Chapter 23 #3
The circle glowed between them. The black carp and white carp began to circle faster and faster until the darkness and brightness were indistinct; not gray, not melded into each other but yet the same entity—two sides of the same coin, necessary complements balancing each other like the Pantheon was balanced.
The circle spun and they spun with it—faster and faster, until the Hexagrams blurred and melded into a glowing hoop. For a moment Rin was lost in the convergence—up became down, right became left, all distinctions were broken . . .
Then she felt the power, and it was magnificent.
She felt like she had when Shiro injected her veins with heroin.
It was the same rush, the same dizzying flood of energy.
But this time her spirit did not drift farther and farther from the material world.
This time she knew where her body was, could return to it in seconds if she wanted.
She was halfway between the spirit world and the material world. She could perceive both, affect both.
She had not gone up to meet her god; her god had been drawn down into her. She felt the Phoenix all about her, the rage and fire, so deliciously warm that it tickled as it coursed over her.
She was so delighted that she wanted to laugh.
But Kitay was moaning. He had been for some time now, but she was so entranced with the power that she’d hardly noticed.
“It’s not taking.” The Sorqan Sira intruded sharply on Rin’s reverie. “Stop it, you’re overpowering him.”
Rin opened her eyes and saw Kitay curled into a ball, whimpering on the ground. He jerked his head back and uttered a long, keening scream.
Her sight blurred and shifted. One moment she was looking at Kitay and the next she couldn’t see him at all. All she could see was fire, vast expanses of fire over which only she had control . . .
“You’re erasing him,” hissed the Sorqan Sira. “Pull yourself back.”
But why? She’d never felt so good before. She never wanted this sensation to stop.
“You are going to kill him.” The Sorqan Sira’s fingers dug into her shoulder. “And then nothing will save you.”
Dimly, Rin understood. She was hurting Kitay, she had to stop, but how? The fire was so alluring, it reduced her rational mind to just a whisper. She heard the Phoenix’s laughter echoing around her mind, growing louder and stronger with every passing moment.
“Rin,” Kitay gasped. “Please.”
That brought her back.
Her grasp of the material world was fading. Before it disappeared entirely she snatched up her knife and stabbed down into her leg.
Spots of white exploded in her vision. The pain chased the fire away, induced a stark clarity back to her mind. The Phoenix fell silent. The void was still.
She saw Kitay across the spirit plane—kneeling, but alive, present, and whole.
She opened her eyes to dirt. Slowly she pulled herself into a sitting position, wiped the soil off the side of her face. She saw Kitay looking around in a daze, blinking as if he were seeing the world for the first time.
She reached for his hand. “Are you all right?”
He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I—I’m fine, I think, I just . . . Give me a moment.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “Welcome to my world.”
“I feel like I’m living in a dream.” He examined the back of his hand, turned it over in the fading sunlight as if he didn’t trust the evidence of his own body. “I suppose—I saw the physical proof of your gods. I knew this power existed. But everything I know about the world—”
“The world you knew doesn’t exist,” she said softly.
“No shit.” Kitay’s hands clenched the dirt and grass like he was afraid the ground might disappear under his fingertips.
“Try it,” said the Sorqan Sira.
Rin didn’t have to ask what she meant.
She stood upon shaky legs and turned to face away from Kitay. She opened her palms. She felt the fire inside her chest, a warm presence waiting to pour out the moment she called it.
She summoned it forward. A warm flame appeared in her hands—a tame, quiet little thing.
She tensed, waiting for the pull, the urge to draw out more, more. But she felt nothing. The Phoenix was still there. She knew it was screaming for her. But it couldn’t get through. A wall had been built in her mind, a psychic structure that repelled and muted the god to just a faint whisper.
Fuck you, said the Phoenix, but even now it sounded amused. Fuck you, little Speerly.
She shouted with delight. She hadn’t just recovered, she had tamed a god. The anchor bond had set her free.
She watched, trembling, as fire accumulated on her palms. She called it higher.
Made it leap through the air in arcs like fish jumping from the ocean.
She could command it as completely as Altan had been able to.
No. She was better than Altan had ever been, because she was sober, she was stable, and she was free.
The fear of madness was gone, but not the impossible power. The power remained, a deep well from which she could draw when she chose.
And now she could choose.
She saw Kitay watching her. His eyes were wide, his expression equal parts fear and awe.
“Are you all right?” she asked him. “Can you feel it?”
He didn’t answer. He touched a hand to his temple, his gaze fixed so hard on the flames that she could see them reflected bright in his eyes, and he laughed.
That night the Ketreyids fed them a bone broth—scorching hot, musky, tangy, and salty all at once.
Rin guzzled it as fast as she could. It scalded the back of her throat, but she didn’t care.
She’d been subsisting on dried fish and rice gruel for so long that she’d forgotten how good proper food could taste.
Qara passed her a mug. “Drink more water. You’re getting dehydrated.”
“Thanks.” Rin was still sweating despite the cold onset of night. Little droplets beaded all over her skin, soaking straight through her clothing.
Across the fire, Kitay and Chaghan were engaged in an animated discussion which, as far as Rin could tell, involved the metaphysical nature of the cosmos. Chaghan drew diagrams in the dirt with a stick while Kitay watched, nodding enthusiastically.
Rin turned to Qara. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” Qara said.
Rin shot Kitay a glance. He wasn’t paying her any attention. He’d seized the stick from Chaghan and was scrawling a very complicated mathematical equation below the diagrams.
Rin lowered her voice. “How long have you and your brother been anchored?”
“For our entire lives,” Qara said. “We were ten days old when we performed the ritual. I can’t remember life without him.”
“And the bond has always . . . it’s always been equal? One of you doesn’t diminish the other?”
Qara raised an eyebrow. “Do you think I’ve been diminished?”
“I don’t know. You always seem so . . .” Rin trailed off.
She didn’t know how to phrase it. Qara had always been a mystery to her.
She was the moon to her brother’s sun. Chaghan was such an overbearing personality.
He loved the spotlight, loved to lecture everyone around him in the most condescending way possible.
But Qara had always preferred the shadows and the silent company of her birds.
Rin had never heard her express an opinion that wasn’t her brother’s.
“You think Chaghan dominates me,” Qara said.
Rin blushed. “No, I just—”
“You’re worried you’ll overpower Kitay,” Qara said. “You think your rage will become too much for him and that he’ll become only a shade of you. You think that’s what has happened to us.”
“I’m scared,” Rin said. “I almost killed him. And if that—that imbalance, or whatever, is a risk, I want to know. I don’t want to strip him of his ability to challenge me.”
Qara nodded slowly. She sat silently for a long while, frowning.
“My brother doesn’t dominate me,” she said at last. “At least, not in a way I could ever possibly know. But I’ve never challenged him.”
“Then how—”
“Our wills have been united since we were children. We desire the same things. When he speaks, he voices both our thoughts. We are two halves of the same person. If I seem withdrawn to you, it is because Chaghan’s presence in the mortal world frees me to dwell among the spirit world.
I prefer animal souls to mortals, to whom I’ve never had much to say. That doesn’t mean I’m diminished.”
“But Kitay’s not like you,” Rin said. “Our wills aren’t aligned. If anything, we disagree more often than not. And I don’t want to . . . erase him.”
Qara’s expression softened. “Do you love him?”
“Yes,” Rin said immediately. “More than anyone else in the world.”
“Then you don’t need to worry,” Qara said. “If you love him, then you can trust yourself to protect him.”
Rin hoped that was true.
“Hey,” Kitay said. “What’s so interesting over there?”
“Nothing,” Rin said. “Just gossip. Have you cracked the nature of the cosmos?”
“Not yet.” Kitay tossed his stick onto the dirt. “But give me a year or two. I’m getting close.”
Qara stood up. “Come. We should get some sleep.”
Sometime during the day the Ketreyids had built several more yurts, clustered together in a circle. The yurt designated for Rin and her companions was at the very center. The message was clear. They were still under Ketreyid watch until the Sorqan Sira chose to release them.
The yurt felt far too cramped for four people.
Rin curled up on her side, knees drawn up to her chest, although all she wanted to do was sprawl out, let all of her limbs loose.
She felt suffocated. She wanted open air—open sands, wide water.
She took a deep breath, trying to stave off the same panic that had crept up on her during the sweat.
“What’s the matter?” Qara asked.
“I think I’d rather sleep outside.”
“You’ll freeze outside. Don’t be stupid.”
Rin propped herself up on her side. “You look comfortable.”
Qara smiled. “Yurts remind me of home.”
“How long has it been since you’ve been back?” Rin asked.
Qara thought for a moment. “They sent us down south when we turned eleven. So it has been a decade, now.”
“Do you ever wish you could go home?”
“Sometimes,” Qara said. “But there’s not much at home. Not for us, anyway. It’s better to be a foreigner in the Empire than a Naimad on the steppe.”
Rin supposed that was to be expected when one’s tribe was responsible for training a handful of traitorous murderers.
“So—what, no one talks to you back home?” she asked.
“Back home we are slaves,” Chaghan said flatly. “The Ketreyids still blame our mother for the Trifecta. They will never accept us back into the fold. We’ll pay penance for that forever.”
An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them. Rin had more questions, she just didn’t know how to ask them.
If she were in a different mood, she would have yelled at the twins for their deception.
They’d been spies for all of these years, watching the Cike to determine whether or not they would hold stable.
Whether they did a good enough job culling their own, immuring the maddest among them in the Chuluu Korikh.
What if the twins had decided that the Cike had grown too dangerous? Would they have simply killed them off? Certainly the Ketreyids felt as if they had the right. They looked down on Nikara shamans with the same supercilious arrogance as the Hesperians, and Rin hated that.
But she held her tongue. Chaghan and Qara had suffered enough.
And she, if anyone, knew what it was like to be an outcast in her own country.
“These yurts.” Kitay put his palms on the walls; his outspread arms reached across a third of the diameter of the hut. “They’re all this small?”
“We build them even smaller on the steppe,” Qara said. “You’re from the south; you’ve never seen real winds.”
“I’m from Sinegard,” Kitay said.
“That’s not the true north. Everything below the sand dunes counts as the south to us. On the steppe, the night gusts can rip the flesh off your face if they don’t freeze you to death first. We stay in yurts because the steppe will kill you otherwise.”
No one had a response to that. A peaceful quiet fell over the yurt. Kitay and the twins were asleep in moments; Rin could tell by the sound of their steady, even breathing.
She lay awake with her trident clutched close to her chest, staring at the open roof above her, that perfect circle that revealed the night sky. She felt like a little rodent burrowing down in its hole, trying to pretend that if it lay low enough, then the world outside wouldn’t bother it.
Maybe the Ketreyids stayed in their yurts to hide from the winds.
Or maybe, she thought, with stars this bright, if you believed that above you lay the cosmos, then you had to construct a yurt to provide some temporary feeling of materiality.
Otherwise, under the weight of swirling divinity, you might feel you had no significance at all.