sister knelt at the side of your corpse, speaking words you could no longer hear.’
‘But … not me.’
‘Not you, not yet.’
He passed a stained hand over his eyes, seeking to dismiss the scene before him. ‘Grief and rage, you said? It seems I am cursed to stand in the way of such things.’
‘Even Tiamath has weaknesses,’ she said. ‘The host can be sundered by the killing of but one. The thing is, how do you choose which one? Each sembling alters the flaw. You must ask yourself, how did Draconus know which one?’
He snorted. ‘Simple. As you said, darkness indivisible. He knew his own. Had Galanas’s death not shattered the sembling, he would have died beneath the fury of Tiamath, and none of this would have come to be.’
She sighed. ‘Must we ever blame Draconus?’
Shrugging, recovered from his ordeal, Narad shook dragon blood from the blade of his sword.
‘Careful,’ she admonished, ‘lest some of that blood find its way into you. I’d not see you consumed by a stranger’s rage, a stranger’s grief, and memories not your own.’
‘No fear of that,’ he muttered in reply. ‘I’ve no room left inside.’
Her etiolated hand rested lightly upon his shoulder, and with the contact her voice changed. ‘My brother, there is so much I would say to you, if only I could. Your worship unnerved me. I well understood, if but dismissively, your odd aversion to capturing me on canvas. But it so sweetened my vanity—’
‘My queen, I am not that brother.’
‘You are not? Then tell me, please, where is Cryl? How he longed for a depth to me that simply did not exist! His love was a girthed thing, cast upon my shallow self, but how terribly the delusion strained his faith, his belief!’
Narad turned at last to face her, and saw clearly, for perhaps the first time, the young woman in her wedding dress, who was no queen, no high priestess, desired by many yet blessed by none. Her face was past its mask of pain, past the mask of shock that followed, past its last guise of life leaving. Her eyes looked out from a place only the dead knew, but the loss and confusion in them somehow reached across the gulf. Narad raised a hand, brushed her cold cheek. ‘I was a lover of men,’ he said. ‘But in my last days, I told no one how visions of you tormented me. How I stepped from one time into another, the only constant this perfect shoreline – oh, and the blood.’
‘Then,’ she said, ‘are we both lost?’
‘Yes. Until it plays out. Only then will our spirits know peace.’
‘How long?’ she asked. ‘How long shall we have to wait, before our suffering ends?’
Narad hefted his sword. ‘See – the storm awakens again. Not long, I should think, my queen. Not long at all.’ But even as he said it, he knew it for a lie. But he would hold to his false assurances, for her sake.
Behind him as he stepped forward, she asked, ‘Yedan, who killed Draconus? Who chained him within a sword of his own making? I do not understand.’
He paused, did not turn round. ‘Yes. There is that. It is odd,’ he admitted. ‘Who killed Draconus? The same man who frees him. Lord Anomander, First Son of Darkness.’
‘Another one,’ she hissed, ‘whom my brother would not paint. Tell me, my prince, how you know all this?’
Shapes were massing behind the veil of the fiery wall. ‘I have an answer, but it makes no sense.’ He hesitated, and then glanced back at her. ‘You say the crown has been worn?’
She nodded, already fading from his vision.
‘Who? When will I meet her?’
But she was gone.
Facing the shore again, his gaze flicked down to the carcass of the dragon he had just killed. Latal Menas. I feel your blood in my body, the heat of all you knew and all you felt. But against my guilt, you are less than a whisper. Still, how did you know what you knew?
In your language, Eleint, Menas is one name for Shadow. The name you seemed eager to attach to this narrow strand, this Emurlahn of ours. Your voice comes from the half-seen, in the place neither here, nor there, and in the gloom – as if barely sketched by a ragged, dry brush – I saw a throne …
Another blink, and before him was the forest, sullen in its winter white and black as the sky to the east began to pale. He was shivering, joints stiff with cold, his feet numbed inside their straw-packed leather boots. Upon hearing someone approach, he turned to find Glyph.
‘Yedan Narad, you have lingered beyond the Watch. Your visions leave you raw. Come, a fire is being lit.’
He studied the Denier. ‘We are being used.’