The Broken Kingdoms

“You like everything I do, Papa.” But my thoughts are turning, fascinated with the idea. “Does that mean I can do something besides make paintings? Like…” My child’s imagination cannot fathom the possibilities of magic. There are no godlings in the world yet to show us what it can do. “Like turn a bunny into a bee? Or make flowers bloom?”

He is silent for a moment, and I sense his reluctance. He has never lied to me, not even when I ask questions he would rather not answer.

“I don’t know,” he says at last. “Sometimes when I sing, if I believe something will happen, it happens. And sometimes”—he hesitates, abruptly looks uneasy—“sometimes when I don’t sing, it happens, too. The song is the door, but belief is the key that unlocks it.”

I touch his face, trying to understand his discomfort. “What is it, Papa?”

He catches my hand and kisses it and smiles, but I have already felt it. He is, just a little, afraid. “Well, just think. What if you took a man and believed he was a rock? Something alive that you believed was something dead?”

I try to think about this, but I am too young. It sounds fun to me. He sighs and smiles and pats my hands.

I put out my hands, closed my eyes, and believed a world into being.

My hands ached to feel, and so I imagined thick, loamy soil. My feet ached to stand, so I put that soil under them, solid, hollow sounding when I stomped because of the air and life teeming within it. My lungs ached to breathe, and I inhaled air that was slightly cool, moist with dew. I breathed out and the warmth of my breath made vapor in the air. I could not see that, but I believed it was there. Just as I knew there would be light around me, as my mother had once described—misty morning light, from a pale, early-spring sun.

The darkness lingered, resistant.

Sun. Sun. SUN.

Warmth danced along my skin, driving away the aching cold. I sat back on my knees, drawing deep breaths and smelling fresh-turned dirt and feeling the glaze of light against my closed eyelids. I needed to hear something, so I decided there would be wind. A light morning breeze, gradually dispelling the fog. When the breeze came, stirring my hair to tickle my neck, I did not let myself feel amazement. That would lead to doubt. I could feel the fragility of the place around me, its inclination to be something else. Cold, endless dark—

“No,” I said quickly, and was pleased to hear my own voice. There was air now to carry it. “Warm spring air. A garden ready to be planted. Stay here.”

The world stayed. So I opened my eyes.

I could see.

And strangely, the scene around me was familiar. I sat in the terrace garden of my home village, where I had almost always been completely blind. Not much magic in Nimaro. The only time I had ever seen the village had been—

—the day my father died. The day of the Gray Lady’s birth. I had seen everything then.

I had re-created that day now, falling back on the memory of that single, magic-infused glimpse. Silvery midmorning mists shivered in the air. I remembered that the big, boxy shape on the other side of the garden was a house, though I could not tell if it was mine or the neighbors’ without smelling it or counting my steps. Prickly things near my feet danced in the breeze: grass. I had rebuilt everything.

Except people. I got to my feet, listening. In all my years in the village, I had never heard it so silent at this time of day. There were always small noises—birds, backyard goats, somebody’s newborn fussing. Here there was nothing.

Like ripples in water, I felt the space around me tremble.

“It’s home,” I whispered. “It’s home. Just early; nobody else is up yet. It’s real.”

The ripples ceased.

Real, yet terribly fragile. I was still in the dark place. All I’d done was create a sphere of sanity around myself, like a bubble. I would have to continue affirming its reality, believing in it, to keep it intact.

Trembling, I dropped to my knees again, pushing my fingers into the moist soil. Yes, that was better. Concentrate on the small things, the mundanities. I lifted a handful of earth to my nose, inhaled. My eyes could not be trusted, but the rest—yes. That I could do.

But I was tired suddenly, more tired than I should have been. As I squeezed the clod of dirt, I found my head nodding, my eyelids heavy. I hadn’t slept much, but that did not account for this. I was in a strange place, scared out of my mind. Fear alone should have had me too tense to sleep.

Before I could fathom this new mystery, there was another of those curious rippling shivers—and then agony sizzled behind my eyes. I cried out, arching backward and clapping dirty hands to my face, my concentration broken. Even as I screamed, I felt the false Nimaro bubble shatter around me, spinning away into nothingness as the sickening, empty dark rushed in.