Even after everything, I had to convince my mother and father to release Gannet from his cell. We were both shadowed by guards back to the subterranean chambers our people had reclaimed, and couldn’t speak together. I didn’t even reach out to touch his mind, for I was watched every moment. My sisters and mother believed that I had lied about our relationship, and I didn’t want to give them any more reason to think so. I cared for him, but it was not some easy dalliance that I could blush and giggle over as I might have done if our lives had ever been normal. It was dangerous. There was no future in it. They would not understand.
I felt drained, besides, by the necessary telling they had already required of me, the display of fire, the prospect of the imposter’s arrival within a few days’ time. Gannet and I would rest for what remained of the night and begin tomorrow. Exhausted though I was, I didn’t know how I would ever sleep. The shadows of the past were growing brighter, softening the edges of the present, making it difficult to determine what was real and what was not, what was and what had been. Putting one foot in front of the other became a challenge; I couldn’t be sure if I would meet freshly swept stone or sand-dusted ruin.
And then I saw the woman crouched on the stair, a mere outline, bright, fuzzy, and wrong. She was looking right at me, through me, and I whipped around, as though I expected to see something behind me.
There was nothing.
But when I turned back, the woman was still there, standing, several steps closer than she had been the moment before. I took an instinctive step back up one stair. Esbat noted my faltering, her worried face flickering with doubt. She opened her mouth to speak.
“Do you see that? Do you see her?” I managed, voice shaking with terror. Esbat looked alarmed when she shook her head.
The woman reached forward.
“Ji, it’s me. Ji?”
The woman’s face imposed upon my sister’s for but an instant, her voice pitched at a stranger’s tone. I did not recognize the name on her lips, on the lips of the other.
“Eiren, are you well?”
“Ji, come on. They’re waiting.”
The not-woman’s hand connected with my chest and two women flashed before my eyes: Esbat, who dominated my earliest memories, and another whom I couldn’t even place. Both were looking at me, speaking to me, the sudden chaos of knowing and not knowing threatening to make me sick. Beyond Esbat there was a changing scene, as well, the crumbling facade of an ancient artifice replaced with an imposing wall hung inexpertly with many faded tapestries. Underneath, the stone was the same. I didn’t know how I knew but I knew.
Esbat’s brow furrowed, yet even as she spoke my name her features changed, her nose flattened, her hair unraveled from its careful plait into wild tangles.
“Eiren?”
I had thought that there was no madness beyond Theba, no madness beyond the haunts of this place, but I was wrong. As the new face came completely into focus, the blurred edges of the other world imposed utterly over the one I was only just becoming accustomed to, I felt myself slipping away. As Esbat changed, I changed, too. It wasn’t like it had been at the fountain in the courtyard, where I had seemed to pass as myself into some distant vision of Re’Kether. I felt the threads of my own consciousness unravel as another weaving began, another person, another set of knowledge and memories. I wasn’t me. I forgot myself.
I was eclipsed entirely by someone else; I was someone else.
“Ji, have you been chewing leaves again? Get out of there before they decide to come looking.”
I scrambled from a tall wardrobe, hitching the waist of artfully loose trousers with my free hand. In the other, I clutched a slip of paper folded around a blade, the trickle of blood from my palm revealing the message scrawled there. More knives were in the belt I wore beneath the trousers, a final and most deadly blade strapped to my thigh. Lucky it was the fashion.
“If she wants to know what I’ve got to tell her, she can wait a little,” I hissed, neither confirming nor denying the accusation that my dalliance was due to the cappa leaf. Another fashion. Another vice.
“I think you overestimate just how much she likes you, Ji. Or what you can do,” Mara returned, grinning. Her eyes were warm beneath a fringe of graying hair tucked behind one tattooed ear, heavy with the weights that identified her as a medium. She walked between the worlds, delivering orders from one into the hands of those charged to carry them out in the other. From our lords to the lorded over. To us.
I didn’t argue with her. Mara’s skills of perception were greater in the other world than they were here, but she was probably still right.
Her eyes flicked to the message in my hand, to the blood that oozed from the pressure of my closed fist. A drop fell, so slowly it was as though it were caught in time, and she swept a leg out to catch it in a fold of her skirt.
“Precious stuff. Don’t want to waste it.”
“And don’t want to leave any evidence behind.”
Though I was bred of the First People, I felt I had more to offer than what flowed through my veins. And that was why we were here.
“Come on,” she said again, gesturing to the door that allowed a sliver of torchlight into the cloister where we waited. At the same time, there were families who could afford only enough fuel to cook their week’s meat, and there was a temple on every corner with fires alight in every empty chamber. This was part of the problem.
We slipped into the corridor, the soles of our shoes weathered soft and soundless. More tapestries hung here, a few flapping in the wind that threatened to bring another storm. It was the month of fury, and the heavens were appropriately thunderous. We made our way down, and then down, deep into the temple’s storehouse. I seethed at the great casks of ritual wine, the bolts of shroud cloth, the rice and grain sealed in spelled jars that repelled the elements and curious rodents alike. Mara laid a hand lightly on my arm, sensing my distress, and I shook her off. I knew she felt the same as I did, that she scoffed at such excess. That was why she used her gifts for our cause and not the temple’s, as they’d been bred to be.
But we couldn’t work fast enough for my tastes.
When we neared the meeting place, Mara withdrew a key from a discreet pocket in the scarf she wore around her neck, inserting it into a dusty lock. Our contact clearly had other means of entering this particular room, and I half considered asking her, wondering if she’d value daring as much as information. Unlikely, but if we were going to be working together, she’d do better to know me for who and what I was.
It was dark in the chamber, and when we entered and closed the door behind us, there was no answering illumination.
“You have a message for me.”
The voice was hale and deep for a woman, though I assumed she pitched her voice to disguise herself if she couldn’t be bothered with a light.
“And no way for you to read it,” I said conversationally, feeling the sharp bite of Mara’s elbow in my side.
There was a pause that another person might’ve filled with a laugh or a snort of dissatisfaction. Our contact did neither.
“I don’t need light to read. Give it to me.”
The message clung to my palm with the blood that had rendered it readable, and I held out my hand, a challenge. The blade I drew back with my opposite hand, sheathing it, but only just. Even if this was the only knife on my person that she could see, I didn’t want her to think that I was too trusting. Trust was part of what had gotten our world into this mess.
I heard her breath, slight and shallow as she read the short missive. Then came the snort, throaty and most certainly displeased.
“A medium and a First Blood, and this is all you’ve brought me?”
“We can bring no more than what is given,” Mara insisted, betraying the teachings that had dominated her early life. I tensed in anger, torn between wishing our contact could see just how much she frustrated me, and thinking it was probably best she couldn’t. Someone placed within the temple was an asset we could ill afford to lose, as valuable as Mara, as valuable as me. Likely more than both of us, though I would never have admitted it aloud.
“What did you expect? There’s discord on both sides,” I said, rising to Mara’s defense.
“But you didn’t read it.” Now her voice was a challenge. My fingers clenched again against my wound.
“Of course not.”
“Why not?” the hooded woman asked. This was a surprise. The temple had all the power, more than the king, more, certainly, than his courtiers. There was nothing they could learn from us, not a thought in our minds they could not extract without waiting for us to voice it. I was flummoxed, not having anticipated the question, and this made me more irritated.
“Interpreting messages isn’t my job.”
Another pregnant pause.
“And you’re afraid you’d misunderstand them.”
I bit the inside of my cheek and tasted blood. She was being purposefully cruel, voicing what I would not have wanted Mara to hear.
I thought of challenging her, to strike her, but even as I deliberated on the least sensible course of action, a sudden flood of light filled the room, my skin buzzed as though stung all over, and I was Eiren again.
It was more disorienting even than Theba’s strongest possession of my heart. I was myself, and then another self, and myself again. I was in the corridor with Anise, Esbat, and my mother, my brother, and Lista, the guards and Gannet having gone on a little ahead. They were slowing, too, and Gannet cast a searching look over his shoulder even with blades bristling about him. As far as I could tell only a few seconds had passed. Had my body gone on while my mind wandered? I could hardly ask. They already thought I was unhinged, and if I had truly experienced what I had seemed to, they were probably right. They would never let Gannet and me do what we needed to do if I couldn’t be trusted to remain in control of my senses.
Who was she? When was she?
“Eiren, are you well?” Lista searched my face, Anise over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes at me.
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“What did you mean just now, when you asked if I saw her?” Esbat’s gaze narrowed, sensing the lie.
“I thought I saw someone in the shadows,” I answered. “But I was wrong. It’s just exhaustion.”
Esbat didn’t seem convinced, but she let it go. Ever the logical sister, I had offered her a reasonable explanation for erratic behavior.
I couldn’t think what this other woman, Ji, had to do with me, or make much sense of what I had seen. The ghost of Mara, if she had been a ghost, didn’t reappear on the stair. Even as I tried to make sense of the thoughts that had filled me while I had been Ji, the details began to fade, like a story I had heard as a child and never had cause to repeat. I remembered, but not truly. Only an impression of the conversation she and Mara and the nameless woman in the dark had had. I hadn’t been myself, but it was still strange, to have known the things that she did for a brief moment and all, only to forget them in the next. One crumbling hall looked the same as another, and I couldn’t tell if it was the same one I had seen in the vision or not. I was deposited at the chamber where my mother had met me, but I couldn’t settle. I waited until I was sure that the guard who patrolled this corridor had passed on before I slipped out of the room and into the dark ruins. I would go back to the stair, to see if the ghost was there again. Perhaps I could talk with her, or she would drag me into the past again. I would try to remember more this time.
It had been one madness after another since Gannet and Morainn had come into my life, and though he was here with me, I felt alone with the wild terrors that he had introduced. Gannet would no doubt insist that I would have awakened to Theba’s madness in time, and I was grateful he wasn’t present to argue the point.
Even as I doubted what I had seen through Ji’s eyes, I perceived the other world, a strange periphery of shadow and flickering torchlight, the smooth, well-tended surfaces of ancient stone now sand-scarred from neglect. I could almost smell the crude animal fat-soaked torches they’d used to brighten the long, dark nights many ages ago. I slipped on the fine threads of a carpet that wasn’t there, followed a worn stair to emerge into the night. I’d gone the wrong way but was too arrested by the sight to retreat.
I should’ve guessed that our subterranean sanctuary was part of the palace, but I was still surprised to look up and see the terraces, the moon-polished veneer of stone walls. Gannet had told me this city had been the seat of our ancient kingdom. What mythical figures had walked here, ruled here, died here?
“It isn’t safe for you to be out here.”
It was Lista, sword perhaps unwisely sheathed, eyes mere shadows with the moon behind her.
“I’m no safer underground,” I insisted, shaking my head to clear it. She’d been carrying a torch but had hastily extinguished it before surfacing. I could smell the burning oil still, as familiar a scent as the expression of concern she wore.
Of all my siblings, Lista had been the only one who had never asked me directly about my gifts. Esbat had an intellectual curiosity, Anise a patronizing concern, Jurnus a rude air of wanting to know if this was something he could best me at. But Lista had simply never inquired, only allowed me to continue being odd, worthy of worry. I’d assumed her too ignorant to care, or too frightened to probe, but now I wondered if her acceptance didn’t come from a different place, a bolder strength. Would knowing the source of my power, the depth of my gifts, change how she treated me?
I didn’t have to ask to know that it would not.
“I can’t very well let you get into trouble on your own,” Lista said, her smile eclipsing the worries her face had taken on the months since we had seen each other. “I’m glad you’re back, Ren. Even if I can’t really believe what has brought you here.”
“It doesn’t matter if you believe me,” I said quietly, hearing the words in another voice, another time, when Gannet had first said them to me, when I had been as reticent as they. It would amuse him, I knew, to see me defending the knowledge I had once scorned.
“But why would the Ambarians worship her?” Lista questioned, ignorant of the offense she dealt. I held fast to the flare of Theba’s temper, remembering a story I should have found solace in months ago. I cast my eyes across the dark ruins of the city, shuddering as I spied the fires of the Ambarian encampment. It was far enough away that I might have mistaken it for star glow but still too close for comfort.
“You’ve heard the same stories that I have,” I said. “Without Theba, life and love would be endless. The truest pleasures are fleeting. She keeps them that way.”
Lista eyed me warily, knowing well that I meant to tell her a story. I couldn’t help but smile. This was the first moment I felt like I had truly come home.
“There was a brief time when Theba made herself absent from the affairs of mortals, and while it should’ve been cause for celebration, instead it was a plague. Theba’s passion for Shran was all-consuming. While she made a devoted toy of the king, his kingdom languished.
“Without Theba’s breath to sow weeds and sing insects among the crops, they outgrew their furrows and choked each other, tendrils crowding. Blossoms had little chance to bud in the shade and entire yields were lost.
“Without Theba’s hands to smother them, the sick wasted and wasted but didn’t pass, the elderly languished, babes without mothers to nurse them cried piteously without relief. No one could die, nothing could change, and the little beauties of the world went unnoticed without Theba’s cruelty as contrast.
“At last, it was Shran himself who noted the strange plague that visited his kingdom, sharing his worries with his wife, Jemae. But it was not Jemae he spoke with but Theba in disguise. She was so ashamed and startled by her inaction that she flew from him in an instant, causing three of the nearest rivers to flood their banks, a dozen granaries to burn, and a wasting sickness to claim the oldest and weakest within the city walls.”
“I doubt anyone thanked her for that,” Lista interrupted, casting a dark look at me. I sighed. This was not so uplifting a tale after all.
“No, her name was a curse. It still is. But it doesn’t change the balance she brings to the world.”
There was no one else to defend her, to defend me, but it made me sick to do it. I felt an uncurling, syrupy warmth in my chest, the low bubble of a chuckle that wasn’t mine in my throat.
“She was here, in Re’Kether.”
I was speaking, but it wasn’t me. Theba parted my lips, moved my hands as they alighted on one of Lista’s armored shoulders. Bile rose so high in my throat I was sure she could see it behind my eyes.
“Would you like me to show you?”
“You’ve never been here before, Eiren. How would you know?”
“I’ve been here.”
And I had been, but it was Theba who laid claim to these ruined stones. My toes curled and I stood, leading, and only after I had taken a few steps did Lista rise and follow, too. We walked back the way we had come, this time out of another door, the lintel cracked and sagging. I wanted to scream at her to stay or to run very fast in the opposite direction, but she was coming after me. Because she trusted me. Because I was her mild sister. Because she didn’t believe that I was a monster.
But I was. Oh, I was.
Lista had a torch, though I didn’t need it to see. Where there was no moonlight I employed my dark sight, or Theba did, as though holding lenses up to my eyes. We snaked through a squat door in the garden wall, a servant’s entrance. I should’ve railed that she drew us away from the safety of my family, of more soldiers, but I wanted to know what Theba knew, what she clearly meant to reveal to us both.
And she intended to take her time. I wasn’t fighting her as hard as I had before, and she used my curiosity as a means to greater control. Theba delighted in my body, tripping my fingers along the rough walls as we passed through close corridors, touching my hair, tasting my lips with my tongue. They were dry and my throat was, too, and I thirsted suddenly for wine to wet them, or a kiss. She would need rivers and armies to sate her, but I would have settled to share a cup with just one man.
“Many blamed Jemae for the kingdom’s fall,” Theba said in my voice, her smile on my lips all wrong. But Lista couldn’t see it, wouldn’t suspect anything even if she could. Theba was carrying on as if I hadn’t stopped telling the story. “It began then, when a woman so beguiled Shran that he failed his people.
“She considered herself blameless, though it was she who possessed Jemae, she who drove Shran to near madness with want of her. He had loved his wife and together they had loved their kingdom, but Theba had given him room enough in his heart only for slavish devotion.”
I tripped and stumbled against a narrow stair, the pain for a moment granting me some control over my body. I reached out for Lista, as though with a touch I could warn her, but it was too brief. The slip caused Theba to clutch at me even tighter, and we continued up, Lista trailing, Theba leading, my will a powerless haze that threatened to blind me.
“If she was at fault, then she suffered plenty,” Lista reasoned, Jemae’s story unfolding in her mind, swelling as Jemae’s belly had with a child that was not her own.
“She couldn’t suffer enough.”
These words caused Lista’s senses to sharpen, and I knew the look she gave me without being able to see her, eyes fixed on the climb ahead. She didn’t suspect the truth, that I wasn’t in control but rather that I had become cruel. She believed something in me had changed in my time apart from my family.
And it had.
“Eiren, we really shouldn’t be out here. The patrols have never penetrated this deeply into the city, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t begin tonight.” Theba ignored her, and Lista followed, partly out of a desire to protect me and partly her own curiosity. We passed out of the dark stair and into a wide, open one, the time-balding stone of the steps beneath our feet giving way to a beautiful chaos of mosaic tile. The colors had kept their vibrancy despite the neglect of many hundreds of years, perhaps because this place was largely shielded from the elements. Moonlight filtered in through miraculously intact latticework screens in the high ceiling, angled smartly to divert the rain.
Lista’s torch created the shadows of wild creatures as we climbed on, their teeth seeming to nip and grind at our heels, sharpened by my imagination. I did not have to wonder long where they chased us, where Theba was leading us, for I recognized it the instant we passed through a high archway and onto what once had been a lush rooftop garden. Silks had hung here, in another time, the smells of waxy, flowering trees profuse in the air. I had dreamed this place.
I knew now it hadn’t been a dream.
I saw the low stone bench where Theba had taken Shran, where he had presumed to take his wife, centuries of neglect failing to diminish the cold burn of the memory in me. The heat of his skin felt as near to me as though I wore it myself. I shivered and was relieved that I could. I felt Theba inexplicably retreating, and I was grateful to Lista for not asking me immediately how I’d known this place.
Why did Theba want me to see this? I could only think that she wanted me to feel as she felt, but what cause had the Dread Goddess for sympathy? Was it not enough to control my body? Must she rule my heart and my head, as well?
Despite her earlier protest, Lista walked ahead of me onto the terrace, running her hands along the crumbling facade that would make it difficult to jump from here to the ground, several hundred feet below. It looked as though it had once boasted a parade of mythical architectural beasts, mostly serpents, and the rare, unlucky creature ensnared in the serpent’s jaws. There was sand everywhere, evidence that storms had been the only occupants of Re’Kether for some time. Storms and ghosts.
The feeling was different here, more akin to the dread I had felt the night I had escaped the barge and yet somehow completely divorced from the wild terror of that night, too. And while there was certainly some of that here, stinging my eyes like smoke from a fire, there was a bitter sweetness in the air, too, as though someone had cast a handful of dried herbs on the fire just as it was dying, tempering the smell. I took a few steps forward, my lips parted as though I might taste what lingered here, the traces of forgotten love, lust, deception.
“Jurnus will piss hot oil if he finds us up here.” Lista’s words drew my attention, her smirk grounding me in the present. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere that Shran retreated to, a very long time ago. Jemae, too.”
This was a place that had been beautiful and secret, a place to escape to when the pressures of court became too much. I was troubled by what was obviously a gift from Theba, showing me this place. I glanced at Lista, but she was looking behind me, beyond me, her eyes hard in the moonlight. I followed her gaze to the distant fires of the nearest Ambarian encampment.
“After they took you, we didn’t know what to expect,” Lista said quietly. “We spent three days in the reliquary, relieving ourselves in one corner, sleeping in another.”
I knew better than to say that I was sorry.
“And within days of being allowed some freedom to ‘ease the transition of power’ for our people, Jurnus raced after you. He killed two of their soldiers in the process. When he didn’t come back, they chained father up. And mother a week later, when they found her mixing poisons. Then they made a spectacle of laying open the backs of the herbalists who had supplied her and burned three community gardens.”
My sharp intake of breath was too loud for the terrace. My father, my mother, our people, we all understood physical pain. But our land was cultivated at great cost. The dozens of families that depended on those gardens would starve, or steal, or worse. Lista’s thoughts were a turmoil of memory, the moments she stole to tend to the raw wounds on our parents’ wrists blurring into clandestine encounters with one of the Ambarian soldiers, the knives she smuggled from his things. The one she’d used to cut his throat.
“How did you get away?” I asked finally, not looking at her.
“The Ambarians assumed that three sisters would behave themselves, with a hunted brother and a shackled mother and father. They were wrong.” Lista forced me to meet her eyes. She needed me to know that she had suffered, that she had survived and was stronger for it. “They also didn’t expect our people to have caches of weapons and water and gold enough for bribes.”
“And now you’re here.”
“And now you’re here,” Lista repeated, her emphasis punctuated by her hands reaching out to clasp mine. She chewed her lip. “You really can’t help us?”
I didn’t need her to explain what she meant. I shook my head, thinking of Theba walking us both here, driven by some need that I couldn’t understand. The Dread Goddess had her own agenda, and it didn’t align with mine.
“There’s not a weapon in the world you’d want to put in my hand. Trust me.”
But she didn’t trust me, not about Theba. And I couldn’t expect her to, not when Gannet and I had promised them just that: a weapon.