“You found a way to send him back to the sky?” Jezara’s voice stretches into a wail. Her eyes bright with tears, she takes a step forward. “I thought—I thought hechoseto abandon me. That chronometer was all I had, and it never worked. That’s why I gave it to—”
Inshara’s voice cuts across her mother’s. “What are you talking about?” she demands.
Jezara passes a shaking hand over her eyes. “Oh, child—that voice you hear. It doesn’t belong to a god, just a man. I made that necklace from a device your father gave me before we were separated. He must have found a way to get it working, but only after I gave it to you.”
Inshara’s hand closes around the chrono amulet. Her face has gone still, its color draining, her eyes flat and hard. “You lie,” she whispers.
“Did he never ask about me?” Jezara asks, taking another step toward her daughter, half lifting a hand in entreaty. “Never ask to speak with me?”
Inshara stands stock-still, one hand curled into a white-knuckled fist around the chrono. “I … I wanted to keep him for myself,” she whispers. “I was only a child when I told him you were dead.”
Jezara’s eyes widen. “Youwhat? Insha—”
“This is all some trick!” Inshara blurts, her eyes filling with tears. “He is divine. A god. The Lightbringer. He told me that this world should burn… .”
Her mother chokes back a sob. “Oh, Insha … come home, my dear.” She lifts her arms in an offered embrace as Inshara stares at her. “You and I have so much to talk about. I wish—”
With a scream, Inshara stoops to retrieve her spear. In one motion she drives it home with a grunt of rage and effort. Jezara’s voice cuts out as she stares down at the haft of the spear protruding from her chest.
For an instant, no one moves. No one speaks. Horror holds us all captive—even Jezara’s daughter, who stares at her mother’s face, her eyes round.
Then a scream rises up as if from the ground itself. It’s a heartbeat before I realize where the sound is coming from:
Nimh.
The figure struggling inside the dense tangle of mist gives a jerk and curls in on itself—then, in a wave of force that knocks me clean off my feet, the mist explodes.
I roll down half a flight of steps as I hit the stone, my battered head aching, my palms scraped raw. With an effort, I manage to get my dazzled eyes to focus again. I can’t see what’s happening up above, but beyond the terrace … My breath catches.
Sweeping like a wave, the spellfire lights are coming back on again. Dazed, I look past the city to the river—and then drop to my hands and knees in shock.
The water is gone, and with it, Inshara’s sky-steel barrier.
Nimh has vaporized the river.
THIRTY-THREE
NIMH
Head spinning, body aching, stars bursting in front of my eyes, all I can do for long breaths is lie there, face against the stone. Then I remember what I felt through the searing pain of mist against my skin, through the gut-wrenching effort of holding myself intact.
Jezara.
Reeling, I drag myself forward until I can see her where she’s slumped in someone’s arms, breath rattling in her throat. Techeki—the Master of Spectacle—is there, holding her. “Jeza,” he murmurs, pressing against the wound as blood flows around the spear shaft and his fingers and becomes a crimson stain spreading across the purple mantle.
I murmur at Techeki to move, reaching for Mhyr’s Sunrise and my vial of thicksweet, my eyes on Jezara’s wound as I try to think how to remove the spear without killing her. But the former goddess gives a shake of her head, her eyes swinging up toward mine. “No, child.” Her lips quiver, a weak attempt at a smile. “I was the goddess of healing, remember? I know when a body’s wounds are beyond the help of magic.”
I grit my teeth, fingers tightening around the vial of thicksweet. “I must try.”
Jezara’s smile fades and her eyebrows draw together. “If I don’t wish to spend my last moments breathing the scent of burning flesh, feeling the grate of broken bone on bone, that is my choice.”
My every instinct tells me to ignore her wishes, to keep fighting. But I look at her face again and fall silent.
Her eyes unfocus, lips working soundlessly as if in confusion. Then her body tenses as she coughs again, the sound thick and wet this time, blood staining her lips a bright, garish crimson.
“She’s such a little thing,” she murmurs to the air. Then her gaze floats past my face without recognition, past North’s, back to Techeki’s again. “You’ll look after her, won’t you?”
Techeki brushes a lock of her hair back, settling it gently behind her ear. “I always have, Divine One. I always will.”
