They could, however, attempt to appease me, which they did by kneeling before the door, heads bowed, praying for my mercy. I showed it by sweeping them off to either side, probably bruising them a little against the walls but not killing them. Then I tore apart the doors and went in.

The room was full of courtiers, more guards, servants, clerks, scriveners. And Remath. She, on her cold stone throne, folded her hands and waited as if she’d been expecting me. The rest stared at me, stunned and silent.

I pulled En loose from its cord. “Kill for me, beloved,” I murmured, and dropped it to the floor. It bounced, then shot around the room, ricocheting off walls and windows and the stone of Remath’s chair. It did not bounce off mortal flesh. When En had punched holes in enough of them and the screaming stopped, it came back to me, flaring hot to cook off the blood and then dropping cool and satisfied into my hand. I slipped it into my pocket.

Remath had not been touched; En knew my heart well. She had not moved throughout the slaughter and showed no hint of concern that I had just killed thirty or so of her relatives.

“I take it you’re unhappy about something,” she said.

I smiled and saw her eyes flicker for an instant as she registered my sharp teeth. “Yes,” I said, raising my hand. In it, conjured out of possibility, lay ten thick, silver knitting needles. Each was longer than my hand. “But I will feel better in a moment. Cross your heart and hope to die, Remath. Here are my needles for your eyes.”

To her credit, she kept her voice even. “I kept my promise. I’ve done you no harm.”

I shook my head. “Shahar was my friend, and you have taken her from me.”

“A minor harm,” she said, and then she surprised me with a small smile. “But you are a trickster, and I know better than to try and argue with you.”

“Yes,” I agreed. And then I stepped forward, plucking the first of the needles from my palm and rolling it between my fingers in anticipation, because I am a bully, too, when all is said and done.

I heard Shahar’s cry before she ran in, though I ignored it. She gasped as she reached the chamber and saw blood and bodies everywhere, but then she ran forward—slipping once in someone’s viscera—and grabbed my arm. This did nothing to slow my advance, since for the moment I was much stronger than any mortal, and after being dragged forward a step or two, she abandoned that effort. But then she ran around me and put herself in my path, just as I put my foot on the first step of the dais that held Remath’s throne. “Sieh, don’t do this.”

I sighed and pushed her aside as gently as I could. This made her stumble off the steps, and she fell into the blood of some cousin or another of hers. I could smell the Arameri in him. Or not in him, not anymore; I laughed at my own joke.

As I stopped in front of Remath—who remained where she was, calm as death loomed—Shahar appeared again, this time flinging herself directly in front of her mother’s throne. Her gold satin robe was drenched with blood down one side of her body, and somehow she’d gotten it on the side of her face as well. Half her hair hung limp and dripping with it. I laughed again and tried to think up a rhyme that would properly make fun of her. But what rhymed with horror? I would ponder it later.

I stopped, however, because Shahar was in the way. “Move,” I said.

“No.”

“You wanted her dead, anyway.”

“Not like this, damn you!”

“Poor Shahar.” I made a singsong of it. “Poor little princess, how is she to see? With her fingers and her toes, once her eyes are with me.” I held the needle forward so that she could see it. “You have betrayed me, sweet Shahar. It is nothing to me to kill you, too.”

Her jaw tightened. “I thought you loved me.”

“I thought you loved me.”

“You swore not to harm me!”

She was right. Her failure to keep her word did not mean I should stoop to the same level. “Very well. I won’t kill you—just her.”

“She’s my mother,” she snapped. “How much do you think it will harm me if you kill her right before my eyes?”

As much as she’d harmed me by betraying my trust. Maybe a bit more. “I’m not interested in bargains right now, Shahar. Move, or I’ll move you. I won’t be gentle this time.”

“Please,” she said, which ordinarily would only have goaded me further—bully—but this time it did not. This time, to my own great surprise, the churning vortex of my rage slowed, then went still. In the sudden storm-calm, I gazed at her and realized another truth that she had hidden from me all this time. And perhaps not just from me. I glanced at Remath, who was staring at Shahar, surprised into an expression of astonishment at last. Yes.

“You love her,” I said.

And because Shahar was Arameri, she flinched as if struck and looked away in shame. But she did not move out of my way.

I let out a long, heavy sigh, and with it my power began to fade. I couldn’t have kept it up much longer anyhow; I was too old for tantrums.

Shaking my head, I let the needles drop to the floor. They scattered over the steps with tinny metal sounds, loud in the chamber’s silence. Listening to the nearby world, I could hear shouts and running feet—Captain Wrath and his men racing to save Remath and die in the trying because they were not sensible like Darre. Even the scriveners were marshaling, bringing their most powerful scripts, though they were disorganized because Shevir was here, his corpse cooling among the others I’d killed. I turned and looked at him, his face frozen in a look of surprise beneath the gaping hole in his forehead, and felt regret. He hadn’t been a bad man as First Scriveners went. And I had been a very bad boy.

On the strength of that, I took myself away from Sky, not really caring where I went instead, just wanting comfort and silence and a place to be miserable in peace.

I would not see Shahar again for two years.