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you come to comfort me?”
    I opened my mouth to say yes — and then paused, startled, as I realized this was not true. Nahadoth glanced at me, laughed softly and not without cruelty, and widened his couch. He knew me too well. Shamed, I climbed up beside him, nestling into the drifting curve of his body. He petted my hair and back, though I was not in the cat’s shape. I enjoyed the caresses anyhow.
    “I hate them,” I said. “And I don’t.”
    “Because you know, as I do, that some things are inevitable.”
    I groaned and flung an arm over my eyes dramatically, though this only served to press the image into my thoughts: Yeine and Itempas straining together, gazing at each other in mutual surprise and delight. What would be next? Naha and Itempas? All three of them together, which existence had not seen since the demons’ time? I lowered my arm and looked at Nahadoth and saw the same sober contemplation on his face. Inevitable. I bared my teeth and let them grow cat-sharp and sat up to glare at him.
    “You
want
that selfish, thickheaded bastard! Don’t you?”
    “I have always wanted him, Sieh. Hatred does not exclude desire.”
    He meant the time before Enefa’s birth, when he and Itempas had gone from enemies to lovers. But I chose to interpret his words more immediately, manifesting claws and digging them into the drifting expanse of him.
    “Think of what he did to you,” I said, flexing and sheathing. I could not hurt him — would not even if I could — but there were many ways to communicate frustration. “To us! Naha, I know you will change, must change, but you need not change
this
way! Why go back to what was before?”
    “Which before?” That made me pause in confusion, and he sighed and rolled onto his back, adopting a face that sent its own wordless message: white-skinned and black-eyed and emotionless, like a mask. The mask he had worn for the Arameri during our incarceration.
    “The past is gone,” he said. “Mortality made me cling to it, though that is not my nature, and it damaged me. To return to myself, I must reject it. I have had Itempas as an enemy; that holds no more appeal for me. And there is an undeniable truth here, Sieh: we have no one but each other, he and I and Yeine.”
    At this I slumped on him in misery. He was right, of course; I had no right to ask him to endure again the hells of loneliness he had suffered in the time before Itempas. And he would not, because he had Yeine and their love was a powerful, special thing — but so had been his love with Itempas, once. And when all Three had been together … How could I, who had never known such fulfillment, begrudge him?
    He would not be alone
, whispered a small, furious voice in my most secret heart.
He would have me!
    But I knew all too well how little a godling had to offer a god.
    Cold white fingers touched my cheek, my chin, my chest. “You are more troubled by this than you should be,” said Nahadoth. “What is wrong?”
    I burst into frustrated tears. “I don’t know.”
    “Shhhh. Shhhh.” She — Nahadoth had changed already, adapting to me because she knew I preferred women for some things — sat up, pulling me into her lap, and held me against her shoulder while I wept and hitched fitfully. This made me stronger, as she had known it would, and when the squall passed and nature had been served, I drew a deep breath.
    “I don’t know,” I said again, calm now. “Nothing is right anymore. I don’t understand the feeling, but it’s troubled me for some while now. It makes no sense.”
    She frowned. “This is not about Itempas.”
    “No.” Reluctantly I lifted my head from her soft breast and reached up to touch her more rounded face. “Something is changing in me, Naha. I feel it like a vise gripping my soul, tightening slowly, but I don’t know who holds it or turns it, nor how to wriggle free. Soon I might break.”
    Naha frowned and began to shift back toward male. It was a warning;
she
was