Chapter Fifteen The Villainess and the God-Child #2
“But the Oracle, the voice of the goddess, prophesied that one day the God-Child would come again to rule the enchanted land of Eyam, drenched with and changed by his spilled blood. The heir of the gods, the Emperor divine.” Key’s voice stopped being sing-song.
It remained sarcastic. “I always thought that story sounded very unlikely, my lady. What a surprise for us both.”
When Rae laid a hand on the Emperor’s vambrace, she felt the muscles of his forearm, as rigid as stone, beneath the laced leather and inlaid metal.
“Do you remember any of it?” Rae asked.
Dying, then having your life and death transform into a story, happened to everyone.
The experience of hearing someone talk about your past in a way that you couldn’t recognize as yours was universal, but at least when you were alive you could speak and tell your own side. In the end, everyone became a story.
Not everyone came back to hear the tale.
“I have dreams sometimes,” Key mused. “Of blood and misery and loss. Of darkness and fire.”
“What dreams?”
All parents are gods to their children, when the children are small. But what if your parent really was your god, worshipped and trusted a thousandfold, and your god betrayed you? What would that loss do to you? What could you worship then?
Rae held onto his arm as hard as she could. Key glanced at her, eyes grey and red and vaguely startled by her concern.
“Unspecific and ominous dreams.” He shrugged. “Honestly, I thought the dreams happened because I was a hired cut-throat as a child. Many of the children bought by the masters had nightmares, and I had more kills than all those weaklings put together. Most children are clumsy and bad at crimes.”
He had dark dreams in the books, as did several other characters, either those with divine blood or those who gods had chosen as their messengers, like the Oracle.
These dreams were always vague, foreboding, and almost contradictory.
People had bad dreams in so many books, Rae usually just thought of bad dreams as foreshadowing.
Dreams were more subtle than having someone write “DOOM IS COMING!” in blood on a castle wall.
Sometimes the Emperor’s dreams seemed to be of events to come, but all he dreamed did not come to pass.
Some readers said the dreams might still come true, some said they were metaphors for how he felt.
Different readers believed the Emperor’s dreams were prophecy, trauma, or memory, but nobody had the last book or the answers.
Key didn’t know what Rae knew. She had that advantage. But she must be careful. She had read his battle plans, his future great victories and his elaborate, vicious revenge schemes. She knew better than anyone in this world how clever the Emperor truly was.
“I’ve read legends of other gods,” Rae said slowly. “In the legends, more than one god eats their children. Gods can be cruel.”
Key’s teeth gleamed like broken glass. “Just as I can be so cruel.”
“I was thinking about fathers,” said Rae.
In Greek legend, Cronus ate his children until his son Zeus defeated him, then Zeus ate his own unborn daughter, in a cycle of family trauma and disordered eating.
Gods didn’t deserve Dad of the Year mugs.
Nor did Rae’s father, who left when Rae got sick, who had a new wife and baby now.
Rae’s father hadn’t eaten her. He’d chewed her up, and spat her out when the taste was bitter.
“My real father wouldn’t have sacrificed me,” Key told her in a low voice.
Rae knew he didn’t mean the Great God. He meant the old man who found baby Key beside the abyss and carried him to safety.
Who nursed the child Key back to health after guards bound burning coins to his hands.
Who raised Key and asked Key to be good for him.
The old man who died of hunger and fever and overwork, with no money to pay for a stone to keep him from rising, who Key had to bury among all those who died penniless and hopeless in the Graves of the Unloved Dead.
Since the old man died, Key had no reason to be good.
The Emperor continued, with more certainty: “My father sacrificed for me. But what did that ever get him? Believe me, my lady, I can be so cruel the moon freezes and the sun hides. I will be the cruellest god. None shall be as merciless as me.”
He aimed his cruel, charming smile in her direction.
“Except one. Be as cruel as you desire.”
“Thank you,” Rae said faintly.
From his perspective, that offer must be something she would want. She had been cruel enough to him.
With a frightening ghost of his old, irreverent grin, Key remarked, “None of my dreams seem like being a god. Be funny if I’m not one.”
Rae thought of the books, the prophecy, the lightning, and the risen dead. All the godlike powers.
“How could you not be a god?”
The Emperor laid his clawed gauntlet lightly on the hilt of Longing for Revenge.
“This is the legendary sword of the Emperor, forged centuries ago, but Octavian replaced the hilt, and I re-forged the blade. How often were pieces of the sword changed out over the years? Maybe once there was a child of the gods, but he died and the flames of the abyss rose. Everything about him was burned away. He is coming, said the prophecy, but I wonder, is this the first time he came? The dreams are all different, all dark. Ice under blood. Dead women whose faces I can’t see.
What if the God-Child rose and lived a short, miserable life, and rose and lived and died, and my dreams are memories of that?
Of living on earth until every last drop of divine light was lost. I’m all that’s left.
Not a child of the gods; a child of the abyss.
The prophecy said, He is coming, so they all waited for the shining one, the innocent one.
What they got is me.” The chill of Key’s smile deepened like frost on a grave. “What do you call a god gone wrong?”
A monster. A devil. Rae feared he saw the answers on her face, or that he knew them already.
In the books, the Emperor considered these things, but never said them out loud. They were a secret between him and the readers, and he didn’t know the readers were there. He thought he was all alone.
Key was trusting her with his thoughts now. Even though he had no reason to trust her.
She had to speak. “Innocence never lasts. Everybody wonders, who would I be, if that one thing never happened? Everybody gets disappointed. Everybody gets betrayed. Everybody comes back wrong. Everybody thinks: there must have been a time I was clean and good, when I deserved to be loved. You don’t remember being that way? Nor do I.”
His smile turned charmed, as if the oath’s enchantment that could stay his limbs at her command might tug at his lips, too.
Abruptly, he pulled her in, as though they had been in the middle of a dance without her realizing.
Rae’s silk slipper caught on a rough edge of that ivory-smooth floor.
She gave a surprised little gasp and clutched at Key, ending up with her fingers curved around the nape of his neck.
She hadn’t meant to hold him. She’d only meant to keep her balance.
His face dipped close to hers, foreheads almost pressed together.
He cupped her elbow in a courtly gesture, the tips of his clawed gauntlet pricking at the rounded flesh of her arm.
Rae thought of entering the forbidden chamber, pricking your finger on a spindle, lighting the lamp to see the face you must not, opening the ancient tomb.
All the deeds that would bring disaster in stories.
She had never understood why people ran to their doom willingly. Until now.
“I like you best at your worst,” murmured the Master of the Dread Ravine.
I like you best at your worst, too, Rae wanted to say playfully back. But she couldn’t say it. She would doom them both.
She must find someone who would see the shining good in Key, who would make him a better man with their love. True love would save him. Her imaginary love had killed him.
She stepped back. “What are you hoping to find in the Room of Memory and Bone?”
He shrugged. “Answers. The God-Child. The Oracle’s prophecy.” The Emperor’s voice grew distant and thoughtful. “Why is there a prophecy for the beginning and not the end?”
There was a prophecy of the Emperor’s end, and only Rae knew it. She had always believed the Emperor would escape his fate. Her sister said nobody could escape a prophecy. Rae said he would be the first to ever do it.
But now the goddess had told Rae fate was coming for Key.
Rae couldn’t meet his eyes, so she stared at the floor, and realized what she had stumbled on. She stood in the exact spot where the dead queen’s throne had stood. What she had thought were scratches on the floor left by the throne weren’t scratches.
Cut deep into the smooth pallor under Rae’s feet were the words No living soul.
The Room of Memory and Bone wasn’t as white as a page with nothing written on it, after all.
The purpose of the room was in the name.
The Room of Memory and Bone had been fashioned from bone on which words had once been engraved, words that should be remembered at all cost. Words worn away, just as winds and time eroded the words on gravestones. Words Rae once read in a book.
The words of the Oracle’s last prophecy, which had never yet been spoken in this world.
An idea came to Rae, as brilliant and terrible as lightning.
If a tree fell in the forest with nobody there to hear, would it make a sound? If nobody ever heard a prophecy, was it still fated to happen? Surely a prophecy was like a story, activated by being heard and believed in.
“I don’t want to hear any more about the Oracle. I’m your prophet now.” Rae tossed her hair. “Believe in me. I don’t want you to listen to her.”
The Emperor tilted his head, apparently intrigued.