The Kingdom of Gods Read online

  “You have to do what we say!” said the girl, stamping her foot. “You will help us!”

  I wiped away a tear and sat back against the stair wall, exhaling as the laughter finally passed. “You will find your own damn way home,” I said, still grinning, “and count yourselves lucky that you’re too cute to kill.”

  That shut them up, and they stared at me with more curiosity than fear. Then the boy, who I had already begun to suspect was the smarter if not the stronger of the two, narrowed his eyes at me.

  “You don’t have a mark,” he said, pointing at my forehead. The girl started in surprise.

  “Why, no, I don’t,” I said. “Imagine that.”

  “You aren’t … Arameri, then?” His face screwed up, as if he had found himself speaking gibberish. You curtain apple jump, then?

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Are you a new servant?” asked the girl, seduced out of anger by her own curiosity. “Just come to Sky from outside?”

  I put my arms behind my head, stretching my feet out in front of me. “I’m not a servant at all, actually.”

  “You’re dressed like one,” said the boy, pointing.

  I looked at myself in surprise and realized I had manifested the same clothing I’d usually worn during my imprisonment: loose pants (good for running), shoes with a hole in one toe, and a plain loose shirt, all white. Ah, yes — in Sky, servants wore white every day. Highbloods wore it only for special occasions, preferring brighter colors otherwise. The two in front of me had both been dressed in deep emerald green, which matched the girl’s eyes and complemented the boy’s nicely.

  “Oh,” I said, annoyed that I’d inadvertently fallen prey to old habit. “Well, I’m not a servant. Take my word for it.”

  “You aren’t with the Teman delegation,” said the boy, speaking slowly while his eyes belied his racing thoughts. “Datennay was the only child with them, and they left three days ago, anyway. And they dressed like Temans. Metal bits and twisty hair.”

  “I’m not Teman, either.” I grinned again, waiting to see how they handled that one.

  “You look Teman,” said the girl, clearly not believing me. She pointed at my head. “Your hair barely has any curl, and your eyes are sharp and flat at the corners, and your skin is browner than Deka’s.”

  I glanced at the boy, who looked uncomfortable at this comparison. I could see why. Though he bore a fullblood’s circle on his brow, it was painfully obvious that someone had brought non-Amn delicacies to the banquet of his recent heritage. If I hadn’t known it was impossible, I would have guessed he was some variety of High Norther. He had Amn features, with their long-stretched facial lines, but his hair was blacker than Nahadoth’s void and as straight as windblown grass, and he was indeed a rich all-over brown that had nothing to do with a suntan. I had seen infants like him drowned or head-staved or tossed off the Pier, or marked as lowbloods and given over to servants to raise. Never had one been given a fullblood mark.

  The girl had no hint of the foreign about her — no, wait. It was there, just subtle. A fullness to her lips, the angle of her cheekbones, and her hair was a more brassy than sunlit gold. To Amn eyes, these would just be interesting idiosyncracies, a touch of the exotic without all the unpleasant political baggage. If not for her brother’s existence, no one would have ever guessed that she was not pure-blooded, either.

  I glanced at the boy again and saw the warning-sign wariness in his eyes. Yes, of course. They would have already begun to make his life hell.

  While I pondered this, the children fell to whispering, debating whether I looked more of this or that or some other mortal race. I could hear every word of it, but out of politeness I pretended not to. Finally the boy stage-whispered, “I don’t think he’s Teman at all,” in a tone that let me know he suspected what I really was.

  With eerie unity they faced me again.

  “It doesn’t matter if you’re a servant or not, or Teman or not,” said the girl. “We’re fullbloods, and that means you have to do what we say.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said.

  “Yes, it does!”

  I yawned and closed my eyes. “Make me.”

  They fell silent again, and I felt their consternation. I could have pitied them, but I was having too much fun. Finally, I felt a stir of air and warmth nearby, and I opened my eyes to find that the boy had sat down beside me.

  “Why won’t you help us?” he asked, his voice soft with honest concern, and I nearly flinched beneath the onslaught of his big dark eyes. “We’ve been down here all day, and we ate our sandwiches already, and we don’t know the way back.”

  Damnation. I’m partial to cuteness, too. “All right,” I said, relenting. “Where are you trying to go?”

  The boy brightened. “To the World Tree’s heart!” Then his excitement flagged. “Or at least, that was where we were trying to go. Now we just want to go back to our rooms.”

  “A sad end to a grand adventure,” I said, “but you wouldn’t have found what you were looking for anyhow. The World Tree was created by Yeine, the Mother of Life; its heart is her heart. Even if you found the chunk of wood that exists at the Tree’s core, it would mean nothing.”

  “Oh,” said the boy, slumping more. “We don’t know how to find her.”

  “I do,” I said, and then it was my turn to sag, as I remembered what had driven me to Sky. Were they still together, she and Itempas? He was mortal, with merely mortal endurance, but she could renew his strength again and again for as long as she liked. How I hated her. (Not really. Yes, really. Not really.)

  “I do,” I said again, “but that wouldn’t help you. She’s busy with other matters these days. Not much time for me or any of her children.”

  “Oh, is she your mother?” The boy looked surprised. “That sounds like our mother. She never has time for us. Is your mother the family head, too?”

  “Yes, in a way. Though she’s also new to the family, which makes for a certain awkwardness.” I sighed again, and the sound echoed within the Nowhere Stair, which descended into shadows at our feet. Back when I and the other Enefadeh had built this version of Sky, we had created this spiral staircase that led to nothing, twenty feet down to dead-end against a wall. It had been a long day spent listening to bickering architects. We’d gotten bored.

  “It’s a bit like having a stepmother,” I said. “Do you know what that is?”

  The boy looked thoughtful. The girl sat down beside him. “Like Lady Meull, of Agru,” she said to the boy. “Remember our genealogy lessons? She’s married to the duke now, but the duke’s children came from his first wife. His first wife is the mother. Lady Meull is the stepmother.” She looked at me for confirmation. “Like that, right?”

  “Yes, yes, like that,” I said, though I neither knew nor cared who Lady Meull was. “Yeine is our queen, sort of, as well as our mother.”

  “And you don’t like her?” Too much knowing in both the children’s eyes as they asked that question. The usual Arameri pattern, then, parents raising children who would grow up to plot their painful deaths. The signs were all there.

  “No,” I said softly. “I love her.” Because I did, even when I hated her. “More than light and darkness and life. She is the mother of my soul.”

  “So, then …” The girl was frowning. “Why are you sad?”

  “Because love is not enough.” I fell silent for an instant, stunned as realization moved through me. Yes, here was truth, which they had helped me find. Mortal children are very wise, though it takes a careful listener or a god to understand this. “My mother loves me, and at least one of my fathers loves me, and I love them, but that just isn’t enough, not anymore. I need something more.” I groaned and drew up my knees, pressing my forehead against them. Comforting flesh and bone, as familiar as a security blanket. “But what? What? I don’t understand why everything feels so wrong. Something is changing in me.” I must have seemed mad to them, and perhaps I was. All children are a little mad
. I felt them look at each other. “Um,” said the girl. “You said one of your fathers?”

  I sighed. “Yes. I have two. One of them has always been there when I needed him. I have cried for him and killed for him.” Where was he now, while his siblings turned to each other? He was not like Itempas — he accepted change — but that did not make him immune to pain. Was he unhappy? If I went to him, would he confide in me? Need me?

  It troubled me that I wondered this.

  “The other father …” I drew a deep breath and raised my head, propping my folded arms on my knees instead. “Well, he and I never had the best relationship. Too different, you see. He’s the firm disciplinarian type, and I am a brat.” I glanced at them and smiled. “Rather like you two, actually.”

  They grinned back, accepting the title with honor. “We don’t have any fathers,” said the girl.

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “Someone had to make you.” Mortals had not yet mastered the art of making little mortals by themselves.

  “Nobody important,” said the boy, waving a hand dismissively. I guessed he had seen a similar gesture from his mother. “Mother needed heirs and didn’t want to marry, so she chose someone she deemed suitable and had us.”

  “Huh.” Not entirely surprising; the Arameri had never lacked for pragmatism. “Well, you can have mine, the second one. I don’t want him.”

  The girl giggled. “He’s your father! He can’t be ours.”

  She probably prayed to the Father of All every night. “Of course he can be. Though I don’t know if you’d like him any more than I do. He’s a bit of a bastard. We had a falling-out some time ago, and he disowned me, even though he was in the wrong. Good riddance.”

  The girl frowned. “But don’t you miss him?”

  I opened my mouth to say of course I don’t and then realized that I did. “Demonshit,” I muttered.

  They gasped and giggled appropriately at this gutter talk. “Maybe you should go see him,” said the boy.

  “I don’t think so.”

  His small face screwed up into an affronted frown. “That’s silly. Of course you should. He probably misses you.” I frowned, too taken aback by this idea to reject it out of hand. “What?”

  “Well, isn’t that what fathers do?” He had no idea what fathers did. “Love you, even if you don’t love them? Miss you when you go away?” I sat there silent, more troubled than I should have been. Seeing this, the boy reached out, hesitating, and touched my hand. I looked down at him in surprise.

  “Maybe you should be happy,” he said. “When things are bad, change is good, right? Change means things will get better.” I stared at him, this Arameri child who did not at all look Arameri and would probably die before his majority because of it, and I felt the knot of frustration within me ease.

  “An Arameri optimist,” I said. “Where did you come from?”

  To my surprise, both of them bristled. I realized at once that I had struck a nerve, and then realized which nerve when the girl lifted her chin. “He comes from right here in Sky, just like me.”

  The boy lowered his eyes, and I heard the whisper of taunts around him, some in childish lilt and some deepened by adult malice: where did you come from did a barbarian leave you here by mistake maybe a demon dropped you off on its way to the hells because gods know you don’t belong here. I saw how the words had scored his soul. He had made me feel better; he deserved something in recompense for that. I touched his shoulder and sent my blessing into him, making the words just words and making him stronger against them and putting a few choice retorts at the tip of his tongue for the next time. He blinked in surprise and smiled shyly. I smiled back.

  The girl relaxed once it became clear that I meant her brother no harm. I willed a blessing to her, too, though she hardly needed it.

  “I’m Shahar,” she said, and then she sighed and unleashed her last and greatest weapon: politeness. “Will you please tell us how to get home?”

  Ugh, what a name! The poor girl. But I had to admit, it suited her. “Fine, fine. Here.” I looked into her eyes and made her know the palace’s layout as well as I had learned it over the generations that I had lived within its walls. (Not the dead spaces, though. Those were mine.)

  The girl flinched, her eyes narrowing suddenly at mine. I had probably slipped into my cat shape a little. Mortals tended to notice the eyes, though that was never the only thing that changed about me. I put them back to nice round mortal pupils, and she relaxed. Then gasped as she realized she knew the way home.

  “That’s a nice trick,” she said. “But what the scriveners do is prettier.”

  A scrivener would have broken your head open if they’d tried what I just did, I almost retorted, but didn’t because she was mortal and mortals have always liked flash over substance and because it didn’t matter, anyway. Then the girl surprised me further, drawing herself up and bowing from the waist. “I thank you, sir,” she said. And while I stared at her, marveling at the novelty of Arameri thanks, she adopted that haughty tone she’d tried to use before. It really didn’t suit her; hopefully she would figure that out soon. “May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?”

  “I am Sieh.” No hint of recognition in either of them. I stifled a sigh.

  She nodded and gestured to her brother. “This is Dekarta.”

  Just as bad. I shook my head and got to my feet. “Well, I’ve wasted enough time,” I said, “and you two should be getting back.” Outside the palace, I could feel the sun setting. For a moment I closed my eyes, waiting for the familiar, delicious vibration of my father’s return to the world, but of course there was nothing. I felt fleeting disappointment.

  The children jumped up in unison. “Do you come here to play often?” asked the boy, just a shade too eagerly.

  “Such lonely little cubs,” I said, and laughed. “Has no one taught you not to talk to strangers?”

  Of course no one had. They looked at each other in that freakish speaking-without-words-or-magic thing that twins do, and the boy swallowed and said to me, “You should come back. If you do, we’ll play with you.”

  “Will you, now?” It had been a long time since I’d played. Too long. I was forgetting who I was amid all this worrying. Better to leave the worry behind, stop caring about what mattered, and do what felt good. Like all children, I was easy to seduce.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Assuming, of course, that your mother doesn’t forbid it” — which guaranteed that they would never tell her — “I’ll come back to this place on the same day, at the same time, next year.”

  They looked horrified and exclaimed in unison, “Next year?”

  “The time will pass before you know it,” I said, stretching to my toes. “Like a breeze through a meadow on a light spring day.” It would be interesting to see them again, I told myself, because they were still young and would not become as foul as the rest of the Arameri for some while. And, because I had already grown to love them a little, I mourned, for the day they became true Arameri would most likely be the day I killed them. But until then, I would enjoy their innocence while it lasted.

  I stepped between worlds and away.

  The next year I stretched and climbed out of my nest and stepped across space again, and appeared at the top of the Nowhere Stair. It was early yet, so I amused myself conjuring little moons and chasing them up and down the steps. I was winded and sweaty when the children arrived and spied me.

  “We know what you are,” blurted Deka, who had grown an inch.

  “Do you, now? Whoops —” The moon I’d been playing with made a bid to escape, shooting toward the children because they stood between it and the corridor. I sent it home before it could put a hole in either of them. Then I grinned and flopped onto the floor, my legs splayed so as to take up as much space as possible, and caught my breath.

  Deka crouched beside me. “Why are you out of breath?”

  “Mortal realm, mortal rules,” I said, waving a hand in a vague circ
le. “I have lungs, I breathe, the universe is satisfied, hee-ho.”

  “But you don’t sleep, do you? I read that godlings don’t sleep. Or eat.”

  “I can if I want to. Sleeping and eating aren’t that interesting, so I generally don’t. But it looks a bit odd to forgo breathing — makes mortals very anxious. So I do that much.”

  He poked me in the shoulder. I stared at him.

  “I was seeing if you were real,” he said. “The book said you could look like anything.”

  “Well, yes, but all of those things are real,” I replied.

  “The book said you could be fire.”

  I laughed. “Which would also be real.”

  He poked me again, a shy grin spreading across his face. I liked his smile. “But I couldn’t do this to fire.” He poked me a third time.

  “Watch it,” I said, giving him A Look. But it wasn’t serious, and he could tell, so he poked me again. With that I leapt on him, tickling, because I cannot resist an invitation to play. So we wrestled and he squealed and struggled to get free and complained that he would pee if I kept it up, and then he got a hand free and started tickling me back, and it actually did tickle awfully, so I curled up to escape him. It was like being drunk, like being in one of Yeine’s newborn heavens, so sweet and so perfect and so much delicious fun. I love being a god!

  But a hint of sour washed across my tongue. When I lifted my head, I saw that Deka’s sister stood where he had left her, shifting from foot to foot and trying not to look like she yearned to join us. Ah, yes — someone had already told her that girls had to be dignified while boys could be rowdy, and she had foolishly listened to that advice. (One of many reasons I’d settled on a male form myself. Mortals said fewer stupid things to boys.)

  “I think your sister’s feeling left out, Dekarta,” I said, and she blushed and fidgeted more. “What shall we do about it?”