Which means there’s nothing I can say that will convince her to stop.
Inshara seems to sense my moment of weakness and presses it, her voice hard now. “The way up to the sky, North.”
I clench my jaw. “No,” I whisper. “Even if I knew, I’d never tell you. Not even to get myself home.”
Inshara lets her breath out in a long, slow whisper of air. “One way or another, Iwillfind a way to reach the cloudlands. If you won’t help me, then my best scholars will be only too happy to serve their goddess and be the ones to solve an ancient mystery.” She pauses, glancing at Elkisa. “Have the guards secure him. We have a journey ahead.”
Elkisa nods, no longer willing to meet my eyes.
“And then,” Inshara continues, “El, you can head up the search for Nimh. I don’t want to count on her showing up in the name of true love—not forthisboy—and we’ll need her if we’re going to convince him to help.”
I’m held in place by the ice suddenly running through my veins.
If there was something I could tell Inshara about how to get up to the sky, in this moment, I’d do it, and damn the consequences.
Danger’s heading for Nimh in the form of her best friend, and she’s not going to suspect a thing until it’s far too late.
I’m moving before I can think, lunging to my left and between two guards. Behind me I hear the cat yowl, and then someone’s seizing my arm, spinning me around.
It’s Elkisa. Our eyes meet as she grabs the front of my shirt, yanking me in close. An instant later, pain explodes along my temple, and I catch a hazy glimpse of her shaking out her fist as I hit the ground, the world vanishing in a whirl of darkness.
THIRTY-ONE
NIMH
I swim up out of my thoughts, pulled by the realization that I’m no longer alone with the dead cultist boy. A voice is calling my name; footsteps squish toward me in the mud.
A heavy weight drops onto my shoulders, as comforting as an arm around me. I look down and see dusty purple linen. I see my hand clutch at the fabric before I’ve decided to do it.
“Nimh, come back to me now… .” The voice is low and gentle. “Come on back now—there’s a good girl.”
Thoughts snap back into sync with my body, jolting as though waking from a dream. I lock eyes with—Jezara?
Her face is tired and travel-stained. Though her gaze is as frank and self-possessed as ever, there’s a flicker in it as she looks at me, a tiny window into some deeper feeling. Dust caught in her hair and on her skin glows in the moonlight and the last of the embers, giving her an aura of gold.
My breath catches, for suddenly I see the delicate, subtle echoes of divinity in her eyes.
I never knew this Jezara. My priests and my tutors and my surrogate father taught me to revile her so well that I never wondered if she and I might be similar; so well I could not imagine sharing any traits with the villain who had cast our world into such uncertainty.
But Jezara was a goddess for longer than I’ve been alive, and wholly loved by her people, and for the first time in my life I can imagine her as she must have been then.
She reminds me of my mother. Back when I knew her, back when I didn’t know I was divine. When I ate pirrackas with the other children and sat on the floor listening to the Fisher King telling stories.
What it must have been like to love her then, instead of hating her. To grow up worshipping the goddess of healing instead of picking at old wounds. To look back into childhood and remember this shining, golden woman floating by on festival nights while we sang and danced her praise, and knew that we were safe.
What a comfort it must be to live in the protection of a god you believe in.
My eyes fill with tears, and I gasp for a breath. Abruptly, the easy remoteness of Jezara’s expression cracks and falls away, and she drops to her knees at my side.
“Oh, child,” she murmurs, shoulders sagging as she reaches out toward the purple mantle she draped across me. She tugs the ends together, the pressure not unlike an embrace around my shoulders. “I know, love. I know. Iremember.”
A sob creaks free as the bands of tension around my rib cage loosen just a fraction. My mind cannot make sense of Jezara’s presence here, not when the last I saw of her was the smoke rising from the ruins of her home. Nor can it make sense of her warmth, her sympathy, when the last words we exchanged were so bitter.
“They do not understand,” Jezara murmurs, her voice gentle. “They cannot know what it is they asked of us. No one knows but you and I.”
There’s no trace of that brusque facade in her demeanor now. Perhaps, seeing me without armor, she is laying down hers.
I shudder, straightening a little, an unspoken signal that she reads immediately; her hands fall away from the mantle she wrapped around me and she sits back on her heels. A shadow now cuts through the moonlight that illuminates her face—the golden aura is gone.
