“He killed my mother! Who cares why?”
“His siblings abandoned him. Only for a brief time, but solitude is his antithesis; it weakened him. Then Shahar Arameri murdered his son, and that drove him over the edge. In this case, the ‘why’ matters a great deal, I think.”
I laughed, bitter, sick with guilt and trying to hide my shock. Solitude? Solitude? I had never known that — No, none of that mattered. It could not matter. “A mortal! Why in the Maelstrom’s name would he mourn a single mortal so powerfully?”
“Because he loves his children.” I flinched. Glee was glaring at me, her eyes plainly visible in the dim room. Neither of us had bothered to put on a light, because the light from the street lanterns was more than enough to see by. “Because he’s a good father, and good fathers do not stop loving if their children are merely mortal. Or if those children hate them.”
I stared at her and found myself trembling. “He didn’t love us when he fought us in the War.”
Glee folded her hands in front of her, steepling her fingers. She’d been spending too much time with Ahad. “From what I understand, your side was winning until Shahar Arameri used the Stone of Earth. Weren’t you?”
“What the hells does that matter?”
“You tell me.”
And of course I thought back to the worst days of my life. Shahar had not been the first to use the Stone. I had sensed a godling’s controlling hand first, sending searing power — the power of life and death itself — in a terrible wave across the battlefield of earth. Dozens of my siblings had fallen in that attack. It had nearly caught me, too. That had been the first warning that the tide was turning. Until then, the taste of triumph had been thick in my mouth. Who had that godling been? One of Tempa’s loyalists; he’d had his own, same as Nahadoth. Whoever it was had died trying to wield the power of Enefa.
Then Shahar had gotten the Stone, and she hadn’t bothered attacking mere godlings. She went straight for Nahadoth, whom she hated most because he had taken Itempas from her. I remembered watching him fall. I had screamed and wept and known then that it was my fault. All of it.
“He … didn’t have to …” I whispered. “Itempas. If he was so sorry, he could have just —”
“That isn’t his nature. Order is cause and effect, action and reaction. When attacked, he fights back.”
I heard her shift to get comfortable in the chair. I heard this, because I could not look at her anymore, with her fine dark skin and too-keen eyes. She was not as obviously alien as Shinda had been, all those centuries ago. She could hide among mortalkind more easily because her peculiar heritage did not immediately announce itself and because the last thing anyone noticed about a six-foot-tall black woman was the aura of magic. There was something about her that made me think she was quite capable of defending herself, too — and I sensed Itempas’s hand in that. Action and reaction. This mortal child would not die so easily; her father had made sure of that.
Our father.
“Many things triggered the War,” said Glee, speaking softly. “Shahar Arameri’s madness, Itempas’s grief, Enefa’s jealousy, Nahadoth’s carelessness. No one person is to blame.” She lifted her chin belligerently. “However much you might like to believe otherwise.”
I stayed silent.
Itempas had never been like Nahadoth. Naha plucked lovers from the mass of mortality like flowers from a meadow, and he discarded them as easily when they wilted or a more interesting flower came along. Oh, he loved them, in his own erratic way, but steadfastness was not his nature.
Not so Itempas. He did not love easily — but when he did, he loved forever. He had turned to Shahar Arameri, his high priestess, when Nahadoth and Enefa stopped wanting him. They’d never stopped loving him, of course; they’d just loved each other a little more. But to Itempas, it must have felt like the darkest of hells. Shahar had offered her love, and he had accepted it, because he was a creature of logic, and something was better than nothing. And because he had chosen to love her and please her, he had bent his own rules enough to give her a son. Then he’d loved that son and stayed with his mortal family for ten years. He could have easily been content with them for the remainder of their mortal lives. An eyeblink in a god’s eternity. No great matter.
He had left them only because Naha and Nefa had convinced him that the mortals would be better off without him. And Naha and Nefa had done that only because someone had lied to them.
Just a harmless trick, I had thought then. It harmed only the mortals, and then only a little. Shahar had status and wealth, and mortals were adaptable. They did not need him.