“Wait until I’m unconscious before you do it,” I said. I couldn’t tell if he was paying any attention to me. “Then pour the blood down the toilet. Don’t leave any for them to use, if you can.”
That same stubborn silence. It didn’t even make me angry anymore; I was so inured to it.
I sighed and raised the knife to make the first cut to my wrist.
Then the glass broke against the floor, and a hand gripped my wrist tight, and suddenly we were across the room, against the wall, me pinned by the wire-taut weight of Shiny’s body.
He pressed against me, breathing hard. I tried to pull my wrist from his hand, and he made a tight sound of negation, shaking my arm until I stilled. So I waited. I had managed to graze my wrist, but nothing more. A drop of my blood welled around his gripping hand and fell to the floor.
He bent. Slow, slow, like a tall old tree in the wind, fighting it every inch of the way. Only when he had bent to his fullest did he stop, his face pressed against the side of mine, his breath hot and harsh in my ear. It must have been an uncomfortable posture for him. But he stopped there, torturing himself, trapping me, and only in this manner was he able, at last, to speak. It was a whisper the whole time.
“They did not love me anymore. He was born first, I came next. I was never alone because of him. Then she came and I did not mind, I did not mind, as long as she understood that he was mine, too. It was not the sharing, do you see? It was good having her with us, and then the children, so many of them, all perfect and strange. I was happy then, happy, she was with us and we loved her, he and I, but I was first in his heart. I knew that. She respected it. It was never the sharing that troubled me.
“But they changed, changed, they always changed. I knew the possibility, but after so long, I did not believe. He had been alone for eternities before me. I did not understand. Even when we were enemies, he thought of me. How could I know? In all the time of my existence, it had never occurred, not once! Even apart from them, I knew their presence, felt their awareness of me. But then… but then…”
At this point, he pulled me against him. His free hand, the one that wasn’t holding my wrist, fisted in the cloth at the small of my back. It wasn’t a hug; that much I was sure of. It didn’t feel like a gesture of comfort. It was closer to the way he’d held me after his release from the Empty. Or the way I sometimes gripped my walking stick when I was adrift in some place I didn’t know, with no one to help me if I stumbled. Yes, very much like that.
“I didn’t think it possible. Was it a betrayal? Had I offended them somehow? I didn’t think they could forget me so completely.
“But they did.
“They forgot me.
“They were together, he and she, yet I could not feel them. They thought only of each other. I was not part of it.
“They left me alone.”
I have always understood bodies better than voices or faces or words. So when Shiny whispered to me of horror, of a single moment of solitude after an eternity of companionship, it was not his words that conveyed the devastation this had wreaked on his soul. He was pressed against me as intimately as a lover. There was no need for words.
“I fled to the mortal realm. Better human company than nothing. I went to a village, to a mortal girl. Better any love than none. She offered herself and I took her, I needed her, I have never felt such need. After, I stayed. Mortal love was safer. There was a child, and I did not kill him. I knew he was demon, forbidden, I had written the law myself, but I needed him, too. He was… I had forgotten how beautiful they could be. The mortal girl whispered to me, in the night when I was weak. My siblings were wrong, wicked, hateful to have forgotten me. They would betray me again if I went back to them. Only she could love me truly; I needed only her. I needed to believe it, do you understand? I needed something certain. I lived in dread of her death. Then they came for me, found me. They apologized—apologized! Like it was nothing.”
He laughed once, here. It was half a sob.
“And they brought me home. But I knew: I could no longer trust them. I had learned what it meant to be alone. It is the opposite of all that I am, that emptiness, that… nothing. I fought ten thousand battles before time began, burned my soul to shape this universe, and never before have I experienced such agony.
“The mortal girl warned me. She said they would do it again. That they would forget they loved me. That they would turn to each other and I would be alone—left alone—forever.
“They would not.
“They would not.
“Then the mortal girl killed our son.”
He fell silent here for just a moment, his body utterly still.
“ ‘Take it,’ she told me, and offered me the blood. And I thought… I thought… I thought… when there were only two of us, I was never alone.”
A final silence, fortelling the story’s end.
Slowly, he let me go. All the tension and strength ran out of him, like water. He slid down my body to his knees, his cheek pressed to my belly. He had stopped trembling.
I have spent time studying the nature of light. It is part curiosity and part meditation; someday I hope to understand why I see the way I do. Scriveners have studied light, too, and in the books that Madding read to me, they claimed that the brightest light—true light—is the combination of all other kinds of light. Red, blue, yellow, more; put it all together and the result is shining white.
This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.
And thus a single moment of solitude had destroyed Bright Itempas. He might have recovered from that in time; even a river stone wears into new shapes. But in the moment of his greatest weakness, he had been manipulated, his already-damaged soul struck an unrecoverable blow by the mortal woman he’d trusted to love him. That had driven him so mad that he had murdered his sister to keep from ever experiencing the pain of betrayal again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was very soft, and not meant for me. But the next words were. “You don’t know how much I’ve thought of taking your blood for myself.”
I folded my arm around his shoulders and bent down to kiss his forehead. “I do know, actually.” Because I did.
So I straightened, took his hand, and pulled him up. He came without resistance, letting me lead him to the bed, where I pulled him to lie down. When we’d settled, I snuggled into the crook of his arm, resting my head on his chest as I’d so often done with Madding. They felt and smelled very different—sea salt to dry spice, cool to hot, gentle to fierce—but their heartbeats were the same. Steady, slow, reassuring. Could a son inherit such a thing from a father? Apparently so.
I could always die tomorrow, I supposed.
18
“The Gods’ Vengeance”
(watercolor)
I think madding always suspected the truth.
Throughout my childhood, I had a strange memory of being someplace warm and wet and enclosed. I felt safe, yet I was lonely. I could hear voices, yet no one spoke to me. Hands would touch me now and again, and I would touch back, but that was all.