“He’ll return …”
Esmenet started. She had been sitting cross-legged to the side of the mattress, drifting in that upright way that made one feel like a sail pulled by unseen winds. She had thought her daughter unconscious, for the severity of her last travail as much the sleepless watches since her womb’s draining. She looked down upon the girl’s drawn face, noted, as she always noted, the saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose—but one of so many things she had inherited from her whorish mother.
Too many.
“Mimara …”
She hesitated, found herself fixed in her firstborn’s brown-eyed gaze.
“I …”
Her wind failed her. She flinched, looked down and away, though it seemed her every fraction clamoured that she endure. Several heartbeats passed. Her daughter’s gaze became palpable, a tingle across her temple and cheek. She braved it once again, only to be overwhelmed by its implacable intensity—and to look down as she once had in the presence of caste-nobles.
Mimara reached out, caught her hand between her own.
“I never understood until now,” she said.
Esmenet looked up, meek in the way of failed mothers and lovers, her breath so shallow it hurt. Her daughter’s smile was dazzling—for its incongruity, its authenticity, yes, but for its certainty most of all.
“All that time, ever since you plucked me from Carythusal, I punished you. Everything I had suffered, I had heaped upon your name … upon the dim image of a mother exchanging her little daughter for coins …”
These words seized her heart within their fist.
“They said you would be a weaver …” she found herself saying, “but I suppose I didn’t believe them.” Her eyes had become burning spikes. “The gold was just an accursed ornament. We-we were ropes, you and I … starved to the bloody gum, and I thought I was saving your life. They had food. You could see it in the fat on their faces. The grease staining their insufferable tunics … Their grin. I nearly swooned for thinking I could smell the food in them … isn’t that mad?”
How could it burn so, matching a child’s gaze?
“You speak as though to absolve,” Mimara said smiling, blinking tears, “to explain … even though you think you deserve neither absolution nor understanding …”
Ringing silence. Numbness.
“Yes …” she said, her heart beating cloth. “Kellhus said the same.”
“But Mother! I see you, Mother—I see you as the almighty God of Gods sees you!”
The Blessed Empress of the Three Seas flinched.
“That’s funny,” she said, reaching out to flatten bedding, “you sound just like Him …”
A smile, crazed and beatific. “Because he pretends to be what I am.”
“I liked you better when you were in pain,” Esmenet said.
Her daughter’s gaze did not so much catch as arrest her, absolutely, as if she only existed so far as Mimara could see her.
“You know …” the beloved face said. “You know what it is I’m going to say … and yet you cannot bear to hear it …”
Esmenet found herself standing, her back turned to her daughter, her whole skin bewildered and afire.
“Perhaps it is best, then,” she said stiffly, her voice nearly cracking on a sob that her breast refused to deliver.
“What is best?”
She turned, but could not bring herself to look directly at her prostrate daughter. She forced a smile.
“That we only have each other.”
Esmenet could do no more than stare at a point to the left of the pregnant woman, the prophetess—the stranger … She could only guess at the pity and adoration upon her face.
“Mother …”
Esmenet knelt, raised a bowl of water to Mimara’s lips, wondered when she had become so numb to the perversities of her lot. So many afflictions—too many, one would think, for any one soul to bear.
And yet here she was.
“Mother …” The woman’s look had a gentle urgency, a maternal conviction in certain things. She was the strong one now. The knowing one. From this moment, the mother would follow the daughter. “You can let it go, now, Mother.”
A narrow smile. “Hmm?”
“Mother …” Gelid brown eyes, seeing what no mortal should. “You are forgiven …”
Life slowed about its most inflamed gear.
“No …” Anas?rimbor Esmenet said on a smile far too honest for her liking. She wiped at her cheeks, expecting tears, found nothing save the grease of exhaustion and worry. Where? she wondered madly. Where had all the weeping gone?
“Not until I say so.”
The Soldiers of the Circumfix were hard Men, as inveterate as any in history. For a great many, the mad trek across E?rwa was but the most recent episode of an entire life spent embroiled in violence and war. They had celebrated triumphs. They had suffered reversals—even wholesale routs. They had ravished, plundered, and butchered innocents. They had made cruel sport of their captive foes. They had trudged through tempests of archery. They had thrown back the glittering charge of Orthodox knights, and they had been scattered, ridden to earth. They had been scorched. Many even bore the puckered and inflamed scars of sorcery.
So it was they suffered no true terror as they watched the wall of the First Riser bow and buckle. Swells of laughter could even be heard as wits called out ribald encouragement. A good number of Men grinned for anticipation as the sheets of masonry fell away. No experience they possessed could prepare them for what followed.