I folded my arm around his shoulders and bent down to kiss his forehead. “I do know, actually.” Because I did.
So I straightened, took his hand, and pulled him up. He came without resistance, letting me lead him to the bed, where I pulled him to lie down. When we’d settled, I snuggled into the crook of his arm, resting my head on his chest as I’d so often done with Madding. They felt and smelled very different—sea salt to dry spice, cool to hot, gentle to fierce—but their heartbeats were the same. Steady, slow, reassuring. Could a son inherit such a thing from a father? Apparently so.
I could always die tomorrow, I supposed.
“The Gods’ Vengeance” (watercolor)
I THINK MADDING ALWAYS SUSPECTED THE TRUTH.
Throughout my childhood, I had a strange memory of being someplace warm and wet and enclosed. I felt safe, yet I was lonely. I could hear voices, yet no one spoke to me. Hands would touch me now and again, and I would touch back, but that was all.
Many years later, I told this story to Madding, and he looked at me oddly. When I asked him what was wrong, he didn’t answer at first. I pressed him, and finally he said, “It sounds like you were in the womb.”
I remember laughing. “That’s crazy,” I said. “I was thinking. Listening. Aware.”
He shrugged. “So was I, before I was born. I guess that happens sometimes with mortals, too.”
But it isn’t supposed to, he did not say.
“What do you intend to do?” Shiny asked me the next morning.
He stood at the window across the room, glowing softly with the dawn. I sat up blearily, stifling a yawn.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I wasn’t ready to die. That was easier to admit than I’d thought. I had killed Madding; to live with that knowledge would be—had been—almost unbearable. But killing myself, or letting Shiny or the Arameri do it, felt worse somehow. In the wake of Madding’s death, it felt like throwing away a gift.
“If I live, the Arameri will use me for the gods know what. I won’t have more deaths on my conscience.” I sighed, rubbing my face with my hands. “You were right to want to kill us. You should’ve gotten us all, though. That was the only mistake the Three made.”
“No,” said Shiny. “We were wrong. Something had to be done about the demons—that I will not deny—but we should have sought a different solution. They were our children.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Stared, though he was now little more than a pale relief against the dimmer sheen of the window. I wasn’t really sure what to say. So I changed the subject. “What do you plan to do?”
He stood as he had on so many mornings at my house, facing the rising sun with back straight and head high and arms folded. Now, however, he let out a soft sigh and turned to me, leaning against the window with an almost palpable weariness. “I have no idea. Nothing in me is whole or right, Oree. I am the coward you named me, and the fool you did not. Weak.” He lifted his hand as if he’d never seen it before and made a fist. It didn’t look weak to me, but I imagined how a god might see it. Bones that could be broken. Skin that would not instantly heal if torn. Tendons and veins as fine as gossamer.
And underneath this fragile flesh, a mind like a broken teacup, badly mended.
“It’s solitude, then?” I asked. “That’s your true antithesis, not darkness. You didn’t realize?”
“No. Not until that day.” He lowered his hand. “But I should have realized. Loneliness is a darkness of the soul.”
I got up and went over to him, stumbling once over the rugs. Finding his arm, I reached up to touch his face. He allowed this, even turning his cheek against my hand. I think he was feeling alone in that very moment.
“I’m glad they put me here in this mortal form,” he said. “I can do no harm when I go mad. When I was trapped in that realm of darkness, I thought I would. Having you there afterward… Without that, I would have broken again.”
I frowned, thinking of the way he’d clung to me that day, barely able to let go even for a moment. No human being could bear solitude forever—I would’ve gone mad in the Empty, too—but Shiny’s need was not a human thing.
I thought of something my mother had said to me, many times during my childhood. “It’s all right to need help,” I said. “You’re mortal now. Mortals can’t do everything alone.”
“I wasn’t mortal then,” he said, and I could tell he was thinking of the day he’d killed Enefa.