And then after dinner one night, I sit on Rasida’s bed, drink in hand, and she lies down in my lap, and I stroke her cheek, and she says, “It is very lonely, being the lord.”
“I imagine so,” I say, and I do not say, “Because you have murdered everyone who has ever cared for you or could ever care for you.” No, we are past that. I know what will happen if I say that. I have shifted how I am playing this game, though it is no easier than the last.
She presses her hands to my belly. “I can feel it moving,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “sometimes it does that.”
She coos at my belly. “You have never taken it this far?” she says.
“No,” I say. She smiles and closes her eyes, and finally, I ask, “What about your own issue? I have not seen you pregnant in all this time.”
“Pregnancy is a risk,” she says. “Each of them, no matter what you birth. I need to stay fit to lead the Legion.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly that,” she says. “There is only one that will ever come to term. You must be absolutely sure it is the right time to birth it. It could destroy you in the birthing. As with any birth. Too dangerous for me. I did what many women do. I gave it to someone else to bear.”
“Does it take a long time to come to term?” I ask, because the question of where her womb is now is far too obvious.
“No,” she says. “I believe in absolute control over what I have to bear. It’s incubating now. It will be born when we are ready to go to Katazyrna. While we are there, it will remake Bhavaja into a new world.”
“How will it do that?” I ask. Ignorance worked with Anat.
“Did they not tell you?” Rasida asks. “How cruel, not to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
Rasida rises. Her hands move to my neck, and I stiffen, but she only rubs my shoulders, as if I am some creature in need of comfort. “I can give birth to worlds,” she says. “Surely you had heard of that on Katazyrna.”
“There were rumors,” I say. “We always thought it was a rumor you planted to make you seem very powerful.”
“Patience,” Rasida says. “Everything is coming together.”
“It’s difficult to be patient, without answers.”
“I anticipate your little experiment with Zan was also aggravating for her.”
“Are you comparing what’s happened with Zan with what you’re doing to me?”
“Not at all,” Rasida says. She shifts away from me.
“That’s not convincing,” I say, and my tone is wrong. I’ve misstepped. I wish, again, that I could slough off my memory the way Zan can. She can afford to be decent. I can’t.
Rasida stands. “I look forward to your birthing time. I’ve never had one myself.”
“Never? Not even someone else’s issue?”
“No,” Rasida says. She chuckles. “I suppose that is something you would ask, of course. I’ve seen your scars, Jayd. I know you weren’t born with a womb that makes what I need. No, you got it from someone else. Who, I wonder? Most importantly, though, I wonder why, and how you convinced her to give it to you. Or did you just take it, rip it from her body the way we ripped the life from that woman on Tiltre?”
“I wanted it,” I say. “Does there need to be another reason? I was tired of fighting. I wanted to make something that lasted.”
She smirks. Her smiles are becoming smirks now more often, amused and disgusted. She does not try to hide her contempt. “I like that you are not a little fool,” she says.
“It could kill me too,” I say, trying to find a safer subject, perhaps one that will tug at her heart, if she has one. “I could die birthing this thing for you, and then you’d have killed my family, taken my world, for nothing. Is this love?”
“I didn’t do it for you,” Rasida says, “not at first.”
“Then who?”
“I did it for Zan,” Rasida says, “to free her from that awful prison you constructed for her. She’s some prisoner from the Mokshi, isn’t she? Made to throw herself at her own world. You are a bunch of monsters over there.”
“And what are you, then?” I say. “You murdered my whole family.” We have arrived here again, though it was exactly where I didn’t want to go. How does she continue to twist me even when I know better?
Rasida laughs. “What does that make me?” she says. “I am a slayer of monsters.”
“Rasida—”
“You are not ready yet,” she says, dismissive. “Go back to your rooms. When you are ready to be mine and be civilized, you can return. But you are not there yet. Not by half. Will you ever be? My mother didn’t think so.”
“I’m yours, Rasida.”
“You keep saying it,” Rasida says, “and for a time, I think you believed it. Your body is mine, certainly, and what you carry. But not you. Not you. And it’s you I want, Jayd. Body and soul.”
She meets my look, and I think it, though I don’t say it: “You will never have me.” And though she cannot hear that thought—certainly her powers cannot go that far—she nods, once, and I feel that she’s heard me, and it’s twisted something in her, something that wasn’t already twisted, which seems impossible. How can she be any more twisted?
“Good night, love,” she says, and opens the door. And for the first time, I pity her, because when she says love, I think she really means it. For her, this is love. This is what she does to someone she loves. And I wonder if I am any better, because this is what I did to Zan all those rotations ago. I seduced her until she loved me with all her heart, and when it came time to do what needed to be done, I was willing to sacrifice that love, but she was not. Instead, she left me and came back to me without a memory. And we began our long dance. It’s the first time I consider that perhaps she lost her memory on purpose. Maybe it was not the Mokshi that took it. Maybe loving me was too much to bear.
Rasida is a slayer of monsters.
But so am I.
“I DON’T REMEMBER A TIME BEFORE I KNEW THAT THE LEGION WOULD KILL US. THERE WAS NEVER A TIME WHEN I DIDN’T STRIVE TO BE FREE OF WHAT IT HAS MADE OF US. I THOUGHT THAT COULD ONLY BE ACHIEVED BY MURDERING EVERYTHING THAT STOOD IN MY WAY.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
26
ZAN
The funerary feast is exactly that: a feast of the dead.
I’m not sure what I expected as I sit at the table and the bodies of the dead we hauled back from the great doorway are laid out before us. Ribs are cooked and slathered in sauce. Mushrooms are sliced and fried with fingers. I would be more repulsed if it all didn’t smell so good.
I look at Casamir beside me, who simply sighs when she sees the heads of the dead lined up on the mantel of the enormous eating hall, their faces illuminated by great green bioluminescent flora. These plants are feathery ferns, and they hang from every crevice and niche and overhang in the irregular walls.