Dragging at this rope, my feet cooled by the water, I am more real, more seen, in this private moment than when I perform the intricate dances and rituals of the divine before hundreds of worshippers, all watching me with hungry eyes.
I lean back against the pull of the rope and let my eyes rest on the shift and change of muscle in Maita’s back some distance ahead of me. In another life, I might have married a riverstrider boy like him. I would’ve spent my days hauling on these ropes with him, or mending fishing nets, or diving for river lettuce. This could have been my world, between sun and water and the muddy borders of the forest-sea… .
Maita shifts his grip, turning to face me and pull against his shoulder—and we both see that the rope has slid a little in his hands, and he’s too close to me. He lets go, recoiling from me so violently that he staggers back waist-deep in the water, striking the barge with a painful thunk.
Capac calls a halt as Elkisa throws her rope down and comes splashing toward us, her gaze wide with alarm. Her agitated questions are a hazy litany, my eyes still on Maita’s face, as ashen as if he’d just been pulled back from the edge of a yawning abyss.
I shake my head in response to Elkisa’s concern—no, I am not hurt. No, he did not touch me.
Yes, I will wait back beneath the trees while they finish securing the barge.
My body tingles as I drop down onto a fallen tree, muscles here and there twitching from such a sudden end to the unfamiliar effort. From there, I watch as the riverstriders and temple guards resume their task—Bryn says something too low for me to hear at this distance, and Maita and the others burst into tension-relieving laughter.
What good does it do to imagine another life?I ask myself, blinking and turning away, fixating on the heavy stillness of the forest in the hope that it will still my mind.This was never for you.
Except that itwas, once. I was never meant to be a goddess. My predecessor, Jezara, didn’t pass her divinity to the next deity upon her death, as every other living god has done in the thousand years since the Exodus. When Jezara forfeited her divinity by committing the one unforgivable, unthinkable act for our kind—touching another—she tore my people’s faith apart and left only tatters for the little girl fate called to replace her.
I was five when the high priest saw that the divinity had settled upon me, and brought me to live in the temple. By the time I was six, I understood that the long chain of gods who had guided my people for a thousand years had been irrevocably broken. While Jezara, with her unthinkable actions, had been the one to shatter that link, I would always be the one left clinging to the other half of that broken piece, trying to pull the dead weight of our wounded faith back from the edge with my bare hands.
Capac begins to sing again, and the boat slides up the shore. I wait quietly with the bindle cat upon my lap and stretch muscles tired from the weight of the rope.
Night settles over the forest-sea before anywhere else, as if gathering its strength before venturing out to envelop the rest of the land. The canopy overhead is dense enough to win out against the weakening sun, and the muted browns and grays of tree and vine and earth absorb what little light makes it through the leaves overhead. The night insects are singing by the time the others finish with the barge and begin transporting supplies to set up the camp some distance from me.
When I was younger, I was scolded often for getting involved when I ought to stay removed from my people. Though I am revered by—most of—my people, I cannot ever truly walk among them.
Matias, the Master of Archives at the temple, was the unlikely source of that particular revelation.
“They want to serve, Lady,” he’d said, bespectacled eyes fixed on the text before him. He hadn’t put it down despite the fact that I’d burst in, upset to have been shooed away from the solstice preparations. “They’ve trained for it all their lives. You can be kind to them, you can show them respect and even affection, but you cannot take from them the acts that give them purpose.”
Purpose.
The word had struck me so deeply I had no answer for him. From the time I was five years old, my purpose had been made clear—and yet, until I manifest with some aspect, be it healing or harvest or anything at all, I have none.
“Are you hungry, Lady?” A familiar voice at my elbow startles the bindle cat, triggering a burble of irritation and the warning press of his back claws against my thighs as he jumps off my lap and stalks off into the dark.
I tilt my head up at Elkisa, who stands by my fallen tree and watches the cat go with a faint frown. “He means no insult,” I tell her. “He is a cat—he only knows rudeness as a quality others possess.”
“I wish I knew why that thing has never liked me,” she mutters, a bit of her formality dropping away. She leans forward, holding out my spearstaff across her palms, having fetched it from the barge.
“He is jealous,” I suggest, taking the spearstaff with a smile. “He knows you are almost as old a friend as he.”
That melts Elkisa’s frown, and with a twitch of her lips, she ducks her head. Her humor is short-lived, though—when she looks back up at me, her eyes are grave. “I’m sorry about what happened during the mooring.”
I swallow, my throat suddenly tight. “It was my fault. I know better than to try to help.”
Elkisa makes a noncommittal sound, then moves to sit beside me, just beyond arm’s reach—distant, to most people. Nearly an embrace, to me. “I think maybe it’s your desire to help that will save us all.”
I give a quick laugh, uncomfortable with the weight of what she’s said, though my heart beats a little faster. “I do not know what awaits me in Intisuyu. I only know I am meant to travel this way.”
I think.But that last part, I don’t say.
“Do you think we’ll be long in the sun lands?” she asks. “The Feast of the Dying is tomorrow night.”
“It will be faster on the way home,” I say. “We will be traveling with the current.” Our return will be a close-cut thing, but I know that her real questions are these:Are you truly sure of your purpose? Will we return with something to convince the high priest we were right to defy him?
I cannot blame her for wondering. Still, I am surprised when she speaks again. “You won’t tell me what this new prophecy says? You don’t trust me?”
I glance at her from the corner of my eye, aching to do just that. We grew up together, she and I—a goddess and her divine guardian. A wistful part of me misses the time when we were both just children.
