But Hawk was thinking more about dysfunctional family dynamics now. “Argon and Illyris are going to have to carry Kali’Mar’s share of Nasheth’s…” She paused, trying to think of how to explain narcissistic supply to the Shadow, and failing. “Support,” was the word she settled on.

  “It’s more than support. They feed her, from ego to bone, with a hunger that nothing can sate.”

  Huh. Sounded like he had a good handle on supply, after all. “So when Illyris said ‘we can die’, she was talking about Nasheth?” Hawk said.

  “She was talking about all three of her fellow-gods. Kali’mar and Argon were never merciful during the ten-year feasts…and they took liberties.”

  “Liberties,” Hawk said, dryly.

  “Rapine. Unacknowledged.” Shadow said, equally dry. “Nasheth seemed to find it amusing.”

  Hawk nodded, slowly, and regretted not putting Kali’Mar through more before she killed him. She’d have risked death a few more times, just to make him suffer. “I…really don’t know how to respond to that.”

  “Neither do I.” He paused. "I respect her for her survival, for retaining some measure of compassion in all this hell. But I've long waited for the day when she begins fighting for herself, and I am still waiting." He dropped his head, allowing that thread of conversation to die. “Nasheth always kept them from marring the Orbs of each other. I always thought it was because she wanted to avoid any of them gaining more power than she. And that she fed upon the Orbs after the ten-year-feast was done. But I did not know my memory was as poor as it is. Now I suspect she left them entirely untouched, lest she break one of them the way I am broken, and turn the others against her.”

  “They trust her with their lives,” Hawk said. This was a gaping horror of an idea, Lovecraftian in scope and scale. Trust Nasheth? She wouldn’t have trusted her, even when the woman was still Naomi. “So what are we trying to get out of Illyris this trip?” She tried to keep her words light.

  “Either a piece of her Orb to heal Henry, or soldiers for the Temple of Light, to guard against a siege.” He said, and started to say something more. But at that perfect moment, the doors to their cold and ice-filled apartment opened, admitting someone in blue robes who carried an aura of stress and discomfort.

  “My lady bids you come,” They said, and then they left without even closing the door.

  ***

  When they arrived back in the wet, lifeless courtyard, Hawk and the Shadow stared at a pacing, enraged Illyris. She walked from her dias to one end of her opulent throne room. Spun on heel and walked to the other side. Each stride seemed titanic, as if her mortal pace were hers by choice, and the whole of the throne room shuddered with each footfall.

  “They dare,” she said, waving a scrap of parchment in one hand. “They dare, they dare, they dare!”

  Hawk and Shadow exchanged a glance. Hawk stepped forward before he could respond further. “What’s wrong, Lady Illyris?” She said. Woman to woman, she thought. Let’s go.

  “My brother-god Argon and mother-god Nasheth…oh, hell with it. You’re from earth. Arthur and that…that…that..." She calmed herself. "My mother, Nasheth, Naomi-that-was. She is demanding I go to them. And I have to, unless I want war. They know about Kali’Mar’s death. They want to respond by razing the Temple of Light to the ground.”

  “Can they do that?” Hawk said.

  Illyris gave her a look like she’d said something particularly stupid. “We carved the Temple of Light out of a single spire of crystal. Maybe they could level a few of the newer buildings, but that’s all.”

  “And you wouldn’t dare touch the Prism, would you?” Hawk added. She was smiling now. On surer footing.

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  “Oh,” Illyris said, looking down at Hawk and…deflating, slightly. “No. We would not.”

  “A curious reaction,” Shadow said, into the silence that followed. “Is not the moment of this world’s creation your greatest triumph?”

  Illyris said nothing at first, but returned to her throne. Each movement now seemed weighted down. When she sat, it was with gravitas and sorrow. “No. There was no triumph in that. Not with…what we did.”

  Merciless, Hawk said, “Forcing an innocent man into the Prism so none of you had to carry the risk? Or eating him when the risk was done?”

  A deadly, awful, silent pause.

  “Ed Studdard went mad. Don’t you get that? We all could have gone mad. We did what we needed to do to survive.”

  “Did Alex go mad?” Hawk said. “Or better, let’s be more specific. Did he have a mental breakdown from the sheer loneliness of his imprisonment? Or did you even bother waiting that long before you ate him?”

  Silence.

  “Because I know my husband. He’d have fought you. Four mortals against an Archetype? You wouldn’t have won. You stunned him while he was still unconscious, didn’t you?”

  More silence. “I don’t,” Illyris said, and failed to get any further. She slumped in her throne, hands on the arms, head threatening to bow. Then she said, “Who are you to hold me accountable, mortal woman?”

  “Who are you to be above accountability?” Hawk spat back.

  A dangerous smile on Illyris’s divine, red lips. “So you can’t do it. Can you? You cannot name yourself ‘wife’ to the Shadow, though he seemed willing to claim you.”

  Hawk held to her self-control. She did not flinch, despite this being a body blow. She let it in, let it hurt, and let it pass. It was the flailing of someone so lost in their own darkness they couldn’t even truck light in. She didn’t need to take it personally. “I can’t,” she agreed.

  “You even admit it.”

  “I can’t,” she said, in measured tones, “Because he does not want me to. I don’t pretend to understand why,” She lied. She thought she understood it very well. Speaking of people needing to fight for themselves. “And my hands aren't clean. I lied when we first met, he and I, and pretended we didn’t know each other because I was terrified of what would happen if he loved me.”

  “And yet you insist he is a good man,” Illyris said. “You feared he would harm you?”

  “Or that others would use me against him.” She said. “Kaiser, mostly.”

  This got a dismissive wave. “I’m sure he’s terrifying in Earth. Here, he’s no God. I’m sure there were always ways around his appetites.”

  Hawk didn’t think Kaiser’s issue was his appetites. She thought it was his ambitions. That, and the fact that he was psychopathic to the point of parody. Hawk also had Illyris pegged as someone who would pull wings off flies for fun. She’d just wallow in her guilt over it for a little while. But that whole subject felt like a rabbit hole she didn’t want to go down. “But we were talking about my unwillingness to name myself ‘wife’ to the Shadow. It's an important decision. Something worth honoring and preserving. That’s not something you decide on a battlefield. And we are making a kind of war here, aren’t we? Or are you going to take the fact of Kali’Mar’s death lying down.”

  Dark and brooding silence. Illyris’s lovely fingers began tapping on the arm of her throne. “I’ll admit,” she said at last, “My only regret is that you killed the wrong one. Kali was redeemable. Argon is not.”

  Hawk suspected this was the sort of lesser-of-two-evils some people use to cope with trauma. Separating your abusers out into “the good one” and “the bad one” can sometimes provide that illusion of control, that if you give in and surrender to the good one then maybe things won’t be so bad. She was also smart enough not to say any of this out loud. If Illyris wasn't ready to hear it, this would end explosively. “I don’t think I’d have won against Argon,” Hawk said, after a moment. She was remembering his chosen form of worship. His priests had been forced to hold their hands in a flame until their skin blackened beyond repair, then had to open those same burnt appendages beneath Argon’s face, near enough to breathe the fumes from their destroyed flesh. There was an implied enjoyment of cruelty, an expression of unthinkable lust on the god’s face as he forced his people through that farce. “It was chance, and the Shadow, that gave me an opening the first time.” She hesitated, then felt the start of a plan commence, and smiled. “But he wasn’t the first Archetype I saw die. The first one I killed, yes, but I went against Kali’mar knowing he could be killed.”

  “How?” Illyris said.

  Hawk described the Ape, her first living Archetype, and how the Ape had been killed by a bullet to the back of the skull. “It shattered the core. So we may not need a great elaborate plan to, say, bring me up against Argon. We’d just need to drag Argon—and Nasheth—in front of the military and tell the snipers where to shoot.”

  The gracious goddess of water tilted her lovely head, sending an envious cascade of soft, dark curls across the pale ivory of her throat. Which Hawk was staring at, with a desire to bite down. Either because the woman was that goddamn beautiful, or because Hawk wanted to add another God to her trophy wall, she couldn’t tell. She’d never been so attracted by such a repellant thing before…and unlike Argon and Kali’mar, she wasn’t sure why she disliked the woman so much. It might have been as simple as her being a rival for the Shadow’s affection…but that didn’t feel right.

  “Not the bravest solution,” Illyris said. “And more merciful than either of them deserve.”