I tremble. “I don’t want anything.” My mind fills with the hundreds of curses I’ve witnessed, all of them cruel. If the Storm is hers, I have to assume that whatever I ask from her will be granted with malicious purpose.
Ma’s strength was the kind that meant she could sacrifice anything for the power to change the world. She walked into the Storm for that power, met the scattered parts of herself, and took only what she deemed worthy. She took the hard, the strong, and left the soft.
But I’m only made up of soft parts. Would I give up the sorrow that still feels like a kick in the teeth? Or the doubt that dogs every choice I make, that worries I’ll never do something right? What of the electric and tentative thing between me and Dalca that makes me strangely conscious and fluttery and unsure?
Or the softest things, the love I hold for Amma, for Pa, for each of the stormtouched who came into my life and left me a little sadder when they left? The love I hold for my home, for the warmth of sundust teaand a smile from under a mosscloth cloak, for the thrill and beauty of ikonomancy, even for the way sunlight glints off the palace and how the Wardana shine against the dark.
I took them, I accepted them, and I’m loath to give them up.
You want nothing? Do not lie.She reaches out a long finger, and with the very tip, she touches my forehead.
Thoughts, naïve and foolish, spill from my mind into hers.I want to save my Pa I want to save Dalca I want to save his mother I want to save my mother I want to save myself.
Things that I have no business wanting:I want to free Izamal of his anger I want to free this place of the Regia’s hold I want to free the world of the Storm.
I want to gather everything and everyone into my heart and protect it all.
I’m embarrassed and angry at being exposed. At being forced to face the truth that, at my core, I’m as soft and idealistic as a child. “You can’t use that against me,” I stammer, as if I have any power here at all.
You do have power here, a great one.All her voices drop away. She speaks with a single, thoughtful one.I will give you something.
“In exchange for what?”
I ask nothing from you but that you accept it. This gift will demand everything of you; if you will master it, you must face it as you have faced yourself.
Vertigo clutches my stomach, the memory of falling into my shadow, of being torn apart, of having to glue myself together again. “What is it?”
It was once called my greatest curse. But with it, what you want may come to be.
“Why give it to me?”
Those who asked for it were not worthy. You, who have not, may yet prove to be.
“But why? You don’t owe me anything.”
Images come to me, of a man bathed in golden light, the twist of hishandsome smile, his hand reaching for an impossibly beautiful woman, their fingers intertwining over the life in her belly, the fire under his skin rising to his fingertips, his red-gold magic wrapping around them in a cocoon made strong by their togetherness, by how they balanced each other, by their love. The Great King and the forgotten Queen.
Perhaps, by your hand, what I desire may come to pass.
I remember the sense of longing I felt when I stepped into the Storm. It was her longing. But this is not the longing of a gentle mother. She is soft and yet hard, loving and cruel, creator and destroyer. She is strong, the strongest woman I’m likely to meet. And yet she misses her King, her love.
She offers me power, the likes of which I’ve never known. Pa’s knowledge is his power; Dalca and Izamal had thought to access it through me. This would be different; this would be power of my own. Power to save Pa, save Dalca, save everyone. My mouth fills with the taste of blood.
The lines of her face harden as she bears down on me.Will you bear this, greatest of all my curses?
Yes.
“Yes.” I say, repeating myself a thousand times more as it pours into me, prickly and clawing and healing and shining and terrible and wonderful. Every inch of it, I accept. I feel it gather within me. It becomes a stream of darkly iridescent water coursing through me, a torrent that wraps around my core and spreads into a thousand shifting rivers that run under my skin like veins, like a pattern, a mark that shifts and morphs, one that can’t be seen, one that can’t be drawn.
This is her curse; this is her gift.
Another heartbeat echoes mine, a thrumming in my chest, and Idon’t understand it. There’s something in me, but it doesn’t feel like power.
The Queen smiles, but it is monstrous. Her nails grow into claws, and blackness bleeds into the whites of her eyes. She lays a clawed hand on the head of the dead serpent. Expanding like ripples in a still lake, life grows within the snake.
When it is made whole, it blinks its reptilian eyes and unfolds leathery wings.
The time has come for you to return to the world from which you came.
“Not alone,” I tell her. “Not without those who came with me.”
Her displeasure radiates from her stilled smile.
Only more darkness awaits you in this cage of clouds. Do not tarry.
I grab hold of the winged serpent’s scales as darkness seeps into the clearing, and I scrabble for a hold as the serpent leaps into the air, leaving the still pond and the circle of trees far below. But no matter how many layers of darkness the winged serpent puts between me and the Queen, I can’t shake the feeling that she’s watching me.