“No, I looked for a woman I thought would live!”
“Because of a tiny bit of fey blood?”
“It wasn’t tiny, and why do you know about all this?”
“Pritkin told me.” Rosier glared at me. “What? It’s his story, too.”
He looked away, and his jaw tightened. “He never talks to anyone. Not about this. He doesn’t talk to me about this.”
“Did you expect him to?”
“Yes! He makes assumptions, and always—always—I am the villain!”
“You could correct him—”
“That’s not my place!”
“—unless, of course, those assumptions are right. . . .”
He started to say something, and then stopped, lips tight. And then decided to hell with it and said it anyway. “You have no idea what it’s like at court,” he spat. “None! The plotting, the scheming—it never ends. The only way out is to die, or to get enough power that no one risks challenging you. But I can’t absorb enough on my own to build up that kind of surplus, not when I am constantly having to expend it to break up feuds and maintain order—”
“So you decided to give yourself a backup.”
“I wasn’t supposed to need one! I was never supposed to have this position so young. Until your mother decided otherwise!”
He trudged ahead, stabbing at the ground with the makeshift walking stick he’d crafted out of an old tree limb and not looking at me. Although that could have been because of the treacherous terrain. I scrambled to keep up.
It was hard to imagine someone who was probably older than the pyramids as “young,” but I guess it was relative. And he wasn’t wrong about my mother. Not entirely, anyway.
She’d been the last goddess left on earth because she’d kicked out all the others, and the gods, too. I’d known that for a while. What I’d only just found out was how.
She’d done it by hunting demons, the oldest, strongest, and most powerful—including the ones that the other demons called “ancient horrors” and shuddered when they mentioned them. And Rosier’s father, who hadn’t been one of the above, but who had had the bad luck to get in the way. Then she used what she stole from them, energy collected over countless millennia, to kick out her fellow gods and to slam the metaphysical door behind them.
No one knew for sure why she did this. The Circle viewed her as the savior of mankind, because the gods had been doing a pretty good job of destroying the new world they’d found prior to their abrupt departure. It was why the Silver Circle took that name, why it was still their symbol: a circle of light, like the full moon on a clear night, like the a
ge-old symbol of the best known of mother’s many names: Artemis, goddess of the moon, the great huntress . . .
Of course, as the son of one of those she’d hunted, Rosier had a slightly different take. Namely that she’d kicked out the other gods in order to rule supreme on her own. Only they had resisted more than she’d expected, leading to her expending most of her newly acquired strength in the battle. And that had left her vulnerable to payback from all those outraged demons—if they could have found her.
They never did.
But they did find me. And naturally assumed that some nefarious plot on my mother’s part had led to my conception. Rosier especially was a big fan of that idea. Recent events had mitigated the council’s view somewhat, but Rosier . . .
He was still in tinfoil hat land, and showed no sign of coming back.
“It was a different age then,” he told me, looking off over the spread of mountains. “My father strode the gaps between worlds like a colossus, magnificent in his power, breathtaking in his influence. In his era, incubi were respected, admired, even coveted. Our people were considered ornaments to any court, valued councilors, trusted spies, functionaries, diplomats . . .” He trailed off.
“And then?” I prompted.
He shot me a glance. “And then came the dark times, and the world we knew shattered and broke. Everyone was set adrift as courts scattered and people fled and my father—we never recovered.”
“So Pritkin was supposed to help you reclaim lost glory?”
“He was supposed to help me survive!” Rosier said, slashing at some gorse bushes that had grown over the “road.” “That’s all any of us have done ever since. And it was damned hard, girl. Our specialized abilities, honed to a fine sheen over countless centuries, were suddenly useless. Beauty, luxury, flattery—none of these things mean a damn when you’re scratching and clawing for survival! When your very civilization is coming down around your ears!
“But survive we did, among them all, among creatures a thousand times more powerful. The ones everyone assumed would be among the first to go, the soft, the indulgent, the useless incubi, survived when countless stronger races fell.”
He whirled on me suddenly, so much so that we both almost went sprawling. “I did that, do you understand? I kept the remnants of us together; I forged us into a functioning whole; I found us a refuge! All I ask is for Emrys to help me hold it. And he could—easily, pleasurably. With two of us to absorb power, and with our gifts . . . no coalition would ever be able to challenge us. It would mean absolute security—”