“ ‘Take it,’ she told me, and offered me the blood. And I thought… I thought… I thought… when there were only two of us, I was never alone.”
A final silence, fortelling the story’s end.
Slowly, he let me go. All the tension and strength ran out of him, like water. He slid down my body to his knees, his cheek pressed to my belly. He had stopped trembling.
I have spent time studying the nature of light. It is part curiosity and part meditation; someday I hope to understand why I see the way I do. Scriveners have studied light, too, and in the books that Madding read to me, they claimed that the brightest light—true light—is the combination of all other kinds of light. Red, blue, yellow, more; put it all together and the result is shining white.
This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.
And thus a single moment of solitude had destroyed Bright Itempas. He might have recovered from that in time; even a river stone wears into new shapes. But in the moment of his greatest weakness, he had been manipulated, his already-damaged soul struck an unrecoverable blow by the mortal woman he’d trusted to love him. That had driven him so mad that he had murdered his sister to keep from ever experiencing the pain of betrayal again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was very soft, and not meant for me. But the next words were. “You don’t know how much I’ve thought of taking your blood for myself.”
I folded my arm around his shoulders and bent down to kiss his forehead. “I do know, actually.” Because I did.
So I straightened, took his hand, and pulled him up. He came without resistance, letting me lead him to the bed, where I pulled him to lie down. When we’d settled, I snuggled into the crook of his arm, resting my head on his chest as I’d so often done with Madding. They felt and smelled very different—sea salt to dry spice, cool to hot, gentle to fierce—but their heartbeats were the same. Steady, slow, reassuring. Could a son inherit such a thing from a father? Apparently so.
I could always die tomorrow, I supposed.
18
“The Gods’ Vengeance”
(watercolor)
I THINK MADDING ALWAYS SUSPECTED THE TRUTH.
Throughout my childhood, I had a strange memory of being someplace warm and wet and enclosed. I felt safe, yet I was lonely. I could hear voices, yet no one spoke to me. Hands would touch me now and again, and I would touch back, but that was all.
Many years later, I told this story to Madding, and he looked at me oddly. When I asked him what was wrong, he didn’t answer at first. I pressed him, and finally he said, “It sounds like you were in the womb.”
I remember laughing. “That’s crazy,” I said. “I was thinking. Listening. Aware.”
He shrugged. “So was I, before I was born. I guess that happens sometimes with mortals, too.”
But it isn’t supposed to, he did not say.
“What do you intend to do?” Shiny asked me the next morning.
He stood at the window across the room, glowing softly with the dawn. I sat up blearily, stifling a yawn.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I wasn’t ready to die. That was easier to admit than I’d thought. I had killed Madding; to live with that knowledge would be—had been—almost unbearable. But killing myself, or letting Shiny or the Arameri do it, felt worse somehow. In the wake of Madding’s death, it felt like throwing away a gift.
“If I live, the Arameri will use me for the gods know what. I won’t have more deaths on my conscience.” I sighed, rubbing my face with my hands. “You were right to want to kill us. You should’ve gotten us all, though. That was the only mistake the Three made.”
“No,” said Shiny. “We were wrong. Something had to be done about the demons—that I will not deny—but we should have sought a different solution. They were our children.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Stared, though he was now little more than a pale relief against the dimmer sheen of the window. I wasn’t really sure what to say. So I changed the subject. “What do you plan to do?”
He stood as he had on so many mornings at my house, facing the rising sun with back straight and head high and arms folded. Now, however, he let out a soft sigh and turned to me, leaning against the window with an almost palpable weariness. “I have no idea. Nothing in me is whole or right, Oree. I am the coward you named me, and the fool you did not. Weak.” He lifted his hand as if he’d never seen it before and made a fist. It didn’t look weak to me, but I imagined how a god might see it. Bones that could be broken. Skin that would not instantly heal if torn. Tendons and veins as fine as gossamer.