“Geder. You’re shouting. It will wake the baby.”
Laughter pushed its way up out of his chest, rich and hot and mirthless. He sat on the divan, his head in his hands.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I didn’t mean to.”
“I understand,” Sabiha said, sitting across from him. Her back was straight as a tutor delivering a lecture. Her eyes were wary. Well, why shouldn’t they be? He hadn’t explained himself so much as popped his soul open and spilled it on the floor. He chuckled ruefully and shook his head.
“It should have been Jorey,” he said. Sabiha stiffened. When she spoke, her voice was careful.
“What should have been Jorey, my lord?”
“He should have been regent. Not me. And more than that. The goddess should have chosen him. He’s smart and strong and people like him. He’s kind. No one laughs at Jorey. And he has you—”
Outside the window, the garden was dead from the cold and dark. Brown sticks and bare wood that would flower again when spring came. That was the promise. It was hard to see the promise of green in all the death.
“You see,” Geder said, “I can’t talk to Aster, because I’m supposed to be strong for him. I can’t talk to my father, because he thinks I’m doing well. And Basrahip… I don’t know what he’d say. What he’d do. I know that everything is happening as it should. The rise of the temples. The voice of the goddess driving back the Timzinae and their plots. The world’s becoming pure again. Maybe not even again. Maybe for the first time. I know that’s all true. And so when I feel…” He lifted his hands, words failing.
“You’re… upset,” Sabiha said. There was a buzz in her voice. A roughness that he could hear her struggling against. “You ordered and oversaw the deaths of hundreds of captive children. And you’ve come to me for comfort because you’re upset?”
“Yes,” Geder said, gratified that she’d understood him despite his rambling. “I was chosen, you know? I am the light that brought her back to the world after her exile. That’s me. I’m making the world better, and everyone knows. I’m the most important man, maybe in the whole world. I know that what we’re doing is right. I know that I’ve helped, that I keep helping. How can anyone do this much good, help the world into light as much as I have, and feel… like this?”
“I… I don’t know what to tell you,” Sabiha said.
“That’s all right,” Geder said softly. “It helps just to say it to a friend. I’d have bothered Jorey with it if he were here. Maybe I will when he comes back. Do you think he’d mind?”
“I can’t imagine,” Sabiha said. She shook her head slightly. He didn’t think she knew she’d done it. What he must look like to her. The greatest man in the empire, the power of life and death in his hand, weeping on her couch over nothing. Over a feeling he couldn’t even put words to. He tugged at his sleeve and dried his eyes.
“To be so sad,” he said, “when there’s no reason for it. I’m only afraid that… Ah, Sabiha. I can tell you this because I know you won’t laugh. I think there might be something wrong with me.”
Cithrin
Cithrin wasn’t there when Inys killed the guardsman. Her understanding of it grew first from the mixture of rumor and report, gossip and speculation that followed the unexpected violence the way thunder follows lightning.
It happened the day after Inys’s return from the south. Cithrin had meant to have one of her usual conversations with the dragon, but freezing rain and a set of queries from the scribes had distracted her. Inys had taken shelter in a covered amphitheater, and for reasons no one knew and likely no one ever would, one of King Tracian’s guardsmen took exception to the choice. To call it a confrontation would have been generous. The guard had approached the dragon, calling Inys by name, and told him to find another resting place. Inys had gutted the man, eaten the corpse, and fallen back asleep.
All those facts were agreed upon. It was the interpretations of them that spread out like feathers on a wing. The guardsman had been drunk or embarrassed after having been dressed down by his commander or goaded into rash action by his friends. The dragon had warned him or it hadn’t. King Tracian was enraged and preparing to act against Inys or he approved of the dragon’s actions. There was even the suggestion—taken more seriously than it deserved—that the guardsman had been the secret lover of a noble lady at court, and the dragon had slaughtered him as a sign of favor to the cuckolded husband.
Only a few seemed alarmed that the huge, intelligent predator that had taken residence in Carse had begun killing. It was a dragon, glorious and powerful. The populace at large seemed willing to assume that whatever it had done was justified by the mere fact that a dragon had done it.
Komme Medean and King Tracian were in the minority that did care what had happened and why. Even then, Cithrin had the sense that it was more a matter of tactics in the war than an issue of justice. Law for dragons, as for kings, was less about abiding by rules than the making of them. It was a distinction she hadn’t considered before she’d starting making laws of her own. That she kept such company—that they were in some ways her peers—left her feeling uneasy, but not so much that she resorted to the bottle. Or, anyway, not more than usual.
Inys arrived at his usual time. Rain and clouds had blown away, leaving a clean blue sky from which the dragon descended. Cithrin sat in the courtyard of the holding company, as she had before, a brazier glowing beside her and a dead lamb cooling on the winter-killed grass. She felt only a little more trepidation than usual. Inys folded his tattered wings and swallowed the animal. His breath was hot and acrid, the fumes stinging her eyes.
“So,” the dragon said. “I have come again. Ask me what you will.”
Cithrin pretended to consult her notebooks. All their conversations were there. The nature of the spiders, the history of the war, the strategies by which Inys suspected the enemy might be overcome. Many times their conversations veered widely from Cithrin’s questions. She had pages of description of the small politics of the dragons’ court, the composers Inys thought of note, the styles and fashions and vast projects that had been the great concern when humanity had still been tame.
She cleared her throat. “There was a man you killed. A guardsman of the king?”
“That,” Inys said, and his deep, symphonic voice seemed thoughtful. “Yes, I’ve been thinking of that since it happened.”
“You have?”
“You sound surprised. Yes, I have thought on it. It was badly done, and I should not have. And so I have been thinking on why I chose to do as I did. What it was that fouled my spirit and led me to act improperly. I think it was the loss of the Stormcrow.”
“You mean Marcus?”
“The burden of the empty world,” Inys said, canting a huge black eye toward the sun. “Every day I smell the air and taste the water, hoping for some sign of another, but there is nothing. I am alone. Profoundly. Completely.”
“Except for us,” Cithrin said, but it was like she hadn’t spoken.
“To be so set apart. So isolated. It was one of the greatest punishments that could be leveled against us, and it is the one to which I’ve consigned myself. The feelings I have can find no outlet, and so I begin to bond with them. And the Stormcrow most of all. It’s sentiment. Nothing but sentiment. But I feel his absence, and it stands in for all the other absences.”
“Them?”
“What are you asking me?”
“You begin to bond with them? Who do you mean, ‘them’?”