“Made you what?”
He tested my guard, first high, then low. “It wasn’t the fight that intrigued me. It was finding someone smart, quick, tenacious. What about all the lazy days in between the fighting? What about those evenings out on the water? Those mornings drinking ta while we watched the sun come up? The fists and bruises were just incidental.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re sick, Pyrre. Your whole religion is sick.”
“What’s the sickness in thinking love is bigger than a few kisses, bigger than running through the same platitudes night after night? Why shouldn’t love be more than that? Why shouldn’t it be braver, more frightening?”
He lashed out with the sword. I parried, bronze grating over bronze. I pressed the attack a moment, slashing high then low, before stepping back, my breath hot in my throat. Ruc watched me warily.
“You’re a killer,” he said. “Just like the crocs or the vipers. A fucking animal.”
“We’re all animals. We’re born. We fight as hard as we can to stay alive, and then, in spite of all that fighting, we die anyway.” I shook my head. “The reason we think we’re different from animals, better than them, is that we know how the story ends. We’re in on the joke.”
Ruc shook his head. “No one told me this was how it would end.”
“You knew it was coming, one way or another.”
“The way matters.”
“Of course it does, you beautiful fool.” I studied him, the rise and fall of his chest, the way his forearm flexed as he shifted his grip on the sword. Then I looked past his brown skin, past the lush muscles of his shoulders and stomach. They teach us this at Rassambur, to peel away each of the body’s layers, to unmake what Bedisa has made and in that unmaking to see what it is we are. Ruc was warm flesh hung on a frame of bone. Soon, in a time counted in heartbeats rather than days, Ananshael would touch him, and he would be dirt. So would I.
What I needed, before the god unmade me, was for Ruc to see, for him to understand.
“Do you know what happened,” I asked him, “our last night together in Sia?”
Instead of answering, he came at me with a series of quick, savage overhand blows. The earlier testing and probing was over. Any one of those, had it landed, would have split me from my throat down through my chest. I turned the first aside with the shaft of the spear, dodged the next two, thrust out with an attack of my own—deflected—and then we were circling again, eyeing each other through the light flashing off of our bronze.
“What I know,” he said between heavy breaths, “is that you said you wanted to stay with me our entire lives, until one or the other died. Then the next morning, you were gone.”
“I tried to kill you,” I said, remembering that night, the way we made love over and over, then how he’d fallen asleep tangled in my limbs. I remembered watching his chest rise and fall, remembered the warmth in my own heart, remembered thinking, This is a test. As Kossal had explained to me days earlier, sometimes the god speaks in our bones. Any murderer can kill someone she hates. Ananshael requires something more of his faithful—I understood this even then, that hot, sweet night in Sia. “After you fell asleep, I took one of my knives and laid it against your throat.”
“And here I thought the fact that you disappeared was bad.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
Ruc snorted. “Obviously.”
“I failed in my faith. At the time, I thought I cared about you too much.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t swoon.”
“Stop being an asshole. I need you to understand this.”
“Understand what? You didn’t kill me in my sleep all those years ago and here you are again, back to finish the job? All right. I understand.”
This time he went for the spear, ignoring my body, trying to slice through the shaft. I knocked aside three blows, four, five, angling the wood so that the bronze glanced off rather than biting, but Ruc kept coming and coming. I had openings, moments when I could have slipped either the knife or the spearpoint past his guard, into his heart, but I couldn’t kill him, not until he saw what I wanted him to see. He didn’t drop back, even when I gave him space, just kept coming at me, trying to back me up against the wall of skulls. I parried, ducked, slid outside his range. I was better than him, faster, but the game I was playing gave me no room for mistakes. Which was true, also, of the game I played with myself.
As he coiled his arm to attack again, I tossed the spear aside, dropped the knife. The weapons clattered to the sun-baked dirt.
He hesitated, staring at me. My breath burned in my chest, but I forced out the words.
“Back in Sia, I thought I was in love with you. Then I thought I needed to kill you to show that my faith was stronger than my love. I was wrong on both counts. What I felt—that need to have you close, to have you near me all the time—that wasn’t love. It was something else, something small and grasping and selfish. Love is not this stupid holding on. Love is larger.”
Ruc stared at me warily, his chest heaving. “I have no fucking idea what that means.”
“Yes,” I said, “you do.”
I reached out, took the tip of his sword between my fingers, raised it to my neck. “When I die,” I said, “I want your hand behind that final cut. I want to do it looking in your eyes.”
It was the truth.
I’d been scrutinizing my own mind for so long, spying on my every move, weighing each choice, second-guessing every path taken or ignored. It felt good to stand there, stripped of my last weapon, stripped of all the lies that had led to that point, and to say out loud, in plain language, one of the few things I knew to be true.
“He is waiting for me,” I said. “He is waiting for all of us.”
The sun ignited the delta haze, setting the world aflame. Blood and sweat burned on my tongue. Every line, every reed and rush, every angle of Ruc’s face, seemed carved into being with a knife. It was beautiful, all of it—the mud, the skulls, the blood-bathed bronze—and soon, maybe before my next breath, it would be gone. I stood with my arms at my side, pinned in place by the day’s heat and Ruc’s unwavering gaze.
This was the man I had come to Dombang to love, and I did not love him.
In that one moment, it didn’t matter.
I could feel my own unmaking hanging in the air like the silence before a song. The silence was all.
Slowly, like a person moving through water or the depths of a dream, Ruc lowered his blade.
“No,” he said.
For a moment I thought I might sob, collapse. I’d failed. I’d done everything I could to serve my god, and I had failed. I ached to have that bronze blade inside me, to feel Ananshael’s final touch.
“Do it,” I said.
“No.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking past me, as though trying to make sense of something far off, but moving closer.
“Please.”
He shook his head, took half a step back.