The Kingdom of Gods

She stiffened, staring at me. “What?”

“I told you already.” Her skin felt good beneath my hands. I bent and kissed her smooth shoulder right on the divot of bone and thought of biting her there as I rode her like a cat. Would she yowl for me? “Childhood cannot survive some things. Sex is fine, between friends.” I smiled on her skin. “Done without consequences. But consequences — like making a child — change everything.”

“Oh, gods. It’s your antithesis.”

I hated that word. Scriveners had come up with it. The word was like them, cold and passionless and precise and overly logical, capturing nothing of what truly made us what we were. “It corrupts my nature, yes. Many things can harm me — I’m just a godling, alas, not a god — but that one is the most sure.” I licked at her neck again, really trying this time, though not holding any great hope of success. Nahadoth had never managed to teach me how to seduce with any real degree of mastery.

“Sieh!” She pushed at me, and when I lifted my head, I saw the horror in her eyes. “I didn’t use any … preventative … when we were together last night. I.…” She looked away, trembling. I regretted my teasing when I realized she was genuinely upset, but it made me happy that she cared so much.

I laughed gently, relenting. “It’s all right. My mother Enefa realized the danger long ago. She changed me. Do you understand? No children.”

She did not look reassured—did not feel reassured, her anguish tainting the very air around us. I have siblings who cannot endure mortal emotions. They are sad creatures who haunt the gods’ realm, devouring tales of mortal life and pretending they are not jealous of the rest of us. Shahar would have killed half of them by now.

“Enefa is dead,” she said.

That was more than enough to sober me. “Yes. But not all her works died with her, Shahar, or neither you nor I would be standing here.”

She looked up at me, tense and afraid. “You’re different now, Sieh. You’re not really a god anymore, and mortals —” Her face softened so beautifully. It made me smile, despite the conversation. “Mortals grow up. Sieh, I want you to be sure there’s no child. Can you check somehow? Because … because …” She lowered her eyes, and suddenly it was shame that she felt, sour and bitter on the back of my tongue. Shame, and fear.

“What?”

She drew a deep breath. “I didn’t try to prevent a baby. In fact” — her jaw flexed — “I’ve been to the scriveners. They used a script.” She blushed, but forged ahead. “To make it easier, more likely, for three or four days. And once I, with you, I, I’m supposed to go to them. They have other scripts that they say … Even with a god, fertility magic works the same way.”

Her stammering embarrassment confused me; I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to say at first. And then, like a comet’s icy plume, understanding slashed through me.

“You wanted a child?”

She laughed once, bitter. When she turned back to the window, her eyes were hard and older than they should be, and so perfectly Arameri. Then I knew.

“Your mother.” Shahar nodded, still not meeting my eyes. “‘If we cannot own gods, then perhaps we can become gods,’ she said. The demons of old had great magic despite their mortality. Or, at the very least, we can gain the greatest demon magic: the power to kill gods.”

I stared at her, feeling sick, because I should have known. The Arameri had been trying to get their hands on a demon for decades. I should have seen it in Remath’s quest for a godly lover; I should have realized why she’d been so pleased to have me in Sky. Why she’d tried to give me her daughter.

I shrugged off the sheet and walked away from Shahar, manifesting clothing about myself. Black this time, like my fur when I was a cat. Like my father’s wrath.

“Sieh?” Shahar blurted the words, cursed, dropped the sheet and grabbed for a robe. “Sieh, what are you —”

I stopped and turned back to her, and she froze at the look in my eyes. Or perhaps at my eyes themselves, because I could not become this angry, even in my weakened half-mortal state, without a little of the cat showing.

I would save the claws, however, for Remath.

“Why did you tell me?” I asked, and she went pale. “Did you wait until now for a reason?” Some of my magic had come back to me. I touched the world, found Remath within it. Her audience chamber, surrounded by courtiers and petitioners. “Were you hoping I would kill her in front of witnesses so the other highbloods would think you weren’t involved? Was that what you told yourself so it wouldn’t feel like matricide?”