The moundhold had gathered at the foot of the spiral stairs like defenders of a fortress at their last stand, staring up at Ra and Shiva on the threshold. No invitation to enter had been extended. Ra drew the dark, heavy cloak in which Shiva had clad her about her body, as Geffn brought Jak from the interior of the mound. Jak looked well, a confidence that had been missing restored. Perhaps there was—
Ra made a high sound of surprise in her throat. Someone else had stepped into the firelight behind Jak, someone who couldn’t possibly be here. Someone with eyes like the soul of the wintry night sky itself.
“So here you are.” The impossible vision addressed her coldly. “Queen Ra.” This was the voice of the one who’d sung MeerRa to his death, the face Ra had seen but once as the veil fell with him. The ground lunged beneath Ra’s feet.
Shiva grabbed her by the arm, forcing her to stay upright. “This is part of what you must face,” she murmured sternly. “If you cannot face your own misdeeds, how can you call yourself Meer?”
Ra pulled herself together, focusing on the warm amber light flickering over the inhabitants of the mound to center herself. It was like scrying in a field of candles to induce a trance before a blessing. Perhaps this was all nothing more than a Meeric vision, and Ahr might disappear in an instant.
Oldman Rem spoke at last. “We’re losing heat. I suppose they should come in.”
Shiva accepted his invitation as though it were graciously offered, the long tail of her black coat floating behind her like the train of a magnificent dress as she stepped inside, while Ra wiped her boots on the sisal mat, as Shiva hadn’t thought to do.
Without hesitation, Shiva descended to the heart of the mound where the fire welcomed and sat in the largest of the overstuffed chairs, her arms on the cushioned armrests as though it were her throne. As Ra came down to stand beside her, Rem cleared his throat and nodded toward the kitchen, and the gathered mound went as a unit, no collective consciousness needed.
“Jak na Fyn.” Shiva fixed her eyes on Jak, still standing in the corridor. “It is time to fulfill your part of our bargain. Come.”
Jak stepped into the gathering room with obvious reluctance, and Ahr flanked Jak’s steps like a trained guard. “What bargain? I’ve made no bargain with you.”
“Did you think what I gave you was for free? Am I worth so little?” Shiva shook her head in reproach. “Come. Sit.” As anyone would before such inarguable authority, Jak obeyed. “You snuck out of Rhyman under cover of dark. You and Ra behaved like children, dodging confrontation. This is no child’s game.”
“No.” Jak’s lip twitched with anger. “It’s not. I’m surprised your kind can recognize that.”
Ra was surprised at Jak’s temerity. Even she had never spoken to Shiva so freely.
Shiva’s stone face was hewn into a dark smile that ought to have terrified a sane person. “Fierce Jak.” Despite the dangerous smile, she seemed to be regarding Jak with approval. “One can face anything when one has lived in hell. You and I know it.” She flicked her gaze to Ra. “One wonders if MeerRa can be so brave.”
Ra raised her eyes to Jak’s, but Jak looked past her, focused on a point beside her as if to avoid any Meeric influence Ra might wish to extend. “Now, MeerShiva?” asked Ra. “Before…?” She couldn’t yet bring herself to say the name.
Shiva lifted one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “If she chooses to stay.” The icy green gaze fell on Ahr. “Perhaps this is too much for the new one.”
Beside Jak’s chair, Ahr crossed her arms primly. “I will hear what Ra has to say. This is all very interesting. Memory serves me sufficiently to know why she is accountable to Jak, but one would think Ra ought to be accountable to me.”
Shiva sighed with annoyance. “The newly renaissanced are so self-centered.”
Distracted from her purpose, Ra took an unconscious step closer, but Ahr took Jak’s hand on the arm of the chair as if to ward her off. “I—” What could one say to someone one had murdered? She knew what she must say to Jak, but to Ahr… The night-blue eyes accused her, and she wanted to fall at Ahr’s feet, to embrace those feet as the only part of Ahr she was worthy to touch, that she might feel her again. Those eyes—they had been her first touch of Ahr, nearly Meeric in their intensity. She could drown in their ocular ink.
Ahr’s face remained impassive. “You seem to think there will be some kind of reconciling between us.” She crossed her fingers through Jak’s. “I want nothing to do with you. I am with Jak. You and I are finished.”
Ra felt her heart dripping out of her like molten lead. She deserved nothing less, but this was Ahr, who’d said, “Forgive me, I love you,” even on the points of Ra’s deadly fingertips. This was the one she needed. She’d believed for a moment that her sin had been erased, that Ahr had come back to her, renaissanced as Ra had been by incendiary desire. This same Ahr had once looked into Ra’s idol soul and breathed life into the dull stone. She’d made the statue a man.
The eyes that had worked this magic were unequivocal now. Ra had lost. It was worse than the finality of Ahr’s death. There was nothing left but to try to give Jak back something of what she’d taken. She relinquished her gaze from the lost Ahr and concentrated once more on what she’d come to do. Jak looked well beside Ahr. Justice had been served. Ra deserved neither of them.
She met Jak’s unreadable eyes. “What happened at Soth AhlZel was my full responsibility. Madness was no excuse. To claim that I could never harm you was selfish of me, since it is clear that I could, and did. I have shamed us both.” She knelt before Jak and spoke quietly. “You trusted me with the most delicate part of yourself, and I tore it out and scored it with my obscene betrayal. I did to you worse than anyone in your life, save one.” Jak flinched at this and Ra fought the urge to comfort. “My crimes were inexcusable. I want to put right what I can—if anything can be. Tell me what you would have of me, and I will give it. Without conjury.”
Jak’s grip on Ahr’s hand was so tight that both sets of fingers had lost all color. “I don’t want anything from you.”
“But I must make reparation,” Ra insisted. “It’s not enough for me to tell you the shame was mine. My words were as much a violation as the crime they spoke of. I gladly made him suffer, but he can no longer be punished, and I must.”
Jak began to shake with emotion, and Ahr glared at Ra, wrapping an arm around Jak fiercely in protection. “You’re ripping at Jak again. Go away. Go away or I’ll—I’ll crush your skull!”
“Don’t, Ahr.” Jak’s voice quavered. “Don’t get involved in this.”
“I’m sorry.” The words breathed out of Ra. Inadequate words. Impossible words. Her entire body hurt with the inability to reach Jak. “My words can’t be taken back, so I must offer you more to cover where they tore. If I could swallow every pain you endured and confer it on myself, I would do it, even if it left me forever mad. I would replace it with the knowledge of what you are that you can’t see: the strength, the beauty—the innocence that rises from you when I look at you. Don’t you know that you’re still that blameless child? She is all that you are. I love her. Tell me what she wants.”
Jak made a sharp sound like a strangled cry. “I only wanted someone to protect me. You can’t do that.”
“No,” Ra admitted, pained. Ahr was regarding her furiously, the one who’d resisted her to defend Jak when she was in the rage of madness; who held Jak now and assured Ra with her consuming eyes that she would once more carry out her expurgatory mission if Jak was harmed again. “But Ahr will. From now on, you will always have Ahr.” With dawning certainty, Ra recognized the inexplicable beating of Meersblood in Ahr’s heart. “She is the protector you didn’t have as a child. She loves you more than I do.” Ra rose and turned away, empty of offerings, but Shiva grabbed her wrist as she tried to leave.
“You are not done.”
Ra beseeched Shiva with her eyes. There was nothing else she could do. What more could Shiva ask of her? With a guilty pang, she reminded herself that nothing was enough.
“On the contrary, MeerRa. It is enough.” Shiva answered her thought. “Now it is for Jak to take heed.”
Shiva stood and prompted Ra forward, bringing her to stand before Jak. “I told you to stand fast.” She addressed these words to Jak. “But you have faltered in your patience with Ra, preventing her from making this offering of her penitence that you might hold on to your suffering, stealing away from Ludtaht Ra before she could muster the courage to do it.”
Jak looked up, riveted by MeerShiva’s inarguable voice.
Shiva held Ra by the shoulders. “Ra stood fast. She is equally passionate in her mistakes and in her remorse.” As she spoke, she lifted the cloak from Ra’s shoulders, and Ra clutched at it, trying to prevent Shiva from her course, but it was fruitless. By Shiva’s machinations, the clothes she’d provided for Ra before they’d set out had dissipated into the ether of Meeric will. As when she’d first come to this mound, a cloak was her only garment. The black folds came away, and Ra was exposed.
The white marks Shiva had given her were visible at Ra’s throat and shoulders, but Jak had seen these before. Jak’s gaze shifted to the deeper marks across Ra’s stomach, hips, and thighs, and then stopped, accompanied by a gasp, at the ribbon of white that marked the more intimate strokes Shiva had inflicted upon her. Ra had never felt shame at her nudity before, but she felt it now—yet another facet of Shiva’s punishment. But it was nothing to the shame Jak had once borne.
Jak threw an angry look at the other Meer. “What do you mean by this?”
Shiva shook her head with a sigh. “Are you deliberately obtuse, Jak na Fyn? These are yours.” Her fingers traced over the deeper scars. “She didn’t move while I administered them. She asked me for more.”
“Sooth.” Jak curled forward, whispering into white-knuckled hands, and at last looked up and met Ra’s eyes. “Meerrá.” With this imprecation, Jak leapt up, embracing Ra’s exposed and branded body. “Why did you do this, Ra? I never asked this of you.”
Ra was afraid to feel the embrace. “I didn’t want you to see. I didn’t mean for you to see. I don’t want you coerced to forgive.”
Jak stepped back, head shaking, wiping at tears. “You shouldn’t have had to show me. I’ve been a fool.”
Behind Jak, Ahr stood holding her arms over her sweater as though in cold, the midnight eyes smoldering with rage and hatred. “I think we’ve all gotten the point.” Her tone was caustic. “Why don’t you put something on?”
Ra crossed an arm self-consciously across her breasts. She looked for the cloak Shiva had taken from her, but Shiva didn’t offer it.
“Dress yourself,” she said to Ra. “But use your tongue frugally from now on. Your words will come through me as vetma until you’ve proven yourself responsible.”
Ra spoke tentatively. “The cocoa brown suit I left at Mound Ahr?” It was something she’d already expended energy in making. It merely needed calling forth. Shiva nodded, and the tight knit wrapped around Ra, her hair looping automatically into the braided knot down her back as she’d worn it with the garment before.
The kitchen door opened as if someone had been watching and waiting for the opportune moment. Peta and Rem emerged into the gathering room, while the others hung back a moment as if they hadn’t all been taking refuge there together.
Peta observed Shiva, who raised a deep ruby crescent brow in her direction. “Will you be staying the night?”
Shiva laughed with the elegance of genuine amusement. “You’d rather we left, despite the temperature below freezing. Our blood does not boil half so vigorously as you think it does. We will impose.”
“Keiren and I can sleep on the hearth,” Mell offered from the kitchen doorway, and tripped forward as though someone had nudged her sharply from behind.
Shiva nodded. “Ra and I will share the bed.”
“No,” said Ra. “I have a room.” She paused. “Do I?”
Peta inclined her head and went to fetch extra blankets from the cupboard in the hall.
Ahr was staring wicked darts at Ra. “Oh, come now.” She looked Ra up and down, arms still folded. “Surely you’d rather have Jak than a cold bed. I can sleep on the floor, or better yet, at Mound Ahr.”
“I would rather have you both,” said Ra solemnly. “But even the Meer can’t have everything they wish for.”
Rem cleared his throat with a disapproving frown.
Shiva broke the tension. “I’ll take your kind offer of a bed.” She nodded at Mell, who slipped before her and hurried down the corridor.
Keiren took the rest of the blankets from Peta and began to arrange them by the fire with irritation, while Geffn emerged from the kitchen last, drawing a pale young woman with him.
Looking at Jak and Ahr, he propelled his friend around them in the protection of his arms. “Let’s stay out of this, shall we?”
Ahr rested her hands on her hips. “Will we stay out of this, Jak? Should I go? Will you return to her bed?” When Jak’s gaze darted from Ahr to Ra in conflict, Ahr laughed, the sound as cold as her eyes. “Truth help you, Jak.”
Truth help me, thought Jak, standing before Ahr later in the bedroom they shared. It didn’t seem to. The more truth Jak knew, the more tangled by fate life seemed to be.
Ahr bristled when Jak tried to touch her arm. “I don’t want you here. Go sleep with her. Go lick her holy wounds.”
Weary, Jak sat on the bed and gazed up at her, standing stiff against the bureau, dressed in clothes like Jak’s now instead of the sweater and skirt. When Ahr had last come to the mounds, he’d been burning for Ra, and it had given Jak a sense of foreboding. His former vitriol and hatred of Ra was more familiar and hadn’t threatened the claim Jak had on his affections. But he’d professed to love Ra with his dying breath, though it was Ra who’d killed him.
Ahr’s first word in her new incarnation had been that name, held so deeply within the matrix of the soul, it was all she knew. Jak had punished her for it and extracted her renunciation of the one they both had loved. And now— How could Ahr not be angry? Jak was like some trickster goblin who’d grubbed in between them and stolen Ahr’s love for Ra to secretly hoard it. There was no way out of this.
“I don’t want to sleep with her,” Jak lied, and shifted on the bed, boot heels resting on the frame. “You know I didn’t intend to forgive her, but how could I see the pain she endured for me and remain coldhearted?”
“Ra’s bloody scars! If she was whipped by that cold devil, she deserved it. She put her hand through me, Jak, and that was not the worst she did.”
“If those marks had been for you, could you have stood it?”
The look in Ahr’s red-pooling eyes stabbed into Jak. “But they weren’t, were they? She suffers nothing for me. And you don’t care. You liar. Liar! Liar!” Red was spilling out in an angry splatter. Like Ra’s when she’d first renaissanced, Ahr’s emotions seemed like a kettle on the fire that might boil over at any instant.
As Jak rose and held a hand out toward her, Ahr moved swiftly to avoid it, bringing something from behind her back where her hand had rested. She was holding Jak’s leather shears in her fist, and the long, sharp blades darted up in the light of the oil lamp behind her. Jak drew back against the bed with dawning alarm. Ahr was missing the part of herself so persistent it had withstood fire, and Jak had forgotten. And Ahr had the advantage of Meerity and its attendant madness.
“You don’t need me now that you have the real thing.” Ahr spoke with deadly calm. “You don’t want me at all. You have your sickeningly beautiful, ageless Meer, to whom I so pathetically gave unconscious homage in the making of myself. You’re done with your game of me.” She jerked the shears up before her, and Jak braced for it, eyes shut tight in terror, not wanting to see it coming.
Instead of the sting of their plunge, the heavy snip of the blades pierced the air. Jak opened one eye and saw that Ahr hadn’t meant violence to Jak at all. Her plunges with the shears were chopping great chunks out of her glorious hair. “You don’t want her poor copy.” Ahr spoke through red tears as she held out another length before her and severed it roughly. “Maybe you still want Ahr ‘No One’. I can be him.”
“Meershivá,” Jak whispered, coming forward. “Don’t.” Jak reached for the shears, but Ahr held them away with a rough motion of her arm that made Jak fear she’d injure herself. “Please don’t, Ahr. My feelings for you haven’t changed. You’re not a copy of her. Please!”
Ahr shook her head and went on cutting until she’d severed it all in a jagged crown two inches from her skull. She dropped the shears onto the bureau and turned to look in its mirror. “Are you him?” She addressed the red-eyed reflection. “Do you remember?” Her eyes met Jak’s in the mirror. “If I dress as you do, you can pretend. Leave my clothes on this time when you make love to me. We’ll both be secretive and untouchable. Will you make love to me, or are you only for Ra?”
“Oh, Ahr.” Jak turned her around, and she gazed out of the conflicting inks of color in her eyes. Jak kissed her, tasting the blood that had crossed over her lips as it fell, and feeling strangely aroused by it. “I told you I couldn’t let you go. Why can’t you believe me?”
“That was before.”
“And in an hour’s time, you think I could change so toward you?” Jak’s head shook almost angrily. “We’ve had this argument before. I told you I loved Ra and you believed it meant I couldn’t love you. I let you think it then, but I refuse to now.” Jak pressed Ahr against the unfinished dresser, fingers playing at the clasp of Ahr’s belt. “I want you…if you’ll still have me.”
Ahr covered Jak’s hand. “Let my sex be a mystery, like yours.”
Jak’s head shook. “I know your sex. And I want it.” Unbuckling the pants and letting them fall, Jak sank down, balanced on boot heels, and partook of that certainty. The piquant warmth of her filled Jak’s mouth, and Ahr began to cry again, punctuating the tears that fell onto Jak’s head with adoring moans. She wept until she trembled urgently into Jak’s kiss with further proof of her womanhood.
“I know your sex, also,” she gasped as she curved into Jak. “Let me have it.”
Jak savored one last taste of her before coming up, unbuttoning the flannel shirt that covered what Ahr had only seen once, and that in a setting of abasement. “Take me, then,” said Jak. “Take all of me.”
Ahr pressed Jak toward the bed and tumbled onto it, the pants Jak had loosened catching at her ankles. She kicked them off and shimmied Jak’s down. Her limbs prowled over Jak, and she let her body press against the equal parts of the other, moving against Jak in the instinctive motion of union.
“Never doubt that I love you,” Jak whispered, and Ahr embraced the words on Jak’s lips.
In the silence of the mound after Jak had gone to sleep, the declaration didn’t seem so simple to Ahr. There was still Ra, who couldn’t be expected to just leave Jak to her. Jak would have to choose, as Ahr had: Ahr or Ra. Ahr couldn’t leave this to fate, which had been so capricious. She slipped her limbs out of the tangle of Jak’s and whispered a conjured robe, leaving Jak sleeping the heavy sleep of satisfaction.
Ra was awake as well, probably expecting her. Ahr found her door and went in without knocking to find her seated in the center of her bed in the pose of meditation, brushing her hair in the dim glow of lamplight. Ahr put her hand to her own wild whim of the night, stung by the beauty of Ra, but perversely satisfied to have defaced her own. Somehow she knew this would be upsetting to Ra. The brushing slowed, and Ra stared as she pulled the door closed.
Ra’s brow wrinkled in concern. “What did you do?”
“You knew me that way, didn’t you?” Ahr still clutched the doorknob behind her. “As the woman, not the man. Whom you murdered.” When Ra continued to brush, watching her, fury spiked in Ahr’s blood. “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
“That you’re here is so much more than I could have hoped. What right have I to questions?”
“I want you to go away. Go away with that other one, and leave me Jak. You owe me.”
“Yes.” Ra drew the brush through her hair. “And I owe Jak.”
“You know that I’m Meer now.”
“Yes.”
“I could kill you.”
“Yes.”
“But that Shiva.” Ahr jerked her chin toward the wall. “She’d kill me, wouldn’t she?”
Ra seemed to contemplate it, drawing on the brush as she held a plait of hair taut beneath it. “I can’t say.”
Her ire was growing at Ra’s quiet, simple answers. “Why did you come here? You knew I was here.”
“No.” Ra shook her head, apparently bemused. “You’d think I would.” She completed a stroke of the brush with excruciating slowness, and Ahr crossed the room in a rage and snatched it from her hand.
Ra looked up at her, waiting. “Will you kill me again, to even the score?”
Unable to control the impulse, Ahr struck Ra’s face with the back of the silver brush. But she was Meer, and she hadn’t realized precisely what this meant. Ra tumbled backward from the bed, catching herself with her arms against the wall as she struck it. Her face was already swelling to a Meeric red, the infamous blood trailing from one side of her mouth.
Ahr’s chest rose and fell with a colossal breath, determined not to show alarm despite the unexpected result of her action. “You come here and you tear Jak up to ease your conscience. Parading your scars for Jak. What devotion!”
“Why are you so angry with me?” Ra put her hand to her swelling cheek, her audacity incredible. “You weren’t when you died.”
“Then I was a fool.” Ahr spat the words at her. “I was a fool to come to you at all. I made Jak go. I was a fool to leave Rhyman and Merit.” She paused. “Merit…” This hadn’t been in her memory before, this piece of time between life at Haethfalt and the end at Ra’s hands. Ahr had been penetrated by the earnest Merit. It had been an act of utmost friendship, midtlif. But when had this friendship grown? It had the indelible certainty of a cataclysmic shared experience. And that experience—it had something to do with Ra.
The dark rubies of the ring that hung on a thread about Ra’s neck caught the light. “Mi la,” Ahr whispered, and the expression of shock took on an instant meaning. Ra’s hypnotic eyes had conquered her. Ahr had forced this same memory upon Ra once, in Ra’s own renaissanced amnesia: the memory of their daughter, whom Ahr had named Mila after that same expression of awe.
The influence of the ebony gaze delivered the rest to her, time flowing in a backward spiral. The violent end to that life and Ra’s at Ahr’s provoking as MeerRa, beaten, tumbled from the temple steps onto the broken body of their child. The isolation from Mila as she was raised as Ra’s heir, renamed RaNa. The theft of the baby, and Ahr’s milk wasted in the rain as she collapsed, hopeless onto the ground. Ra’s refusal to acknowledge the child inside her. Ra’s inexplicable silence after the weeks together. Ecstasy at his hands, his mouth, his cock. The irrevocable piercing of her maidenhead. The stumbling of beloved Merit as he bore Ra in his litter, allowing Ahr to be secretly drawn inside the curtains. The seven unbearable days of visual communion between two pairs of eyes in the dusty streets of Rhyman as Ahr followed MeerRa’s procession during the People’s Blessing.
The brush Ahr still held dropped from her fingers. She was numb, unable to move. “My god, how I’ve hated you.” Ra made a move toward her, and Ahr stumbled back against the door. “You took my hatred in the last life.” Ahr shook her head to clear it of the drug of Ra’s eyes. “It was a deliberate act to weaken me, to bewitch me once more.”
“No.” Ra stepped back against the bed. “It was an act of instinct. It felt like acid on your skin when I touched you. I took it without thinking.”
Ahr ignored her excuses. “You took my hatred,” she repeated with a growing conviction. “But I found it again in the elements, and it’s mine. We are even on the score of murder. But there is all the rest. You left me in the beggar’s yard in the punishment of silence with your baby in my belly and upheld me to the scorn and ridicule of the host of Rhyman. You stole my child! You broke my maidenhead without a thought for my pain, and then threw me back into the street like garbage. I was fifteen, barely more than RaNa would become.” Her voice became an untrusted whisper. “And you made me your concubine without caring to see my face.”
Her voice wavered as the inevitable tears began. “You shamed me, Ra, making me wear the veil when you’d been inside me. You dishonored my virginity. It was worth nothing to you!” Ra tried to speak, but Ahr refused to allow it. “For all of it, and for loving Jak, I hate you.” She grasped the handle of the door, and turned back once more to Ra. “Jak was far more gentle in taking my new maidenhead.”