She trailed off, breathless, chest heaving.
“Maybe I cared about the wrong thing,” Kaden replied quietly. “I keep thinking about what we’ve seen-the Annurians slaughtering the monks back in Ashk’lan; the Ishien in the Dead Heart; Adiv and your mother; the conspirators that helped to overthrow the empire; Adare, who murdered Valyn, then lied to me about it.… Why would we want to preserve that? Why would we want to save any of it?”
“I don’t,” Triste said. “I’m not trying to save the goddess or your ’Kent-kissing empire. It can all burn. I’ll set fire to it myself.…”
“We can do that,” Kaden said.
Meshkent roared in the chasm of his mind. Kaden stared down into the bottomless emptiness of the vaniate. It would be so easy to fall. He gestured from Triste toward the real cliff’s edge, the verge of Rassambur’s sheer-walled mesa, just a dozen paces away. “We can end it right here.”
When Triste finally replied, her voice was small, lost. “I don’t want to die.”
Kaden stared at her. She had come so close so many times already. “Why not?”
She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know.”
“There is only more of this, Triste. More hiding, more hunger, more torture.”
“We might get out. We might escape.”
Kaden shook his head wearily. “It doesn’t matter. Rassambur isn’t the prison.” He tapped a finger against the side of his skull. “This is.”
Her lips twisted back. She looked as though she were getting ready to leap on him, to rip out his throat with her teeth, only she didn’t move. The sound, when it came, wasn’t a scream, but a hopeless sob. He watched her, watched her shoulders heave, studied her perfect, mutilated body as it convulsed with grief.
“This is what I mean,” he said quietly.
She didn’t reply. Just shielded her face with her hands.
“How can this,” he gestured to her with one hand, “be right? Long Fist told me, before we came after you, that this is what we are for, but how can that be true?” He cocked his head to the side. “You are like a fish pulled from the water. This struggle, this suffering-you can’t breathe it. None of us can.”
Slowly Triste raised her head. Tangles of black hair fell across her face, but her eyes were fixed on him, steady, even as that unnamed grief continued to wrack her body. Meshkent shifted inside Kaden’s mind as though he felt the girl’s suffering, as though he were feeding off it.
“There is more,” Triste said quietly, her voice like something torn apart. The tears still coursed down her cheeks, but she made no move to scrub them away.
“More what?”
“More to…” She gestured helplessly to him, to herself. “To this. To us. To life.”
“That’s the cruelest part of it,” Kaden replied. “That belief. That hope. It’s worse than all Meshkent’s agonies. That’s what keeps us here; it’s what makes us accept our suffering. The young gods aren’t just the children of Ciena and Meshkent; they are their generals, the keepers of their jails.” He shook his head at the memory of Long Fist sitting across the fire from him in a hide tent in the Waist. “He said we were instruments. We are slaves.”
He rose slowly to his feet, muscles and bones protesting. More of Meshkent’s work there. He scrutinized that pain a moment, then set it aside. They lived in a world twisted by the god, but now the god himself was trapped. Kaden lifted Triste’s belt knife from the stone. The blade was barely three inches long, and somewhat dull, but it would do. Bedisa wove the souls of living beings so weakly into their bodies.…
He placed the point against the inside of his arm, dragged the notched steel over his skin. Meshkent hissed and twisted. Kaden turned away from the god, studying the dark blood welling up behind the blade. Pain came with the blood, bright and hot.
That pain is there to stop me, he thought. That, and the hope, and the fear.
All his human feelings, just a fence, a wall built by the gods to keep their precious chattel penned.
Such a meager fence.
Meshkent was raging now, bellowing, his demands all tangled up with his defiance. It didn’t matter, the god was on the far side of the ridge, caught deep in a chasm he could not escape. If Kaden dropped into the vaniate once more there would be no climbing free, not this time. Kiel had been warning him about that for months, but Kiel was wrong. How could the Csestriim understand how badly humanity was broken, how desperately in need of salvation?
The walking away. That was what the monks called that passage, the departure from the world of human need into a more perfect world of sky, and snow, and stone. They were wrong, too. The walking was secondary, unnecessary. All that was necessary was the letting go. Kaden considered the shape of his mind, that narrow knife of stone stretching on endlessly into the clouds. He felt his grip slipping. He smiled, and let go.
The vaniate closed around him, endless and unsullied. It seemed impossible, inside that emptiness, that he had ever considered the haphazard construction of flesh and blood his self. He looked at the knife, at where the blade’s point opened the skin of his arm. He’d fought so hard to preserve his carcass, and for what? The Shin had thrown open the door to his cage, and he had slammed it closed again, had hung against the bars, refusing to be set free.
It’s so easy. Easier than breathing.
Meshkent roared. The sound meant nothing.
Then Triste closed her hand over his wrist, pulling the knife away.
“What are you doing?”
Kaden turned to her, confused. “I’m leaving.…” He gestured to the slash along his skin.
“You can’t,” she snarled, face a rictus of fear and confusion.
“Triste,” he said quietly. “You don’t understand. Everything you’re feeling now-you don’t have to feel it. You’re not supposed to. You’re a sick woman insisting on the beauty of your sickness.” He smiled at her. “We can be well. Whole.”
He tried to go back to his work, but she had him by the wrist. Her fingers felt like steel.
“Let me go, Triste.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“All of this, everything wrong in my fucking life, happened because of you, and you are not leaving me here alone.”
He smiled. “I won’t leave you. We can both be done with this.” With his free hand, he ran a finger along her neck. Her skin was smooth as cream. Something stirred inside him, some spasm of the beast he had been. He crushed it. “You’re trapped,” he said, tracing a line down to her heart. He could feel it slamming against her chest. “You don’t have to be.”
“Stop saying that.”
Kaden shook his head. Blood slicked his arm, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to cut deeper, further.
“Let me go, Triste.”
“I already told you-you are not fucking leaving me, you bastard.”
She pivoted as she spoke, twisted his wrist so viciously that the knife fell free and then, he, too, was falling.
So strong, he thought vaguely. Even on that first night in Ashk’lan, when she was waiting for him naked in his bed, Triste had always been so strong.
He landed hard, the stone bruising his hip, then jarring his skull as it struck. For a few heartbeats, he reeled, dizzy, confused, the vaniate swaying around him. Pain blazed outside the trance, in his arm, in the back of his head, but he was free of the pain, if only …