I needed to stay calm, but I could not hold it all in. I closed my eyes and began to laugh. So many hopes had been rested on me.
“Am I allowed none of my own?” I whispered.
“What would you want?” Nahadoth asked.
“What?”
“If you could be free.” There was something in his voice that I did not understand. Wistfulness? Yes, and something more. Kindness? Fondness? No, that was impossible. “What would you want for yourself?”
The question made my heart ache. I hated him for asking it. It was his fault that my wishes would never come true—his fault, and my parents’, and Dekarta’s, and even Enefa’s.
“I’m tired of being what everyone else has made me,” I said. “I want to be myself.”
“Don’t be a child.”
I looked up, startled and angry, though of course there was nothing to see. “What?”
“You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.”
If he had said it in his usual cold voice, I would have walked out in affront. But he truly did sound tired, and I remembered the price he had paid for my selfishness.
The air stirred nearby again, soft, almost a touch. When he spoke, he was closer. “The future, however, is yours to make—even now. Tell me what you want.”
It was something I had never truly thought about, beyond vengeance. I wanted… all the usual things that any young woman wanted. Friends. Family. Happiness for those I loved.
And also…
I shivered, though the chamber was not cold. The very strangeness of this new thought made me suspicious. Was this some sign of Enefa’s influence?
Accept that and be done.
“I…” I closed my mouth. Swallowed. Tried again. “I want… something different for the world.” Ah, but the world would indeed be different after Nahadoth and Itempas were done with it. A pile of rubble, with humanity a red ruin underneath. “Something better.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” I clenched my fists, struggling to articulate what I felt, surprised by my own frustration. “Right now, everyone is… afraid.” Closer, yes. I kept at it. “We live at the gods’ mercy and shape our lives around your whims. Even when your quarrels don’t involve us, we die. What would we be like if… if you just… went away?”
“More would die,” said the Nightlord. “Those who worship us would be frightened by our absence. Some would decide it was the fault of others, while those who embrace the new order would resent any who keep the old ways. The wars would last centuries.”
I felt the truth of his words in the pit of my belly, and it left me queasy with horror. But then something touched me—hands, cool and light. He rubbed my shoulders, as if to soothe me.
“But eventually, the battles would end,” he said. “When a fire burns out, new things grow in its wake.”
I felt no lust or rage from him—probably because, for the moment, he felt none from me. He was not like Itempas, unable to accept change, bending or breaking everything around him to his will. Nahadoth bent himself to the will of others. For a moment the thought made me sad.
“Are you ever yourself?” I asked. “Truly yourself, not just the way others see you?”
The hands went still, then withdrew. “Enefa asked me that once.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No.” There was sorrow in his voice. It never faded, for him. How terrible to be a god of change and endure grief unending.
“When I am free,” he said, “I will choose who shapes me.”
“But…” I frowned. “That isn’t freedom.”
“At the dawn of reality I was myself. There was nothing and no one else to influence me—only the Maelstrom that had given birth to me, and it did not care. I tore open my flesh and spilled out the substance of what became your realm: matter and energy and my own cold, black blood. I devoured my mind and reveled in the novelty of pain.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. I swallowed hard and tried to will them away, but abruptly the hands returned, lifting my chin. Fingers stroked my eyes shut, brushing the tears away.
“When I am free I will choose,” he said again, whispering, very close. “You must do the same.”
“But I will never be—”
He kissed me silent. There was longing in that kiss, tangy and bittersweet. Was that my own longing, or his? Then I understood, finally: it didn’t matter.
But oh gods, oh goddess, it was so good. He tasted like cool dew. He made me thirsty. Just before I began to want more, he pulled back. I fought not to feel disappointment, for fear of what it would do to us both.
“Go and rest, Yeine,” he said. “Leave your mother’s schemes to play themselves out. You have your own trials to face.”
And then I was in my apartment, sitting on the floor in a square of moonlight. The walls were dark, but I could see easily because the moon, bright though just a sliver, was low in the sky. Well past midnight, probably only an hour or two before dawn. This was becoming a habit for me.
Sieh sat in the big chair near my bed. Seeing me, he uncurled from it and moved onto the floor beside me. In the moonlight his pupils were huge and round, like those of an anxious cat.
I said nothing, and after a moment he reached up and pulled me down so that my head rested in his lap. I closed my eyes, drawing comfort from the feel of his hand on my hair. After a time, he began to sing me a lullaby that I had heard in a dream. Relaxed and warm, I slept.
23. Selfishness
Tell me what you want, the Nightlord had said.
Something better for the world, I had replied.
But also…
In the morning I went to the Salon early, before the Consortium session began, hoping to find Ras Onchi. Before I could, I saw Wohi Ubm, the other High North noblewoman, arriving on the Salon’s wide, colonnaded steps.
“Oh,” she said after an awkward introduction and my inquiry. I knew then, the instant I saw the pitying look in her eyes. “You haven’t heard. Ras died in her sleep just these two nights past.” She sighed. “I still can’t believe it. But, well; she was old.”
I went back to Sky.
I walked through the corridors awhile, thinking about death.
Servants nodded as they passed me and I nodded back. Courtiers—my fellow highbloods—either ignored me or stared in open curiosity. Word must have spread that I was finished as an heir candidate, publicly defeated by Scimina. Not all of the stares were kind. I inclined my head to them anyhow. Their pettiness was not mine.
On one of the lower levels I surprised T’vril on a shadowed balcony, dangling a clipboard from one finger and watching a passing cloud. When I touched him, he started guiltily (fortunately catching the clipboard), which I took to mean he had been thinking about me.
“The ball will begin at dusk tomorrow night,” he said. I had moved to stand at the railing beside him, absorbing the view and the comfort of his presence in silence. “It will continue until dawn the next morning. That’s tradition, before a succession ceremony. Tomorrow is a new moon—a night that was once sacred to the followers of Nahadoth. So they celebrate through it.”
Petty of them, I thought. Or petty of Itempas.
“Immediately after the ball, the Stone of Earth will be sent through the palace’s central shaft to the ritual chamber, in the solarium spire.”