2
Five months later
When the maiden-prieststaught me to sing, all our great epics started in the middle. When we sang the story of how Wesha, the Maiden, trapped her husband Death in the mortal world, we didn’t open with the Great War between Death and the other gods, with battles and fire and lightning.
To most people, that was the important point: a long time ago, all our gods lived among us, but after Wesha shut the Gates between the mortal realm and the divine Summerlands across the sea, only Death remained to demand worship here.
But no. That part had to wait.
We sang first about Wesha walking alone down the Mountain in her white silk wedding gown. Innocent. Doomed. We described the tears on her flawless cheeks. The sharp knives on her golden belt.
We sang about the lonely tower where our goddess was to be imprisoned for eternity, and we made the audience understand the weight of Wesha’s sacrifice when she married the greedy monster whose war had nearly reduced the world to ashes.
Eventually, the listener would hear the full tale: how Death broke the ancient laws of the Allmother when he started the Great War, and how Genna, Peace-Queen, broke her youngest daughter’sheart when she gave Wesha to Death as the price of peace. How Wesha then locked away Death’s power over the Underworld and exiled him from the Summerlands for his crimes. How Death schemed and fumed for centuries, seeking to return. All of it out of order.
When stories have a beginning, people expect an ending, and the maiden-priests wanted listeners to understand that they were part of a story still being told.
I was now the only one left to compose and place the verses about how my rebellion ended the three hundred years of Death’s tyranny in the mortal world, but I hadn’t sung since Taran died. I knew the story wasn’t over, but I wanted my part in it to be.
“Does she have worms?”
I’d forgotten where I was and what I was supposed to be doing when a young woman deposited her baby in my lap, and I jolted in confusion. Multiple times a day I was painfully yanked from the gray fog of my own memories into a world where Taran was dead, but there was still work that I was required to do.
I’d come to the new royal residence to speak with the queen on behalf of the surviving acolytes, but this was the third time I’d come, and we’d been left to cool our heels out in the courtyard with the common petitioners for hours. Nobody had dared approach me before this girl in a homespun smock, even though my white dress and ten-stringed kithara used to be as good as a request to be handed strangers’ babies. Hiwa had dressed me like a doll this morning, as she did every morning.
Iona, you must eat something. Iona, you must change your clothes. Iona, you must tell us what we are all to do now.
I was scared by how angry those demands could make me, even when delivered by sweet little Hiwa ter Genna. But if I was dressed like a maiden-priest, I couldn’t be angry at this young mother for expecting me to act like one and treat her child. She couldn’t knowthat engaging with the present felt like rubbing raw wool across a fresh burn.
After a sidelong glance to check that the single royal guardsman was out of earshot, I quietly chanted one of Wesha’s blessings. The Maiden’s power flowed obligingly through me, revealing that the baby was a little anemic but blessedly parasite-free.
“No worms,” I told her mother, who didn’t look reassured by the news.
“But she sleeps all the time. And when she’s awake, she’s tired. Should she be so tired?”
The infant had screwed up her pearly pink lips when dumped on my lap as though contemplating a good scream, but she only turned her head and frowned at her mother instead. She should have yelled at being handed to a stranger, and she should also have a lot more plump on her bowed little legs.
I took a closer look at her mother. My age, so this was probably her first baby. Very thin too.
“What’s she eating?”
“Pap, porridge. She weaned herself a couple weeks ago.”
The baby must have weaned when her mother’s milk failed. The whole country was doing poorly, but women often ate last. A simple case to diagnose, but a difficult problem to solve.
“She’s malnourished. Needs milk. Donkey or goat is best, cow or sheep if that’s all you can get.”
The young mother nodded stoically, but her shoulders slumped. Death’s greed for sacrifices had thinned all the herds, and the drought had kept them from rebuilding. I might as well tell her to sail across the Sea of Dreams and feed the baby the sweet wine of the gods in the Summerlands.
“Thank you, maiden-priest,” she muttered without much gratitude.
I bit the inside of my cheek and quickly dug into the purse at myhip. Before the acolyte seated to my left could object—we’d come to beg money from the queen, not to give it away—I pressed some coins into the young woman’s hand.
“Buy a nanny goat. Keep it with a neighbor, so your family doesn’t know you have it.”
The girl immediately brightened.
“I will, thank you, maiden-priest,” she said again, this time with real feeling. “Can you bless me too?”
