“But it’d get us all out of this intact.” Shadow said. “Not everything must be about a dramatic show, Illyris.”

  “You would know!” she snapped. And then, slowly, the ire retreated. “I apologize.”

  “It is a difficult subject,” the Shadow agreed. “And you deserve better than what we can offer.”

  She brushed this aside, as if she were completely uninterested. “So it’s a war you propose? That I finally break with my brother and mother?”

  “She’s not your mother,” Hawk said. “She’s Naomi Studdard. Argon isn’t your brother. He’s your ex-coworker. They’ve created this pantheon, this abusive little family myth, so that you don’t realize you don’t need them.”

  Believe it, she yearned to say. Buy what we’re selling because it’s the truth, and part of you knows it.

  “They’re all I have,” She said, more simply than a child. And then she turned her face to the Shadow. “Stay for dinner. Stay the night. Let me thank you for your visit and concern.”

  “Are you going to help us?” Hawk said.

  “Of course.” She said. “I shall try.” She paused again, her eyes fixed on Shadow. “But what does it matter? We can work things out tomorrow as surely as we can today. Should my brother and mother gods—”

  “Naomi and Arthur Anderson,” Hawk corrected.

  “—attack, we will be well provisioned and protected for a siege. I am safe to refuse them, little Hawk.”

  And in that moment Hawk realized why she disliked Illyris. She reminded Hawk of every single white, WASP woman who had ever bungled their concept of race relations. This was the woman who had petted Hawk’s hair like she was some kind of puppy when Hawk was twenty-one. This was the woman who had asked Alex, upon finding out that she and he were married, if he’d been really sure. This was the cheerleader slights in high school, the shoulder strikes in the hallway, the condescending looks. They’d stuffed her desk full of cotton once, that coterie of wealthy blonde girls with long fake nails who went clubbing to songs by Usher and Beyonce. And this was the teachers who stood over all of it, just standing there, why were they just standing there? Why did they stand there as if it didn’t matter? She remembered the day she realized they were silent because it didn’t matter to them, she didn’t matter, she was just a tally-mark in a book and that coterie, that clique, held more power in their parents and their skin than she ever would. This was the reduction to those people in conversations. And this was those girls and that teacher all grown up, and those small cruelties aren’t fashionable anymore. They need to excuse them, and they do it with downcast eyes and shameful faces, but they don’t really mean it because they keep doing it.

  “I am not little,” Hawk said, in a cold voice. “And I have been infinitely wronged by you.”

  The temperature in the throne room seemed to drop several degrees.

  “And what offense have I given you?” Illyris said.

  You’ve treated me like shit, like baggage, like the also-ran, the whole time I’m here, she thought, but that was deniable. So instead, she said, “Or am I wrong, and you can give me an intact Alex West with a gesture of your pretty fingers? Everything you are and everything you have are an offence to me, because of what it’s built on.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” And here was the real Illyris again. Hawk hadn’t recognized it the first time. You would know, she’d snapped. Here it was again. The breaking point for her brittle psyche: Being called on her own shit. “Why do you think I welcome him with open arms?” A tilt of the head. “Or maybe that is your problem with me. I have taken—multiple times—what you have abandoned?”

  Hawk decided she wasn’t playing nice. “You think I’m upset because you fucked my husband?”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Tension in the throne room of the goddess seemed drawn wire-tight and razor-sharp across the air. Both of Illyris’s beautiful hands were on the arms of her throne, her whole body poised for attack.

  “I’ll concede it,” Hawk said. “I’m jealous as fuck because I love him. That hasn’t changed at all. But I’m also old enough to know the pick-me game is a losing wager, and I don’t give a solitary shit about you beyond what you can do for us. But that pales in comparison to this: You ate him. You would not be here, Goddess Illyris, if you hadn’t. You’d have died centuries ago. You’d be in a neat little grave somewhere. That’s what I resent you for.”

  “What you hate me for.” Illyris said.

  “That’s fair,” Hawk agreed.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s something I cannot help. It is in the past. No amount of reparations can propitiate the past. And what could I give you? Money? Jewels? What can equal what I’ve done?”

  “You can give us part of your Orb,” Hawk said.

  Silence in the great room. Something that was quickly bordering on wrathful. “You say? You dare say—”

  “There’s a good friend of ours who was murdered by Kaiser Willheim. We think we can resurrect him, but we need part of an Orb to pull it off. Shadow isn’t an option. There isn’t enough of him left, thanks to you people, to pull it off. We came here to beg for your help in one of two ways: Either you give us part of your own orb, or you help us gain the orb of another.”

  She had turned whiter than ivory, the beautiful goddess Illyris. She seemed to have no blood left at all. A beautiful corpse on a throne of glorious clear stone, a perverse Snow White. That’s what she appeared to be. “A piece…of my Orb?”

  “It would be small,” Shadow said, placating. “No more than a sliver. We would have used Kali’Mar’s, but we destroyed it before we knew of our need.”

  “Before Kaiser killed Henry,” Hawk said, dryly.

  “And you ask so much of me, to help a stranger I do not know.”

  “It’s less,” Shadow said, softly, “Than what was stolen.”

  Silence again. A pattering of fingertips on the throne. It sounded almost like rain.

  “So let’s be real, then,” Hawk said. “You’re not going to do it. So that means if you really, truly regret who and what you are, and what you’ve put us through,” She gestured at herself and the Shadow, “then you’re going to help us get our hands on Argon’s Orb.”

  And Hawk thought the woman had paled before. Now she looked positively green. “Argon’s Orb? You would take things that far, just to save your dead man? If you would, why not just take from him? He’s willing. I know my Shadow. I know his dear, bleeding heart. He’d give you the most delectable part of himself, the memory of a lovely day, or a glorious night. Or perhaps ten words that could change a wish to a prayer, or the memory of a favorite song. You’d have much clearer, cleaner things, if you took from him.”

  “He’d probably survive it,” Hawk agreed, nodding. “But we aren’t doing that.”

  “Why not? He can afford it, as surely as the rest of us.” She sounded nearly panicked.

  “Because he’s not the one who owes it.” Hawk said. “He offers out of the poverty you left him in. You have abundance. That’s why I come to you.”

  “I am sorry—”

  “Oh, stuff your apologies!” Hawk said. And silence echoed throughout the room, as every eye in it was fixed upon her in awe and trepidation. “They’re not real or useful.”

  “And how can you dare say that to me?” purred the goddess, truly angry now.

  “Because it doesn’t come with sacrifice, goddess. Or don’t you get that sacrifice is what gives apology meaning?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “You have an altar. You demand people throw their money and their finery and their own bodies on it.”

  “I’ve never held truck with human sacrifice. You mistake me for Argon.” Illyris said, hastily.

  “But you still take from your worshippers. Did you think they were doing it because they loved you? They wanted you to wallow in the best they had to offer because they have pure altruism? Did you ever think, even for a minute, about what you’ve been asking your followers to do?”

  The goddess breathed from her place on the throne. That was her only movement. That, and the increasing grip on the arms of the chair, as if she were afraid Hawk were about to rip it out of her fingers. “I should kill you for this,” Illyris said. “The disrespect. The blasphemy—”

  “You can’t blaspheme what you don’t believe in,” Hawk said. “And if you kill me…well, I can’t stop you. But if there’s such a thing as a cosmic ledger, that’d be another debit on your account. Something else that you’d ignore while you celebrated your own life. And if you want to be the kind of person where rape and murder don’t matter, you go right on ahead. But what you can’t do is pretend to be any better than your sibling gods. You’re all cut from the same cloth.” She paused, and mentally added, and it looks about white to me.

  The god continued to stare down at the floor of her own throne room. The temperature in the room was now so cold that Hawk’s breath formed clouds before her face. She swallowed against fear, against the knowledge she had gone too far and was about to die. And then Illyris shifted in her throne and brought one lovely hand to rest upon her cheek. God, Hawk had never resented beauty as much as she did right now.

  “I will aid you. I will send my entire garrison—empty my city—in the prayer that you can get what you seek from my brother-god. Even if it destroys all that I have built, you have my word.” She paused, as if waiting for the elusive thank you, and then said, “So get out. Now.”