Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars 0.5)(82)

“Your father passed away before you were born,” she said. “He was sick for a long time, with a wasting illness that slowly destroyed his body.”

“Why didn’t you help him? Why didn’t you save him if you loved him?” If I could heal someone’s broken back, surely a god could heal someone from an illness. She could have at least given me a father if she wasn’t going to be there for me.

She blinked slowly, her black eyes unreadable. “That is not my role.”

Anger raced through me, fierce and wild. “So you left me with no family? If you couldn’t save my father, why did you bother getting close to him?” What was the point of falling in love if it was doomed to end from the start? I never would have let myself grow so accustomed to Ina’s arms around me if I’d known they would one day be torn away. I never would have kissed Hal if I’d known how he had betrayed me.

“I didn’t mean to. But your father composed the most beautiful music. He had the sweetest voice,” she said distantly, remembering. “I spent so many hours hovering close by, waiting for the right time to welcome him. I fell in love with those melodies—and with the man who made them—even though I didn’t want to. Not after what happened to Veric.”

The way I heard music in all of nature, in the chirp of a cricket, the whisper of leaves in the wind, the sound of a stream running over rocks—that had been my father’s gift. The vespers were a far kinder one than my mother had given me.

“But how could you leave me all by myself?” My voice trembled. My life would have been so different if I had grown up with someone who understood my powers, with someone who would have told me I was dangerous. My decisions in life would have been so different. Would that not have been better for everyone?

“Asra, my days and nights are spent at the edges of battlefields, by the bedsides of the sick, or hovering at the edges of an accident just before it happens. I am sometimes the only witness when a mortal chooses to take their own life. I am fed by the last heartbeats of the dying, and my duty is to unmake their souls and deliver them back into the magic that exists all around us. What way would that have been for a child to grow up, seeing death at every turn? Even if it is part of the cycle that sustains our world, love cannot grow where grief and sorrow reign.”

Resentment smoldered in my breast. She’d never even given me the chance to be loved. “It might have. You could have at least shown me how to use my gifts. Told me who you were. That you existed. That you cared!”

“Your gifts are those of blood, fate, and death. And like all gifts, they have their prices. No one has ever survived the blood gift long enough to master it. You know what happened to Veric. . . . I thought if you never used it, perhaps you might have a chance at a more normal life.” Her voice was deep with sorrow. Perhaps she did have feelings after all.

“Nothing about my life has been normal.” I failed to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“But a life with me would have been no life at all. I left you because you deserved the chance for a quiet and beautiful life, and if that meant I could only watch you from the shadows when you cut the stem of a plant or took the life of an animal for food, so be it.”

“I would rather have known who I was,” I whispered. “I would rather have known that someone loved me.” Tears streaked down my cheeks.

“I have always loved you, sweet girl.” She pulled me forward and kissed my tearstained cheek, the brush of her lips cold and tingling. In that single kiss the pull of darkness and final endings called to me. “I did not want to repeat the mistakes I made with Veric. He was ambitious. I visited him often when he was a child, and sometimes I took him places I thought he needed to go to understand the gravity of his power. The problem was that he never could keep it to himself—he wanted to make the world a better place, and to use his gift to accomplish that. When he was still quite young, he used his gift to destroy the serpent king at the behest of the Six, much like you ended the southern drought.”

I remembered the story. The serpent king had been the most evil leader Zumorda ever had. While it was true that Zumordans favored power, and the strong would always rise to leadership, once he got there the serpent king had twisted the power into something evil. He hadn’t cared for his people. His rule was one of bloodshed and death, as venomous as the enormous black snake he’d taken as his manifest. Entertainment at his court was always something that ended with spilled blood.

“When the serpent king turned away from the Six Gods, refusing their guidance or their magic, we asked Veric to write his death.”

“So the mouth rot . . . and the respiratory infection that killed him . . . you’re saying that wasn’t natural? The gods were responsible?” I had never heard this version of the story.

“Yes, Veric wrote the king’s fate in great detail, and it came to pass. The use of his power aged Veric into a feeble old man. He retreated with his partner, Leozoar, to the cave in his territory, hoping no one would find him. But he was too well known and had done too much work documenting how his blood could be used for various purposes. Mortals were desperate for what he had to offer—desperate to get it from him before he died. So they hunted him. Only by the grace of his lover’s protection did he escape. But he knew he could only hold them off for so long. He decided that if he couldn’t do good for his own generation, he would do it for the next.”