CHAPTER XII

When they bring Kaeo to the empress, he is her prophet, the prophet of the Daughter of the Gods. They walk him through the palace from a high room under the eaves in a robe of white silk, two of the giants escorting him and a slave to open doors, whenever the empress is moved by the desire for prophecy. The wizards fear her. There is madness in the yellowroot and it poisons them for a vision of her enemy, the false heir of the gods, the deceit of the devils who is sent to bring Nabban to war and anarchy, as if it were not already there, and while she hunts for dreams of the prophets’ heir of the gods in the north, her generals mutiny and retreat, serve the provincial lords their cousins, and slaves and peasants seize manors and butcher the banner-lords who hold them. She executes other prophets who say only what Kaeo has said. She executes the priests who shelter them, and burns the shrines, and builds her own temples in the towns. Priests and priestesses are ordered to proclaim the holiness of the Daughter of the Gods. Some do. Some flee into the wilderness. Some die martyrs. And while she wars on the priests of the gods, the two armies that have flowed out of Dar-Lathi to cross the Little Sister into Lower Lat and into Taiji plunder and burn. The folk flee, or they join their Lathan kin and the wild jungle-folk of Darru.

He dreams this. He says it. He says, the empress of the folk must defend the folk. She strikes him. He is scarred from the edge of her fan.

She has sent Captain Diman from her, sent her north into the winter with a handful of her assassins to murder her enemy before ever he comes against her, and Kaeo dreams and speaks his dreams and says, there is death in the dead land, where the dead god sleeps. He laughs and laughs and laughs, because she is a fool, and if she kills him, still the heir of the gods will come.

She sends assassins to kill the Wild Girls, but they do not survive to come to the army of Dar-Lathi. The queens, too, have their guardians.

“You do not see, you do not see,” he cries.

She orders diviners of the imperial corps of wizards brought to her, and the tea poisons some, but some survive and dream as Kaeo dreams. Unjust. He is no wizard.

She likes their dreams no better. They see too little. He is the prophet, while they are merely diviners. The gods speak through him, while they only strive to see echoes of what pours through him, and they die for their failure. The youngest of the giants, most often made her executioner, has haunted eyes. One night he walks off the roof of the moon-viewing tower.

Kaeo wishes he could die, but he endures and keeps enduring.

The heir of the gods is coming. He tells her so, and laughs.

All the palace gossips how the prophet falls in the grip of his visions, how he injures himself in his violent seizures; the price of prophecy.

There are nightmares in the aftermath of her questioning, always nightmares, and the room they keep him in—where none come but the giants and a slave-attendant he knows for a trusted spy of the Wind in the Reeds, because he has felt the knives the young woman wears beneath her court gowns when once he fell against her half-fainting, though he has not yet figured out how to abstract one unseen—whirls about him as though he has drunk far too much.

The tattoo over his heart burns. It is black as fresh ink on the brush and he thinks the caged words that he cannot read writhe like the legs of a knot of insects, scorpions interwoven. He thinks it a chain, binding him, the iron collar of a runaway dragged back to be branded on the face. He cannot see, the gods do not know, to what he had been bound.

Death, death, death. He screams the word after them as they leave him.

The hangover, when the delirium leaves him, will be worse. He has discovered, though, that if he can manage to vomit, it will not be so bad as it can be. Perhaps this is why the wizards so often die; they have not learned this secret.

He wishes he could give up and simply die, but there is something in him that is angry, too angry, the ghost of the man who carried messages in coded books for Prince Dan and his rebels, the man whose deep-buried anger remembers that he is Dwei Kaeo and a free man before the gods, a child of Nabban, a soul that cannot be owned.

He is Dwei Kaeo. He always has been. The gods know it.

And in the nightmares, sometimes, he can find a place of quiet. In the distance he will see a rider, a white horse, and banners, blue like the sky, black like the night.

He wakes from those dreams broken and sobbing, bruises burning, scabs cracked and bleeding again, and all the scars of his torture aching and pulling. He weeps because he is alone and his god is gone into dreams and he does not know when the empress will send for him again, to torment and poison him and open the way again for that briefest of glimpses of his god.

He hungers for the oily bitterness of the tea.