I smiled, then kissed him one more time. He tasted like blood and sorrow.
We fought that immortal creature like dreaming. If Chua, and Kossal, and Ela hadn’t injured him, slowed him down, we wouldn’t have had a chance, but even so, I never thought we would survive. He was too fast, too strong, too perfect in every motion. I didn’t fight him because I wanted to win; I fought because I wanted to fight. I didn’t love Ruc, but I liked him, I admired him, and it felt good to move my body beside his, not to be fighting against him for once, but with him, to be testing ourselves against something that had never been defeated. Everything felt good. The sun on my skin, the blades in my hands, the hot wind on my face, the breath in my chest. Even Ruc seemed to feel it as we fell into our rhythm, covering each other’s attacks and retreats, trying to pry open the tiny cracks in the creature’s guard. When I finally stole a glance at him, he had that look I recognized so well, the look of a brawler in a deadly brawl or a singer lost in a song. The world had contracted to this. There was no place else, no one else. The moment was all we wanted. I felt something new, a perfect surrender, an annihilation of whatever lifelong thought-thin membrane had separated me from everything else, from the whole glowing world.
The song of life echoing in my heart, I feinted high, low, high again, dodged a fist, ducked under a blow from the wounded arm, and slashed Sinn across the chest.
It wasn’t a killing blow, shouldn’t have been, but when he stepped back, Ruc roared and hurled himself forward. I barely had time to think how stupid it was, the attack of a mindless drunk in some barroom brawl, a lunge that left no reasonable defense, no chance to extricate himself if it went wrong. Sinn swatted aside the sword, and Ruc let it drop, but kept coming on, opening his arms. Even as the Nevariim shattered his chest, Ruc wrapped the creature in a huge embrace, pulled the immortal thing in tight as life seeped out of him.
“Pyrre,” he managed, my name half a cough, half a moan, and I saw that he hadn’t been stupid at all. His attack wasn’t an attack, but a sacrifice, one last gift to me, the woman he thought was a monster. In the quarter heartbeat that the Nevariim was tangled in Ruc’s arms, I stepped in and cut the creature’s throat.
Ananshael is a humble god. He claimed that immortal trophy with the same quiet grace he claims all things. In the end, this creature that the people of the delta had worshipped as a god for so many thousands of years died in the same way as a bird, a fish, a lizard, any of the world’s small, scuttling creatures that live their flame-quick lives, then unravel in his gentle hands.
Ruc fought the god a moment longer, long enough for me to hear him whisper in my ear as I knelt, just one word, one solitary syllable: “Love…”
Then, before he could finish, the light went out of those green, green eyes. I still don’t know if love was a word he was using for me, or something he intended to explain, something he believed I still had wrong. I closed his lids. The sun would keep his skin warm until night fell. That seemed right, somehow. He’d always been warm.
I straightened, then turned to face the two remaining Nevariim.
My knives were light in my hands. The day was young. I could feel myself smiling.
“Who’s next?” I asked, pointing a bronze blade at Hang Loc. “You?” I turned to Kem Anh. “You?”
The woman cocked her head to the side, as though trying to see me clearly, or to understand what she saw. I gazed into those eyes, the same eyes that had haunted me since my childhood. They were the same—liquid and inhuman—but the terror I’d felt of them for so long had vanished. How could I feel terror in a world brimming with such beauty?
“Let’s fight,” I murmured.
Kem Anh didn’t move forward, didn’t even raise a hand. She examined me a while longer, and then she smiled, shook her head, turned away, toward the brush and the thick forest beyond, Hang Loc following her as they receded toward legend once more.
I threw the knife, not because I expected to see it strike, but for the beauty of the bronze flashing in the sunlight. As I expected, Kem Anh turned, caught the blade as it spun end over end, studied the weapon for a moment, then tossed it aside. When she stepped into the brush with her consort, I didn’t try to follow. The Three were Two now, gone, vanished back into the labyrinth of the Given Land.
I turned to consider the slaughter behind me. The corpses were gorgeous, even in the postures of their ending. The wind had picked up. It gusted through the rushes, half whistling—a note, a voice as wide and bright and gracious as the world, that lifted, shifted, then disappeared each time I thought I almost heard it clearly.
EPILOGUE
That is the story, my love. My story, but yours, too.
The Vuo Ton found me on the island three days later, a slender boat sliding out of the warm morning mist, tattooed figures silent as idols, even those at the oars motionless as the hull drifted toward the shore. The Witness stood near the bow, one foot on the thwart. When the boat was still a pace and a half from the sand, he leapt, landed easily, then stood watching me for a long time.
“You are alive,” he said finally.
I nodded, but didn’t get up from where I was sitting. I’d made no effort to escape the island. If Ananshael wanted me, he knew where to find me.
I’d spent the first day burning the bodies of the dead. I laid Kossal and Ela, Ruc and Chua on a great pyre of dry rushes, labored half the morning to kindle an ember with a dry stick in a piece of driftwood, then stood back and watched as the fire devoured the piles of bone and meat. The four warriors were gone, utterly unmade, but their bodies burned bright as anything still alive.
Sinn, I did not burn. I carved his head from his shoulders with the bronze knife, then spent the afternoon shaving away the skin from the skull, prying out the eyes, scooping clear the brain—which seemed heavier than human brains, more dense—then washing the bone in the river until it gleamed. When it was finally clean and dry, I placed it atop the wall of skulls, packed the sockets of the eyes with dirt, then planted a pair of river violets.
I spent a long time looking at the monument. To the people of Dombang, the island is a sacred place, the abode of their gods. It is not sacred to me—no more sacred than any other place where my god has unmade a creature—but it is beautiful. I smiled, laying Sinn’s skull atop the pile; he had been a gorgeous creature, and it seemed appropriate that what was left of him, too, should be gorgeous.
After that I spent the days and nights seated on the shore, listening to the birds, watching the clouds. I expected my god to gather me to him, but instead of my god, the Witness of the Vuo Ton had arrived in his long boat.
“You are alive,” he said again.
I realized that I hadn’t replied the first time, rose to my feet, and smiled.
“I am. The only one.”