Chapter Fifteen

Though we considered for a moment going back the way we had come in the hopes that the battle was over, a thorough survey of the cavern revealed four more caches of fire oil and a rotted platform and pulley system that had been used to lower the casks here, many generations ago. There were handholds carved into the rock, leading straight up to the open air. It had grown dark, and I quelled the panic at having lost a full day with the knowledge that we had, at least, secured one small advantage for my family’s forces. I didn’t immediately recognize the surrounding ruins, but I could see the palace in the near distance, and we moved quickly and quietly in that direction, noting the turns that we took and any features that would help us find our way back to the cache of fire oil. How we retrieved it I would leave to my parents and my siblings. Gannet and I still had work of our own to do.

There were no specters in the streets, no sense that the past would overtake me, though I could see it as before, out of the corners of my eyes. I needed more of Ji’s story, needed to know what she knew, and I was as ready to open my mind again to her world as I might open a book and page quickly through it to the conclusion. But no one and nothing appeared, and when we drew close enough to the palace to encounter a patrol, Gannet and I both threw our hands up in the air, baring our faces in the cleansing moonlight. When they escorted us within, only my father was awake, poring over documents in the room where Esbat had shown us the map. He looked up, and Gannet explained quickly what we had found.

“Are you sure the Ambarians didn’t know it was there? That wasn’t why they were attacking in that quarter?” My father’s face was lined with worry, exhaustion, having aged years, it seemed, in the months I’d been away.

Gannet shook his head.

“If they’d known, they would’ve used stealth. Disrupting a cache that size with missiles would’ve resulted in that whole section of the city being sunk in fire, and all the oil with it.”

“Then we’re lucky they didn’t.” My father laid a hand upon my shoulder, pulling me into a sudden embrace. I was dead on my feet, but I didn’t sink into his arms as I might have before, and I couldn’t place my hesitation until he spoke. “You kept her safe. Thank you.”

I bristled. Gannet’s look was guarded, his words careful.

“Han’dra Eiren doesn’t need safekeeping.”

My father’s gaze narrowed, and when he smiled, the expression didn’t reach his eyes.

“So I am beginning to understand,” he responded, releasing me. I felt his discomfort and had the sense that it had more to do with thinking of me as a woman grown than the icon of a goddess possessed with terrible strength and fury. I didn’t like to be so close to his thoughts and took a step back, toward Gannet.

But I knew that hurt him, too.

“We should sleep. It will be another early morning for us,” I offered, my tone apologetic. My father nodded rather more enthusiastically than was necessary.

“Of course, of course. I should do the same.”

But when we moved to depart the smoky chamber, the braziers burning low, my father didn’t follow. I felt the light touch of Gannet’s mind against mine, gentle as a nurse’s hand might be tending to a wound. It was dark in the corridor outside my small chamber, the lone torch burning several paces away, failing to banish the shadows from Gannet’s face.

“You haven’t called me Han’dra Eiren in some time. I always wondered why you addressed me so formally, and after our fashion, not Ambar’s,” I said on an impulse, unable to keep my hands from settling against his chest, smoothing the rumpled collar of his shirt. I felt the warmth of his skin beneath, tantalizingly close, but I didn’t allow my fingers to stray.

Gannet studied me, head cocked at a slight, quizzical angle.

“I wanted you to know from the first that I respected you and where you came from. I knew you felt conquered and lost, at the mercy of strangers. I assumed it would be a comfort to you.”

And now my hands did stray, framing the bones of his jaw.

“You were a comfort to me,” I whispered, feeling the jump of his pulse beneath my fingers. “You are.”

I leaned forward then against his chest, not wanting a kiss and the inevitable breaking of it. He held me only a moment and I was keenly aware of the huff of his breath in my hair, as though he were gathering my scent. When he stepped away and retreated down the corridor, he was silhouetted a moment in the torchlight, his shadow thinning impossibly long behind him until it was folded into the darkness where the wall met the floor. Gone. He would go to his bed, and I would go to mine.

“What were you doing?”

I jumped, bracing myself against the stone wall behind me. Esbat had emerged from the chamber opposite, twitching the cloth closed behind her. How long had she been there?

“Gannet and I found a cache of fire oil beneath Dsimah’s temple.” My words came out in a guilty rush, sure that I owed my sister more but strangely resistant to share my feelings with her. “We’ve told father, and Jurnus will be able to muster a force to recover it tomorrow.”

Esbat hugged the shadows, and I couldn’t see her whole face. Her mind was quiet, but I sensed her trying to make sense of my actions all the same. So, she had seen something of what had passed between us.

“Gannet is a friend to me,” I continued, determined to curb her suspicions. It was bad enough that I had to share him with Theba; I didn’t want my sisters passing judgment, too.

Despite the dark, I could see Esbat’s eyes widen.

“He took you from us. From your home. You were their prisoner, Eiren.”

“Yes, but—”

“They’ve slaughtered our people,” she continued heatedly, her reason sharpened like a blade against a stone. “You left and it didn’t stop, and it was worse because we didn’t know what was happening to you. And then you return here with him and claim he is a friend? How could someone like that ever be a friend to one of us?”

Unless you aren’t one of us anymore. She didn’t say it but I suspected she knew that I could hear it, and that hurt more. Before I could argue or temper the rage that twisted in my gut, she waved a hand, dismissing her thoughts, or mine.

“Lucky you stumbled on such a find. I found a record detailing how to craft a slow-burning fuse for use with fire oil—I’ll be sure to share it with Jurnus in the morning.”

And she swept back behind the little curtain, leaving me alone in the corridor. It might have been made of stone for the distance it put between us.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected, returning to my family, but the distraction of the war made it easier to ignore the obvious unease between us. We didn’t have to reach an understanding, not really, not yet. It wasn’t only the Dread Goddess that had awakened within me. I didn’t always like who I was becoming, and I was beginning to think they didn’t, either.

I didn’t sleep in my room, not at first. Someone had left tough bread and bitter wine at my bedside, and I ate every crumb while drinking more than a reasonable share of the bottle. My head was spinning by the time I laid it on the thin pillow, and my body, too, seemed to turn in the sheets, twisting like a corpse in a funeral shroud. There were no windows in my chamber, but the light that touched my eyes come morning was warm as day. I opened my eyes, expecting a torch or a lamp, but it was the sun, breaking through a clever skylight above where I slept. Beneath me I felt the touch of silk, and the air was heavy with fragrant flowers.

I sat up, wondering what dream I had wandered into, or if this were a vision, pressed upon me while I slept. It felt most like the brief encounter at the fountain with the fish, when Jurnus had first brought us into the city. I was still Eiren, still aware that what was happening was not quite real.

But if I was in Re’Kether as it had been, as myself, I should learn what I could, shouldn’t I?

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feeling the thick pile of a rug beneath my bare feet, unable to resist curling my toes into the luxurious weave. There was a fine sturdy door of pale wood where the curtain had hung, and when I tested it, it opened easily.

The corridor was equally bright and happily empty. I sped down the hall, not sure where I was going, only looking out for inhabitants or perhaps a library. Esbat must have gotten her scrolls from somewhere, and what I couldn’t learn from Gannet I could maybe learn here.

But several turns brought me outside, and I found I couldn’t move for wonder. I was in a lavish garden, leaves as broad as my body and as brightly green as pigment arching overhead, providing ample shade. Vivid pink, yellow, and orange flowers were bedded at the bases of the trees and they stirred in a delicate wind, spilling their heady scent. This place was empty, too, but I felt surely this was somewhere the wealthy would gather to admire and envy each other. And I did hear them, muffled laughter and the splash of water. I followed the sound, moving off the stone path onto tufted, springy grass. The slick blades beneath my feet felt so real it tickled.

There was an opening in the garden wall that didn’t lead onto a street but into a narrow foyer. Here I saw someone, at last, a slight figure with his back to me, a child, perhaps, with a dull knitted cap only just containing a mop of dark curls. Beyond him I heard more voices, adult voices, arguing, groaning, and flirting, and the air soured, the cloying perfume of the flowers doing very little to combat the rotten, stony smell that was drifting up from below us both. I thought of retreating, perhaps to find another way in, but he turned then and when his eyes met mine, they were glowing faintly gold. The world listed to the left and I felt like my stomach had dropped right out of my body. My arms flew out, as though I could steady myself, and he caught my hand. His touch was like fire, and he pulled me forward, pulled me into him, and I felt myself beginning to unravel as I passed through him. I felt Ji’s increasingly familiar resolve, her edges furious, racing toward some rebel’s bloody end. I fought harder than I had before to hold onto some part of myself even as her consciousness claimed mine, I wanted so badly to observe, to know, to remember. I even reached out to Theba, as though her strength of will could supplement mine, but though she uncoiled down my legs and arms, she was just as powerless as I was to stop what was happening.

For once, we weren’t fighting. We weren’t anything.

We were someone else, again.

The bathhouse was a necessary evil. I might’ve felt differently if I had been able to simply enjoy the water, the occasional splash of a handsome body slipping in, the cautious gossip passed between lovers and friends when their lips broke the surface. But I had business. The priestess I’d been charged with following was rutting with one of the king’s courtiers in the curtained pool behind me, and I ducked beneath the water to keep from rolling my eyes at her obviously staged cries of ecstasy. When I surfaced, there was someone worthier of my attentions newly arrived in the bathhouse. Two someones, in fact.

The crown prince, Shran, and his personal god—or so we joked—Tirce, here, in a public bathhouse. Either Shran was slumming it, as his father’s courtier was, or someone had displeased his divine shadow. They were both fully dressed and didn’t look like they intended to alter that state anytime soon.

I sank to my eyes, watchful.

“Ameth the Radiant. Where is he?” The god’s voice was penetrating, causing the marbled stone benches to quake as readily as the bathers who lounged upon them. No one answered the god, but pointed looks were cast toward the many-curtained enclosures where visitors were meant to sequester themselves in pious reflection and cleansing steam but were more likely to engage in deeds both intimate and illegal.

Yet the gods had eyes and ears everywhere, not to mention senses more keen than those of any mortal.

The pair had to pass by the pool where I waited, mouth obscured beneath the surface as I fought to keep the breaths I pulled through my nose measured and soft. The prince met my eyes briefly, his gaze cold and unreadable. Did he enjoy this work, rounding up his own people for scrutiny and inevitable punishment? Did he anticipate the oath he would take as king, which bound his life first in service to the gods, and only second to the people, whose blood and bodies were as vulnerable as his own?

I had hugged the pool’s edge to give myself quick exit if I needed one but it also, unfortunately, meant that when the pair stopped, they were too near to me for comfort, and all but blocking my view of the scene. I peeked around Shran as much as I dared to the curtained enclosures behind me, my curiosity momentarily overcoming my sense. Tirce did not wait for Ameth to emerge, reaching behind the curtain and yanking him to his feet with a stony fist. The fool surely knew what waited for him, and while I could only guess at his crime, there were no gentle punishments in this city.

Liquid streamed down Ameth’s legs, and I didn’t know if it was water or if he had lost control of his body in fear.

“Someone has been putting gold behind the things that they’re saying about me!” Ameth squealed, but Tirce wasn’t even looking at him, moving back already the way that he had come. “I would never cheat the temples. I give my tithe of blood and coin. It’s lies, what they’re saying about me.”

Shran shifted his weight to follow Tirce and his captive, giving Ameth a brief view of where I sat, partially submerged. Ameth’s face twisted into a grimace of glee.

“It’s her you want! Ji the sneak, the sly, the gutter-tongued. She has more dark deeds to her name than me! She’s a killer. They say she’s running messages for the rebellion.”

My stomach clenched. Ameth knew me. While my reputation was a comfort in the streets and back alleys where it granted me a wide berth, now only cold dread crept forth from my belly, combating the water’s warmth. To speak such an accusation out loud was a desperate move. He further risked his own condemnation as well as mine.

Time to put my so-called gutter-tongue to task. “A man will say anything to save himself. I’m a servant of House Kaliri, reserving a space in the pool for my mistress.”

It was a common enough practice for a servant to hold a prime position in the water for her master, and there were enough merchant families in the city that I didn’t expect the prince to know everyone. My voice was pitched firm but deferential—an innocent who, though fearful, knows she has nothing to hide.

Tirce made no motion, expression impassive, but I could tell he waited for some confirmation from the prince. Shran’s hand tensed on the ceremonial blade he wore at his side. I was sure he’d never drawn it, or perhaps hoped that he had not.

“You’ll come with us. Two criminals are better than one,” the prince said, at last, expression unreadable.

“But, my mistress—”

“Now.”

There were gasps at my questioning the edict, and I wasn’t sure the crown prince was entirely taken in by my slow-witted servant’s act. I didn’t know many idiots, even, who would dare to defend themselves, but to follow the pair was certainly to die.

Still, he left me little choice. I rose out of the water, shrinking with the humility that was to be expected from a girl in the station that I claimed, for I wore not a stitch of clothing. My own instincts trended more toward lunging for the weapon the prince wore and giving it a first taste of blood rather than covering myself.

Tirce’s eyes remained fixed on mine before traveling cursorily down my lean frame.

“House Kaliri doesn’t waste much food in the keeping of their servants, then.”

It was a crude joke, and there were bathers relieved enough not to have been the target of Tirce’s attentions to laugh. It was then that I blushed, seething at the insult, struggling to remind myself that there were better causes to die for than wounded pride. Shran gestured then with chin only, a curt command, and I moved past him, angling away. He might look at me, he might judge, but he would not touch me. Tirce did not take my arm, which was a very small comfort. I was unlikely to get far if I chose to run, but I hadn’t ruled it out.

It seemed he had no intention of allowing me to recover my garments at the entrance to the bathhouse, either, but to parade me through the streets of the capital with less courtesy than one would a woman whose services could be bought. I conceded that there were matters of pride worth killing for.

Ameth took this opportunity to begin to jabber again in his own defense, to draw as much attention to us as possible.

“I’m not a rebel! They’re mad, with their talk of god-killing. My life is in service to the temple, to the crown. It’s her you want, and those like her. Not me, not me!” If he hoped for a distraction, a chance to slip away, he was more of a fool than someone who had simply allowed himself to be caught.

But I had been caught, too.

And his efforts weren’t entirely in vain. A crowd was beginning to gather, and it did not take long in this part of the city for a crowd to become a mob. I felt the eyes of the crowd, hungry for a spectacle, the entertainment of cowards. Some men grabbed at themselves, watching me. Women threw cold oils from their cooking, first, and then the contents of their waste buckets. I was their target, for Tirce was too close to Ameth and they wouldn’t have risked angering the god. There were soldiers among the crowd, though the crown prince hardly needed additional protection with the god at his side. The soldiers did nothing to keep the onlookers from attacking me, however. I fought to remain calm with every splash and the stink of urine against my skin, my face, their slurs as sour and as sick. But I wasn’t tortured, wasn’t shamed.

I raged.

My next move was calculated. I knew this part of the city, knew we were near a safe house and an entrance to the warren of the underground where they would not be able to follow without getting lost. I broke from the line into the crowd, hands clawing, legs kicking wildly with every stride. The crown prince and the god attempted to follow me, as I suspected they might, and the soldiers began to push their way toward me, as well. But there was chaos now and rebel sympathizers within the throng began to hurl their abuse more broadly. I cast a quick look over my shoulder to see Shran with a smear of mud, or something worse, in his bright hair. The look on his face was one of cold determination, resignation, as he tried to cleave to Tirce.

With the hands of strangers pawing my body I dove for the ground, weaving between pairs of legs filthier even than my own, my escape assured even as I heard the soldiers calling for order, the voice of the god raised in a divine howl. I saw the sigil carved into the safe house’s foundation, the diamond divided. Our sign. I grinned at the risk of having my teeth kicked out of my mouth. They might have all the power, but there were more of us, and more wildness in us, more want, than any unfeeling god and his royal puppet could muster.

My heart beat hot and fast with Ji’s thrilling, her anger. My anger. Ji and I, a stranger and a woman estranged. I felt hollowed out, like an empty lamp or a waiting coffin. I came to myself slowly, my heart and head unwilling to relinquish the other world, another life.

“Eiren.”

Cold stone, cold as the frosted soil I’d clutched in the woods beyond Zhaeha. A stern voice, but warm, too. Warm enough to breathe feeling back into stiff fingers.

“Eiren, where were you?”

My eyes popped open. Gannet’s face wheeled above mine before settling into a familiar shape, smooth jaw, a sweep of pale hair, the worried curve of his lips beneath the unfeeling mask. I’d fallen out of my bed. He reached out a hand to help me from where I lay prone, but I didn’t take it, using my own instead to be sure that I was whole, unharmed. The smell of refuse faded from my nostrils, so real I could still feel Ji’s suppressed gag. Gannet frowned, and when I still did not take his hand, he retracted it.

“Another vision?” His tone was distant, but he couldn’t disguise his curiosity.

Already the fine details of Ji’s experience in the bathhouse and the street beyond were slipping away, and I scrambled to my feet, scanning the chamber for a writing implement. There was nothing to be had but last night’s wine, or the cold coals from the brazier. I snatched one up, beginning to scrawl on the stone floor as much as I could remember of the steps I had taken to the bathhouse, tracing Ji’s course through the street. As I worked I could in one moment feel the heat of water on my skin, the slick of pots of emptied waste, and in the next the sensations were as unfeeling as a dream. I couldn’t even remember the faces of the god, Tirce, or the mythic Shran, both of whom were far more interesting to me than they had been to Ji. The shock at having seen both appear in the vision stilled my fingers, and I was unsettled by the perversion of the friendship I had believed between them from stories. In the instant I hesitated, I felt more of the vision drifting away.

“Ji was thinking of a safe house, underneath of the city. A warren of places to hide, and to hide things.”

Gannet crouched beside me, eyes roaming over the dark, hasty sketch.

“Do you think you could find this place she sought?”

I wanted to promise him that I could, but even the sign she’d seen wavered in my memory. It had been a diamond, but corrupted, somehow. And would such a thing have survived the ages of neglect?

“I think we should try,” I answered at length, leaning back to study the etchings on the floor as he had. I was sure that I could trust the visions, though the landscape of the palace and the surrounding ruins had changed so greatly the way might be impassable. I caught Gannet’s eyes. “Is that why you came in here for me? Is it morning already?”

He nodded. “Only just. I wasn’t going to come in but I heard you thrashing around.”

“You probably shouldn’t have.” I didn’t need to elaborate, and Gannet’s jaw tightened.

“I’ve seen the way that they look at me. I know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I insisted, heaving a sigh as I made an attempt to rise. But Gannet had laid a hand on my wrist, arresting my progress.

“It does matter, Eiren. If we live through this, it matters.”

He might have held my heart in his hands.

“I can’t even imagine what my life will look like in an hour, let alone what it might be after this,” I said quietly, his touch as perilous as the press of a blade. “As hard as it was for me once to believe that I was Theba, now I don’t know how I could be just Eiren, again.”

“It won’t matter what you call yourself,” he said, withdrawing his hand, a contrast to the intimacy of his words. “It won’t matter what you’ve done, or what you do to survive between now and then. I want to live to share that day, the day when this is over.”

Being so close to him and not touching was like sitting near a fire but feeling none of its heat. I knew there was warmth there, and comfort, but dared not get any closer. I struggled to mirror his restraint.

“I do, too,” I replied, at last, keeping my eyes carefully leveled on the partial map I’d scrawled on the floor, as though looking at it could bring back more of the vision’s details. I took a deep breath. “Let’s find a safe house.” Though it was just barely morning, as Gannet had implied, we were far from the only ones stirring. No one was about belowground, so we went above. Soldiers who either hadn’t slept, or had been up for some time, stalked to or from some skirmish, carrying messages, delivering reports, ferrying the wounded. It was a short walk from the small series of chambers where my family slept, ate, and received news to an interior courtyard that served as both a hospital and a practice yard. Many of those who served under Jurnus had no military training or nothing more than what they’d learned brawling in the streets of Jarl. As we followed two soldiers supporting a third between them, I heard the cutting sound of steel against steel and was not surprised that they were already being drilled.

Lista, my brother, and a few of the more seasoned members of my family’s force were working with smaller groups of men and women. I saw Esbat and Anise at the courtyard’s edge, ladling out porridge and discs of hard, flat bread to the soldiers who were not fighting. Esbat met my eyes from across the courtyard and released them immediately. I didn’t need her to look at me to feel the force of her thoughts, the scrutiny over how close I stood to Gannet, her wondering over where we meant to sneak off to today. I didn’t have to report to anyone, but I resented the notion that I could not be trusted and resolved to speak to Jurnus myself, explain what I had seen and what I hoped to accomplish today.

When we drew near, Jurnus had just disarmed a young man who couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. Both were sweating profusely despite the early hour, and I wondered how long they had been at this work.

“Jurnus,” I said at a distance, not wanting to startle him. When he looked up from explaining some military particulars to his sparring partner, his eyes flitted quickly between Gannet and me. A brief, whispered exchange with Esbat was at the front of his mind, and I felt the same suspicion in him that I had in her. My temper flared, and I fought to keep it from my voice. “I believe there may be another cache of some kind nearby. We’re going to look.”

Jurnus had a definite swagger as he strode to meet us. It was not an affectation I had seen in him before; he must have developed it during my absence.

He carried a spear, which I knew was not his favorite weapon but was the preference of most of the soldiers of Ambar. No doubt he had been observing the enemy’s tactics, and hoped to master the weapon.

“It would be useful to know more about what to expect from this invading force,” he said, driving the spear’s shaft into the sand beside him with some force and cocking a hip against it. Despite his posture, I knew the weapon could be easily readied. “Gannet, you’re a man of Ambar. What training have these bastards received? What weaknesses can we hope to exploit?”

The challenge in his voice was plain, and Gannet stiffened slightly beside me.

“Gannet’s not a warrior, Jurnus,” I began, but my brother raised a hand, silencing any further comment. Jurnus had never known when to shut his mouth, and I’d never wanted to throttle him more for it than I did just then.

“Neither was Lista. Neither was I. We watched, we learned. What have you learned in your years of service, Gannet?”

Several of the sparring pairs near us had stopped to observe the exchange, and their attention quickly spread to others. I felt Gannet walling himself up, and I had no idea what he intended to do until he adjusted the fittings of his cloak. Not to remove it, as Jurnus imagined he might in anticipation of a fight, but to tighten it.

“I do not think that what I learned in my years of service will be of much interest to you,” he answered in the superior tone that had once been so irritating to me. I hadn’t heard it in weeks, and I knew now he did it to protect himself. “Patience, watchfulness, delayed gratification. Useful skills in war, but rarely possessed by those who wage them.”

Jurnus’s nostrils flared at what he perceived as a subtle insult, though I couldn’t tell what Gannet had intended. Whatever passed between them now was beyond me, though I suspected I played some unsought for role in the exchange. Instead of responding, Jurnus swiftly tore the spear from the sand and tossed it forcefully to Gannet. Rather than let it fall, Gannet caught it. Though he shifted it in his hand to hold it properly, it looked wrong, and I didn’t like seeing him armed.

“The Ambarians can’t have allowed you to come all this way the first time without any means of defending yourself, unless they spared good men to protect able-bodied ones,” Jurnus said with a sneer. Where was this anger coming from? “If that’s the case, perhaps we stand a chance, after all.”

There were chuckles amidst the soldiers, though many didn’t smile or laugh, looking to Jurnus instead for a level of direction I was beginning to believe he didn’t deserve. One of the soldiers nearest to my brother passed him her spear.

“That’s enough, Jurnus,” I broke in, but he wasn’t looking at me. Gannet had assumed a posture I had seen on Antares any number of times, and I found myself taking several unwitting steps away from him, heart hammering. I felt Theba’s bloodlust burning eager trails up my body and something else, too, at the sight of my brother circling the man who rivaled all others in my esteem.

“You’ve learned something then,” Jurnus said, sweeping out with his own spear before he’d finished speaking. Gannet retreated, shuffling across the sand, but maintained his defensive stance. “What about this one, though?”

Jurnus’s next lunge was a feint, easily disarming Gannet who was slow to counter the attack. He smirked and I felt my heart straining against my ribs, a whistle of rage on my lips.

“Maybe you ought to accept that armed escort my father offered,” Jurnus crowed, bending to collect the second spear even though Gannet had made no move to recover it. They were close enough together now that he lowered his voice, but I still heard what he said next. “He doesn’t trust you alone with her any more than I do.”

Many things happened then, all at once.

Something in me boiled over, and where Jurnus stood the packed earth cracked and tilted, launching my brother a short distance away, scrambling and tumbling to the ground. Gannet, too, was knocked off his feet. Neither man had much time to recover, for into the square swarmed armored men and women, swords and teeth flashing. Jurnus rolled but not quickly enough to avoid a glancing swipe at his unprotected side. The Aleynian soldiers who had been idling, watching the encounter between my brother and Gannet, sprang to action, some pulling discarded helmets onto their heads while others didn’t pause before launching themselves at the enemy. Lista was among these, engaging two of the enemy without hesitation. A sharp yank on my arm drew me back to myself and the immediate danger.

My father and mother flanked me. Two of the enemy were running at us, and I could not tell if they were men or women for they wore bulky, ill-fitted armor and dark cloth wound over their mouths, noses, and brows. I could see only their eyes, and these were as charged, wild, and empty as only those of a zealot can be.

“Can’t you do something?” This from my mother, a shriek that I heard but barely over the clatter of weapons, the growls of battle. I tried to reach into myself, to summon the fire or something worse, but I felt cold, like a hearth after a long, neglected night. There was only terror at the nearness of the battle. I was only Eiren, afraid to be hurt, afraid to die.

Not just Eiren. Never just Eiren.

Time seemed to slow as I took in the weapon strikes, the parrying, the bodies twisted in defense and in falling, too. On instinct I bent and scooped a handful of sand, and when I stood, I blew it into the face of an advancing attacker. My lungs were hot as an oven, and the grains turned to glass as they flew forward, instantly blinding the one who’d dared come at me. It was Theba’s doing; she burst from me then, a snake coiled in a nest. I felt her just under my skin and thought I might shed it, so great was the press of her outrage. The next nearest Ambarian she flung away without even needing to use my hands, the others closest to me felt their weapons burn as hot as they had in the instant of their forging. But they could not drop them. The blaze crept from their screaming hands to their shoulders, their bellies filling with fire, their mouths belching smoke. Blackened figures crumpled before me, their bodies broken in a perverse semblance of worship. Theba’s leer was on my lips as though strings pulled them back, and I fought to control my expression, eyes taking in each figure, and those still standing, drawing near in shock.

Six at my feet. What I had not finished my family’s forces had.

“You did this,” Jurnus said, an uncanny blend of horror, relief, and outrage on his face.

I nodded, my chin dipping forward as though weighted. I wanted to look away from the corpses, wanted to drop to my knees before them, wanted to retch. I did none of these things.

“And the stone, before. You broke the stones under my feet.”

I nodded again. My face burned as Theba burrowed back within me, satisfied as a glutton after feasting. It wouldn’t last.

Behind Jurnus my sisters assembled, and I felt my mother and father at my back. I didn’t need to see any of them to know they warred with themselves as my brother did; I could hear their thoughts torn between marveling at my power and horror at seeing it employed.

I felt a hand on my heart, squeezing. They were grateful to me, but I’d finally inspired the fear I’d hoped to when I first told them that I was Theba. It hurt, to see the truth of what I was through their eyes.

Another mind intruded upon mine, but I shrank from him, too. Gannet could not comfort me now. I turned to look at him, standing behind my father, a spare, tidy figure in black. Not a warrior. Not a killer.

I tried to back away from them all and my hem caught against the charred curl of a limb, burned beyond recognition. I felt tears in my eyes, hot as oil.

“Dispose of these corpses,” my father called out, directing the soldiers who’d hung back, uncertain. “Figure out how they got in here, and send someone below to check on the others.”

“It was a scouting party,” Gannet said. “When they don’t return, the enemy will send another.”

“Then we’ll be ready next time.” Jurnus wasn’t looking at me now, but at our father, his gaze fevered. “We’ll need to be ready for an offensive.”

“I won’t rush to attack.” My father’s voice had gravel in it, and I heard echoes of this argument in his mind, tackled from many angles by my dogged brother. “We risk leaving our people leaderless. We are safe enough here for now.”

“It is obvious that we’re not,” Jurnus muttered, eyes on the corpses that others had begun to drag away from the courtyard. “If we don’t press what advantages we have, we will lose them.”

He wasn’t just speaking of the knowledge of the terrain, of the capacity to surprise our enemy, but of me. My father sensed it, too, even without my gifts. They were all thinking of it, of what I could do and how I might be used. My mother was resigned. Esbat’s gaze, on the other hand, was critical, a scholar’s consideration of what must be done. What sacrifices should be made for the preservation of all.

I met Lista’s eyes then and she searched my face, her own marked with blood and sand. She didn’t recognize me. She wondered over what it was she had seen—the fire, and if Jurnus had merely tripped, if Gannet could be trusted…if I could.

“I already told you I can’t,” I said hoarsely, turning my back on her, on all of them, and exiting the courtyard. Let more of the enemy come. I would burn myself to a cinder torching their flesh from their bones, and then what? What place could there be for me in the world they built after?

Gannet caught up with me and kept pace, several lengths removed so that even the hems of our clothes were in no danger of brushing together. “I think you’ve forgotten everything I’ve taught you.”

“You never taught me how to control my temper.” Or hers. “In fact, you used to be particularly adept at igniting it.”

“It’s a gift,” he answered, tone severe for all his eyes glittered behind the mask. My laugh was like sand rasping in my throat. Soon it collapsed into a sigh, not of discontent, but of release. We had work to do. I relaxed, only just, and drew nearer to him when we stopped to allow a cluster of older children, their arms full of bandages and salves in squat jars, to hurry in the direction we had come from. The search before us seemed all the more urgent on the heels of the attack.

We moved beyond the perimeter of activity, going more carefully even than the day before. Between following what I could remember of the vision and keeping an eye out for surprise attackers, our pace was crawling. I fought to keep the sight of both cities before me, Re’Kether as it was, and the wonder that it had been. Ji’s flight from the bathhouse was messy, an incomplete memory crowded with fright and fury. But I thought I recognized the cobbles here, or the sun-baked ruin that had once been cobbles. I crouched, the fleeting scrape of stone against my hand the same sensation Ji had experienced when scrabbling between the legs of rioters. Wind whipped sand against the stone faces of ancient buildings that stood still in this quarter, and I heard in the howling the animal rage of a long-dead rebellion. Was that the gutter she had crawled to, the worn stoop that had born the mark that promised her sanctuary?

Where there should have been the indifferent glare of the sun there was shadow, an inexplicable square of it between two columns that were all that remained of a once-modest structure. And in the shadow a gloved hand extended, reaching out to me, or to Ji. I shook my head, confusion like heat sickness muddying my thoughts. I gestured to Gannet to come near, my vision blurring as I felt the stones beneath my feet shift. The owner of the hand didn’t wait for me to take it, but snatched forward like a viper striking, seizing my wrist. I felt Ji’s heart and head eclipse my own, and I wanted it and didn’t want it. I turned to look at Gannet, his alarm plain even as he disappeared.

Desecrating a temple was a crime punishable by death. There was no appeal, not for anyone, and certainly not for me. It was rumored Adah was doling out punishments himself of late, rather than allowing his disciples to exercise their own cruel interpretations of justice. While the god could be counted upon to harbor neither human jealousy nor outrage, neither did he possess anything resembling empathy. I wasn’t sure whose justice I would prefer, if caught.

The streets were dark, what few lanterns usually maintained in this quarter stolen or smashed to conceal crimes of another kind. There was no moon. Still, I saw the figure that stepped into my path an instant before they did so, and my own limbs roused to defense even as the person raised their arms in surrender.

“I am not your enemy.”

I recognized the voice. It was the woman from the temple, the one that had refused to show her face to Mara and me even after we had delivered the message. As she had appeared then, there was nothing to identify her but her voice, featureless under a hood, shapeless in a large, shadowy garment. Still I knew her, and that was all I needed to duck into the open doorway to which she gestured.

Once inside, I stopped, unwilling to go further without answers. “How did you know that I would come this way? Are you having me followed? Have I been followed? What is this place?”

She didn’t answer at first, busying herself far too long with bolting the door before sweeping past me with an air of importance, angling down a hall. “You’re safe, for now. But you’re careless. I expect it won’t last.”

I snorted, quick on her heels despite her advantage in height, the length of her stride. The corridor was dimly lit and stank of disuse, and I began to feel the weight of stone and sand above as it sloped downward.

“Torching a prayer garden from within without being seen takes great care,” I boasted, my desire for information wrestling with my desire to save face. “I wasn’t seen, was I?”

She halted before a closed door, old and partly rotted, but brushed clean. The murmurs of those within ceased abruptly, as though they could sense, if not yet see, our approach. “If you’d been seen, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The door seemed to pulse, the age-softened wood alive to the tremors perceived in the living bodies that drew near. I watched, fascinated, as it opened a fraction, smooth as a breath, and closed again.

“Go in. I’ll wait here for you.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I’m not wanted. Now go in before I decide to give you up to Adah’s hounds.”

I shuddered, thinking of those most fiercely devoted to Adah, the unwashed ones who wore the hides of animals scraped only partly clean of sinew and fat. The creatures that lived in the wild had a natural order and no need for crime and were sacred to the just god. His followers became near feral themselves in their pursuit of his favor.

“You don’t have to threaten me,” I hissed, placing a hand upon the splintered wood when next it opened, the pressure of my touch parting the door from frame like a pair of withered lips. There was a slight pressure on my back—she’d pushed me!—and the door closed behind me as soon as I was within.

It was darker here even than it had been in the corridor, and my eyes took a moment to adjust. The resistance, it seemed, was not in favor of illumination, nor of ample spaces, as the chamber we occupied was hardly large than a wardrobe. Three figures clustered together opposite me, and I recognized them immediately, cursing as I stumbled back against the door. It couldn’t be opened from the inside.

“She’s betrayed us, but I won’t,” I insisted, eyes blazing even as I trembled with fear. Mara had been so sure we could trust her, the woman from the temple, but she’d given me up to them, not even remaining behind to see how they chose to punish me.

Tirce, with his great hands muddied and his jaw set like a sharpening stone.

Dsimah, her rounded belly promising fertility, fecundity to barren fields and women both, if we offered the brightest and most beautiful youths to service in her temple.

And Najat, the Dreamer, whose eyes were preternaturally wide and without pupils, glowing with the golds and blues of sweet things realized in the blink of a sleeping eye and in another instant, the blood-dark stuff of nightmares.

It was Najat who spoke first, and her voice arrested me, bade my knees to buckle and my belly to clench. I only just managed to keep from collapsing to the floor in an abject posture of devotion. “She did not lie to you when she claimed she was not your enemy. She led you here because neither are we.”

I snorted. I would be daring even in the face of death.

“A madman who does not receive what his dreams promise takes it from the three young virgins in his master’s house,” I said, voice steady though my heart hammered a ritual staccato against my breastbone. I looked away from Najat, glaring at Dsimah. “And just today I saw a woman outside your temple, her belly heavy with not one child but two, begging you to take one if only the other would grow healthy and strong. She had a knife. She meant to do it herself if her prayers were not answered.”

I looked at Tirce.

“And you, I saw you, in the bathhouse. You and the crown prince.”

No mortal face could rival the frown of a god whose province was earth and stone.

“We do what we must to maintain appearances. Would you look more favorably on me if I told you of that man, Ameth’s, ill deeds? He is no friend to you or your kind. It was never meant to be like this,” Tirce intoned, shaking his head. His remorse seemed genuine, but gods did not feel. They bade others do it for them.

“It has always been like this.”

The woman from the temple had entered behind me, but I did not turn to look at her, not wanting to put my back to the three who stood before me. My retort was lost, words stifled in my throat as neatly as Tirce might have crumbled a handful of stones to dust.

“I don’t care what it was or was meant to be, only what it is,” I insisted. I couldn’t trust them. I wouldn’t. Would there be time enough to reach one of my weapons? Would it even matter?

“But how do you kill a god?” Alarm sprang in my belly when Najat spoke, answering a thought even I hadn’t dared utter aloud. Her expression was immutable. The depths of a cloudless night were in her eyes, moon glow, the edge of a dawning sky that promises an end to dreaming.

To hear her say it shocked me, but the others showed no surprise. What wasn’t said did far more to convince me of their truthfulness than what was. This truth was at the heart of what we did, what we hoped to do. The gods walked among us, warm flesh, heavy hands, heavier deeds. In our prayers we could not ask them to leave us be, and so we must put an end to praying. We must give them up.

And I didn’t imagine they’d respond to much but lethal force.

“I don’t know,” I said, at last. I had no weapons now but honesty. I had seen too much. Men who swallowed stones to give themselves the strength of the god who stood before me, his mouth touched with a sorrow I couldn’t understand. Wild-eyed dreamers whose herbal abuses induced sleep, or prolonged wakefulness so as to control Najat’s visitations. Lives lived out only in part because of devotion, or fear, or both.

“We have little time for you to learn.” This from the woman who stood behind me. If I’d know her name, I’d have used it as a curse.

“What is it you do for the rebellion, exactly?” I rounded on her now, temper blazing, searching the blank darkness of the hood for eyes and finding none. “How is it you don’t have to risk your life?”

“I take a great many risks you would never understand.”

“Try me,” I growled, but even as it seemed she intended to speak, her shoulders rising and her chest, too, with an angry puff of breath, Dsimah interceded.

“Enough. You both have secrets.”

I started at her words, sure that at least part of the diffusion of feeling in my breast was divine in nature. What did she think she knew about me?

And what didn’t I know about the woman who’d led me here?

Dsimah’s gaze leveled on us both. “It is best for now, for all of us, that you keep them. There is something you must do together.”

The mention of a task grounded me, though knowing now that my orders came from those I purported to fight was unsettling.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“If you have any hope of succeeding, if we have any hope,” she insisted, “there’s something we need. Something old. Something powerful.”

The hooded woman circled behind me. They had our undivided attention now. Even as I leaned forward into the response, it didn’t come. Her lips moved and slid away from her face, eaten up in a blaze of light. Gannet held me, the pressure of arms arresting. We were tucked against the remains of a stone wall, taking advantage of what little shade it provided.

“What did you see, Eiren? What are you seeing now?”

I closed my eyes, desperate to hang on to any memory that I could. Already Ji’s world was losing color and distinction, the edges like sand dunes slipping into unrecognizable shapes. Ji aspired to put an end to the wicked reign of the gods, and I did, too.

“She was sent to recover a weapon,” I said. “What we’re searching for, she sought, too. And I saw—I saw the gods. Their true faces.”

I was delirious, squeezing my eyes shut against Gannet’s chest and pressing my face forward into the shadow of his cloak as though I could return to Ji’s world by will alone. But it was impossible to hold on to more than an impression and nothing to sketch in the sand this time. After a moment Gannet freed a hand to hold a water skin to my lips, and I took a few sips to oblige him.

“Where was she sent, Eiren?”

I shook my head, feeling the rough brush of his shirt against my cheeks, my nose.

“I don’t know. There were two gods, no, three. They told her, they told her—”

Quiet.

Gannet’s hands tightened on my frame, and I looked up at him, following his gaze to the gutted ruin of a building some distance away, where the sun’s light was captured by a glass and reflected out again. Three quick blinks of light, a longer exposure, and then two more blinks. My heart sank.

One of yours?

I don’t think so.

The message was being broadcast out toward the city’s edge and the Ambarian encampment. Had there been one among the scouting party who had escaped, or were there others secreted away in the city already? Was the Ambarian daring increased by the imminent arrival of the imposter’s army?

Or had they arrived already?

We were running out of time. We needed to hide, to run, something to guide us beyond instinct and vision.

But we couldn’t go anywhere when, their thoughts racing ahead of their boots, the force that had been signaled began to advance into the city.