By the time I caught up with my brother, the sun had long set but the
moons had yet to rise. In the darkness I would have overshot him, if not
for the fact that a glow lighted up the moment I passed that certain spot
in the forest. There, leaning against the base of a tree, slept the little
blonde monster.
A fresh wave of anger reinforced the rage I already felt for the
deaths of my friends and comrades. He was responsible for their deaths,
he ran away during the battle, and there he was, sleeping.
I grabbed Nethen’s small shoulders and shook him violently. "How
dare you," I growled out between clenched teeth, "How dare you sleep."
Chunks of my light brown hair fell in front of my face, obscuring my vision,
but I could tell there had been no tears of regret in his eyes.
Nethen awoke with a gasp of pain and I was glad he hurt. "Please,
Kiya, stop," he pleaded, and I saw that I had dislocated his shoulder.
I stopped but I made no move to help him. "It’s less than what you deserve,
little brother," I said. I should have drawn my sword and killed him right
then. But no matter what he does, he is still my brother, my only family,
my charge.
He looked up into my eyes. His blue eyes, which were so bright
the rare times he laughed and so dark when he was sad, looked right through
my leather armor and sore flesh to my soul. Part of me froze up right then.
I had never seen such a gaze. But my anger was great, and it kept me going.
I set my jaw and stared right back at him, straining anger and disappointment
into my amaber hawk-eyes. Nethen had known he was leading the Inquinois
into a trap. They took him into their world, they trusted him, an undersized
adolescent from the plains, and he had killed them.
Nethen took his gaze off me and I exhaled the breath I hadn’t
even know I was holding. He checked his shoulder by poking it a few times
and then trying to relocate it. He couldn't. "What I deserve?" he said
softly, partly to me, partly to himself, and partly to someone else. He
was amused by the words. I took a deep breath and restrained myself. Times
past I would have struck out instantly. Now I waited so I could respond
without reacting.
Nethen shook his head. "Sister, you have no idea of the consequences
of my actions. All you see is the fact that I killed the Inquinois."
I couldn’t stand being lectured by my coward of a brother. "Yes,
you killed them. They took you in, and you led them to slaughter and ran
away—"
"—So someone would follow me after the battle and be led here."
"Is that what it is about? I think," I said sarcastically, "that
there are better ways of getting me here." I gestured towards the forest
surrounding us. "Would you prefer a slow death, or a fast one?"
"You can’t kill me," he said confidently.
I drew my sword. I had not cleaned it so the blood of both enemy
and friend had caked on it. "And why not?" I challenged. I hoped with all
my heart he had a good reason.
"I’m still your brother," he said.
"You are nothing."
"I am everything." That stopped me cold. I could do nothing
but stare into my brother’s familiar face. It was such a ludicrous statement,
and yet I did not doubt him at all. When he said that sentence, Nethen’s
voice was ancient beyond the measures of time. There was no arrogance in
that voice. Instead there was bitterness and anger, but also compassion
and a deep steady love for me, for all. Even the now dead Inquinois. And
on his face I saw such an expression of wisdom and strength that I dropped
my sword and knelt. In that instant, I knew that Nethen was everything.
He was everything that mattered because he was everything that was and
everything there will ever be. I averted my eyes to the forest ground because
I couldn’t stand the joy and sorrow of my brother’s presence. I wept.
When I could look up again I saw an ordinary seventeen-year-old
boy. It was not Nethen, because my brother never gave the impression that
he was ordinary. In that moment I knew I was no longer an older sister
or a protector. He was slowly cleaning my sword, using both hands doing
it. "Who are you?" I whispered.
He looked past and beyond me. "Guess," he said. Then he smiled
and his eyes lit up like I remembered from before the days before Father
left, Mother wasted, and Nilly trapped herself in marriage. I remembered
that Nethen had never told me anything out right; I had to guess wrong
a few times first. It was an old game.
"A mage," I said. It was the first thing that came to my mind, even
though Nethen had grown slowly instead of quickly.
He shook his head and thrust the cleaned sword into the dirt by his
feet. "I wish I were," he said, "That would be so much easier." It was
the first time I heard anyone refer to the life of one without the guidance
of the gods as an easy one. Nethen shook his head again. "I never said
it was easy. Try again."
I shivered. "Prophet. Seer."
"No, more than that."
I shook my head. "If not a mage, prophet, or seer, then what are you?"
"Veainya," he said.
"Veainya’s a god," I stated uselessly. Everyone knew Veainya,
created in the War of the Ancients to be the dawn and dusk between Luis
and T’van. A bridge between two extremes.
"Yes," he nodded.
"A female god."
"Yes," he agreed.
"How can you be her?"
Nethen shrugged. "She’s trapped," he said with regret. "So she
found a way out. And now she's still trapped."
I shook my head. I could not understanding any of it. It was a
dangerous topic, so I dropped it. "Why am I here?" I asked. "You said the
Inquinois are dead to bring me here. Why?" Some of the anger was returning.
Nethen fixed his eyes on me and let some of the old seep into
them. I backed up a step. "You are here because you are my sister, sister,"
he said simply. My eyes widened. A stray thought entered my mind; What
would Mother have thought of all this?
That her children were failures, that was what she would have thought.
That was what she thought of us when we were children, at any rate.
I looked up in the sky and started. I saw two moons. For decades the
Juggling Moon, Veainya’s Moon, had been missing from the sky, and at first
I hoped that that was what I saw. But no, both moons were colored. One
was the blue of Luis’s Sea Moon, and one was T’van’s Red Moon. In all recorded
history, in all myths and legends, the two colored moons were seen in the
same sky only twice before; once when they were formed, and once after
the War of the Ancients.
"They come," was all Nethen said.
The next night no moons hung in the sky. Nor would any, I knew,
be there for a long time.
