Chapter 31 #2
‘Should I not return what you dealt me?’ He bows his head. ‘Tell me, who killed me?’
A mental test. ‘Sajamistan,’ I answer.
His image wavers in the chamber. ‘You are wrong. But when are you not? You forget things, even when your hands are coated in blood. You time-blank to protect your coward self.’
My feet stumble back.
He nudges closer. ‘Try again.’
My skin burns. ‘Do not say anything,’ I plead. ‘Please.’
‘I speak as I will. I accepted your uma into my empire. I raised you from nomadic barbaric stature to nobility. I fed you with my hands. I trained you. And you repaid me with blood.’ My eyes flicker shut.
The emperor yanks my collar to meet his dark expression, wielding a vendetta that death cannot cheat.
‘My daughter killed me. Say, I killed the emperor. I did not teach you to kill in shame, I taught you to kill with pride.’
And the words burst from me.
‘I killed you.’
The admission settles like dust. I killed my own father.
My knees drop to the ground beside Farzaneh’s corpse. And the memory jumbles out like a ghoulish lesion, skin torn, inviting infection.
It has always been the emperor lurking in the depths of my thoughts, judging my actions. Hissing at me to obey. The night of Eliyas’s execution and then Warlord Akashun’s invasion with Sajamistani forces, I remember now.
Uma had been surrounded by the Sepāhbad’s soldiers while the capital descended into chaos.
On the hill, I shoved the emperor away to reach Uma.
And I did it again. I was angry. I felt it in the way my hands shook, the way my blood boiled, my head pounded.
But I was not in control. I released slivers of nūr, piercing his flesh against the tree, and turned away.
I had wounded him. I hardly realised that I killed him.
My anger bested the control of my affinity; anger at a man who let a daughter’s mother die for his ambitions. At a man who executed her brother in a breath. At a man who used me night and day.
‘It was a mistake!’ I cry to him. ‘I was angry. So angry. But you made me like this. You never permitted me to feel anything. You despised my emotions!’
The emperor crouches. ‘You hated me. And now I hate you. Tell me what you did.’
‘I killed you like Sajamistan. I did not avenge you.’
The emperor grips my throat and tightens his fingers. I could stop this – after all, it’s by my command that No-Name is the emperor. But if I can choose anything, it’s my own punishment. This is what I most deserve.
‘You never hated it. You wanted me to order you. You had no home and wished for my clan,’ he continues against my ear.
I wish to say no but that is another lie.
He owns me. I like that he does because the not knowing of who would own me instead seems infinitely worse.
If I escape him, who will swoop in and chain me next?
The emperor is the poison that I choose, rather than handing my fate to another.
The time-blanks are my checks and balances.
The notion is morbidly laughable; the schisms in my mind are my own creation.
I deflect memories. I erase them from existence.
And why not? It’s better to divide the brutality of my memories – the happiness, the urge to cry, the sadness – rather than feel everything at once.
It’s better to dam the memories than endanger myself with a flood of emotions.
My mind is my own gameboard, the planes a conquered domain. Here no one commands me. Not even my father. Only I can.
No-Name returns to herself.
‘The emperor never hurt me.’ The words lodge in my throat. ‘When did he hurt me? Prove it.’
No-Name snatches my arm. ‘He created Mitra from you. He hurt you when you failed your poison tests. But you loved it because it meant your father held a stake in you and some acknowledgement was better than none.’ She throws my arm back down.
‘Who cares if he hurt me!’ The confession tears from my throat. ‘Pain, everyone feels it, it’s normal. The ones who complain of it, they are weak. It was discipline.’
‘No. The emperor made you nameless. Until he discovered, that out of all his children, you were the only Eajīz, and to his embarrassment, bred from nomads.’
Nomads. Suddenly, I am no longer with No-Name. Memories bombard my mind.
I am in a green gorge with the ones I’d made myself forget.
In this makeshift memory, I walk into a yurt.
My lips shape their names as I kneel before the hearth.
Beside me, Usur Khan snips a gold thread dipped in amber dye and mare milk.
Then she enters like a gall of wind – Babshah Khatun – yanking on my freshly threaded, bloodied arm.
She guides me outside before the tribesmen.
The girl who felled a karkadann with her tongue and an arrow at the age of seven, it is she who will carry with her the tales of your greatest joys and fears until the end of her days. She is your entrustment.
But I’ve forgone that oath.
Then I am in a different plane of existence.
‘Eliyas,’ I say. In this memory, he carries me on his back, whirling through the bazaar.
‘Look at the Heavens,’ he says in awe. We stop at a pit of performers, and he swings me on to my feet, and wraps his arms around me. ‘Let me tell you a secret,’ he whispers when I am not listening, eyes twinkling. ‘I told the emperor to name you Khamilla Nūr-e-S?ltana, little bird of light.’
‘I am not a light.’ I curl into his chest, my voice shaking. ‘I killed you too. That is all I do. I ruin beautiful things.’
He tucks a small braid behind my ear. ‘You were a girl, yet you blame yourself? I do not hate you. My regret is that I did not give you the home you desired.’
‘I failed you.’ My words tremor like a prayer. ‘And more, the people we trusted failed us both. Your trust in Warlord Akashun was nothing as you imagined – he made worse the emperor’s machinations – and my trust in the emperor was a lie. I am sorry.’
He smiles, forlorn. ‘I wished for a hero. My other mistake was I dreamt more for our people.’
‘You were my hero. You deserved to rule. Maybe then our enemies in Sajamistan would not have been able to take and take from us. But I had you killed. I could not save my tribe, my clan, my brother or my uma. But I swear,’ my voice pierces my soul, ‘to atone for my mistakes.’
I reach into the bonds of my past, fingers trembling. I am sorry I’d forgotten you, I tell Babshah and Eliyas.
My mind goes to other instances. The times when I would catch Uma with her arms around her stomach, tears dripping down her delicate cheeks. But the emperor hated tears. Perhaps it was an excuse. I cared, but my fear of the emperor was greater than my care.
The muscles around my throat spasm but nothing regurgitates.
How sick am I that I ache for my father? The warring world is worse than any pain from his love. Because he did love me. And I believe that.
‘The Sepāhbad was right,’ I breathe out. ‘I have no conviction; I am worse than greed, for I only follow. If someone commands kill, I kill. And now, the emperor has let me down – but all my heroes do.’
No-Name shakes her head. ‘You must cleanse yourself of the emperor; you must let him go. He is your poison.’
Desperately, I take her hand. ‘Tell me. What is the antidote?’
Her rows of sharp teeth gleam in the torchlights. ‘You must kill him.’
Then she is my father again. ‘Khamilla,’ he breathes.
My eyes well with tears. I imagine him hugging me.
Then he kneels. He is hugging me. He has never embraced me like this. He is solid. Real. Warm. My arms lift, the temptation great. A part of me understands, logically, what embracing him is doing.
He smiles so affectionately; a keen wrongness tugs in my liver. ‘You’ve done it,’ he says. ‘You infiltrated our enemies. A worthy weapon for the clan.’ But a frown disrupts that satisfaction as he sees us on the ground. ‘Why are we on the floor?’
‘Because I am in pain,’ I whisper.
He is jarred at this. And why not? I have never told him my true feelings, about anything – least of all my pain.
‘Rise.’
‘Did you hear me? I said I am in pain.’
‘Rise before your clan; it was what you were bred to do.’
‘Your clan – your children – deserved better. Eliyas, Yun, Zhasna, Azra, they were pure.’ My hands feel wet, and I think I am bleeding – from everywhere.
But the emperor does not care. For he was the cause of it – even now, still is the cause.
Does he not see outside his own perception of me or is he wilfully ignorant, liking that I straddle the line between daughter and dog, smiling at the master that chokes the chains around its neck.
For really, what is priceless to an emperor who sees the world as a series of finite values waiting to be conquered?
As if sensing my change, his arms tighten so I am a daughter tucked in the crook of her father’s arms. But love is for fools who will recklessly chain themselves to its corpse even when it rots. Love is not made for the ones who have nothing to spare.
I lean into him and wipe my tears. ‘I already killed you.’
His face crumples. ‘Foolish girl, we could have reigned if only you had stopped resisting.’ His grip tightens. ‘You need me. You can never go a night without my name upon your lips. It makes you feel useful.’
I back away. ‘This is wrong.’
‘Many things in the world are wrong.’
‘No, you are wrong.’ My voice is a plea, praying, hoping, clawing my way to the words so I may believe them.
‘Would you believe me if I said, all this time, you were my strength, too?’
I despise the acknowledgement. At him, I smile. ‘No.’
‘You had one task,’ he snaps. ‘I forgave you for your failures, for your roots. I made you. You only had to avenge me.’
‘You lied to me!’ I burst. ‘You lied about the poisons, about empires – everything!’
‘The world is full of liars! What we know of it is determined by the victors. I became your father for victory.’