That wasn’t enough.
Finally, she’d come to understand that the god portion was impossible for her to comprehend in her present state. The seed crystal was incarnitive; to harness its full powers, she needed to integrate it with her body.
To do that, she had to break the halo.
Her gut twisted again at the very thought. Growing up, she’d always thought breaking the halo was pretty much the same as dying. The two were always inextricable. Breaking the halo on purpose was tantamount to suicide.
Despite all she’d learned of the Chromeria’s lies, those were still her foundational truths, ruts in the streets of her mind. To be fair, even in the Color Prince’s camp, it was known to be very, very dangerous. Even the Color Prince had had to put down some drafters who attempted too much too soon.
Not that she herself was so far from breaking the halo anyway. A few more battles, or a couple of years without them. She’d used superviolet wantonly in her time with Zymun. It had stilled her terror, given her poise, and she had relied on it utterly.
Had relied on it from her own weakness, truth be told.
Her own weakness was the enemy now, and the only way to overcome that was to become a goddess.
The Danavis motto was Fealty to One. Her father had lived by that, at least for a while, and it had done him no good. Her uncles and grandparents before him had served some fool lord and lost everything. Fealty to One? More like Fealty to None. There is only one to whom I will have fealty: myself.
So she would become a goddess—for herself, not for them. The Chromeria said that the sin associated with superviolet was pride. This wasn’t pride. This was power, and Liv chose power now with all her heart, mind, soul, and strength.
With the superviolet seed crystal in one hand, she streamed great gulps of alien, logical light and let it suffuse her body. She became a waterfall, a cataract of the invisible and barely visible purplish light.
She felt her body reach its boundary. No one had talked to her about this. Wasn’t that strange? When the price for stepping too far was death, that no one in the Chromeria explained exactly how you could tell when you’d reached the edge of the precipice?
No, those fearmongers were ignorant. More worried about paying homage to their sky puppeteer than about paltry matters of life and death for hundreds of drafters every year.
To hell with them.
She would have said it was like giving birth—reaching a crisis and then pushing through—except she had never given birth and never would. There was a sense of building energy, building resistance, of moving with agonizing slowness suddenly, like what athletes called hitting the wall—
And then.
Parts of her mind seemed to blow apart. She felt or heard something in her, and it felt as if her eyes were bleeding.
It was like when she’d first tried ratweed and smoked far, far too much to impress some so-called friends. First was the sense of having done something really, truly wrong to her body. Then came a rush of euphoria so strong it threatened to carry her away. This felt like the way a deep draft of brandy on an empty stomach set fire to your body, except this started from her head and rushed through her limbs, her eyes hot and cold, the drafting scars on her hands freezing, every pathway through her blood alive and tingling like a first kiss.
She gulped deep breaths and tamped the corners of her hot eyes.
For a long time, she didn’t dare move. Didn’t dare look to see if her hands had come away from her eyes bloodied or worse. She knew that when she started, everything would be different.
Non serviam, she thought. I shall not serve.
Nor would she have to. She felt connected now, not a part of a greater whole, but the mistress of it. A spider feeling vibrations in her web. And one such vibration was before her. A magical creature of some sort? Bound to her?
She couldn’t yet decipher all that her new feelings were telling her. It was like stretching a new pair of arms, opening a new pair of eyes, suddenly standing three times as tall and having to learn to run again. She opened her eyes slowly, feeling the qualities of the light streaming over her.
She looked first at her hand. It was unbloodied. Whatever had changed her hadn’t injured her. Then she saw him.
Hands clasped behind his back, a tiny man who came no higher than her chin stood before her. He had golden-etched skin that sparkled in the cold sun.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Your humble slave, Mistress. How do you wish me to address you in your magnificence?”
But she ignored the question. “I have duties for you,” Liv said.
“Of course, Mistress.”
Chapter 32
Not many archers were brazen enough to try a head shot on a sentry. Too many bones, too many angles that could deflect even a perfectly aimed arrow. A man could turn his head fractionally even in the time it took an arrow to fly. Most archers thought such a shot was foolish. Especially on a sentry wearing a helmet. Especially in the gathering dark of an evening.
But Winsen was different. Danger was an abstraction too alien for him to grasp. Sometimes it seemed he couldn’t even conceive of the possibility of his failing, much less the consequences of such a failure.
He had disappeared into the brush minutes ago, saying he’d take care of the sentry. Kip could see where Winsen had to be, but with their camouflage in the dim woods, he couldn’t make him out at all.
The sentry was walking the deck of a light-hulled scout boat, which had been drawn up on the bank about fifty paces downstream from where two huge barges floated in the river, tied to the bank with many ropes, with ingenious walkways spiderwebbed out to them for loading grain.
Given how low the barges were sitting in the water, this was not the foraging party’s first stop; they were laden with some cargo already. If they were sunk, it would be a more significant blow against the Color Prince than Kip had originally thought.
Kip was hiding behind a mossy stone with Big Leo and Ferkudi. The air felt humid and full. Cruxer had left to climb the ridge that separated this fork of the river from the waterfall and the village of Deora Neamh.
Cruxer crept back now, putting his back to the broad trunk of a pine tree.
“Things aren’t quite going according to plan,” Cruxer told Kip. “Conn Arthur seized the warehouse rather than attacking and falling back. Must have been a weaker defense there than we expected. He set fire to two barges identical to these at their docks. Saw three other barges burnt out, different design, though, so the town already had burnt their own. White King’s people brought barges with them.”