Yet still she looked past him to the window, not seeing him, and he gave it up, sending in one of the servants instead, a heavy-bodied woman who would peel Pamra out of the tight fishskin armor and the high helm at Tharius Don’s command. As she did, coming grim-lipped from the room.
“That’s no dress for a woman. What kind of heretic is this? What’s the matter with that child?”
“Never mind, Matron. Just see that the luncheon I’ve ordered is sent up promptly.” The thought of food made him slightly ill. He had not eaten for days, perhaps for weeks. His body refused food, even though he was light-headed sometimes from hunger. He told himself it was only the imminence of the strike, the ultimate victory of the cause, but even telling himself this could not make his tongue enjoy the taste or his throat want to swallow. He had always felt his vision was clearer while he was fasting. Perhaps he fasted instinctively now, desiring the resultant clarity. Still, Pamra had to eat. The child had to be fed. Pamra seemed to be mostly skin stretched over slender bones. He did not look into the mirror to see how this description suited himself as well. “Send up the luncheon,” he repeated to the servant’s departing back.
She was gone with a fluster of skirts and a tight-lipped grunt. To spread more rumor, no doubt, thought Tharius. Rumor, the blood of the Chancery. Which we suck together, more, and yet more.
They sat together at a small table set by the window. The child drank water. Pamra ate almost nothing, and that little without any indication of enjoyment.
“What is the child’s name?” he asked her.
“Lila,” she answered. She told him about Lila. He understood about one-tenth of what she said, and disbelieved most of that. The child was very strange. Its expression was not childlike. The way it moved was not childlike. It could not be her sister, and yet it could not be what she said it was, either. Tharius turned his eyes away to poke at the food without tasting it, watching this year’s flame-bird as it built its tinder nest on the ledge, flying back and forth across the window with beakfuls of fiber from the pamet fields.
“Do you see him?” she asked suddenly, her eyes fixed on the open window.
“The flame-bird, yes.”
“Flame-bird,” she said. Yes. Neff was a flame-bird, born from the flame of his funeral pyre. How clever of this man, this ancestor, to have known. She reached out to take his hand, wanting to share with him what she knew, what she felt, about Neff, about Delia, about the God of man. Words poured from her, a spate of words, tumbling over one another in their haste to be spoken.
“Tell me,” he asked finally, marveling at what he thought she was saying to him, “is Neff in the keeping of the God of man?”
She nodded urgently. “Yes, oh, yes.” “But he is not a man. Neff, I mean. Treeci, didn’t you say. Not human at all.”
Treeci! His heart pounded. The Treeci existed. They really did. Just as the books had said, just as they needed to be. Beautiful. Civilized. As the Thraish would be, too. “Neff was a Treeci. Not human?”
“Not then, no,” she said. “But now, now he is . . .” She had not thought of this before, but of course he was. She saw him, radiantly winged, not the Neff of Strinder’s Isle, but Neff with arms to hold her and a mouth that spoke to her, kissed her gently through the flames. “He’s a man now. Not like I am, or you, Tharius Don. Something finer than that.”
“An angel, perhaps.” He was trembling, awed, feeling himself in the presence of something exalted and marvelous.
She considered this. “Angel” was a very ancient word, but one that every Northshoreman knew. A kind of beneficent spirit. Without sex or identity or kind. Suddenly she knew that was exactly what he was. “An angel, yes,” in a tone of ringing rapture that made him want to weep.
“And the general saw all this, when you explained it to him!”