N. Jemisin - The Awakened Kingdom

“That depends on what you think of as sedition.” Eino shrugged, no longer demure or serene. The look on his face was openly contemptuous now; he looked around at the Warriors’ Council the same way Ia had looked at me on that first day, or Zhakkarn on the second—like he knew they were beneath him. He lifted his chin, as if to emphasize this. “I believe the Darre are stronger as a whole people, not with half of our kind reduced to possessions and treated like children. I act in accordance with this belief. Is that sedition?”

“It is!” yelled one of the women behind us, and there were other murmurs in the room, some of them from the circle, others from beyond it. Kitke-ennu glanced around at them without moving her head; her jaw flexed.

“I do not believe so,” she said—and there were murmurs in agreement with this, too, which made me happy. But then Kitke added, “Yet if men would be treated as women, then they must carry themselves as women, and exercise sound judgment, comport themselves with dignity. You cannot act the barbarian, Eino mau Tehno, and expect civilized folk to listen.”

“The men of Darr have been civilized for two hundred years and more,” Eino said, his voice sharp and words quick. “It has gotten us nowhere. Perhaps barbarism will be more effective.”

And he drew his hands into his sleeves for a moment, then slipped them out again; with his left hand he raised Lumyn’s mosaic knife.

There were murmurs again, and gasps, and Fahno froze. “Eino—”

He glanced at her, then set his jaw and drew his hands into his robes again. “I will not be bartered, Beba,” he said. “Not even for your sake.”

“What are you doing?” Arolu, behind us, was trying to come forward; Mikna and Ia held him back. “No, no, he is my son, I cannot let him—”

“There is no need for anything drastic,” Kitke-ennu said, holding up her hands in alarm; she’d half risen to her feet already. “To kill yourself—”

“ Kill myself?” Eino laughed again, so harshly that I jumped. “No. I do this with the Warriors’ Council itself as witness, in a house that belongs to all Darre. I am claiming myself.”

We could not see what he did, there inside his robes, but we saw the sudden, sharp jerk of his movement. Saw how his face tightened, his lips drawing back from his teeth. He did not cry out, though I flinched, and so did Ia, at the white flare of his pain. I smelled his demon blood then, a lot of it! And a moment later, spots of darker color appeared on the cloth across his lap.

There were SCREAMS! I was almost one of them! Fahno staggered back, staring at Eino; beyond her, Mikna and Arolu were just as shocked. Ia—he stared, too, but there was the tiniest of admiring smiles on his lips. Lumyn looked ill.

Eino’s face had gone sallow. He swayed where he knelt, and I saw his eyes roll back. He was going to fall! So I ran over and caught him, and held him against me while everyone around us just kept on freaking out.

“I don’t suppose… you can heal me,” he murmured, through the screams and chaos. “Sweet bright hells, this hurts.”

“I don’t know how,” I said, anxiously. “I still haven’t learned that. Ia’s coming, though—”

“No. He can only n-negate what I’ve done. I don’t want it negated.” Eino’s eyes fluttered shut; he’d begun shaking, his skin turning cool and clammy. “I will be… what I choose to be. If they cannot make a p-place for me, I will carve my own.”

I blinked. Oh.

Ia and Arolu reached us, Arolu’s eyes wide and white; at once he tore off one of his sleeves, twisted it, and then pushed Eino back so he could get his robes up. Someone was calling for a bonebender. Eino, however, had started to laugh through his shaking. He murmured something; I leaned close to hear it.

“I am a warrior,” he said, through gritted teeth, “and I will not fight fair.”

I sat up, staring down at him. Ia, standing at the edge of my vision, suddenly looked sharply at me.

Oh . I understood a new thing, all of a sudden:

Power is not a thing that can be given.

The men of Darr had tried to give up theirs, to prove their loyalty after their fellows’ betrayal, but they were still Darre. The Darre as a whole kept trying to let go of their warrior selves, but they couldn’t; it was what had made them strong for so long, and they knew it. Even Ia—he had chosen to live among the mortals because they did not fear him, but that did not make him anything less than he was: the greatest and most terrifying of the Three’s remaining children.

Everyone treated Eino like less than he was, but that did not make him so. Even when he tried to fit himself in with their thinking, when he let them use him, he was still not their thing. He was still himself: a great mortal temporarily folding himself small, choosing to bend and smile behind his sleeve and refrain from dancing in others’ presence. He might allow others to forget his worth, might have to remind them, might have to fight and bleed to make them recognize it—but as long as he remembered who and what he was, none of them could diminish him. He was, would forever be, glorious.

Oh!

And all he would ever have to do, to claim his true glorious self—

OH! OH! OH!

—was take his power back .

I lifted my hands without quite knowing why. Just felt right. I made cups of my hands. Something filled them now, brimming gold and bright-hot and strange. Where had it come from? Mostly Eino—but there was some of me in there, too, just a little, just enough. A spark of myself. Why had I added that to Eino’s shining power?

Because I had to. Because it was… it was why I was there! Why I was , at all.

All around us the mortal realm seemed to swirl, as if something had set it spinning around an axis that was us. But here, here which had become the center of all things, everything was suddenly still.

“Shill?” Ia’s voice was sharp.

“This is yours,” I whispered to Eino, who squinted up at me, panting. “You took it back from them.”

Eino looked utterly confused. “Mine? ”

I grinned. “Here!”

“Wha—” he began, before I plunged both hands up to the wrists into his body.

Into him! Into the he-that-was-Eino, not the flesh, not just the soul! Oh, there are no words for it, not even in my sophisticated big-girl vocabulary, but it was beautiful and perfect, all the whatness and howness of existence pouring through me, finding all the whoness and whyness of him and filling it up, blowing it open, setting us both on fire like baby stars! And I was all swirly, WE were swirly together, there is nothing to describe it except

YOU

ARE

And also, also:

I

AM

Because I am! Because THAT IS WHAT I AM!

Many things happened.

There was light like morning all around me. In the light, my hair lifted and whipped. I rose—no, I grew , limbs and face getting longer, breasts and hips becoming more than thoughts, hair stretching into a whipping banner. As I grew I pulled the shining, screaming thing that was Eino with me, dragging him by his soul; I was laughing. We were laughing, him through his screams and me through my tears, as all around us gathered a ring of power so vicious and intense that the Raringa’s floor peeled apart in splinters and rubble and its roof shattered and flew outward and most of the mortals screamed and fled.

And high above us the moon moved back into the place that it had held for eons, and the sun gasped and turned to see what was happening, and all the planets, everywhere, suddenly paid attention and got excited. All over existence I could feel all the incomprehensible members of my family perk up, or inhale, or sparkle, or ripple as they perceived the change.