Then Sieh pulled back. I stared at him, but his eyes were still shut. Uttering a deep, satisfied sigh, he shifted to sit beside me again, lifting my arm and pulling it ’round himself proprietarily.
“What… was that?” I asked, when I had recovered somewhat.
“Me,” he said. Of course.
“What do I taste like?”
Sieh sighed, snuggling against my shoulder, his arms looping around my waist. “Soft, misty places full of sharp edges and hidden colors.”
I could not help it; I giggled. I felt light-headed, like I’d drunk too much of Relad’s liqueur. “That’s not a taste!”
“Of course it is. You tasted Naha, didn’t you? He tastes like falling to the bottom of the universe.”
That stopped my giggling, because it was true. We sat awhile longer, not speaking, not thinking—or at least I was not. It was, after the constant worry and scheming of the past two weeks, a moment of pure bliss. Perhaps that was why, when I did think again, it was of a different kind of peace.
“What will happen to me?” I asked. “After.”
He was a clever child; he knew what I meant at once.
“You’ll drift for a time,” he said very softly. “Souls do that when they’re first freed from flesh. Eventually they gravitate toward places that resonate with certain aspects of their nature. Places that are safe for souls lacking flesh, unlike this realm.”
“The heavens and the hells.”
He shrugged, just a little, so that it would not jostle either of us. “That’s what mortals call them.”
“Is that not what they are?”
“I don’t know. What does it matter?” I frowned, and he sighed. “I’m not mortal, Yeine, I don’t obsess over this the way your kind does. They’re just… places for life to rest, when it’s not being alive. There are many of them because Enefa knew your kind needed variety.” He sighed. “That was why Enefa’s soul kept drifting, we think. All the places she made, the ones that resonated best with her, vanished when she died.”
I shivered, and thought I felt something else shiver deep within me.
“Will… will both our souls find a place, she and I? Or will hers drift again?”
“I don’t know.” The pain in his voice was quiet, inflectionless. Another person would have missed it.
I rubbed his back gently. “If I can,” I said, “if I have any control over it… I’ll take her with me.”
“She may not want to go. The only places left now are the ones her brothers created. Those don’t fit her much.”
“Then she can stay inside me, if that’s better. I’m no heaven, but we’ve put up with each other this long. We’re going to have to talk, though. All these visions and dreams must go. They’re really quite distracting.”
Sieh lifted his head and stared at me. I kept a straight face for as long as I could, which was not long. Of course he managed it longer than me. He had centuries more of practice.
We dissolved into laughter there on the floor, wrapped around each other, and thus ended the last day of my life.
I went back to my apartment alone, about an hour before dusk. When I got inside, Naha was still sitting in the big chair as if he hadn’t moved all day, although there was an empty food tray on the nightstand. He started as I walked in; I suspected he had been napping, or at least daydreaming.
“Go where you like for the remainder of the day,” I told him. “I’d like to be alone awhile.”
He did not argue as he got to his feet. There was a dress on my bed—a long, formal gown, beautifully made, except that it was a drab gray in color. There were matching shoes and accessories sitting beside it.
“Servants brought those,” Nahadoth said. “You’re to wear them tonight.”
“Thank you.”
He moved past me on his way out, not looking at me. At the room’s threshold I heard him stop for a moment. Perhaps he turned back. Perhaps he opened his mouth to speak. But he said nothing, and a moment later I heard the apartment’s door open and close.
I bathed and got dressed, then sat down in front of the windows to wait.
26. The Ball
I see my land below me.
On the mountain pass, the watchtowers have already been overrun. The Darren troops there are dead. They fought hard, using the pass’s narrowness to make up for their small numbers, but in the end there were simply too many of the enemy. The Darre lasted long enough to light the signal fires and send a message: The enemy is coming.
The forests are Darr’s second line of defense. Many an enemy has faltered here, poisoned by snakes or weakened by disease or worn down by the endless, strangling vines. My people have always taken advantage of this, seeding the forests with wisewomen who know how to hide and strike and fade back into the brush, like leopards.
But times have changed, and this time the enemy has brought a special weapon—a scrivener. Once this would have been unheard of in High North; magic is an Amn thing, deemed cowardly by most barbarian standards. Even for those nations willing to try cowardice, the Amn keep their scriveners too expensive to hire. But of course, that is not a problem for an Arameri.
(Stupid, stupid me. I have money. I could have sent a scrivener to fight on Darr’s behalf. But in the end, I am still a barbarian; I did not think of it, and now it is too late.)
The scrivener, some contemporary of Viraine’s, draws sigils on paper and pastes these to a few trees, and steps back. A column of white-hot fire sears through the forest in an unnaturally straight line. It goes for miles and miles, all the way to the stone walls of Arrebaia, which it smashes against. Clever; if they had set the whole forest afire, it would have burned for months. This is just a narrow path. When it has burned enough, the scrivener sets down more godwords, and the fire goes out. Aside from crumbling, charred trees and the unrecognizable corpses of animals, the way is clear. The enemy can reach Arrebaia within a day.
There is a stir at the edge of the forest. Someone stumbles out, blinded and half-choked by smoke. A wisewoman? No, this is a man—a boy, not even old enough to sire daughters. What is he doing out here? We have never allowed boys to fight. And the knowledge comes: my people are desperate. Even children must fight, if we are to survive.
The enemy soldiers swarm over him like ants. They do not kill him. They chain him in a supply cart and carry him along as they march. When they reach Arrebaia, they mean to put him on display to strike at our hearts—oh, and how it will. Our men have always been our treasures. They may slit his throat on the steps of Sar-enna-nem, just to rub salt in the wound.
I should have sent a scrivener.
The ballroom of Sky: a vast, high-ceilinged chamber whose walls were even more vividly mother-of-pearl than the rest of the palace, and tinted a faint rose hue. After the unrelenting white of the rest of Sky, that touch of color seemed almost shockingly vivid. Chandeliers like the starry sky turned overhead; music drifted through the air, complicated Amn stuff, from the sextet of musicians on a nearby dais. The floors, to my surprise, were something other than Skystuff: clear and golden, like dark polished amber. It could not possibly have been amber since there were no seams, and that would have required a chunk of amber the size of a small hill. But that was what it looked like.
And people, filling this glorious space. I was stunned to see the enormous number present, all of them granted special dispensation to stay in Sky for this one night. There must have been a thousand people in the room: preening highbloods and the most officious of the Salon’s officials, kings and queens of lands far more important than mine, famous artists and courtesans, everybody who was anybody. I had spent the past few days wholly absorbed in my own troubles, so I had not noticed carriages coming and going all day, as they must have been to bring so many to Sky. My own fault.