A fog rose up within the youth, one that chilled his skin for interior heat.
“What happens here?” Serwa said, stepping from behind one of the monstrous oaks. Neither man was surprised. Nothing escaped her notice for long.
“Look at him, Sister …” Mo?nghus said without breaking eye contact. “Tell me you do not see hate …”
Pause. “I see only what I have alw—”
“He even clenches his pommel! Threatens to draw!”
“Brother … We have discussed this.”
What were they talking about?
“If he were to strike me dead now!” Mo?nghus cried. “Would you believe it then?”
“All hearts are divided! You know this. And you kno—”
“He! Hates! Look at hi—!”
“You know that I always see deeper!” the Grandmistress of the Swayali cried.
“Bah!” the towering Prince-Imperial spat, turning on his heel.
Sorweel stood rigid, his fury not so much blunted as cracked into gravel for confusion. He watched Mo?nghus’s broad back dip and dwindle across the sun-striped floor.
“Madness!” the youth spat to the girl. “Both of you are mad!”
“Or maddened,” Serwa said.
He turned to her, saw the same imperturbable expression he always saw.
“Am I such a riddle?” he asked on a snarl.
She stood upon a canted slab, its back carpeted in black-green moss, its edges caked in white lichen. She seemed taller than him because of it … mightier. A lone lance of sunlight bathed her face, made her glow like her accursed father.
“You love me …” she said, her voice flat as her gaze.
Rage, as if he were a catapult and her voice the release.
“I think you are an incestuous whore!”
She flinched, and some vicious fraction of him exulted.
But her retort fell as liquid brilliance from her mouth, rose as steam from the surrounding gloom.
“Kaur’silayir muhiril …”
Sorweel stumbled back, first for astonishment, then for articulations of seizing light. His feet pedalled air. He was thrown back, pinned against a great rutted oak. Her voice crashed upon him from all angles, as if he were a leaf tossed in the tempest of her will. Rancourous light flashed from her gaze, bright as the obscured sun. An obsidian nacre framed her, a black that twigged and branched as if chasing cracks into the very cut of existence. Falcons of gold battled her whipping hair.
And she was upon him, not so much traversing as cutting down the interval between them, seizing his shoulders, setting his skin afire with her light, sucking all air from his breast with her emptiness, looming with the compressed weight of mountains, compelling, demanding …
“What are you hiding?”
Her lips opened about the surface of the sun.
His words rose on the back of blackness to meet her demand.
“Nothing …”
Not as toil, as freedom.
“Why do you love us?”
“Because I hate what you hate …” Like words spoken on pipe-smoke. “Because I believe …”
On the breath following a kiss.
Ink had clotted and conquered his periphery, folding the vein-spangled wood and the airy spheres beyond into oblivion. She alone remained, a titanic presence, her eyes flaring like Nails of Heaven.
“Can you not see our contempt?”
A word like a wave to a friend.
“Yes.”
She leaned forward, wrath incarnate, terror incarnate, and he was blown as paint across the bark.
“I think not.”
His head arched back in abject terror, he could only stare down his cheeks at her catastrophic aspect, only moan his lament, his blubbering shame. His water spilled as hot as blood. His bowel.
And in a span of a heartbeat it was all gone.
Her sorcery. His honour.
“Why?” she was crying. “Why would you love us? Why?”
Shivers blew through him, twirled like a breeze. He had soiled …
“Can’t you see we’re monsters!”
Soiled himself. He glimpsed something uncertain, even vulnerable in her gaze … Fear?
Trembling for … for …
The reek of his own unmanliness rose about him …
The proof.
The first sob, wrenched from his breast by an ethereal fist. “Wh-who?” he coughed, his face grinning for madness. Degradation, crashing through, crushing against. Then, all of it.
Everything.
Losing Harweel. His little brother hot in his callused palm. Losing his inheritance, his people. The image of them—sinuous and obscene. Sitting with Zsoronga in the fading light, listening to Obotegwa forgetting to breath. The glistening cleft. Watching the Sranc-faced Goddess claw muck from her own womb. The brandishing—the bestial heat! The growl that climbed to the tip. Crying out as Porsparian threw his throat upon a spear. The lunging bliss! Fierce with … Taut with … Riven. Cringing in a cavern of inhuman faces, clutching Eskeles, the whole world roaring, raving, gibbering …
Threads of seed branching hot across knuckled shame. His father flapping as a vexed goose—afire.
His mother grey as stone.
His seed! His nation! The smell of shit and shit and shit—