The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(307)

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.