Fall of Light (The Kharkanas Trilogy 2)

She shrugged. ‘She must set him aside. Oh, give him a secret room that they might share—’

‘High Priestess, you cannot be serious! Do you imagine Urusander will bow to that indulgence? And what of Mother Dark herself? Is she to divide her fidelity? Choosing and denying her favour as suits her whim? Neither man would accept that!’

Emral sighed. ‘Forgive me. You are right. For peace to return to our realm, someone has to lose. It must be Lord Draconus.’

‘Thus, one man is to sacrifice everything, but gain nothing by it.’

‘Untrue. He wins peace, and for a man obsessed with gifts, is that one not worthwhile?’

Rise Herat shook his head. ‘His gifts are meant to be shared. He would look out upon it as if from the wrong side of a prison’s bars. Peace? Not for him, that gift. Not in his heart. Not in his soul. A sacrifice? What man would willingly destroy himself, for any cause?’

‘If she asks him.’

‘A bartering of love, High Priestess? Pity is too weak a word for the fate of Draconus.’

She knew all of this. She had been at war with these thoughts for days and nights, until each became a wheel turning in an ever-deepening rut. The brutality of it exhausted her, as in her mind she set Mother Dark’s love for a man against the fate of the realm. It was one thing to announce the necessity for the only path she saw through this civil war, measuring the mollification of the highborn upon the carcass, figurative or literal, of the Consort, in exchange for a broadening of privilege among the officers of Urusander’s Legion, but none of this yet bore the weight of Mother Dark’s will. And as to that will, the goddess was silent.

She will not choose. She but indulges her lover and his clumsy expressions of love. She is as good as turned away from all of us, while Kurald Galain descends into ruin.

Will it take Urusander’s mailed fist pounding upon the door to awaken her?

‘You will have to kill him,’ Rise Herat said.

She could not argue that observation.

‘The balance of success, however,’ the historian went on, ‘will be found in choosing whose hand wields the knife. That assassin, High Priestess, cannot but earn eternal condemnation from Mother Dark.’

‘A child of this newborn Light, then,’ she replied, ‘for whom such condemnation means little.’

‘Urusander is to arrive to the wedding bed awash in the blood of his new wife’s slain lover? No, it cannot be a child of Lios.’ His gaze fixed on hers. ‘Assure me that you see that, I beg you.’

‘Then who among her beloved worshippers would choose such a fate?’

‘I think, on this stage you describe, choice has nowhere to dance.’

She caught her breath. ‘Whose hand do we force?’

‘We? High Priestess, I am not—’

‘No,’ she snapped. ‘You just play with words. A chewer of ideas too frightened to swallow the bone. Is not the flavour woefully short-lived, historian? Or is the habit of chewing sufficient reward for one such as you?’

He looked away, and she saw that he was trembling. ‘My thoughts but spiral to a single place,’ he slowly said, ‘where stands a single man. He is his own fortress, this man that I see before me. But behind his walls he paces in fury. That anger must give us the breach. Our way in to him.’

‘How does it sit with you?’ Emral asked.

‘Like a stone in my gut, High Priestess.’

‘The scholar steps into the world, and for all the soldiers that comprise your myriad ideas, you finally comprehend the price of living as they do, as they must. A host of faces – you now wear them all, historian.’

He said nothing, turning to stare out to the distant north horizon.

‘One man, then,’ she said. ‘A most honourable man, whom I love as a son.’ She sighed, even as tears stung her eyes. ‘He is all but turned away already, and she from him. Poor Anomander.’

‘The son slays the lover, in the name of the man who would be his father. Necessity delivers its own madness, High Priestess.’

‘We face difficulties,’ Emral said. ‘Anomander is fond of Draconus, and this sentiment is mutual. It is measured in great respect and more: it possesses true affection. How do we sunder all of that?’

‘Honour,’ he replied.