digger in dark places. I know nothing of gods and magic.”
“You know a great deal more now than you did,” said Noetos, who was, through circumstances Lenares had not yet enquired about, the miners’ master. “And more than most other people do, or would want to.”
“Aye,” Seren said. “Doesn’t stop me wondering, though. Or lying awake when I ought to be sleeping. So is he gone?”
“Lenares said so, and I believe her,” Kannwar said.
His words brought a rosy glow to her chest.
“I saw him, you know,” Noetos said. “Just before the earthquake. He tried to get me to set him free.” The big man described his encounter with Dryman’s corpse in the beachfront forest. “All the while I thought I was outsmarting him, he was tricking me into releasing him. But the hole in the world was at that point not sufficiently large to admit him fully into the world. I hacked at Dryman’s body until it could no longer sustain the presence of the god, but Keppia did not achieve freedom. The earthquake followed within minutes. Provoked, no doubt, by an angry and frustrated god.”
“We have been fortunate,” Moralye remarked. “We came far closer to disaster than we knew.”
“We must be much more careful,” Kannwar warned. “To that end, I believe we should appoint Lenares the leader of this expedition. More than anyone else, she has the sensitivity to see Umu’s attacks before they arrive. She has held the god captive before, and still has a link to the void. We need to follow her.”
There were words spoken after this, many words, but Lenares could later remember none of them. All she could remember were those Kannwar had spoken, placing her right at the centre of the world.
Finally, for the last time, her counting could stop. She had no need to orient herself with regard to some fixed point. She was herself the very centre of everything. Wherever she chose to go, the centre would move with her.
Yes, she said to herself. Yes. This is who I was born to be.
QUEEN
CHAPTER 14
DEATH OF A CAPTAIN
STELLA KEPT HER FEET moving, her arms swinging and her face expressionless as she and Robal slowly drifted further behind the other travellers. It did not matter what he said or how he said it, she would not reveal how deeply torn she was.
She had known this agony before, of course. The Arkhos of Firanes had been a man she could have given herself to, heart and soul, had she not ignored her heart and remained loyal to Leith. And even her relationship with Leith himself had not been simple: far from it. Phemanderac had loved the Falthan king with far more passion than she had ever been capable of generating, much as she’d grown to love him. Moreover, she and Phemanderac had grown closer over the years, until the regard she held him in was similar in every respect to that in which she held Leith. A perfectly triangular relationship, unrequited but energised, enabling them to achieve great things together. Faltha had never enjoyed such a golden period in its history.
Yes, she had known the bittersweet agony of loving more than one man. And, given the never-ending future stretching away from her, she would know it again.
Knew it again now.
She worried that all she had done was to replace Leith and Phemanderac with Robal and Kannwar respectively. Robal’s passion, energy and naivety for Leith’s, and Kannwar’s wisdom and experience for that of Phemanderac. But whether or not this was what she had done was irrelevant really. She had been about to give her heart to Robal, until it had been taken by Kannwar.
Both men were manifestly unsuitable. Robal was insufferably arrogant, ridiculously overprotective towards her and foolishly outspoken. Kannwar was far worse with his genocidal morals and his constant dissembling. Yet she loved them both, fool that she was. In this, and only this, aspect of his discourse on love was Robal correct: the heart could seldom help where it gave its affections. But what she had learned, what she knew more completely than anyone else alive, was how the heart could be overridden. How, in fact, it must be overridden if anything beyond momentary pleasure was to be achieved.
So as Robal walked beside her, his hand on her arm, cool fingers whispering secrets that ran along her nerves and straight to her brain, she fought to reveal none of her feelings to him.