The first time I wake, they’re trying to separate my pants from what’s left of my skin. I congratulate myself for surviving an unwinnable duel and pass out again. The next time I wake, it’s to dim lighting in a palatial tent, the astringent scent of antiseptic unguents and the disturbing sense that my body is a frail cage of bones and blood, barely held together with bandages.
Naturally, I try to sit up. I almost make it, too. Donal’s the one who catches me and lowers me back down, propping me up on several pillows. Before he’s done arranging them I croak, “Situation.”
“Never rests, does she,” Colblain’s voice says from out of sight.
“You’ll live,” Donal tells me, ignoring him. At my baleful glare, he continues. “You’ve been moved into the Godson’s tent at the insistence of just about everyone. But the situation is…delicate.”
“Curse it,” I say, struggling to sit up again despite the way it drags against my skin like nettles. “Delicate how?”
Colblain comes into view over Donal’s shoulder. “The Shraevenaese are dancing in the streets of their capital, toasting their liberator. You’ve vanquished their conqueror; gods they can handle, but mere mortal men with vast armies are another matter. Meanwhile, here in the vast army, you’ve been accepted as the Godson’s military replacement. The men are discussing the duel with great zeal…but I give it only a few days before the implications of what’s happened begin to make trouble.”
“Here, anyway,” Donal says. “We’ve grounded all the messenger birds and stopped all travel. For now, the news of the Godson’s…death? Ascension? Is limited to the people here.”
“Blood and gods,” I swear.
“Exactly that,” Colblain says.
“The fires?”
“Doused,” Donal says. “Otherwise it would be a rather ill-advised night for that celebration they’re having.”
I ignore him and continue down my check-list. “The egg?”
“It’s behind you,” Donal says. “We sent Ragna out to walk, she’s been here for seven hours straight, or she’d tell you so herself.”
“No stars falling, tidal waves, earthquakes...?” I ask.
“You mean ‘have the gods objected to you shoving your problems off onto them?’“ Donal says. He chuffs a low laugh. “No. Everything’s quiet on that front.”
Finally, I allow myself to think of the personal. “...Silfie?”
“Broke a few ribs, but she’ll live too. She’ll be back on her feet before you,” Donal says. “She’s in a tent near yours.”
“Damn near ruined that duel,” Colblain adds. “What was she thinking?”
She was thinking that she loved me, and that I was about to die. But I don’t say that. I am exhausted, burnt and.. gods, but I feel hollow inside. How do I feel about all this? We have made a god, and he was us. And I…with a single stone knife I declared all the hopes and aspirations of an entire society void. Everything I have believed in my entire life…is true…and wrong.
But there’s work to be done. I can wallow later. “Good thinking on the travel moratorium. We shouldn’t have to keep that running long, though. As you noted, Colblain, we don’t have much time.”
“What do you intend?” Donal asks, and I hear a trace of that unexpected formality. My farm-boy prince. Or was he a blacksmith?
“I intend,” I say, closing my eyes tightly, “to think very hard about this and figure out a way to sew it together before it explodes.”
“Good plan,” Colblain says dryly.
“Go,” I say. “I need time.” I grimace. “And send a chirugeon. Whatever the hell you’ve done to me is wearing off.”
“Hasn’t changed a whit,” Colblain mutters to Donal on the way out.
“Not a feather. More or less.”
* * *
One great advantage of being installed in the Godson’s tent: I have access to some of the best chirurgeons in the Kingdom. Still, I begrudge the amount of time I am forced to spend with them. I have too much else to do, and instead of doing it I’m trying to bargain my way out of mind-clouding opiates and arguing about how much rest I need.
My body takes that choice from me. I’ve borne a lot of wounds in my decades in the army, but most of them were inflicted by steel, not by fire. I’m not used to recovering from burns; they hurt far out of proportion to the actual healing to be done. I end up needing the laudanum anyway.
So I’m not sure how much time has passed when I open my eyes and find her leaning over me.
“Silfie,” I say.
“Hara,” she answers in that velvety contralto, the one that can still lift the hairs on the back of my neck. I have a very long neck.
She traces the edge of my bill where it meets skin. “Glad to see you’re alive.”
“Same,” I say. “You were gone a long time.”
“Not that long,” she says.
“Feels that way.”
“To me too,” she says.
There is a…a numb place I am talking around, and I have recovered from too many hurts not to recognize it. I still love her. I love her so much. And everything between us has gone so wrong. Where do we go from here? Because there’s never any going back. Until there’s a god of time, there will never be any going back.
“I’m sorry,” Silfie says. “But I had no choice. Everything I cared about, they took from me.”
I open my mouth, but she shakes her head and touches a finger to the tip of my beak. “Hear me through, please. You owe me that, Angharad.”
I swallow and nod.
“My family arranged my marriage to get an heir to the Dale,” Silfie says. “And my husband was such a bastard I had to kill him to keep him from hurting me or my offspring. But I was the one who suffered for that, not him. I’m the one eyed askance in my own town. Which isn’t mine anymore, because my parents have the child Sixblood of the Dale to inherit my land.”
She looks at me, eyes flat copper. “So I went back to the army…and there you were. But I realized I couldn’t have you either, because you had to marry someone to have the child Godkin of the Sunblood Cliffs. When you kept that rape baby, even though I thought it was wrong, I had some hope…that maybe you would feel you were done with duty and I could be with you. You wouldn’t need a man. But the longer I stayed, the more I realized…you still wanted it. To have a father for your child, to have a…a thing that looked proper from the outside even though your child was a bastard. Maybe particularly because of that.”
My hand curls into a fist beneath the blanket, but I force myself to listen without interrupting.
“But then,” she says, meeting my eyes again, “I ended up in the governor’s custody. He took away my freedom…raped me and put a child on me. And when I fixed that problem, you took the last thing away from me that mattered, Hara. You sent me from the army.
“So yes,” she says. “I’ve turned outlaw. And outlaw I’ll stay. There’s no place for me in the Kingdom, in the army or with you. But make no mistake…it would have taken an outlaw to break the dueling laws to try to save your life. No one else dared.”
What do I do? What do I say? I still love her, but I don’t know where to go from here.
Hasn’t that always been the way with us?
She’s right. Not about everything…but about the two of us…I love her, but I don’t know how to be with her. How to reconcile being with her and my desire for a father for my children. Because it’s become that now: no longer a duty, a burden, but a desire. I look around me at the good men I’ve worked with and find myself thinking how good it would be to have children with a male I selected, that I think worthy! And I surprise myself by wanting a family. If I even can…but I want my baby to have a sibling. And for that, I need a man…a man I want to be a part of my life, and my children’s lives.
“If you were willing to share with Ragna,” I begin, tentative but desperate to salvage something.
“Ragna is not a man,” Silfie says. “Ragna would never give you a family, a family that would take you away from me. But a man who could give you a family, and that family…soon enough there would be no room for me.”
Oh gods. What a ruin this is. I don’t dare look up at her, knowing what she’ll see in my eyes.
“I love you, Angharad,” Silfie says, low.
I reach for her hand and caress it when she gives it to me. “I love you too,” I say, wondering how you can love someone so much and regret it so painfully. We remain thus, for how long I don’t know. But she sets my hand down on the covers and rests hers on it for a heartbeat…and then she goes.
I am grateful when the chirurgeons return with the laudanum. If they wonder why I don’t fight them this time, they are gracious enough not to ask.
* * *
Even as it happens, I know that waking after this conversation is going to be one of my most painful memories. Struggling toward consciousness past the opium fog, aware of an emptiness behind my breastbone and not remembering why it’s there…and then recalling, in fits and starts, pieces of the conversation, the memories sharp as splintered glass grasped through the dullness of the drug.
Hateful, just hateful. I don’t cry because I feel a numb, distant indignation at the unfairness of having to deal with it at the same time I’m recovering from the most cataclysmic fight of my life.
“But life isn’t fair,” Ragna says, voice low, as she settles beside me.
I know I didn’t say anything out loud. But then, we once had a full conversation while her tongue was a mess of knife cuts. Long ago, that was…so long ago it seems. “No,” I say. “But am I allowed to be sour about it? Just for a while?”
Ragna peels the blankets back from my body and inspects my bandages. “No,” she says. “No, Angharad, and you know why.”
“Tell me,” I say. Anything to keep from contemplating the amputation of any possible future with Silfie.
“Because you have work to do,” Ragna says. She offers me her thick hands and I find myself taking them.
“Is this a good idea?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “You can do this.”
She’s right. I can get up. I can walk, even if that leg isn’t very steady. My whole body hurts but it hurts a lot less than my spirit does. I remember once being proud of how quickly I heal—that seems like very long ago also.
I have work to do.
“How can I help?” Ragna asks once I’m tentatively upright.
“I need to get out of this camp,” I say. “Somewhere I can be alone.”
“All right,” she says. And just like that, she trusts me; trusts that I’m not going to do anything stupid, that I’m not planning to run away or kill myself or…gods know what. And amazingly that helps. Not a lot, but it does.
Together we hobble out of the tent, which is large enough to have a second entrance near the back for servants. It’s not that I want to avoid people. I just don’t want the healers to stop me. Or to be followed. Or to have to explain what I’m doing when I’m not sure what that is myself.
All right. I want to avoid people.
Still, there’s no way to get out of a camp this size without being noticed. I let Ragna handle the soldiers between me and the perimeter. “She goes to talk with the gods,” is what she says, and with renewed respect for the whole concept of godhead, the men let us by.
When we reach the broad, wind-ruffled plains and the camp lies behind us, I say, “Am I here to talk with the gods?”
“I don’t know,” Ragna says. “But it seemed the thing to say. When should I come back?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “An hour. Two hours. Just…I don’t know.”
She nods once, touches my shoulder and withdraws, without questions or hesitation. If there’s one thing Shraeven seems to breed in its people, it’s an ease with ambiguity. Or is it resignation? Acceptance? Something. Perhaps living with gods makes you more pragmatic about the inexplicable and the numinous. We Godkindred…we love to question and plan and experiment and control. I would have had to give my captains an exact answer…if they would even have been comfortable leading me out here at all.
I hang my head, exhausted. Again, it comes back to this. Who are we? And what will we be now that we have to choose a new path? And who will shape that path?
There on the plain, then, I sit, with my injured leg stretched out before me and the other knee up. I rest my arm on it and look out over the grasses as they bend beneath the wind. That same breeze pulls my mane over my shoulders and ruffles my fur…but doesn’t speak.
The Stars don’t shake the heavens either. The Land, the Sea…all of them, absent. I see only the thin shadows of the partial moons, the gray and purple of the plains…smell new flowers and that delicious, dusky scent of a grassland cooling off by night. The crickets are creaking, and in my ears the low whorr has nothing to do with my god-painted ear: the song of the wind over land.
I think I’m glad. It is relaxing to be alone for a while. Besides, didn’t I just claim this realm for mortal souls?
I close my eyes and concentrate on just being here…here in Shraeven, after a long and winding career bringing me to this moment now. After a duel so intense I can barely remember it: like a traumatic wound, my mind’s eye keeps veering away from the sight of it. I feel all my years in my bones…and all the heavinesses of my heart like weights pulling my chest down toward my knee. And I am struck by the beauty of a world beheld by senses uninterrupted by divine quarreling...
My eyes are wet but I don’t realize that I’m crying for a long time.
I know then. I know what has to be done.
Ragna does not come back for me until long after that epiphany has settled, and that is good also. But she does come for me…sits beside me on the cool grass, in a companionable quiet.
I say, “I’m going home.”
Ragna does not answer, but her silence has a resigned quality. So I continue.
“Shraeven still needs a queen. How about it, od Ragna?”
Her head jerks up and she meets my eyes, her own wide. I laugh at her expression. “Don’t tell me you can’t do the job.”
“I...” She trails off, then says, “But why?”
“Because I’m going home to restore the Kingdom…and that means dismantling the empire,” I say. “I need a few allies I can trust not to stab me in the back while I’m dealing with the provinces convinced that our withdrawal is a sign of weakness.”
“Isn’t it?” Ragna asks, curious.
“Yes,” I say. “But not a military one, and gods help them if they try it.”
Ragna is silent again, this time a very self-reflective quiet. “Me. Queen of Shraeven?”
I nod. “Surely it will go over if the liberator of Shraeven crowns her faithful esquire, the native guide who brought her to the capital to free the country.”
“Yes,” she says, musing. “I think it will.”
“I’ll want to sign a treaty,” I say.
“Of course.”
“You can keep Negrat,” I say. “You might need him.”
Ragna’s whiskers arch into fans. I laugh with her.
She says, at last, “They won’t take it amiss? Your countrymen. Do you even have the right to do this?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But someone’s got to go home and fix this. Our whole way of life, our religion, the things we hold dear, our goals as a society…all of it has to change. And since I’m the one who put a sword through its chest, I have a duty to help make it right.” I take in a breath and let it out. “Besides, I have personal experience with what we were trying to become. I know gods. I can tell people what they’re like.”
I can’t describe the nature of Ragna’s last silence. She breaks it to say, “That sounds like a lifetime’s work.”
“Yes,” I say. And then I grin. “That’s why I decided to spread the misery around and give you Shraeven. How’s that for a love-gift? Endless toil unto the grave!”
“For a free Shraeven? It’s worth it,” Ragna says. And smiles. “And you will free the Godkindred also. It will be a good work for us both.”
“They’ll sing songs about us,” I say.
“My daughter will have to marry your son,” Ragna says, whiskers fanning.
“If he doesn’t marry Donal’s first,” I say.
“Ah! You will give him Aneshet?” Ragna asks. “Of course. Another ally to guard your back.”
I grin. “Want to go back and tell him with me?”
Ragna laughs aloud this time, a low chuffing sound. She rises and offers her hands to help me to my feet. “Let it not be said the queen of the Godkindred was not generous to her lovers.”
I huff. “Donal hasn’t been quite that lucky.” At Ragna’s raised brow ridge, I add, innocently, “Yet.”