Wrinkles swallow the elder’s smiling eyes, and she nods, releasing his hands to take mine. How long has she been here? Decades? Centuries? What must it be like to wake every day and know no sadness or grief?
“Good girl,” the woman announces. She pats my hand. “A good partner. Loyal and strong.”
Boreas is drawn into a short discussion about the harvest, and I use the time to observe the festivities. After she leaves us, I turn to Boreas with newfound revelation. “They know you.”
“Of course they know me.”
“No, I mean theyknowyou.” This level of familiarity is not established from a single meeting, Judgment served in the vast halls of his citadel. It comes from exposure over time. Frequent visits, if my assessment is correct. “How often do you visit Makarios?”
He accepts a flower garland from a young girl, yet shies from my gaze. Does he think I judge him for visiting these souls? He has granted them a place to sleep without worry, an opportunity to rise with the knowledge that a day has endless potential for all the good things.
“One of my duties as the North Wind is to visit the various parts of the Deadlands, to ensure they are in working order.” He drapes the garland—blooming roses and iris—around my neck. “But I spend additional time in Makarios when I can. The people are kind and deserving of this life.”
“You’re right.” Never did I think those words could pass my lips, but things have changed. I’ve changed. “This place—it’s beautiful.” A haven, safe from the encroaching cold.
He could have shown me Makarios at any point, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. My perspective of the king would not have changed, for I wasn’t ready to accept the truth. Only now does he let me in, let me see.
And so we stand in the field where peace has bedded down, the spirits dancing hand-in-hand, and I ask my husband a question I have long wondered.
“What became of Orla’s husband?”
The tips of his naked fingers brush the bark of a nearby tree, curved black talons scraping the rough texture. Since our conversation in the greenhouse, Boreas has begun to forgo his gloves at times. “I admit, I brought you here to show you that another side exists to the Deadlands.”
I hear his unspoken words:I brought you here to show you that another side exists to the Deadlands—and to me.
Had he spoken those final three words, I would be inclined to agree. The North Wind is not a plane of ice, flat and uninspiring and of a single dimension. He is like the snowflakes he calls down, each multi-faceted, uniquely wrought.
“But I am afraid,” he goes on, “that if I tell you what horrors Orla’s husband currently suffers through, you will return to your previous perspective of the Deadlands.”
“And what perspective would that be?”
“That the Deadlands, and everything in it, is abhorrent.”
I believe at one point I did call Boreas a selfish, narrow-minded, heartless god. At the time, I thought that was the least of what he deserved.
I shift nearer, my arm brushing his, the fabric of our sleeves clinging. “You told me you seek to make a fair assessment of a soul. So I trust that however you sentenced her husband, it was justified.”
He drops his hand from the tree, where it hangs at his side. Shadows swath his knuckles.
“Orla was one of the earliest souls I sentenced to Neumovos. I judged her based on the murder of her husband, but I looked no deeper than that. I didn’t care to, and the fault was mine.”
He takes a bracing breath. “It was my late wife, actually, who told me why Orla had killed her husband.”
“What was her name?”
His face softens, and my heart twinges with a sudden, unforeseen pain. “Lyra.”
The thought of Boreas harboring lingering feelings toward his late wife bristles in me, yet his expression hardens, and the wrath flickering in his pupils is so potent I nearly take a step back. “I realized I had misjudged Orla. I did not complete my due diligence in learning the truth behind her actions. As for her husband, I sent him to the Chasm. For the beating, neglect, and raping of his wife, his punishment is to be ripped to shreds by wild dogs, day after day. His fingernails are pried off with rusted nails, and regrown, his starving body on the cusp of collapse.”
By the gods, it sounds horrid. But—deserved. Absolutely deserved.
I study him closely. “Does it ever feel like a burden to you? You are the deciding voice on so many eternities.”
“All the time. But judging people’s lives objectively isn’t always possible.” He nudges me with his shoulder, a lighthearted gesture, so unlike him. “You taught me that.”
“You’re saying you take my perspective into consideration?” I gesture wiping away an imaginary tear.
Boreas releases a sigh that can only be described as long-suffering. “I rescind my statement.”
