“Do you remember,” he began, his voice hoarse, “when I first came to you?”
“Yes,” I replied softly.
“Besieged on all sides by corruption and rot,” he continued. “And then a single light. A gleaming mote in the darkness.”
He shuddered again.
“Help me,” he whispered. “I beg of you.”
I had never held lightning or thunder in my hands, but it felt as if thunder clapped and lightning struck to take him from me. My skin burned and sparked where he’d sat. And the ichor that spilled from his mouth had burned a hole in the stone floor.
I did not go to prayer. For long hours I sat where I’d held him, immobile, unable to think. Or rather, able to think only one thing. For I knew what I must do, what it was, truly, that he was asking of me. And I knew too that it was forbidden—that the priestesses would never allow it, that the king, as many kings before him, had decreed it a crime. For the power of rulership of our world was to be held by the king alone, and a saagkazaar could not be seen to hold the influence of the kazerach. It would tip the power of nations.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Bayyur was dying, and he would take our world with him.
I was sixteen and it was easy to mistake my love for him as love for the world. But I think, if I had loved the world more and Bayyur less, I might have trod more carefully. I would have gone to the Temple of the Great Mother and asked for assistance. But I loved Bayyur and I believed he loved me, and I thought in doing this I might save him. Perhaps more arrogantly, I believed I would survive my wedding rites.
Two nights passed before I prepared a gatha unlike any other. I dyed the ochre paste I put on my eyelids and lower lip black, and I chose a simple linen gown dyed in saffron. I wore no gold—not in my hair nor at my wrists. From my neck hung a single pendant, the emerald stone that had hung from his ear on our first meeting, given to me by his own hand when I was a child.
The monastery was quiet as I swept the small prayer bower. The kazervaaj were used to my calling Bayyur, and none had guessed what I called him for now. But the leader of my hagaad, Vala, looked down into the prayer bower, her spear in hand, her eyes hard. I could not hold her gaze, for if she guessed my purpose she would drag me, screaming, back to my chamber, whether my skin was sacrosanct or not.
Songs of love had been forbidden to me, for—or so the mother priestess said—I did not understand their power. I did, or I thought I did, for the arrogance of what I’d accomplished at thirteen was a powerful drug. And I understood that to enchant Bayyur, to call him for this even as his essence decayed, I could not use joy or ecstasy. It had to be love.
And so I sang the suku softly, as if only to myself. I sang of love as I knew it—all-consuming, fractious, like thunder and lightning at once, roiling between my two palms. Love, for me, was Bayyur looking up at me in wonder, was his voice rasping for my help, was the moment—the single second—my skin had touched his.
How little I knew of love, and yet how much.
Suku flowed into dekaad, and so, too, did the bitterness of what I had to do. I had grown up loving Bayyur and being told that he could never love me in return. What use did a kazerach have for a mortal’s love when it was fleeting, a brief moment in the shade of ages?
And I had been named such, hadn’t I? Khefa—a mote, a speck. Named such because I was the mote irritating market sellers, and I remained such in hopes that I would be the blood mote in Bayyur’s eye, as close to him as his own heart.
So here I was, my heart song lifting from my throat, my feet moving through the paces I’d learned since I was a girl. The dekaad of love, too, was different. It was not sultry or beckoning. It yearned and it pleaded and it desired. The dekaad of love was love unfulfilled, waiting for the kazerach to join and turn it to joy.
And so I danced and I danced and I danced until it seemed all stars had gone from the sky and all the lanterns went out. And when at last I stopped, my skin shining with sweat, the ochre at the corners of my eyes bleeding down the sides of my face, Bayyur stood before me. Gone was the gold dust from his skin and hair. He gleamed, instead, with blood.
But I felt hope, perhaps foolishly. Hanging from his left ear was the emerald stone I loved so, swinging from a delicate gold chain. He held out a clawed hand. I did not hesitate to take it, to let him draw me to him. The orange of my gown, soaked through with his blood, turned crimson and then black. His free hand swept over the curve of my cheek.
No one had ever touched me. No one had dared. I was meant for Bayyur and Bayyur alone, and I knew, too, that in all likelihood he would not have me. But now, in the circle of his arms, with his black eyes fixed on mine, I understood the yearning in love, the way flesh and the divine were inextricable from one another.
He did not warn me before he raised a clawed thumb to my bottom lip and split the skin. It was painless, and yet I felt my own blood drip down over my chin, taking the ochre dye with it.
“Do you take the step forward?” he asked.
Here was the Bayyur I knew, confident, assuming, without fear or doubt. I did not question the blood on his skin or the look in his eye. I knew only that the dance had worked, had brought him to rights. And the marriage was not yet done.
“Yes,” I said.
His mouth came down on mine. Where I had felt thunder and lightning at the touch of his skin, this—
How I loved him, and how I loved this. The divine was fire and thunder, the implosion of suns, the horrible, cacophonous unmaking of worlds. It thundered through my blood, it stretched my mind to its limits. We mortals were not made for kazerach, not like this, and yet my body held and my mind, too, though I waited for both of them to disappear.
When he pulled away I knew what would be left on my mouth and chin; a black line splitting my bottom lip, and carving its way over my chin. The mark of the kazerach’s bride. But I thought little of that as I looked at him. He had not changed, and yet some aspect of him was different. Something in his sight unsettled me. He caught my eye and smiled as he had long ago, and it did not ease my fear. He came forward and did not pause when I stepped back.
A hand, without claws, rested on the emerald hanging from my neck.
“Why do you balk at me?” he asked.
The saagkazaar knew song and dance beyond anyone and anything. And I understood suddenly, horribly, what had changed in the patterns of his voice.
He was become part mortal.
Not all. Not even most. Half of a sliver’s sliver. And yet, I knew, it was enough. The part mortal could not power the divine. Could not sustain our world.
“Bayyur—” I breathed, searching his face. A man stared back. Not a kazerach. “What have we done?”
I felt sick hearing the tones of my own voice, because I understood without his speaking. For the mortality that had seeped into his voice had been leached from mine. And in exchange he had given me a little of his divinity, a little of his cosmic fire.