“Thank you,” Shiny said again, softer. “You are all very kind.”

“So are you,” said the thin voice, and then the woman murmured something about letting me sleep, and all three of them went away. I lay there in their wake, not quite boggling. I was too tired for real astonishment.

“There’s food,” Shiny said, and I felt something dry and hard brush my lips. The bread, which he’d torn into chunks so I wouldn’t have to waste strength gnawing. It was coarse, flavorless stuff, and even the small piece he’d torn made my jaws ache. The Order of Itempas took care of all citizens; no one starved in the Bright. That did not mean they ate well.

As I held a piece in my mouth, hoping saliva would make it more palatable, I considered what I had heard. It had had the air of long habit—or ritual, perhaps. When I’d swallowed, I said, “They seem to like you here.”

“Yes.”

“Do they know who you are? What you are?”

“I have never told them.”

Yet they knew, I was certain. There had been too much reverence in the way they’d approached and presented their small offerings. They had not asked about the black sun, either, as a heathen might have done. They simply accepted that the Bright Lord would protect them if He could—and that it was pointless to ask if He could not.

I had to clear my dry throat to speak. “Did you protect them while you were here?”

“Yes.”

“And… you spoke to them?”

“Not at first.”

With time, though, same as me. For a moment, an irrational competitiveness struck me. It had taken three months for Shiny to deem me worthy of conversation. How long had he taken with these struggling souls? But I sighed, dismissing the fancy and refusing when Shiny tried to offer me another piece of bread. I had no appetite.

“I’ve never thought of you as kind,” I said. “Not even when I was a child, learning about you in White Hall. The priests tried to make you sound gentle and caring, like an old grandfather who’s a little on the strict side. I never believed it. You sounded… well-intentioned. But never kind.”

I heard the glass thing move, heard a stopper come free with a faint plonk. Shiny’s hand came under the back of my head, lifting me gently; I felt the rim of a small flask nudge my lips. When I opened my mouth, acid fire poured in—or so it tasted. I gasped and spluttered, choking, but most of the stuff went down my throat before my body could protest too much. “Gods, no,” I said when the bottle touched my lips again, and Shiny took it away.

As I lay there trying to regain the full use of my tongue, Shiny said, “Good intentions are pointless without the will to implement them.”

“Mmm.” The burn was fading now, which I regretted, because for a moment I had forgotten the pain of my arm and head. “The problem is, you always seem to implement your intentions by stomping all over other people’s. That’s pretty pointless, too, isn’t it? Does as much harm as good.”

“There is such a thing as greater good.”

I was too tired for sophistry. There had been no greater good in the Gods’ War, just death and pain. “Fine. Whatever you say.”

I drifted awhile. The drink went to my head quickly, not so much dulling the pain as making me care less about it. I was contemplating sleeping again when Shiny spoke. “Something is happening to me,” he said, very softly.

“Hmm?”

“It isn’t my nature to be kind. You were correct in that. And I have never before been tolerant of change.”

I yawned, which made my headache grow in a distant, warm sort of way. “Change happens,” I said through the yawn. “We all have to accept it.”

“No,” he replied. “We don’t. I never have. That is what I am, Oree—the steady light that keeps the roiling darkness at bay. The unmoving stone around which the river must flow. You may not like it. You don’t like me. But without my influence, this realm would be cacophony, anarchy. A hell beyond mortal imagination.”

Surprised into wakefulness, I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Does it bother you that I don’t like you?”

I heard him shrug. “You have a contrary nature. I suspect you are of Enefa’s lineage.”

I almost laughed at the sour note in his voice, though that would’ve hurt my head. I sobered, though, as I realized something. “You and Enefa weren’t always enemies.”

“We were never enemies. I loved her, too.” And I could hear that, suddenly, in the soft interstices of his tone.