“I remember.”
She raised and wetted a small, rose-coloured sponge, then, using the soap congealed across his scalp, she began washing his face with gentle, even tender strokes.
“Inrilatas was-was the strongest of all of us,” she said upon a spastic blink. “The most-most cruel.”
“Stronger than me?”
“Far stronger.”
Lying bitch!
“How so?”
“He saw too deeply.”
“Too deeply,” the boy repeated. “What kind of answer is that?”
Theliopa shrugged. “The more you know a soul-soul, the less of a soul-soul it becomes. For Inrilatas, we-we were little more-more than beetles, scuttling around and about-about, blind-blind. So long as we remain blind to those blindnesses, our souls and our worlds remain whole-whole. As soon as we see-see them, we see that we are nothing more-more than beetles.”
Kelmomas looked at her uncomprehendingly. “The more you know a thing,” he said, frowning, “the more real it becomes.”
“Only if it was real to begin with.”
“Pfah,” he sneered.
“And yet you do the very thing he did.”
“Which is?”
“Make-make toys of the souls about you.”
The boy caught his breath, such was the force of his insight.
“So that was what Inrilatas did? Made you his toy?”
“Even now-now,” she said on her damned stammer, “this is what youyou attempt to do.”
“So I’m a beetle too!”
She paused to draw the sponge across his chin. The water was becoming tepid.
“A beetle that eats beetles.”
He mulled these words while she laboured to cleanse his throat and neck, particularly about the divot between his collarbones. It struck him as an epic and beautiful thing, that brother and sister could discuss the grounds that would see one murder the other … like a tale from the Chronicle of the Tusk.
“Why did he call you Sranc?” he asked without warning.
Another facial seizure.
Kelmomas smirked when she said nothing. There was only one beetle here.
“No tracks in the snow, eh?”
“Because I was-was always so skinny.”
She lies … the voice said.
Yes, brother, I know …
The young Prince-Imperial pressed aside her wrist to peer at her. It seemed a miracle to be so close to a face so hated, to see the spatter of freckles, the pink rim of her lids, the cant of her teeth. All this time he had assumed that she had been found, only to discover that she had been made, that his brother had bent her—broken her. It seemed he could remember it so much more clearly now …
Her weeping.
“How many times?” he asked her.
A lethargic blink. “Until Father locked him up.”
A deadness had crept into her voice.
“And Mother?”
“What of Mother?”
“Did she ever find out?”
The chirp of dripping water.
“She overheard him once-once. She was-was furious …”
She raised the sponge, but he recoiled in annoyance.
“She-she was the only one-one who never-never feared Inrilatas,” Theliopa said.
He could see it all so clearly now.
“She never found out,” Kelmomas said.
Her head rocked as if at a silent hiccough, only three times in rapid succession.
“Inrilatas …” he continued, watching the name bleach her expression.
“What-what?”
“Did he seduce you?” He grinned. He had seen what the grown do when their blood rose. “Or did he rape?”
Now she was truly blank.
“We are D?nyain,” she murmured.
The young Prince-Imperial chortled, shivered for the glamour of elation. He leaned forward, placed his wet cheek against her sunken one, whispered in her ear in the same grunting manner he knew his older brother had, not so many years ago …
“Sranky …”
She smelled like sour milk.
“Sranky …”
Suddenly he was sputtering soap and water, rubbing eyes that burned so fiercely he could scarcely see Theliopa fleeing, just shadows and hooped shimmering. He made no attempt to call her back …
She had left plenty of tracks in the snow.
Kelmomas dunked his head in the embalming warmth, swatted the soap from his face and hair. He had almost certainly doomed himself, he knew, but he whooped in silent triumph all the same.
Terror had always been his soul’s laggard, where his will was most weak, his heart most strong.
And it was no small feat making an Anas?rimbor cry.
Issiral was not in his chamber.
His jubilation had been short-lived. Seized by a monstrous panic, he had leapt from the tub and dressed without so much as towelling down, stealing sodden and dripping into the arterial depths of the shadow palace. Never, it seemed, had he suffered such paroxysms of dread—such vicious recriminations!
Fool! You’ve killed us! Killed us!