The dawnless morning came too quickly. Hawk did not remember returning to her hummock, but she did wake there. Someone had built a very small fire and was roasting what looked like rabbit over it. There was also a small, metal pot for boiling water.

“Where did we get this?” Hawk said, peering into the happily bubbling pot.

“A mutual friend brought them,” the Archon said. “I suspect the same friend you were talking to while you believed the rest of us were sleeping.” A long pause. “He likes you.”

“I guessed.” Hawk said.

More silence, broken only by small bodies rushing through underbrush, and the occasional mote of birdsong. The Archon scraped his pot against the fire, as if that could speed up the heating.

“Why are you lying about your name?”

Hawk couldn’t think of anything to say. Somewhere in the dark came a call of surprising beauty, the sort of bird that should have peacock plumage and an iridescent shimmer. The sort of thing that would blind you with its perfection. Hawk knew that in a darkened world, the odds of anything having beautiful plumage were vanishingly small; it did no good to make your feathers beautiful if no one were ever going to see them.

“Hawk-of-the-West. Alex West. Are you going to make me say it out loud?”

“That the husband I’m looking for is him?” she said it softly, but harsh enough to make up for a lack of volume. “Is that what you want me to say?”

“I mean no offense.” Silence. “Besides. He’d say he’s only one fifth your husband. Poor, Gods-eaten thing he may be. I’d back that fifth against the rest of the Gods.”

“Aren’t you doing that already?” She said. And it was his turn for awkward, bleeding silence. Because his quiet defiance had become loud, hadn’t it? “No offence but…what are you going to do?”

A shrug. “I could make my way back to the pavilions and throw myself on the Gods’ own mercy. Not that they have any. In fact, that may be all that’s left to do—”

“You can come with us,” she said it hastily, before she could second guess herself. “We’d find a place for you. Probably as an advisor to someone important. Your Gods are going to be our headache for a while yet.” She could already feel it in her imagination, that first little kernel of a migraine, right before it explodes.

“And what would I do with myself there? What gods would I serve?” He leaned forward, musing. “No temple to keep, unless I should bow and become penitent again. That’s how religious service begins, you know. They make you beg for it. As if you didn’t have to struggle your way up to religious life on your own.”

“Probably a control thing,” Hawk said, unguarded. “Alex would—” And she stopped. That was a mistake. Made in front of someone she could trust, but she couldn’t be that careless.

“Would what?” he said, in the silence of frozen fear and molten grief.

“He’d know why religions make you beg to join them. He’d know why it’s about control. He’d be able to tell the difference between a good church and a predatory one. Though he kind of insisted there wasn’t much difference.” She let her words fall like petals to the darkened forest floor. Then she said, “If someone put a gun to my head, what would he do?”

“Right now? I don’t know. Something spectacular and guaranteed to cement his reputation as the most wicked and evil thing to ever exist. If and when he finds out about your connection? That you still, knowing what you know, call him ‘Husband’?” He thought for a minute, turning his mask up towards his own coldlight. “I would be afraid. I know him better, these days, than I think I know my own kin. After all, I’ve outlived most of them. If someone he truly loved were put at risk because of him…I would be afraid to be anywhere near him.” A longer pause. “I think your choice to keep it hidden is wise. But why are you trying to hide it from Willheim?”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The rabbit-thing they were about to eat for breakfast was done. Hawk used this as a distraction so she could formulate her own answer. She heard noises from Emile’s hummock; they were about to rise and turn the whole world into wonderful chaos again. And then Henry, and then Kaiser and then they would have to be moving again. And then, as quietly as she could, she whispered, “I know what they ate.”

“Rabbit, I think,” said the Archon, gesturing to the slumbering others.

She shook her head. “The gods. I know what they took from Alex and consumed. It’s why I’ve been asking if the Shadowmaster ate the fifth part, or if they are the fifth part.” And then she made her voice as quiet as she possibly could. “I know how to kill them. Your gods, what we call Archetypes. It’s hard, but I’ve seen it done.”

She said it as quietly as she could, barely breathing it.

“Have you?” He whispered, in kind. “Do you?”

“Yes.” She said, firmly. And she let it sit for a minute. She suspected that for his entire life, the Light Archon had looked at Gods as something unavoidable, like wind or rain or tornadic storms. She was saying, in effect, that she knew how to kill a tornado, or a hurricane, or a solar storm. The unchangeable, unmerciful cosmos suddenly possessed a tiny hint of mercy: gods could be killed.

But.

“Men like Kaiser? They don’t seek out the hard fights. They go for the easy prey. Nasheth? He’s not touching her with a ten foot pole. Argon’s off the menu, too. Kali’Mar would be his second choice of target.” She took a deep breath. “Can you guess who would be the first?”

He said nothing at all for a while. Small rodents jumped through the underbrush, putting out the few lights the plants had begun to put out. Their voices were enough to put the light out. Then, he said, “Can you do it? I don’t have to be blind to see the way you look at him. And there’s a chance he sees it too. And he is starved for love.”

“Right. But Kaiser will buy it as hysterical mourning. I don’t matter in his equations, Archon, unless threatening me can get him to do what Kaiser wants. What’s important here isn’t what I think, or what he thinks. It’s what Kaiser thinks.” She sighed. “And I think we’ve already blown it. If I’m looking at him like that in public, when I know better—”

“No. You say he has your husband’s face. If you did not respond with sorrow, Kaiser would want to know why. He would test the connection between you and the Shadowmaster immediately, just to see what will happen.” A pause. “He’s likely already planning it. You wouldn’t need be at risk, either. He’s made his attachment to me very clear.”

And then the Light Archon took off his mask.

He had a nice face. Calm, and younger than Hawk expected, though he was certainly older than her. Somewhere between her and Kaiser, in fact, with dun colored, short-cropped hair and a small and tidy beard. His eyes were brown, and his skin was a bit more nut-colored than expected. He lowered it down in his hands.

“I was fourteen cycles old when I first put this on. (A cycle ends when the Gods say it ends. Usually it is three hundred and seventy sleeps) I swore that I would not take it off in public. And I have kept that vow for all, save once-in-a-while, when my friend comes to visit. His rage at the Gods compels me to take it off. He was angry, once because I had been oathed to celibacy…” A long silence. “But that is a lie. He was angry because the children in the Rivers district were starving. Children in the Rivers are always starving; they are so far from the Light that only His coldfire could sustain their fields. The Gods were battling with one another, Nasheth against Illyris, and they choked the rivers between them, and the harvests failed, and the Gods in response doubled the tithes as an act of faith and mercy, and there was talk of a revolt.”

Hawk felt the ghost of John Brown stir in her blood. “I’d do a revolt.”

“As would I. As would He—I should tell you of the days when the Shadowmaster was a warlord in his own right. It would send you shivering into the dark, but for the shadows you find there.” He hit the tone and Candance of a well-turned storyteller. “I think it runs in his veins still, the warlord, the leader. It was the bloodshed he could not stand, and when his attempt to overthrow the Gods failed, he smote the sky with the Nexus and vanished off to wherever it is he finds shelter. He won’t do it again.

“And yet he gets wrathful when the injustices of the outlaying countries reach his ears. Like the Rivers starving, or the Wastes being populated again—it means that our greater cities have begun throwing people outside their walls, to starve and suffer in the dark. Word of rebellion fermenting reaches his ears, he goes out to see…and one thing or another happens and he realizes there is no hope for it, and nothing to be done, and no war will ever make the scales be right.

“That is when I have removed my mask before. So I could speak with a shaken man, worn threadbare by time, and bring him back to true.”

The rabbit had cooled enough to eat. He snapped off a drumstick and gave it to Hawk, who blew on it and let it bounce from finger to finger. She took a bite. It needed some salt, but he’d found some spicy herb to flavor their breakfast. “Thank you,” She said, after she’d eaten the first few bites. “And…for more than just the meal. Thank you for being…”

“No more needs to be said,” he whispered. He ate a few small, neat bites of his own rabbit haunch. “Thank you, in turn, Hawk-of-the-West.”

And then Henry Dyson was rising, and the interlude was done.