“Where is she? Is she all right?”
“She’s - ”
“Get out of here, Paulo!” The Prince moved quickly, yanked on Paulo’s arm, and shoved him away from me. “One instant more and you’ll reveal your passage to our guests.”
Pounding hooves from across the valley announced rapidly approaching riders. Ten or more.
Raising a hand in farewell, Paulo passed through the portal again - little more than “thinking himself through” the protrusion of rock in the heart of the ruin. I’d forgotten to ask him about Roxanne.
My father did not speak to me as we waited for the riders to arrive. Knowing what he had seen inside me - and knowing what was going to happen a day from now - I didn’t know what to say to him, either. Certainly nothing I said was going to change his mind about what he had to do. So I just sat in the corner and waited, wondering who was coming, wondering whether he would give Paulo the time he needed to save the Singlars, wondering whether he would use his sword or his knife or some enchantment to kill me.
The “guests,” Radele and his father Men’Thor and some of their men, were all for executing me right there in the ruins, and from the way the Prince talked, I thought he was going to do it. But then he told them that he was planning to make a public show of naming a successor and executing me, so that the Dar’Nethi would see clearly what was happening. So, they made me a prisoner instead, putting me in restraints that would prevent me using power.
When I thought of all those I’d sealed into slave collars, I couldn’t complain about their bindings. The spell-ridden silver manacles that made it feel as if bars of red-hot iron had replaced the bones in my arms and back weren’t half so bad as the slave collars. But I thought it strange that my father would do such a thing to me, when I’d freed him from his collar in Zhev’Na. That irony must have been on his mind as well, for when I was tied to the horse, and he came up to put his own seal on the magic, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. And at the very moment his enchantment ripped through my mind and body like a flaming ax, I would have sworn I heard him whisper, “Forgive me.” But I was screaming, and after that I couldn’t think of anything for a long time.
Over the next day and night I kept telling myself I was a fool even to think about my father any more, much less believe he had some plan that might keep me alive. Yet those two words kept popping into my head every time I saw him. He brought one group of bloodthirsty, superior Dar’Nethi after another to gawk at me, and he’d tell them how corrupt I was, and how I’d tried to murder my mother. But then he’d call up D’Arnath’s magic again, the white fire that made me want to crawl out of my own skin, and I couldn’t put two sensible thoughts together.
The interesting thing was that he never told the damnable gawkers the real evils he’d seen in me, only the things they already believed. And he would always finish with the same speech. “When the time comes for his execution, he’ll call on the Lords to come for him. It doesn’t matter what he claims now, but when the moment arrives, he’ll do it. That will demonstrate what he really is. If, at that moment, I were to reach out my hand and offer him freedom from his depravity, what would you wager that he’d take it?”
He would never answer his own question, and just about the time I would begin to think that perhaps he was trying to tell me something, he’d slam me with the fire again. After ten times or twenty on that endless day, I believed that the only thing he was telling me was that I was going to be dead sooner rather than later. And I didn’t care in the least.
But, of course, when the time came, after Radele and Men’Thor were dead, and I was chained to a stone, trying to make sure my skull hadn’t actually cracked in two as it felt, I remembered what he’d said all those times. If he wanted me to summon the Lords, using the oculus would be the way to do it. I could tell the Three I was desperate, that I was ready to surrender, that I would do anything for power and to escape my father’s sword. It wouldn’t be hard to be convincing. But I dared not take too long to decide; the Lords would feel my doubts and know it was a trick.
When I could move my head without passing out, I looked at the Prince for some signal that would tell me what he wanted me to do, but he showed no interest. I warned him, and he turned his back on me. But behind him… behind him was my mother, and if he’d brought my mother, then he cared very much about what was going to happen. I had to trust him.
So I reached into the orb and called on the Lords to come and save me. They came. In the instant they joined with me, I felt as if I were back in Zhev’Na, bursting with all those things I’d hidden and ignored and buried in myself for so long: the smell of the blood I had taken, the taste of the pain I had inflicted, the intoxication of causing horror to feed my pleasure and my power. Though the remembrance disgusted me, though I loathed what I had been and had tried everything I could to leave it behind, I hungered for more. My hands quivered with the desire for power, and my soul craved the emptiness the Lords had given me, the freedom from confusion and pain and fear. I’d had more than my fill of pain and confusion.
No more of it! I flicked away my father’s sword and ignored his accusations. Why should I die? I was what I was. Better to live with power… The Lords were congratulating me, welcoming me back, drowning me in their lusts and hatreds, and my four years of denial were erased in the first instant of my listening. When my father threw the mask in front of me, I remembered nothing of duplicity, nothing of an imagined plan, nothing of deception. My body begged for the touch of gold, for the vile ecstasy as the mask embedded itself in my flesh. My feeble human eyes burned for their diamonds that would see everything and nothing.
Yet even as my hand raised the mask to my face, my mother took up the tether that bound me to her. She called my name as if to remind me who I was. “I know your true heart! You do not belong with the Lords!”
I almost spat it back at her. If not in Zhev’Na, then where do I belong?
But no sooner had I voiced the question, than I realized that, for the first time in my life, I knew the answer. I know your true heart… Everything my parents had tried to tell me suddenly made sense. Everything I had learned and felt in the past months settled into place. I belonged in the Bounded, where my broken people were just learning how to live. I was one of them, broken, too. And if this was so, then perhaps, like them, I was not evil.
For that one astonishing moment, this novel possibility quieted my pain and hunger and the enticements of the Lords. Thus, when my father whispered, “Come into me,” I heard his voice. When he said, “My dear and beloved son,” I believed him. And though it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, when he reached out his hand, I took it.
Only after the pain of the fire began to recede did the Lords begin to bargain. They writhed and squirmed within our shared mind like snakes in a kettle, but I drew up power as they themselves had taught me and held them still.
“Young Lord,” wheedled Notole. “I have nurtured you in the ways of power. All this” - I could envision her hand waving across the black velvet landscape revealed by the waning flames - “is but more food for your talent. You will be the greatest of the Lords, feared and worshiped in every world, able to take any soul at your whim, to eat or use as you desire. You will stand with one foot in one world, and one foot in another, and laugh while Parven and Ziddari grovel for your favors. Release me, and I will draw you back to Zhev’Na to take your rightful place.”