I hated her patronizing, sanctimonious, knowing tone. “You don’t know anything about it!”
“I know how your father died.”
I froze.
She continued, oblivious to my shock. “Ten years ago—on the very day, it seems, that the Gray Lady’s power swept the world—your father was in the village market. Everyone felt something that day. You didn’t need magical abilities to sense that something momentous had just occurred.”
She paused as if waiting for me to speak. I held myself rigid, so she went on.
“But it was only your father, out of all the people in that market, who burst into tears and fell to the ground, singing for joy.”
I sat there, trembling. Listening to this woman, this Arameri, dispassionately recite the details of my father’s murder.
It wasn’t the singing that did him in. No one but me could detect the magic in his voice. A scrivener might have sensed it, but my village was far too poor and provincial to merit a scrivener at its small White Hall. No, what killed my father was fear, plain and simple.
Fear, and faith.
“The people of your village were already anxious.” Serymn spoke more softly now. I did not believe it was out of respect for my pain. I think she just realized greater volume was unnecessary. “After the morning’s strange storms and tremors, it must have seemed as though the world was about to end. There were similar incidents that day, in towns and cities elsewhere in the world, but your father’s case is perhaps the most tragic. There had been rumors about him before that day, I understand, but… that does not excuse what happened.”
She sighed, and some of my fury faded as I heard genuine regret in her tone. It might have been an act, but if so, it was enough to break my paralysis.
I got up from my chair. I couldn’t have sat any longer, not without screaming. I put the teacup down and moved away from Serymn, seeking somewhere in the room with fresher, less constricting air. A few feet away, I found a wall and felt my way to a window; the sunlight coming through it helped to ease my agitation. Serymn remained silent behind me, for which I was grateful.
Who threw the first stone? It is something I have always wondered. The priest would not say, when I asked him over and over again. No one in town could say; they did not remember. Things had happened so quickly.
My father was a strange man. The beauty and magic that I loved in him was an easily perceptible thing, though no one else ever seemed to see it. Yet they noticed something about him, whether they understood it or not. His power permeated the space around him, like warmth. Like Shiny’s light and Madding’s chimes. Perhaps we mortals actually have more than five senses. Perhaps along with taste and smell and the rest there is detecting the special. I see the specialness with my eyes, but others do it in some different way.
So on that long-ago day, when power changed the world and everyone from senile elders to infants felt it, they all discovered that special sense, and then they noticed my father and understood at last what he was.
But what I had always perceived as glory, they had seen as a threat.
After a time, Serymn came to stand behind me.
“You blame our faith for what happened to your father,” she said.
“No,” I whispered. “I blame the people who killed him.”
“All right.” She paused a moment, testing my mood. “But has it occurred to you that there may be a cause for the madness that swept your village? A higher power at work?”
I laughed once, without humor. “You want me to blame the gods.”
“Not all of them.”
“The Gray Lady? You want to kill her, too?”
“The Lady ascended to godhood in that hour, it’s true. But remember what else happened then, Oree.”
Just Oree this time, no “Lady.” Like we were old friends, the street artist and the Arameri fullblood. I smiled, hating her with all my soul.
She said, “The Nightlord regained his freedom. This, too, affected the world.”
My heart hurt too much for politeness. “Lady, I don’t care.”
She moved closer, beside me. “You should. Nahadoth’s nature is more than just darkness. His power encompasses wildness, impulse, the abandonment of logic.” She paused, perhaps waiting to see if her words had sunk in. “The madness of a mob.”
Silence fell. In it, a chill laced around my spine.
I had not considered it before. Pointless to blame the gods when mortal hands had thrown the stones. But if those mortal hands had been influenced by some higher power…
Whatever Serymn read on my face must have pleased her. I heard that in her voice.
“These godlings,” she said, “the ones you call your friends. Ask yourself how many mortals they’ve killed over the ages. Far more than the Arameri ever did, I’m quite certain; the Gods’ War alone wiped out nearly every living thing in this realm.” She stepped closer still. I could feel her body heat radiating against my side, almost a pressure. “They live forever. They have no need of food or rest. They have no true shape.” She shrugged. “How can such creatures understand the value of a single mortal life?”
In my mind, I saw Madding, a shining blue-green thing like nothing of this earth. I saw him in his mortal shape, smiling as I touched him, soft-eyed, longing. I smelled his cool, airy scent, heard the sound of his chimes, felt the purr of his voice as he spoke my name.
I saw him sitting at a table in his house, as he had often done during our relationship, laughing with his fellow godlings as they drew their blood into vials for later sale.
It was a part of his life I’d never let myself consider deeply. Godsblood was not addictive. It caused no deaths or sickness; no one ever took too much and poisoned himself. And the favors Madding did for people in the neighborhood—for those of us who were too unimportant to merit aid from the Order or the nobles, Madding and his crew were often our only recourse.
But the favors were never free. He wasn’t cruel about it. He asked only what people could afford, and he gave fair warning. Anyone who incurred a debt to him knew there would be consequences if they failed to repay. He was a godling; it was his nature.
What did he do to them, the ones who reneged?
I saw Trickster Sieh’s child eyes, as cold as a hunting cat’s. I heard Lil’s chittering, whirring teeth.
And from the deepest recesses of my heart rose the doubt that I had not allowed myself to contemplate since the day Madding had broken my heart.
Did he ever love me? Or was my love just another diversion for him?
“I hate you,” I whispered to Serymn.
“For now,” she replied, with terrible compassion. “You won’t always.”
Then she took my hand and led me back to my room, and left me there to sit in silent misery.
10
“Indoctrination”
(charcoal study)
That afternoon, Hado put me on a work crew to help clean the large dining hall. This turned out to be a group of nine men and women, a few older than me but most younger, or so I judged by their voices. They watched me with open curiosity as Hado explained about my blindness—though he did not, I noticed, tell them that I had been forced into the cult. “She’s quite self-sufficient, as I’m sure you’ll find, but of course there will be some tasks she can’t complete,” was all he said, and by that I knew what was coming. “Because of that, we’ve assigned several of our older initiates to shadow the work crew in case she needs assistance. I hope all of you don’t mind.”
They assured him that they did not in tones of such slavish eagerness that I immediately loathed all of them. But when Hado left, I made my way to the work crew’s designated leader, a young Ken woman named S’miya. “Let me handle the mopping,” I said. “I feel like working hard today.” So she handed me the bucket.