And then, one sorcerous step and it was gone, this world of stone and ice and gaping plummets. They were back into the forests, the ground steep to be sure, but terraced and overgrown, a place where no one need fear standing.
The trees were cramped for altitude, and the grasses and bracken were thinned for gravel. Streams roped the rutted heights above, shooting with waters cold enough to pinch fingertips and crack teeth. The three of them sat wordless for some time, savouring the warm and easy air. Serwa dozed against the crook of her arm. Mo?nghus switched his glower between the vista and his thumbs. Sorweel stared out, watching the scrawl of ridges flatten into a less troubled horizon.
“What do your people know of Injor-Niyas?” Serwa eventually asked.
Her voice, he realized, always descended upon him. It never reached out.
He said nothing, turned to the west to spare himself the cruel hilarity of her gaze. He hated her more, he decided, in the sunlight.
“Father,” she continued, “says that it is our lesson, that the ghouls are a cipher for the extinction of Men.”
Staring away was his only reprieve. He could not look at them without cringing for shame, just as he could not sleep without dreaming of their congress. Only by turning his back to them could he think those thoughts that let him breathe. How he was Narindar, an instrument of the dread Mother of Birth. How he was the knife that would kill their demonic father and deliver them to their ruin. The very knife!
He had even begun praying to Her in the knotted watches before sleep.
Deliver them, Mother …
What he had seen was a crime—of that he had no doubt. Incest was anathema in all nations, all households—even the Anas?rimbor, who more than any other had to appease the mob. They were afraid, Sorweel had come to realize. They feared their father would see their crime in his face …
But they also feared, he had decided, what their father might see in their faces. This, Sorweel realized, was the only thing keeping him alive. He had no idea how much they could or could not hide, but he knew that murder was no small thing, not even for the likes of them. Perhaps they only had so much faith in their ability to deceive their accursed father. To murder a man—such an act left hard tracks in any soul. So they had elected to sin in sand, to drive him away, let the wild accomplish what they dare not, and let their wandering blow the spoor of guilt from their soul.
So they baited him, laughed and tormented. They played games—endless games!—all of them meant to shame, to infuriate! Over the Demua and now upon the bourne of fabled Ishterebinth, last of the great Nonmen Mansions.
They were running out of time.
“This World once belonged to the Nonmen,” she was saying, “the way it now belongs to Men—to you, Sorweel.” He could feel her remorseless gaze upon him. “What Fate will you seize?”
Wind whisked sharp through the grasses.
“That one is easy,” Mo?nghus said, standing on a grunt. He leaned to swat pine needles from his leggings. He clasped Sorweel’s shoulders in two embattled hands, shook him with mock camaraderie. “The purple one.”
Sorweel twisted out of the man’s grip, swung at his face—missed. The Prince-Imperial lunged and shoved him—hard enough for his legs to tangle like thrown rope. Sorweel crashed backward across the ground, scuffed an elbow against a stump of granite. Lightning deadened his hand.
“What?” Mo?nghus bellowed. “Why do you persist? Run, little boy—Run!”
“You ca-call me cursed!” Sorweel cried. “Me?”
“I ca-call you wretched. Weak.”
“Tell me, then! Where do incests burn? What part of Hell has your holy father reserved for you!”
A lupine grin and careless shrug. “The one where your father keens like a pregnant widow …”
From whence does the power of words come? How can mere breath and sound strike the rhythm from hearts, the stone from bones?
“Podi!” Serwa called to her brother. “Yus’yiril onpara ti …”
Even though there was warning in her voice, Mo?nghus laughed. He glared at Sorweel for a moment, then, spitting, turned to descend the slopes. Sorweel watched the light and shadow break across his receding back, his heart a cracked and cooling cauldron.
He turned to the Swayali witch, who gazed at him with a fixity that should have shamed both of them. Out of spite, he welcomed her peer. Sunlight traced glowing threads through her hair.
“How?” she finally asked.
“How what?”
“How could you still … love us?”
Sorweel looked down, thought of Porsparian, his dead slave, rubbing the mud and spit of Yatwer across his face. This was what she saw, he realized, the spittle of the Goddess, a magic that was no magic—a miracle. They picked and sneered and goaded, and yet saw only what their dread father had seen: the adoration proper to a Zaudunyani Believer-King. Hatred strapped his heart, his being, and yet she saw only desire.
“But I despise you,” he said, returning her gaze.
She continued peering for several heartbeats.
“No, Sorweel. You do not.”