“I doubt if it’s really dead, just licking its wounds. Discouraged if we’re lucky. But it didn’t make the hole; it was only first in line. I hope the next one will be smaller.”
“What’s our task then?” he asked, as steady as any comrade-in-arms she’d ever had.
Branwyn wished she had better news.
“The knights should get here eventually, particularly if we don’t return for a while,” she said. The tip of a dead-white tendril wavered above the rift, not out enough to strike yet. “They’ll bring one of Letar’s priests if they have any sense. Mourners and Blades both know how to fix these rips. The longer we hold out, the easier they’ll find their job.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“We all die one day,” said Zelen. “You’re the best company I could’ve hoped for.”
She blinked away tears—clear vision was important—and smiled. “Love and death, hmm? You’d have done the Dark Lady proud, from what I can tell thirdhand.”
Other tendrils were winding their way to the rift’s edge now, wide but oddly flat in the same way that the demons at the ball had been. Finding her balance again in the few seconds they had, Branwyn suddenly heard Yathana.
Switch weapons, said the sword, faint but distinct.Quickly. There might still be time.
Chapter 40
Zelen didn’t catch the words, but the sense of what Yathana was saying filled his mind. He switched his grip so that he could offer Branwyn his sword hilt-first, and took the soulsword in return.
All swords were different in small ways, matters of weight and balance. Yathana was as unlike them as one of the knights’ great warhorses was unlike Jester, and Zelen couldn’t have reduced the difference to one physical aspect. Like the steeds, she gave off an overwhelming feeling of being able to destroy without effort, even completely by accident. He had a second to wonder if the Sentinels ever sparred using their swords, and if so, how any of them survived.
Then the voice was in his head again, still with the sense of shouting from a long way off or over other noise.
Are you still hers?
In shock, he looked to Branwyn, utterly confused that the sword would pick that moment to ask about their affairs, and that either Yathana or Branwyn would have chosen the language of possession.
You didn’t have the choice. Now you do. Are you hers?The sword went on, and as the white things crawled over the rim of the pit, Zelen realized that he’d heard the pronoun wrong: nothersbutHers. No mortal woman, not even Branwyn, was the subject of discussion here.
Once he’d worked that out, the answer was easy. “Of course.”
Say your full name. Hold on as well as you can.
Not understanding, not needing to understand, Zelen began, “Zelen Sienatav Catalzin Verengir—” and it felt as though he should go on, say more, but first there was no more to say and then there was nohimto say it with.
It was as though Yathana had pulled aside a set of drapes, spilling radiant midday light into the dark room that had been Zelen’s entire being. The speck that remained of his consciousness cringed, but marveled too: pain was only a small part of what he sensed, even of the fraction that any mortal could have put into words.
There was a presence and a pattern.
They emerged from each other and became each other again. Maybe they were never different. Was a flame different from the fire?
They were flame and fire. They were blood, tears, seed, and sweat, purification and destruction and birth, all the tides of rage and pain and desire that ran bone-deep in most mortal life.
Letarwas the name he knew. Any name or gender seemed inadequate in the face of that flood, though—a lantern to contain a midsummer bonfire—even if the being overwhelming him had once put on both. There were traces of that self in the presence, as there were flashes of the features Zelen had seen on stained-glass windows, but traces were all they were.
The pattern was all that lived, from Branwyn to the moss on the outside of the wall to a scuttling creature far beneath the ocean. Zelen couldn’t approach that understanding, but he sensed for a second the depth of the god’s knowledge. It encompassed all lives—their choices, their changes, their deaths, all winding around one another and shaping each other, even from leagues and years away.
There was a beauty to that pattern that would’ve blinded any mortal. There was, within and around Zelen, an utterly shattering love for that creation and each part of it, for every bit of life that did the best it could in its own way and thus took part in the great, ever-shifting splendor of the world. The god could only make a few adjustments, minor in the scheme of things, but they did what they could to heal, to protect, and to shelter at the end. They always, eternally, loved.
With that love came hatred, unbounded and implacable, for whatever would harm any part of that creation—whether a segment that turned against the whole or a force from outside. Life could make many choices. Most balanced. Some did not. Some splintered the beings who’d made them, destroyed their better selves, and rotted their surroundings. For those decisions, for those threats, there was no mercy.
In that awareness, Gedomir and Hanyi were scabbed wounds, loathsome but already closing.
The rift was different. The rift was abomination.
