The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(101)

I stood naked before him, an offering—

Gone, like fish in a pond.

“How do you feel?” he asked. I flinched again, not sure I understood the words. How did I feel? Warm. Safe. Clean. I lifted a hand, sniffed my wrist; I smelled of soap.

“I bathed you. I hope you’ll forgive the liberty.” Low, soft, his voice, as if he spoke to a skittish mare. He looked different from the day before—healthier for one, but also browner, like a Darre man. “You were so deeply asleep that you didn’t wake. I found the robe in the closet.”

I hadn’t known I had a robe. Belatedly it came to me that he was still holding out the cup of tea. I took it, more out of politeness than any real interest. When I sipped, I was surprised to find it lukewarm and rich with cooling mint and calmative herbs. It made me realize I was thirsty; I drank it down greedily. Naha held out the pot, silently offering more, and I let him pour.

“What a wonder you are,” he murmured, as I drank. Noise. He was staring and it bothered me. I looked away to shut him out and savored the tea.

“You were ice cold when I woke up, and filthy. There was something—soot, I think—all over you. The bath seemed to warm you up, and that helped, too.” He jerked his head toward the chair where we’d been sitting. “There wasn’t anywhere else, so—”

“The bed,” I said, and flinched again. My voice was hoarse, my throat raw and sore. The mint helped.

For an instant Naha paused, his lips quirking with a hint of his usual cruelty. “The bed wouldn’t have worked.”

Puzzled, I looked past him, and caught my breath. The bed was a wreck, sagging on a split frame and broken legs. The mattress looked as though it had been hacked by a sword and then set afire. Loose goosedown and charred fabric scraps littered the room.

It was more than the bed. One of the room’s huge glass windows had spiderwebbed; only luck that it hadn’t shattered. The vanity mirror had. One of my bookcases lay on the floor, its contents scattered but intact. (I saw my father’s book there, with great relief.) The other bookcase had been shattered into kindling, along with most of the books on it.

Naha took the empty teacup from my hand before I could drop it. “You’ll need to get one of your Enefadeh friends to fix this. I kept the servants out this morning, but that won’t work for long.”

“I… I don’t…” I shook my head. So much of what had happened was dreamlike in my memory, more metaphysical than actual. I remembered falling. There was no hole in the ceiling. Yet, the bed.

Naha said nothing as I moved about the room, my slippered feet crunching on glass and splinters. When I picked up a shard of the mirror, staring at my own face, he said, “You don’t look as much like the library mural as I’d first thought.”

That turned me around to face him. He smiled at me. I had thought him human, but no. He had lived too long and too strangely, knew too much. Perhaps he was more like the demons of old, half mortal and half something else.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“Since we met.” His lips quirked. “Though that can’t properly be called a ‘meeting,’ granted.”

He had stopped and stared at me, that first evening in Sky. I’d forgotten in the rush of terror afterward. Then later in Scimina’s quarters—“You’re a good actor.”

“I have to be.” His smile was gone now. “Even then, I wasn’t sure. Not until I woke up and saw this.” He gestured around the devastated room. “And you there beside me, alive.”

I didn’t expect to be. But I was, and now I would have to deal with the consequences.

“I’m not her,” I said.

“No. But I’ll wager you’re a part of her, or she’s a part of you. I know a little about these things.” He ran a hand through his unruly black locks. Just hair, and not the smokelike curls of his godly self, but his meaning was plain.

“Why haven’t you told anyone?”

“You think I would do that?”

“Yes.”

He laughed, though there was a hard edge to the sound. “And you know me so well.”

“You would do anything to make your life easier.”

“Ah. Then you do know me.” He flopped down in the chair—the only intact piece of furniture in the room—one leg tossed over one arm. “But if you know that much, Lady, then you should be able to guess why I would never tell the Arameri of your… uniqueness.”

I put down the shard of mirror and went to him. “Explain,” I commanded, because I might pity him, but I would never like him.