Chapter Two

Into the Woods

Inanna knows she dreams.

She knows this because where else does the love of your life peer at you through a hole in reality? She is breathless for glimpsing him, Enk Gueye, the touchstone of her heart. He stands on the other side of the aperture, clad in soiled Peacebringer blues, wild for the filth of recent abuse. Sunlight winks across his lugubrious eyes, twinkles across his sodden cheeks.

Melancholy pricks her breast, he appears so decrepit. He has always been frail and sickly, but has never looked so wretched.

Because of me. I did this.

And with this realization her sadness sharpens, stabbing through instead of merely pinching.

“I’ll come for you,” he cries. “I’ll murder the world if I have to, but I’ll come.”

“No. . . !” she hisses, then chokes upon upwelling horror. “You must move on. Let me go. I’m nobody.”

“Wrong, you’re mine. Mine! My . . . my everything.”

Her grief becomes too much, she turns away from him, returns her attention to the interior of her carriage. Heat burns her eyes, tears drape her cheeks.

“Inanna, don’t go!” his voice wails, a sound that wanes into vapor.

It is too late, she knows, she cannot return home, not now. When she had made her traitorous choice all those weeks ago, she had known she traded love for the promise of revenge. And in preparation for what must be done, she had transformed her heart into a barren place, a salt mine where nothing should grow. Yet still her lips tremble. . . .

Inanna wakes, knocked into consciousness by the rattling of her carriage bobbling along an unpaved road. She brushes the sleep from her eyes, pauses in remembered recollection. Her heart falls with a heavy thump-thump.

Enk. . . . She is despondent for recalling the memory of him.

Enk. . . . A boy who belongs to her abandoned past.

The Immortal-Emperor. . . . He is her here and now, the soil beneath her feet.

The one she must seduce to achieve her goal. . . .

She studies the world outside her window. Twilight paints the sea of ancient trees that line the uneven roadway with dark ocher, transforms gnarl branches into twisted mandibles for fear of the approaching night.

“We’re here, my Lady,” comes the driver’s gruff voice from the front of the vehicle.

Inanna sticks her head outside the window, sees a stone obelisk looming at the end of a small bend. A cool breeze skips through her hair, sends strains of her white mane careening. The carriage makes a slow turn, stops with her door facing the monolith.

“Thank God,” squeaks a terrified voice.

Inanna blinks, notices what she has missed, a brown-haired girl standing beside the obelisk. In her excitement, the girl knocks over the luggage stacked next to her and spills to the ground with a surprised cry. The hem of her velvet dress skips open, a pink rose in full bloom, and reveals a hint of white stockings before whooshing close.

“Are you okay?” Inanna hops out of the carriage, rushes to the poor girl, helps her to her feet.

“Yes . . . I think so,” the brown-haired girl says, flashing a bashful smile. She brushes the dirt from her dress with a gloved hand, grimaces at the mess her fall has made of her garment.

“That’s a beautiful dress,” Inanna says. And it is, despite the splotches of loose soil that now stain it, each woven thread shimmers in the fading light, like strings cleaved from a salmon-colored dawn.

“I should hope so, considering how much Father spent on it.” She pouts, tries to glimpse the back of her dress. “Did I get all of it?”

“Spin.”

The girl performs a whimsical pirouette, as graceful on one leg as a drunkard on two. The scent of vanilla and papaya thickens on the air, wafts from the girl’s ecru-colored hair.

Inanna picks a twig from the hem of the girl’s pink dress. “There, perfect.”

“Thank you.” The girl beams, shares a grin that sets her green eyes shimmering. She smacks her forehead, then holds out a gloved hand. “Sorry, where are my manners? My name’s Nany.”

Inanna frowns at the dirt-smeared glove, stares at the brown smudge that now adorns the girl’s pale forehead.

“Oops!” Nany chuckles, pries the glove free from her hand, tosses it over her shoulder. “Let’s try that agai—”

A cough draws their attention to the carriage driver’s curly-haired helper—a teenage boy brimming with a passion Inanna cannot quite place. He sets her bag down at her feet, wearing a dopey grin.

“Thank you,” Inanna tells him.

The boy stands mute and grinning.

“Is there something else?” Inanna shifts, unnerved by the boy’s manner.

“He wants a tip, you dolt,” Nany explains.

“Oh,” Inanna replies, checking her blue gown for pockets it did not have.

Nany rolls her eyes. “I’ll take care of it.”

As Nany rummages in her luggage for her coin purse, the boy’s eyes do not stray from Inanna, to where they seem affixed to her personage. She graces him with what she hopes is an apologetic smile, but he does not even blink.

Inanna frowns, trying to unravel the mystery of the boy’s expression. Once such an act would have been a simple thing, but ever since her first moon blood at thirteen, the passions of others had become a puzzling cipher, as it was for all women with the Mutna bloodline.

Perhaps he is simpleminded, she thinks.

“Ah, there it is!” Nany straightens, her coin purse in hand. She slips something with the glint of gold into the teenager’s hand. “Here you go, boy. Don’t go spending it all in one go.”

The boy palms the coin, but Nany might as well not exist for the amount of attention he pays her or her overgenerous gratuity.

The girls stand-side-by-side, gazing into the maw of the grinning fool.

“Damon!” the carriage driver yells.

“Yes, Pa?” the boy replies, his gaze unwavering.

“Let’s go.”

“Yes, Pa.”

Damon retreats, yet refuses to look away from Inanna as he does so. He trips over his own feet, catches himself on the side of the vehicle, still grinning like a fool.

“Idiot, boy!” the driver howls. “In. In.”

“Ungrateful little shit,” Nany hisses. “I gave him a gold gilic. A gold gilic!”

Inanna watches the carriage fade from view. “Why was he. . . ?” She turns to face the other girl. “Do I have something on my—?”

Nany whirls away in a huff, flops down on her luggage in a very unladylike manner.

“What’s wrong?” Inanna asks. “Is it the tip? I’ll pay you back. Promise.”

Nany’s shoulders tighten, but she does not reply.

Inanna sighs in resignation. It always ends like this, or so it seems, with her staring at hunched shoulders, wondering what she could have done to cause offense. This is her curse, the one that has seen her ostracized from the rest of her sex, the one that forced her to spend so much time in her brother’s company.

She feels her lips lift into the pantomime of an actual smile. Despite her isolation, those had been transcendent days, running and cavorting with Enk and Ilima, before the strangeness of puberty had made the whole world strange. . . .

“You’re mine. Mine!” Enk’s remembered voice cuts anew. “My-my everything.”

She bats the hint of moisture from the corner of her eye.

No more, she promises herself. She will think of him no more.

And with this vow, her gaze comes to rest upon the monolith and the gilded nuns that stipple its sun-touched surface, nuns with glowing eyes and golden halos. . . .