Thalia Altrersyr. Queen of Ith and the White Isles.

Did I not say, once, that I would live, and live, and live?

The strange thing is how much I think of my former life in the Great Temple. As though it were both so long ago and only yesterday. Things here make me think of it, and I wonder about it. The news we hear from Sorlost, of what is happening there … I think about them. The little child Demmy. Demerele. It had not occurred to me that she would be made High Priestess so young. I think about myself as a child before I was made High Priestess, knowing what I would have to do. I do not know, truly, which would have been better or worse, at that age: to do it, or to know that I would have to do it when I was older. I lived for ten years, knowing I would have to do it. I pitied Demerele, when she drew the red lot, because I knew she would spend the next ten years waiting knowing she would have to kill me.

No. In truth, I have no idea whether I pitied her. So much has happened since then. But I like to tell myself I did. One would, surely? You would, wouldn’t you?

Like Marith talking about his childhood, I seem to think a great deal of my life in the Temple. Sitting on my bed talking to Helase of gossip and poetry and girl’s fantasies of the world beyond us. It astonishes me, how wrong we were. Or we would go down into the gardens to play with the little ones: Demmy; the baby Sissly with her fat brown legs; the tall girl whose name … what was her name? She had yellow hair but I cannot remember her name. And yet it was so little time ago.

Our times of innocence. The past, that shines golden. We both think so much about these things.

“I dared Ti to climb the highest tree in the orchard at home, once,” Marith tells me. We are walking in the gardens of Malth Tyrenae, his gaze lights on a fruit tree. “Right to the top, to bring back an apple from up there, I pointed out the apple I wanted to him. We were only little, he was maybe five years old, I don’t remember. He climbed it, got stuck, I went up to join him, got stuck as well. We were there for what felt like forever. We were helped down and beaten. Our nurse Glytha was whipped, for letting us get away from her like that.”

“And?” I say to him.

“We learnt to climb down.”

Innocence, indeed.

“I feel sorry for your nurse,” I say.

Marith laughs. “Looking back, so do I.”

He says then, “If we should … should have children …” And then he is silent. And I am silent.

We should not talk of the past, perhaps.

But if there is guilt for both of us, it was worth it. Ith is a very beautiful kingdom. Tyrenae is a very beautiful place. Its buildings are of dark stone, tall, wild. Spires and towers that leap into the heavens. Sharp, like spines. Their roofs are made of copper, green with verdigris. The copper roofs are beautiful like cold green water. The city is beautiful like bare winter trees.

Marith does not seem to like it as much as I do. He is already talking of us moving on. It reminds him of Sorlost, Marith says. Its beauty. The sense of the city, of its grandeur that is fading, of a place that is old. Tired of itself. Decaying. Do I not think?

“I don’t think I understand,” I say to Marith. “Is that like Sorlost?” Sorlost, my city, the greatest city that ever was or ever will be, decaying, tired of itself?

“It’s what Sorlost is famous for,” he says. Puzzled. “Isn’t it? The decaying heart of a decayed empire. A city of such wealth and such squalor. A rotting corpse.”

“I …” I feel my face hot with something that might be shame. “I didn’t know …”

I have seen old pictures of emissaries from half the world kneeling in the Great Temple, spellbound and trembling before the might of Great Tanis Who Rules All Things. Now I officiate to peasants and petty merchants, while foreign kings laugh at us for our beliefs behind fat fingers. Pointless, it seems sometimes. All the candles, all the gold and silver and bronze. Pointless, in the way most lives are pointless. A ritual motion we must go through, for want of anything else to do or believe.

I said that once. Told you that. But I did not understand … I thought that I had some kind of power, when I was the High Priestess of Great Tanis, the holiest woman in all Irlast. I killed men and women and children, to keep my city as it is.

“It’s so strange, isn’t it?” Marith says then. “That I know Sorlost better than you?” He blinks with astonishment, thinking about it. “All your life, in one building. Locked in. I would have gone mad, not being able to get about. It’s impossible to imagine it.”

It is strange. That he knows Sorlost better than I do. That he knew of its decay, while I did not.

“I was the Chosen of God,” I say. My voice sounds stiff and foolish.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It doesn’t matter. Truly. I don’t think of Sorlost.” Try to laugh. To brush it away. “If I lived in a cage, at least the women who cared for me never had to be whipped.”

“And you would never have lamed your first horse riding it into a peat bog, or lost your best boots to an incoming tide, or been yelled at for tearing your clothes climbing a tree. I was beaten for that last. I was supposed to be being presented to someone at court. Not covered in mud falling out of a tree.”

“No,” I say.

Ah, Great Tanis. We should not talk of the past. Either of us.

Yet I begin to see what Marith means, about Tyrenae. I have seen it, I realize, I have seen it and known it for longer, now, than I have seen and known Sorlost. Strange, yes. And I look at it with new understanding. It does, somehow, feel something like my Temple. Beautiful. But tired. Dried out. The great lords and ladies here drink quicksilver every night and every morning. They claim it keeps them in good health. But they and their city are so worn down. Weighed down. The air here is heavy. This, after all, is all that is left of Caltath that was home to the Godkings, who lived and lived and could not die and were so very afraid of death.

And there is squalor here. Decay. Poverty. I begin to see that. I saw it, I think, in Sorlost, briefly in the streets, and in the faces of the people who came sometimes to the Temple. The people who came offering themselves for sacrifice, especially, I saw it in them. I begin to understand that, here. What it was. Some of the people who came to the Temple dripped with jewels. Others had the thin pinched faces of those who have nothing. No food, no shelter, no hope. I saw that without understanding, in Sorlost. I did not wonder at the blank broken faces that came to me, laid themselves before my knife. I see it now in Tyrenae, and I begin to understand it. Blind children and madmen go begging in the streets here. The wealthy look at them and turn away and do not care. “The quicksilver mining kills them,” Kiana Sabryya says. “That is all.” One day, riding through the city, I pass a private garden, very beautiful, very lush. At the gates a woman is standing. A servant. She throws fruit through the bars of the gates. Rotting apples: I can smell the heavy scent of them. A group of beggars gathers. They begin to fight over the fruit. “Come away, My Lady Queen,” Tal says.

“But …”

“All great cities are full of hunger, My Lady Queen,” Tal says.

“I didn’t see it like this,” says Marith, “when I came here before. I just thought it was exciting, being here. Standing in the footsteps of the Godkings. Of Eltheri. I don’t think it can have changed much, even, since Eltheri’s day.”

The first thing we did when we came here, of course, was go to the room in Malth Tyrenae where Amrath boiled Eltheia’s parents alive while Eltheri watched him. The second thing we did was to order the door to that room locked and barred, and to throw away the key.

“It’s lucky, don’t you think, that you married a woman with no parents,” I heard Osen say to Marith one night. We had all been drinking, I don’t think Osen had any idea I could hear what he said. As I say, we had the door locked and barred. The next morning, I threw away the key.

Terrible things were done here, in Tyrenae. Over and over. Torture and pain and hunger and neglect. The city and the fortress … they are well named indeed.

But it is still a beautiful city, Tyrenae. In its tired old beauty. Despite what it is. Ith is a beautiful kingdom. Malth Tyrenae, for all its past, is a very beautiful place. Its towers rise so high that the clouds gather around them: we climb the stairs of the tallest tower one day, round and round, up and up, we are exhausted when we reach even halfway, gasping and laughing. When we reach the top, there is a room that opens out onto a balcony. We are above the clouds. They lie below us, a thin grey mist. We can see the city, ghostly, through the clouds, the copper roofs glowing green. Then the clouds grow thicker, higher, we are surrounded by cloud, everything is damp and silent. Before us, just out of reach, is a pool of quicksilver, a lake of quicksilver, perfectly still. It seems to glow in the cloud-damp. Marith throws a coin into it. The surface moves in slow ripples, heavy like the clouds, then is still.

“What is its purpose?” I ask Marith. “Why are they there?”

“No one knows,” he says. “Perhaps only to be beautiful. The sky up here burns sometimes,” he says. “Burns with cold fire. I should like to see that, up close. I saw a woman’s head bathed in mage fire once and wondered, what must it feel like?”

Another day we go up there when the sky is clear blue, see the city spread before us, the dark forests and the meadows, the Bitter Sea. The mountains, north of Tyrenae, beyond which lie the Wastes and Illyr. It grows dark and all the lights of the city flicker beneath us. Like stars. Beautiful like stars. I am glad I have seen this place. Seen this.

“What is that?” In the mountains, too, I think I see lights flickering.

Marith looks where I am looking. Smiles. “You know, don’t you? Surely? What that is?”

I look at him. “No. What is it?”

“Think. Guess.” He smiles. “Wonderful things.”

Oh! I think … I think I do. Oh. Oh! Fear and delight, both at once. “Truly?”

“We’ll see,” he says. “Soon. You’ll see.”

Yes. It is time to move on. To find new kingdoms. Make our own world. Our future, not our pasts. Places neither of us have ever seen. Who knows, I think, looking at the mountains, who can say what is out there, to take away our memories of pain? To give us new things. New life. The Emnelenethkyr, they are called. Which means, in Itheralik, the Empty Peaks. For we who are burdened by our pasts, surely a good name?