Although there is little chance in a life like mine for friendship, there was a time when Elkisa and I were close that way. As an initiate, she’d been slower than the others to embrace tradition. She’d seemed blessed by preternatural agility and strength, although she once confessed to me that it was no lucky blessing at all but hard work, constant and unflinching. But her affinity with blade and bow, her quick adoption of every new combat style she encountered, meant that she was granted far more leeway in other areas than her comrades. She could be a little more outspoken before she was chastised; she could fail now and then to respect the proprieties without being dismissed outright.
She’s older than I am, but one soul singled out—even for possessing a greater skill than her peers—inevitably seeks another, to banish isolation with camaraderie.
But the jealousy of her fellow initiates changed as they did, age bringing perspective and admiration to replace frustration and envy. And the best fighter in the world would still never be chosen as defender of the divine if she could not respect the formality and ritual of the role.
She pulled away, as she had to. Even if the Divine One was still as lonely as she’d ever been.
I dismiss that deep, old ache. “El, I don’t even entirely trust myself.” The relaxation of my speech is the only intimacy I can offer her now, and it makes her smile a little. “How can I trust anyone else?”
She sighs and leans back, bracing her palms against the half-rotted wood of the fallen tree. “There’s nothing in the ruins of the sun lands anymore. Not for centuries.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong.” I turn toward her, leaning my staff against the tree. “The story of a whole people is there. Skeletons of a great metal city, even the least of them stretching taller than the temple itself.”
“You’ve been there?” Elkisa’s eyebrows rise, her surprise tinged with a hint of jealousy.
“Not since I was very young—my first pilgrimage. Before you came to train at the temple.” That seems to soothe her, and I close my eyes, recalling what I can of that whirlwind, terrifying first experience of being an entire land’s only hope. “I think you will like it there. I remember thinking the forest-sea seemed to have slipped its banks and crept up into the hills, as if contesting the ancient city’s control of the sun lands—covering all the stone it could reach in the green fabric of vine and sapling and moss.”
A muffled noise from beside me makes me open my eyes, and I find Elkisa grinning at me.
Seeing me start to frown, she lets out a little laugh. “Forgive me, Nimh. Sometimes you turn a phrase or tell a story to rival the riverstriders’ Fisher King. I was just thinking—maybe your aspect will be poetry, when you manifest.”
My breath huffs, so close to a snort that I’m glad the temple’s Master of Spectacle isn’t here to see me violate his endless lessons in etiquette and deportment. Techeki has no time for children’s tales. “It’s been centuries since fate has allowed us anything so lovely as poetry. I’ll leave that to the riverstriders, it’s their tradition.”
“Before you, the divine chose the form of the goddess of healing. Isn’t that something … I don’t know. Something hopeful?”
Long ago the gods’ aspects heralded times of great literature or discovery or art, sometimes even expansion, exploration, and conquest. Now … now my people have no use for art, for art won’t feed them, or hold back the mist, or keep them safe. Over the centuries, our divinity has declined to simpler aspects—harvest, home.
Jezara, goddess of healing, let my people think for a time that the world might heal too.
“Hope?” My gaze slides from Elkisa’s face as I whisper, “We had hope last time. Look how that worked out.”
Elkisa doesn’t answer, and I tilt my head back to gaze into the depths of the canopy overhead. The lowest branches are painted with warmth by the firelight, each successive layer fading into the night like afterimages echoing in the dark. Somewhere in the shadows, the leaves quake with the passage of a colony of lying monkeys traveling to their nighttime berths.
Elkisa sighs and rises to her feet, and when I tip my head back down, I see that the riverstriders have finished making camp and are busying themselves at one of the fires. Bryn and Rheesi are nowhere to be seen, patrolling in the darkness beyond the firelight while Elkisa stays close to me.
I’m about to suggest she go see about something to eat when she speaks. “I know you heard the ravings of that Graycloak this morning. We all pretended not to, but I know you heard him.”
My gut clenches with the memory I’ve been trying not to think about all day.
The Graycloak had been there at dawn as if he’d been waiting for us, though no one but my guards and the riverstriders knew of my plans to slip from the temple city unseen. Perched on top of a crate of fruit, he called out to the few people moving through the floating streets, inviting them to pause a while and listen. Voice cracking, body gangly, he could not be more than fifteen years old.
Seeing us, he spun around to follow us with eyes and voice, though I wore plain robes and no crown, and my guards had left the official black-and-gold tunics of the divine guard behind. He didn’t know who I was—only that until Capac’s barge cleared the market, his audience was captive.
They dress her in crimson, they paint her eyes, they let her speak the sacred rituals and touch the guardian stones. The high priest, in his desperation, calls her meager magic divine, as if that word, and not the truth of what she is, will keep us enslaved to a faith we should have abandoned a thousand years ago.
Our barge slid past him, the pace of the riverstriders quickening in response, but the Graycloak’s words followed me long after he himself had vanished from sight.
What aspect is she but nothingness? What power does she have but what her priests claim for themselves? The last of the gods has gone, and all that is left is nothingness in the form of an empty girl called Nimh… .
His words still follow me, though he and his crate, and the market, and the city and the temple that overlooks it all have vanished down the lazy curves of the river behind us. I think they will follow me until I die.
“Nimh.” Elkisa’s gentle voice summons me back. That childhood name, which had cut so deeply coming from a stranger in the market streets, is a balm coming from my friend.
“It doesn’t matter, El.”
“It does to me,” says my oldest friend, her normally easy gaze carrying an odd intensity. “And it matters to you. They claim that when J—when the blasphemer allowed herself to be touched, she destroyed the spirit of the divine altogether. That she consigned this world to darkness.”
Elkisa must see something in my face when I look up, for she drops down before me, one knee bracing her against the ground. “You are not empty. You are not a puppet for High Priest Daoman to use—your very presence here, against his wishes, makes that clear enough. You arenotwhat they say you are.”
