Chapter Fourteen

Gannet stared at me, lips parted slightly as he sought for words.

“I don’t think you know what you’re asking, Eiren,” he replied, at last, lowering me to the ground and squatting in the sand before me.

“The icons share memories, don’t they? That’s part of how your histories are kept.” It was a gamble, a guess, but his sudden intake of breath confirmed my suspicions.

“When one icon dies, those who knew them will share their experiences, their knowledge, with the new icon, when they are old enough. I have only ever been the receiver of memories, Eiren. Never the giver.”

“But you’ve shown me things before. I just need to know what you know.”

“I don’t know how to choose what I share with you,” he insisted, and I felt his discomfort growing despite the barriers he usually had in place against me, against the world. “I don’t know what you’ll see.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“And what if I am?”

He leaped to his feet and I remained at a crouch, limbs beginning to protest. But I didn’t move.

“This has always set me apart,” he said, his eyes a storm when he gestured to the mask, though his hand was steady. “Adah knew me, but only Adah. In every life, I am sentenced without even knowing the crime. I don’t want you to see how much that once…troubled me.”

“Do you really think that I could judge anyone for being unwilling to accept a punishment?” I asked, drawing slowly to my feet but not touching him, not yet. “Theba would burn up everything soft in me, every sentiment, every gentle thought. I hate it and my hate feeds her.”

“And she would have that same opportunity in me,” he said, low as the groan of thunder. “We would be that close. Could you control her?”

Would you control her?

It was a thought we shared, bred of the desire we felt for each other, the uncertainty of what it might mean to give in.

I laid a hand upon his arm, against the skin between his wrist and where he had rolled his sleeves against the heat. But he was cool, and the touch hummed up through my fingers into my arm, my shoulder, to my heart.

“I am stronger than she is.” Even as I said it, I knew that to win against Theba I would have to lose. She had tempted me with revenge, with secrets, with the power to have and hold what I wanted, and I had given in to her every time and cursed her for it afterward. If Gannet opened his mind to me, I knew that I would want everything and she could give it to me, if I let her.

But I didn’t want to take from him.

“Please, Gannet,” I continued, taking two steps forward and willing his arms to open, to embrace me. “I saw something terrible, I think, and I feel like I am playing a game of dice without etchings. Like there’s a score being kept and I don’t know what it is.”

He hesitated, his anxiety stirring the air around us. The burn of rejection had just begun to heat my core when he laid a hand against my neck, pulling my face to his in a fierce kiss, our teeth knocking against each other in a rattle that shook its way down my body. And then his cheek was against mine, the prickling of a hastily shaved face paired with a sensation of another kind: falling, weightless, cradled in his hands, buoyed by the murmur of his words against my cheek and the tidal swell of his thoughts.

Every story of every icon that had come before, generations of lore cataloged as only a man like Gannet might organize memories that were not of his own making. I sensed only Adah’s touch in this record, the Adah that we knew and the Adahs that had come before him, each, apparently, the sole carrier of Gannet’s icon’s experiences. He was the only one who knew who he was, the only one who could see justice done. Each of them had possessed a scholarly interest in the past, and I recognized the details that Gannet had shared with me in his story of the icon of Adah, who had united the Ambarians. I peeled away these layers of memory, searching for what they knew that had come before, of the exodus from Re’Kether, of the city’s fall.

Many of the stories that I knew professed that the gods had walked among us, meddled with us, made demands and handed down punishments. I was overwhelmed by the number of histories recorded in his mind, the ledgers of past sins, variations on tales that I knew that were too dark to retell. I needed to focus, and I felt my grip on Gannet’s neck tighten as I prowled about in his mind.

I needed to know more about the gods as they had been. They had favored the First People, Shran and Jemae among them, because they were special. The First People had created the gods, and their descendants were both servants and councilors. But how had the gods been driven away? And why did their departure coincide with the collapse of the kingdom we had once shared? For I could see now the great gaps in what Gannet could share with me, the kingdom as it had been, the terror and chaos of living under immortal rule, Shran and his kind merely puppets. The gods had fallen, and when they did the blood of the First People had failed, too. What Gannet knew amounted to little more than lengthy records of births, marriages, deaths, the proceedings of justice, lines of succession, ritual and tradition, but it was enough to provide a frame on which to hang the things that I had seen in my visions. Details from Ji’s world glittered like the facets of a jewel passed from hand to hand under a light; with the skeleton of Gannet’s knowledge, I saw things I hadn’t been able to hold onto before. The visions were of a rebellion, and of Ji’s part in it. I felt Ji’s hatred for them even now, nearer to the purity of Theba’s rage than it was to my own. With Mara, she had fought them, had been party to some scheme against them. Their culture, the central function of the temples of the gods to dispense justice, fortune, food. The children of the First People given over to the temples, their blood a prize, a commodity. But there was nothing in my visions to explain the departure of gods from our world, and nothing in Gannet’s mind, either, the fact that they went on to live as icons a mysterious burden.

Icon.

It was a whisper, and the catalog of memory around me dimmed, light from another corner of Gannet’s mind pulsing the potent red of a fire waiting to be stoked. I didn’t have time to wonder if this was something he didn’t want to show me, if this was something he feared, because I felt an umbilical tug drawing me near to that light, that sound.

Icon.

“She is an icon. You must trust me.” I saw Gannet in the dark cloak and impractical garb he had worn when I had first met him, standing on the terrace in Jarl with his sister. Though the edges of this Gannet blurred, around him I recognized another chamber in the palace I had lived in as a child. Days before we’d met, then. “We will have to take her with us.”

“Is that why you were sent with us? To find this icon?” It was Morainn, and I felt my heart squeezed by the fists she clenched in her skirt. Sweat stood out on her brow. “Did Adah tell you that she would be here?”

“Maybe he knew, I don’t know,” Gannet’s tone was impassive despite his words. “But I don’t think so. I can sense her, her every breath, every thought, every gesture. They’re getting close. I’ve never felt anything like this.”

Morainn’s face clouded, and I realized Gannet hadn’t recognized the emotion on her face, did not remember this as accurately as I might have done.

“That sounds dangerous.”

“You have no idea.” I drew near to Gannet, studying him, looking for the twitch of alarm or longing in his pursed lips. I could still feel his true lips against my cheek, the soft, meditative breath, as though he slept.

“What happens when we take her back?” Morainn’s question was a practical one, but her tone demanded many answers.

“The world ends. Or it begins.”

“And if we don’t?”

“We have to,” Gannet insisted, looking away from Morainn, one hand brushing the lip of the mask above his brow. “I have to. It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt I had to do.”

Now Morainn seemed truly shaken.

“Which icon is she?”

He looked at her, and when he opened his mouth to speak, a cruel mockery of my own voice emerged.

“Theba.”

My voice, first, and then my face, pushing forward through his, shredding skin and breaking bone. I was screaming, scrambling back as though I could escape this memory and Theba’s invasion of it. He reached out for me, the fine points of my own fingers twined before me as they burst through his, spraying blood. I heard her laugh, high and cold, like the strike of a blade against stone. I felt it shaking me out of the memory, rattling my teeth and tongue as I was returned to myself, when I captured Gannet’s mouth with mine in the corridor of the temple where our bodies crouched still.

“The only thing you’ve ever felt you had to do?” She spat his words back out at him in between the fevered press of my lips against his. She made me bite his lip so hard I tasted blood, and worse, I felt his hands slide down to my hips, pulling me against him. I felt his need and though I wanted to cry out that it wasn’t me, I remembered the night before, when he had left me wanting.

I had promised I would control her. Even if she offered me what I wanted.

“Gannet, no,” I ground out the words between my teeth, my arms leaden as I tried to draw away from him. Theba made my blood sluggish, my muscles weak.

Gannet’s eyes were closed behind the mask and still he held me, so tightly now I thought he might bruise me. When he spoke, it was as though he wasn’t even with me, was lost in a memory of his own. “Adah said I can’t hide from her. The mask hides me from everyone, but I can’t hide from her.”

Theba’s words were wine on my tongue, a sip taken but not yet swallowed. “And why would you want to hide from me?”

She was easing me against him and even through our clothes I felt dizzy at the contact, the pressure of my own need, of his, of hers. I didn’t want it to be like this.

But if we couldn’t have each other any other way?

I had promised him control and I was losing it. A shout and a crash of stone and sand drove us apart as the ceiling above us shuddered perilously. Gannet’s eyes snapped open, but they were unfocused.

“We need to get out of here!” I hissed, grabbing for his hand and attempting to haul him to his feet. But he was far heavier than I was, and I nearly fell over, scrambling as the ceiling’s rattling was joined by unsteady stone beneath us. Whether it was my family’s forces or the enemy outside, we would be buried alive if we remained here.

Gannet pressed a hand against his face and though it was only a few seconds, it felt unbearably long before he rose. We raced back up the corridor toward the light, but another explosive crash sent us sprawling. The Ambarians were launching stones from somewhere behind the ruined temple. I could see a small force ahead, my family’s soldiers, attempting to maneuver between the stone missiles and the lethal whirring of arrows. They were being driven back.

And there was no way we could safely reach them.

“Eiren, here,” Gannet hissed, pulling me into one of the small chambers we had explored previously. The earlier impact had shifted the thick stones in the wall here, revealing an opening. He bent down and I joined him, noting the ancient plate that we had missed before that, when pushed, revealed the false floor.

“We don’t even know what’s down there,” I said, wary.

“But we do know what’s out there,” Gannet returned, looking back over his shoulder. We heard shouts now, the clang of weapons in close combat. I could’ve called upon Theba, perhaps driven them all off, but her fire was not merciful, and I’d already proven today that I couldn’t control her. I ducked into the opening, choking on the dust and the stale air, and he was quick to drop in behind me.

I was relieved to learn that it was no cellar we had discovered but another path that wound toward the temple, a deep, secret way that went beneath the collapsed street we had entered this building to avoid. They had stopped launching the stones above us, no doubt because they didn’t want to endanger their own forces, and I was grateful: my dark sight illuminated for me every stirring mote of dust, every crack in the tunnel’s ceiling. Gannet strode ahead and as the path widened, I moved to walk beside him. I wanted to apologize for losing control of Theba before, of perhaps seeing something he hadn’t meant for me to see, but he began speaking first.

“I saw what you saw, when you were in my mind. Did you learn anything that will help us find what we’re looking for?”

I grimaced, eyes on the floor.

“I understand their world better. But I think the visions must hold more answers, if I can find a way to remember them more clearly.”

“So we’re hunting for ghosts now, too.”

There was a touch of amusement in his voice. I stumbled with surprise and he steadied me with his hand, a slight pressure that he immediately released as though the touch had burned him. When I opened my mouth to thank him, the start of a story came out instead.

“I feel like blind Cassia, lost in the dark,” I said, nerves live as quivering strings in my voice. Gannet didn’t look at me, but his posture softened.

Who?

I realized he wanted me to tell a story, that as much as I needed to hear myself in this place to ground myself again, he had missed hearing my stories as much as he had once pretended to dismiss them.

“Cassia was the daughter of two famous court musicians. They made music so fine common folk were not permitted to hear it, only those lords and ladies with wealth and influence enough to win a seat at one of their performances. The king and queen kept them as permanent retainers at court, and so Cassia, too, was raised in the palace.

“But Cassia had no talent for music. No matter the instrument they put in her hands, no matter what song they bid her sing, she was far more likely to leave an audience weeping for wanting her to stop than she was to move them to any sincere feeling. Though her mother and father bemoaned her lack of skill, and the king and queen, too, no one felt the disappointment more keenly than Cassia herself.”

Gannet’s mind touched lightly against mine, sharing a hazy picture of the girl taking up one instrument and then another and the next and the next, the lines of sorrow in her face drawn as tightly as strings. As it had been in Jhosch, sequestered with the icons, I considered how full and wondrous something like telling a story could be when in the company of those who had the capacity to contribute to the telling without speaking.

“Cassia determined that the only way she could develop an ear for music would be to deaden one of her other senses. Maddened by her need to prove herself, she heated a dagger in the fire and plunged it into one of her eyes, and then quickly into the other before fear and pain overcame her.

“It was her dearest friend and lover, Denia, who found Cassia in a wounded stupor in her bedchamber, all but bled to death. Denia cleaned the blood from Cassia’s face, her own tears softening the medicinal waters she used to sterilize the wounds. She tucked her into the bed they had secretly shared and begged another servant to bring a healer, and Cassia’s mother and father.

“It was four days before Cassia woke, and though she could no longer see her, the contours of Denia’s face were fine and familiar when she reached out to touch the girl.

“‘You idiot,’ Denia scolded, weeping-wet kisses pressed to Cassia’s wan face. ‘What were you thinking?’

“But Cassia would not explain, only begged for a harp, for double-reeded pipes, for a drum. Denia was reluctant to comply, sure that she was only putting disappointment into the hands of her dearest friend, but she did as she was asked. The pipes were lifted to Cassia’s lips, and as the young woman took a breath and hesitantly blew, dulcet-sweet tones issued forth, circling the pair like a cooling breeze. Next came the drum and the harp, finger cymbals, the long-necked lute. Every instrument that had refused to yield to Cassia’s clumsy handling despite hours and years of practice, she picked up again and was its master. Her smile cracked so wide the sockets where her eyes had been crinkled and began to bleed anew, and she seemed to weep red tears.

“When Cassia’s mother and father came at the glorious sounds teased out by their daughter, they banished Denia from the room. Their daughter would play as they did, only ever for the noblest of ears, and never for Denia again.”

I wondered then, and Gannet, too, at the unnecessary order of our lives, why things must be so, and not so. In a story it was easier to see how such things were foolish, but we had as many boundaries to our own behavior as folk in tales; we only lived them and did not think them as strange.

The tunnel widened further, but I saw no intentional breaks in the stone, no sign of doors or what this way might once have been used for. We walked on.

“Cassia would play for the king and queen in a week’s time and was kept busy performing with her parents and suffering fittings of headdresses that would disguise her disfigurement. She could only see Denia at night, and secretly, and was now so protective of her new gifts that she brought no instruments to their meetings. She feared, and perhaps rightfully so, that the gods would take away what they had given, no matter the price she had already paid. But Denia was sorry for it—she had loved the way that Cassia’s face lit up when she played, how her whole body seemed to bend into the music, even when others could not appreciate her playing. She had often told Cassia as much, but just as Denia’s heart was stubbornly set on the happiness of her lover, Cassia’s was blinded by a lifetime of disappointment.

“So desperate was Denia to hear Cassia play again that she snuck into the performance, covering her face with a rich silk she’d taken from Cassia’s own stores so that she would not be recognized. She swayed rapturously as Cassia’s hands danced across a lap harp, folded herself against the wall in a swoon when Cassia beat her heart’s rhythm into the pliant skin of a drum, felt herself lifted to the rafters on the wind of Cassia’s breath blown through a set of pure silver pipes.

“But Denia, in her rapture, tripped and fell, dragging the scarf away from her face, revealing plain, unpainted features and the stark, unadorned collar of a servant. She was seized immediately and dragged before the court. Though Cassia could not see her, she recognized her cries and rose to her defense. But she could not stop the punishment that befell anyone who dared listen where they were not welcome: boiling oil was poured into Denia’s ears, deafening her. She was imprisoned, and Cassia vowed never to play again until she was released. But the judgment came from Adah himself and would not be reversed. Cassia begged to be chained up, too, and it was perhaps his perverse version of mercy that he allowed it. They shared a cell, chained to opposite sides of the wall so that they could not touch, one calling out in a voice the other could not hear, one pair of eyes searching and seeing nothing. They could take no comfort in each other, and lost their youth in darkness and silence.”

My breath was shallow and sorry, and I could almost feel the dragging weight of manacles on my wrist, the raw sadness of jailed isolation. I wondered now, with what little sense I had been able to make of the visions with Gannet’s help, if there wasn’t more to this story. Maybe Cassia had been one of the First People, and Denia had not. Maybe the cruelty of that world had been driven by a god’s hand, and not a mortal one.

But weren’t we just as cruel, or worse, if we acted on their behalf?

“I’ve fought Adah’s judgments in the past,” Gannet said, and there was something in his tone that made me think it wasn’t just his own punishment, the burden of the mask, that he spoke of. “Being an icon has many privileges.”

“I know that,” I replied, thinking of our earliest conversations, when he had urged me to accept who I was.

“Including using the power and influence of our station to change things,” he insisted, slowing as the terrain grew rocky, more naturally subterranean than shaped by tools. It was cool here but dry, and my steps grew more halting at the smooth, uneven stone beneath my feet.

“Is this your way of telling me to be optimistic about our chances with the Ambarians?” I asked, incredulous. Always Gannet had seemed resigned to his fate, urging me to accept the same for myself, but something within him had been woken. Had it been when he struck out to find me after the fire in Jhosch? At the opera? Or sooner, even? Had the conversation I had witnessed in his mind with Morainn been the start of something neither of us could have anticipated?

Gannet strode forward with none of my hesitation, pausing to inch his way down a deep depression in the stone where the shadows in my dark sight parted to reveal at least a dozen stout, squat casks, each as large as a seated man.

“That depends,” he answered, examining the seal on the nearest cask, “on whether this is wine or fire oil.”

I crossed to him, holding out a hand toward one of the casks, closing my eyes as I felt for the spark within, not wanting to feed it, not yet. I just needed to know if it was there. I immediately sensed but did not stoke the embryonic fire within the cask, the hungry flame in my heart that recognized fuel.

I opened my eyes.

“We won’t be drinking tonight to celebrate your change of heart.”