The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(15)

He paused to see if I understood. I did. At my shudder, he nodded and sat back.

“Just don’t talk to them unless you have to,” he said. “Now. Shall we—” He reached for the ink dish and cursed as it toppled the instant his fingers touched it; Sieh had somehow lodged a brush underneath. The ink splattered across the tabletop like

like

and then Viraine touched my hand. “Lady Yeine? Are you all right?”


That was how it happened, yes. The first time.


I blinked. “What?”

He smiled, all condescending kindness again. “Been a hard day, has it? Well, this won’t take long.” He’d cleaned up the ink spill; there was enough left in the dish that apparently he could continue. “If you could hold your hair back for me…”

I didn’t move. “Why did Grandfather Dekarta do this, Scrivener Viraine? Why did he bring me here?”

He raised his eyebrows, as if surprised that I would even ask. “I’m not privy to his thoughts. I have no idea.”

“Is he senile?”

He groaned. “You really are a savage. No, he isn’t senile.”

“Then why?”

“I just told you—”

“If he wanted to kill me, he could have simply had me executed. Trump up an excuse, if he even bothered. Or he could have done what he did to my mother. An assassin in the night, poison in my sleep.”

I had finally surprised him. He grew very still, his eyes meeting mine and then flicking away. “I would not confront Dekarta with the evidence, if I were you.”

At least he hadn’t tried to deny it.

“I hardly needed evidence. A healthy woman in her forties doesn’t die in her sleep. But I had her body searched by the physician. There was a mark, a small puncture, on her forehead. On the—” I trailed off for a moment, suddenly understanding something I’d never questioned in my life. “On the scar she had, right here.” I touched my own forehead, where my Arameri sigil would be.

Viraine faced me full-on now, quiet and serious. “If an Arameri assassin left a mark that could be seen—and if you expected to see it—then, Lady Yeine, you understand more of Dekarta’s intentions than any of us. Why do you think he brought you here?”

I shook my head slowly. All along the journey to Sky, I’d suspected. Dekarta was angry at my mother, hated my father. There could be no good reason for his invitation. In the back of my mind I’d expected to be executed at best, perhaps tortured first, maybe on the steps of the Salon. My grandmother had been afraid for me. If there’d been any hope of escape, I think she would have urged me to run. But one does not run from the Arameri.

And a Darre woman does not run from revenge.

“This mark,” I said at last. “It will help me survive this place?”

“Yes. The Enefadeh won’t be able to hurt you unless you do something stupid. As for Scimina, Relad, and other dangers…” He shrugged. “Well. Magic can only do so much.”

I closed my eyes and traced my mother’s face against my memory for the ten thousandth time. She had died with tears on her cheeks, perhaps knowing what I would face.

“Then let’s begin,” I said.





5


Chaos


THAT NIGHT AS I SLEPT, I dreamt of him.


It is an ugly, stormcloud-choked night.

Above the clouds, the sky is lightening with the approach of dawn. Below the clouds, this has made absolutely no difference in the battlefield’s illumination. A thousand torches burning amid a hundred thousand soldiers are more than enough light. The capital, too, is a gentle radiance nearby.

(It is not the Sky that I know. This city sprawls across a floodplain rather than over a hill, and the palace is embedded at its heart, not hovering overhead. I am not me.)

“A respectable force,” says Zhakka, beside me. Zhakkarn, I know now, goddess of battle and bloodshed. In place of her usual headscarf is a helm that fits her head almost as closely. She wears shining silver armor, its surface a glory of engraved sigils and incomprehensible designs that glow red as if hot. There is a message written in the gods’ words there. Memories I should not possess tease me with its meaning, though in the end they fail.

“Yes,” I say, and my voice is male, though high-pitched and nasal. I know myself to be Arameri. I feel myself to be powerful. I am the family head. “I would have been offended if they had come with even one soldier less.”

“Then since you are not offended, perhaps you can parley with them,” says a woman beside me. She is sternly beautiful: her hair is the color of bronze, and a pair of enormous wings feathered in gold, silver, and platinum are folded on her back. Kurue, called Wise.