The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(321)

(They had ripped off her wings to force her to do it. It was too complex a task to be commanded, and she was too wise; she could easily find the loopholes in it. The wings grew back and they tore them away again, but she bore the pain in cold silence. Only when they’d driven heated spikes into her skull, threatening to damage her now-vulnerable brain, had she capitulated. She could not bear to be without her thoughts, for those were all she had left.)

Nahadoth, that awful first year, was left alone. This was partly necessity, as Itempas’s betrayal had left him silent and broken. Nothing stirred him; not words, not whippings. When the Arameri commanded, he would move and do as he was told—no more, no less. Then he would sit back down. This stillness was not his nature, you understand. There was something so obviously wrong with it that even the Arameri let him be.

But the other problem was Naha’s unreliability. By night he had power, but send him to the other side of the world, past the dawnline of the sun, and he turned to drooling, senseless meat. He had no power at all in that form—could not even manifest his own personality. The meat’s mind was as empty as a newborn babe’s. Still dangerous, though, especially when sunset came.

Because it was, in its own way, a child, I was given charge of it.

From the first I hated this. It shat itself every day, sometimes more than once. (One of the mortal women tried to show me how to use a diaper; I never bothered. Just left the creature on the ground to do its business.) It moaned and grunted and screamed, incessantly. It bit me bloody when I tried to feed it—newborn or not, it had a man’s flesh, and that man had a full set of strong, sharp teeth. The first time it did this, I knocked several of those teeth out. They grew back the next night. It didn’t bite me again.

Gradually, though, I came to be more accepting of my duty, and as I warmed toward the meat, so it regarded me with its own simple species of affection. When it began to walk, it followed me everywhere. Once Zhakka and Rue and I had built the first White Hall—the Arameri still pretended to be priests back then—the creature filled the shining corridors with jabbering as it learned to talk. Its first word was my name. When I grew weak and lapsed into the horrifying state that mortals called sleep, the meat creature snuggled against me. I tolerated this because sometimes, when dusk fell and it became my father again, I could snuggle back and close my eyes and imagine that the War had never happened. That all was as it should be.

But those dreams never lasted. The thin, lifeless dawn, and my mindless charge, always returned.

If only it had stayed mindless. But it did not; it began to think. When the others and I probed inside it, we found that it had begun, like any thinking, feeling being, to grow a soul. Worst of all, it—he—began to love me.

And I, as I should never, ever have done, began to love him back.


Hymn and I stood now in the creature’s large, handsomely furnished office, wreathed in disgusting smoke.

“I’d ask you to sit,” he said, pausing to take another long drag on the burning thing in his mouth, exhaling the smoke with a languid air, “but I doubt you would.” He gestured at the equally handsome leather chairs that faced his desk. He sat in a fine chair across from these.

Hymn, who had been glancing uneasily at me since we’d come upstairs from the parlor, sat. I did not.

“My lord—” she began.

“Lord?” I spat this, folding my arms.

He looked at me with amusement. “Nobility these days has less to do with bloodlines and friendships with the Arameri, and more to do with money. I have plenty of that, so yes, that makes me a lord.” He paused. “And I go by the name ‘Ahad’ now. Do you like it?”

I sneered. “You can’t even bother to be original.”

“I have only the name you gave me, lovely Sieh.” He hadn’t changed. His words were still velvet over razors. I ground my teeth, bracing for cuts. “Speaking of loveliness, though, you’re rather lacking at the moment. Did you piss off Zhakkarn again? How is she, by the way? Always liked her.”

“What in the fifty million hells are you doing alive?” I demanded. This earned a little gasp from Hymn, but I ignored her.

Ahad’s smile never flagged. “You know precisely why I’m alive, Sieh. You were there, remember? At the moment of my birth.” I stiffened at this. There was too much knowing in his eyes. He saw my fear. “ ‘Live,’ she said. She was newborn herself; maybe she didn’t know a goddess’s word is law. But I suspect she did.”

I relaxed, realizing that he referred to his rebirth as a whole and separate being. But how many years had passed since then? Ahad should have grown old and died years before, yet here he was, as hale and healthy as he’d been on that day. Better, in fact. He was smug and well dressed now, his fingers heavy with silver rings, his hair long and straight and partially braided like a barbarian’s. I blinked. No, like a Darre’s, which was what he looked like now: a mortal, Darren man. Yeine had remade him to suit her then-tastes.