“Sieh!” She pushed at me, and when I lifted my head, I saw the horror in her eyes. “I didn’t use any… preventative… when we were together last night. I…” She looked away, trembling. I regretted my teasing when I realized she was genuinely upset, but it made me happy that she cared so much.
I laughed gently, relenting. “It’s all right. My mother Enefa realized the danger long ago. She changed me. Do you understand? No children.”
She did not look reassured—did not feel reassured, her anguish tainting the very air around us. I have siblings who cannot endure mortal emotions. They are sad creatures who haunt the gods’ realm, devouring tales of mortal life and pretending they are not jealous of the rest of us. Shahar would have killed half of them by now.
“Enefa is dead,” she said.
That was more than enough to sober me. “Yes. But not all her works died with her, Shahar, or neither you nor I would be standing here.”
She looked up at me, tense and afraid. “You’re different now, Sieh. You’re not really a god anymore, and mortals—” Her face softened so beautifully. It made me smile, despite the conversation. “Mortals grow up. Sieh, I want you to be sure there’s no child. Can you check somehow? Because… because…” She lowered her eyes, and suddenly it was shame that she felt, sour and bitter on the back of my tongue. Shame, and fear.
“What?”
She drew a deep breath. “I didn’t try to prevent a baby. In fact”—her jaw flexed—“I’ve been to the scriveners. They used a script.” She blushed, but forged ahead. “To make it easier, more likely, for three or four days. And once I, with you, I, I’m supposed to go to them. They have other scripts that they say… Even with a god, fertility magic works the same way.”
Her stammering embarrassment confused me; I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to say at first. And then, like a comet’s icy plume, understanding slashed through me.
“You wanted a child?”
She laughed once, bitter. When she turned back to the window, her eyes were hard and older than they should be, and so perfectly Arameri. Then I knew.
“Your mother.”
Shahar nodded, still not meeting my eyes. “ ‘If we cannot own gods, then perhaps we can become gods,’ she said. The demons of old had great magic despite their mortality. Or, at the very least, we can gain the greatest demon magic: the power to kill gods.”
I stared at her, feeling sick, because I should have known. The Arameri had been trying to get their hands on a demon for decades. I should have seen it in Remath’s quest for a godly lover; I should have realized why she’d been so pleased to have me in Sky. Why she’d tried to give me her daughter.
I shrugged off the sheet and walked away from Shahar, manifesting clothing about myself. Black this time, like my fur when I was a cat. Like my father’s wrath.
“Sieh?” Shahar blurted the words, cursed, dropped the sheet and grabbed for a robe. “Sieh, what are you—”
I stopped and turned back to her, and she froze at the look in my eyes. Or perhaps at my eyes themselves, because I could not become this angry, even in my weakened half-mortal state, without a little of the cat showing.
I would save the claws, however, for Remath.
“Why did you tell me?” I asked, and she went pale. “Did you wait until now for a reason?” Some of my magic had come back to me. I touched the world, found Remath within it. Her audience chamber, surrounded by courtiers and petitioners. “Were you hoping I would kill her in front of witnesses so the other highbloods would think you weren’t involved? Was that what you told yourself so it wouldn’t feel like matricide?”
Her lips turned white as she pressed them together. “How dare you—”
“Because this wasn’t necessary.” I rode over her words with my own, with my grief, and that drove the anger from her face in an instant. “I told you I would kill her for you, if you asked. All I ever wanted was to be able to trust you. If you had given me that, I would have done anything for you.”
She flinched as if I’d struck her. Her eyes welled with tears, but this was not like last night. She stood in the slanting afternoon light of Itempas’s sun, proud despite her nakedness, and the tears did not fall, because Arameri do not cry. Not even when they have broken a god’s heart.
“Deka,” she said at last.
I shook my head, mute, too consumed with my own nature to follow her insane mortal reasoning.
She drew another breath. “I agreed to do this because of Deka. We made a bargain, Mother and I: one night with you, in exchange for him. The scriveners would take care of the rest. But when you said that a child would kill you…” She faltered.