The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(328)

11


I L-O-V-E, love you

I’ll K-I-S-S, kiss you

Then I pushed him in a lake

And he swallowed a snake

And ended up with a tummy ache



THE SERVANTS TOOK ME to a large sumptuous bathchamber with lovely benches that reeked of sex despite their freshly laundered cushions. They stripped me, throwing my old clothes into a pile to be burned, and scrubbed me with careless efficiency, rinsing me in perfumed water. Then they put me into a robe and took me to a room and let me sleep the whole day and well into the night. I did not dream.

I woke up thinking that my sister Zhakkarn was using my head as a pike target, though she would never do such a thing. When I managed to sit upright, which took doing, I contemplated nausea again. A long-cold meal and a pitcher of room-temperature water sat on a sideboard of the room, so I decided on ingestion rather than ejection and applied myself grimly. It helped that the food tasted good. Beside this sat a small dish holding a dab of thick white paste and a paper card, on which elegant blocky letters had been written: EAT IT. The hand was familiar, so I sighed and tasted the paste. The alley rat had been more rancid but not by much. Still, as I was a guest in Ahad’s home, I held my breath and gulped the rest down, then quickly ate more food in an attempt to disguise the bitter taste. This did not work. However, I began to feel better, so I was pleased to confirm it was medicine, not poison.

Fresh clothing had been set out for me, too. Pleasantly nondescript: loose gray pants, a beige shirt, a brown jacket, brown boots. Servant attire, most likely, since I suspected that would suit Ahad’s sense of cruelty. Thus arrayed, I opened the door of the room.

And promptly stopped, as the sounds of laughter and music drifted up from downstairs. Nighttime. For a moment the urge to play a dozen bawdy, vicious tricks was almost overwhelming, and I felt a tickle of power at the thought. It would be so easy to change all the house’s sensual oils into hot chili oil or make the beds smell of mildew rather than lust and perfume. But I was older now, more mature, and the urge passed. I felt a fleeting sadness in its wake.

Before I could close the door, however, two people came up the steps, giggling together with the careless intimacy of old friends or new lovers. One of them turned her head, and I froze as our eyes met. Egan, one of my sisters—with her arm around the waist of some mortal. I assessed and dismissed him in a glance: richly dressed, middle-aged, drunk. I turned back to meet Egan’s frowning gaze.

“Sieh.” She looked me up and down and smirked. “So the rumors are true; you’re back. Two thousand years wasn’t enough mortal flesh to satisfy you?”

Once upon a time, Egan had been worshipped by a desert tribe in eastern Senm. She had taught them to play music that could bring rain, and they had sculpted a mountain face to make a statue of her in return. Those people were gone now, absorbed into the Amn during one of that tribe’s endless campaigns of conquest before the War. After the War, I had destroyed Egan’s statue myself, under orders from the Arameri to eliminate anything that blasphemed against Itempas, no matter how beautiful. And here stood the original in mortal flesh, with an Amn man’s hand on her breast.

“I’m here by accident,” I said. “What’s your excuse?”

She lifted a graceful eyebrow, set into a beautiful Amn face. It was a new face, of course. Before the War, she had looked more like the people of the desert tribe. Both of us ignored the mortal, who had by now begun trying to nibble at her neck.

“Boredom,” she said. “Experience. The usual. During the War, it was the ones who’d spent the most time among mortalkind, defining their natures, who survived best.” Her eyes narrowed. “Not that you helped.”

“I fought the madman who destroyed our family,” I said wearily. “And yes, I fought anyone who helped him. I don’t understand why everyone acts like I did a horrible thing.”

“Because you—all of you who fought for Naha—lost yourselves in it,” Egan snapped, her body tensing so with fury that her paramour lifted his head to blink at her in surprise. “He infected you with his fury. You didn’t just kill those who fought; you killed anyone who tried to stop you. Anyone who pleaded for calm, if you thought they should’ve been fighting. Mortals, if they had the temerity to ask you for help. In the Maelstrom’s name, you act like Tempa was the only one who went mad that day!”

I stared at her, fury ratcheting higher in me, and then, suddenly, it died. I couldn’t sustain it. Not while I stood there with my head still aching from alcohol and Ahad’s beating the day before, and my skin crawling as infinitesimal flecks of it died—some renewed, some lost forever, all of it slowly becoming dryer and less elastic until one day it would be nothing but wrinkles and liver spots. Egan’s lover touched her shoulder to try and soothe her, a pathetic gesture, but it seemed to have some effect, because she relaxed just a little and smiled ruefully at him, as if to apologize for destroying the mood. That made me think of Shahar, and how lonely I was, and how lonely I would be for the rest of my mercilessly brief life.