The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Inheritance Trilogy, #1)

by N.K. Jemisin

In the Arameri way, which is the way of the Amn race from whom they originated, I am the Baroness Yeine Darr.

got my first glimpse of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ heart.

Only three, I mean. Now there are dozens, perhaps hundreds. They breed like rabbits. But once there were only three, most powerful and glorious of all: the god of day, the god of night, and the goddess of twilight and dawn. Or light and darkness and the shades between. Or order, chaos, and balance. None of that is important because one of them died, the other might as well have, and the last is the only one who matters anymore.

or thick straight Darre hair colored Amn-pale. I have Amn eyes: faded green in color, more unnerving than pretty. Otherwise,

The bluest eye

It is not safe to hate the Arameri. Instead we hate their weapons, because weapons do not care.

“The Enefadeh are the reason we wear the blood sigils, Lady Yeine. No one may pass the night in Sky without one. It isn’t safe.”

reedy Amn beauty of sable hair, patrician features, and regal grace. I recognized her by that hair as the woman who’d sat beside Dekarta at the Salon. She wore the kind of dress that only an Amn woman could do justice to—a long straight tube the color of deep, bloody garnets.

So many bits of myself have escaped already. So.

The walls of this prison were blood and bone; the barred windows were eyes; the punishments included sleep and pain and hunger and all the other incessant demands of mortal flesh.

I learned from the priests of Bright Itempas that this fallen god was pure evil.

“So be good,” the priests would add, “or the Nightlord will get you.”

a child thrust his face through the opening, looked around, and spied me. “Come on,” he said. “Hurry up. It won’t take him long to find us.”

“The arena,” said the boy ahead of me. “Some of the highbloods fancy themselves warriors. This way.”

He wasn’t much smaller than me, maybe nine years old, with the spindly look of a fast grower. Not Amn, not with skin as dark as mine and sharpfold eyes like those of the Tema people. They were a murky, tired green, those eyes—like my own, and my mother’s. Maybe his father had been another wandering Arameri.

“Trickster, trickster / Stole the sun for a prank. / Will you really ride it? / Where will you hide it? / Down by the riverbank…” It was not our sun, mind you.

Sieh was immeasurably old, another of the Arameri’s deadly weapons, and yet I could not bring myself to dash the shy hope I saw in his eyes.

“I think the others will like you,” he said. “Even Naha, when he calms down. It’s been a long time since we had a mortal of our own to talk to.”

“I wasn’t expecting that, either,” he said softly. “But perhaps you remember now—we need this one. Do you remember?” Sieh stepped forward, reaching for his hand.

This city sprawls across a floodplain rather than over a hill, and the palace is embedded at its heart, not hovering overhead. I am not me.)

“Yes,” I say, and my voice is male, though high-pitched and nasal. I know myself to be Arameri. I feel myself to be powerful. I am the family head. “I would have been offended if they had come with even one soldier less.”

My wife. My son.

“To Senm,” I say. “The Amn homeland. We will rebuild there.”

“I was ancient when your kind first began to speak and use fire, Yeine. These petty torments are nothing to me.”

Sky is deeply, profoundly wrong in Darre eyes. It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all—but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. Still… I could not help drinking in the view. It is important to appreciate beauty, even when it is evil.

As for the rest of my purpose… well. The walls of Sky were hollow, its corridors a maze. This left many places wherein the secrets of my mother’s death could hide. I would hunt them down, every one.

No; not human. If he had been free.

“All that happens in darkness, I see,” he said. “Every whisper, every sigh, I hear. Even if I leave, some part of me will remain. That cannot be helped.”

The priests’ lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal’s doom. My grandmother’s lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.

And he is Nahadoth’s, blood and soul. Just think about that, Lady. The Nightlord, living embodiment of all that we who serve the Bright fear and despise. Sieh is his firstborn son.”

“T’vril seems to like you, too—though that isn’t surprising, given his history. And you have me, Yeine. I was your mother’s friend before she left Sky; I can be yours as well.” If he had not spoken those last words, I might have indeed considered him a friend.

“You know these darkling races, Brother. They have no patience, no higher reason. Always angry over things that happened generations ago…”

the Walking Death.

Still… my father survived. I will remember later why this is relevant.

The Betrayer, who betrayed no one. I had never thought of her as someone’s mother.

But in the morning I would recall something—a taste in the air, as Sieh had termed it. That taste was something I had little experience with, yet I knew it the way an infant knows love, or an animal knows fear. Jealousy, even between father and son, is a fact of nature.

I knew that once my people had been heretics. That was why the Amn called races like mine darkling: we had accepted the Bright only to save ourselves when the Arameri threatened us with annihilation. But what Nahadoth implied—that some of my people had known the real reason for the Gods’ War all along and had hidden it from me—no. That I could not, did not want to, believe.

the carriage, caught up to it and brought it back. Dekarta could have even ordered the Enefadeh to—

???

“There’s truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.”

His skin has turned warm brown and his eyes are layered shades of black, and his lips make me crave soft, ripe fruit. The perfect face for seducing lonely Darre girls—though it would work better if his eyes held any warmth.

Zhakkarn’s face was framed like Enefa’s, with the same sharp jaw and high cheekbones.

like siblings or even members of the same race. All of Enefa’s children had kept some feature, some tribute, to their mother’s looks. Kurue had the same frank, dissecting gaze.

“I told her you’d say that. You do have one advocate among us, Yeine, however little you might believe it.”

“Is this what you want? Is it?” Inhuman fury in that voice, echoing through the forest shadows. Following it came a scream of such agony as I have never imagined— I ran through the trees and stopped at the edge of a crater and saw— O Goddess, I saw—

Repentance

the Nightlord. “How?” he asked. The vision, he meant, of his defeat. “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s happened before. I had a dream once, of the old Sky. I saw you destroy it.”

sister lover pupil teacher friend otherself,

“I must work harder to keep my temper around you,” he said. “You have a memorable way of chastising me.”

I do not understand the pain I perceive, wrapped around both of them like chains, but I can tell that love is their defense against it.

And yet, compared to the Three, I was weak. Like them in many ways, but obviously inferior. Naha was the one who convinced her to let me live and see what I might become.” I frowned. “She was going to… kill you?”

“Yes.” He chuckled at my shock. “She killed things all the time, Yeine. She was death as well as life, the twilight along with the dawn. Everyone forgets that.”