Shadow and Betrayal

And he’s my father.’
    ‘More reason that you should stay.’
    Idaan moved to him, touching his arm like a beggar asking alms. She felt herself shaking and loathed the weakness, but she could not stop it. Adrah’s eyes were as still and empty as pebbles. She remembered Danat, how he had looked when he arrived from the south. She had thought he was ill, but it had been this. He had become a killer, a murderer of the people he had once respected and loved. That he still respected and loved. Adrah had those eyes now, the look of near-nausea. He smiled, and she saw the determination. There were no words that would stop him now. The stone had been dropped, and not all the wishing in the world could call it back into her hand.
    ‘I love you, Idaan-kya,’ Adrah said, his voice as cool as a gravestone. ‘I have always loved you. From the first time I kissed you. Even when you have hurt me, and you have hurt me worse than anyone alive, I have only ever loved you.’
    He was lying. He was saying it as she’d said that her father would welcome death, because he needed it to be true. And she found that she needed that as well. She stepped back and took a pose of gratitude. Adrah walked to the door, turned, nodded to her, and was gone. Idaan sat in the darkness and looked at nothing, her arms wrapped around herself. The night seemed unreal: absurd and undeniable at the same time, a terrible dream from which she might wake to find herself whole again. The weight of it was like a hand pressing down on her head.
    There was time. She could call for armsmen. She could call for Danat. She could go and stop the blade with her own body. She sat silent, trying not to breathe. She remembered the ceremony of her tenth summer, the year after her mother’s death. Her father had taken her to sit at his side during all that day’s ritual. She had hated it, bored by the petitions and formality until tears ran down her cheeks. She remembered a meal with a representative from some Westlands warden where her father had forced her to sit on a hard wooden chair and swallow a cold bean soup that made her gag rather than seem ungracious to the Westlander for his food.
    She fought to remember a smile, an embrace. She wanted a moment in the long years of her childhood to which she could point and say here is how I know he loved me . The blue silk stirred in the breeze. The lantern flames flickered, dimmed, and rose again. It must have happened. For him to be so desperate for her happiness now, there must have been some sign, some indication.
    She found herself rocking rapidly back and forth. When a sound came from the door, she jumped up, panicked, looking around for some excuse to explain Adrah’s absence. When he himself came in, she could see in his eyes that it was over.
    Adrah pulled off the cloak, letting it pool around his ankles. His bright robes seemed incongruous as a butterfly in a butcher’s shop. His face was stone.
    ‘You’ve done it,’ Idaan said, and two full breaths later, he nodded. Something as much release as despair sank into her. She could feel her body made heavy by it.
    She walked to him, pulled the blade and its soft black leather sheath from his belt, and let them drop to the floor. Adrah didn’t try to stop her.
    ‘Nothing we ever do will be so bad as this,’ she said. ‘This now is the worst it will ever be. Everything will be better than this.’
    ‘He never woke,’ Adrah said. ‘The drugs that let him sleep . . . He never woke.’
    ‘That’s good.’
    A slow, mad grin bloomed on his face, stretching until the blood left his lips. There was a hardness in his eyes and a heat. It looked like fury or possession. He took her shoulders in his hands and pulled her near him. Their kiss was a gentle violence. For a moment, she thought he meant to open her robes, to drag her back to the bed in a sad parody of what they were expected to be doing. She pressed a palm to his sex and was surprised to find that he was not aroused. Slowly, with perfect control and a grip that bruised her, Adrah brought her away from him.
    ‘I did this thing for you,’ he said. ‘I did this for you . Do you understand that?’
    ‘I do.’
    ‘Never ask me for anything again,’ he said and released her, turning away. ‘From now until you die, you are in debt to me, and I owe you nothing.’
    ‘For the favor of killing my father?’ she asked, unable to keep the edge from her voice.
    ‘For what I have sacrificed to you,’ he