There was a gigantic burst of light. “So help me, the next one of you isn’t going to land in water,” Gavin said, his voice ringing.
Kip expected to hear gunshots—surely the governor had guards—but there was nothing. They took it.
That’s my father. That’s my father?
Gavin imposed his will, and the world took it.
“So,” Kip said, feeling very much like the men floundering in the bay beneath him, barely able to swim and desperate to be pulled out. “So. Will. That’s next, right?”
Chapter 59
Corvan Danavis approached Garriston as the sun set. The outer walls of Garriston, of course, had long ago been demolished. During the Prisms’ War—Corvan never thought of it as the False Prism’s War—he had set men to working on rebuilding them, but there just hadn’t been time. The outer walls had been built to shield a city of hundreds of thousands. At the time of the war, there had been perhaps ninety thousand. There had been no way to protect them all.
The irrigation canals that could have been watering all the land between the outer walls and the inner walls were broken, except for one or two. But the inner walls still stood, as did the Ladies.
The Ladies, mostly now stripped of associations with the goddess Anat, guarded each gate. Each was an enormous white statue, incorporated into the wall itself. Each had represented an aspect of Anat: the Guardian was the colossus standing astride the entrance to the bay; the Mother guarded the south gate, heavily pregnant, defiant, dagger bared; the Hag guarded the west gate, leaning heavily on a staff; the Lover lay across the river gate to the east. For reasons Corvan had never understood, the Lover was depicted perhaps in her thirties while the Mother was depicted as very young, perhaps still in her teens. Each was carved of the most expensive, faintly translucent white marble, such as was only available in Paria—Orholam alone knew how they’d shipped so much this far. The statues, luckily, had been coated in the finest sealed yellow luxin—all of one piece. Astounding work. The city had been invaded at least three times, and still the Ladies were unmarked, even after the fiery devastation of the great conflagration.
Anat, the Lady of the Desert, the Fiery Mistress, the sub-red, had been the goddess of all hot passions: wrath, protection, vengeance, possessive love, and furious lovemaking. When Lucidonius had taken the city for Orholam and eliminated the cult, his followers had wanted to tear down the statues, which, granted, would have taken some powerful drafters. Famously, Lucidonius had stopped them, saying, “Tear down only what is false.” Several times in the intervening centuries, zealous Prisms had wanted to tear down the pagan relics anyway, but each time the city had threatened war. Until the Prisms’ War, Garriston had had enough military power that a threat of going to war with her was daunting.
Corvan had never approached the Lover at sunset. As with the other Ladies, her body was incorporated into the gate. She lay on her back, back arched over the river, feet planted, her knees forming a tower on one bank, hands entwined in her hair, elbows rising to form the tower on the other bank. She was clad only in veils, and before the war a portcullis could be lowered from her arched body into the river, its iron and steel hammered into shape so that they looked like a continuation of her veils. But in the war the portcullis had been broken and never replaced.
The sight of her still took Corvan’s breath. With the sun setting, the thin yellow luxin sealing the statue, usually nearly invisible, was set alight. The yellow was like golden bronze skin, fading slowly as Corvan walked and the sun sank, finally leaving only a welcoming silhouette—a wife waiting abed for her long-absent husband.
It sent a pang through him. He could never come here without thinking of Qora, his first wife. Liv’s mother. Qora had greeted him like that once, lying abed, clad only in veils, deliberately mimicking the Lover when Corvan had returned to her. Even now, eighteen years later, grief and remembered desire and joy and love twined in his breast. Corvan had remarried in Rekton, two years after Qora’s death, but marrying Ell had been more to give Liv a mother than for love. Three years later, Ell had been murdered by an assassin who’d finally tracked Corvan down. Corvan had considered moving, but the alcaldesa begged him to stay, and Kip was there, so he’d stayed. But he’d not remarried again, not even with the overwhelming number of women for every man in Rekton and the constant carping of the would-be matchmakers. He couldn’t love as he had loved before. Losing another woman he loved as much as he’d loved Qora would kill him, and it wasn’t fair to ask another woman to act as mother to his daughter if he wasn’t willing to love her with his whole heart. Corvan no longer had a whole heart to give.