“The Fisher King,” he repeats. “His stories are his fish. Quick, glistening things that are always moving.” The old man is animated now, energy restored as he speaks. “They jump up, and if you’re quick you can catch them, and pin them in place for a while. The Fisher King is the keeper of our traditions, lad. The teller of our stories, our songs, our ballads. He knows the laws that go beyond those of the temple, that belong only to the riverstriders. He is where we go for wisdom. And my, but you have questions for the Fisher King, don’t you? You, from your faraway place.”
“It is the mist,” I whisper to North, whose eyes go even wider at that last statement, uncannily true. “Or else the pain—he cannot know what he is saying.”
Quenti’s brows draw in, and his dusty voice grows heavier. “You spend too much time around our goddess, boy. She is not for you to love… .”
North finally succeeds in freeing his hand, and he retreats back toward the door. “I’m sorry. I won’t, uh, do that anymore.”
But Quenti’s alarm is already subsiding, as though whatever invented memory he was reliving went dark the moment he let go of North’s hand. He mumbles something, then closes his eyes, breath slowing again.
North turns that wide-eyed look on me, and I tilt my head in a silent gesture toward the door.
The breeze, though still warm, is like a dash of cold water as we stumble out of Quenti’s barge and into the night.
North takes a few more steps, as if all too eager to put some distance between himself and the wounded old man in the bed. “Nimh, what the … Whatwasthat?” he blurts.
I have to wait a moment before I answer, letting the cooler air restore some of my equilibrium. “He is mist-touched,” I say finally, as I turn toward the row of riverstrider barges, looking for Orrun’s boat.
“The mist didthatto him?” North gestures at his own face, his gaze creeping back toward the single lighted window above us.
“It can damage the mind and the body. Make people see things, bestow power or take it away. Sometimes it even grants the gift of prophecy.”
“Prophecy,” North echoes, voice equal parts confusion and skepticism.
Orrun’s boat is not far from Quenti’s. It’s one of the newer barges, smaller than the others, though that suits our purposes fine. I move down the little woven reed pathway and step up onto the edge of the boat.
North follows me, though his mind is still up in Quenti’s room. “So you’re saying he somehow knew who I was and that you’d brought me here? And he’s trying to warn me not to …” He halts, and when I glance over at him, his eyes meet mine and then dart away.
“That was not prophecy,” I tell him. “He did not even know I was the goddess—he thought I was still a little girl.”
“Still. Unnerving,” North mumbles, following me as I move toward the steps up to the captain’s perch.
Orrun is no “idiot boy,” as Quenti said—he is a man well into his thirties. But if Quenti’s mind was stuck in a time ten years past, Orrun would have been younger too.
Please, I pray, reaching for the latch on the door,let him be as foolish now as he was then.
I step back, inspecting the inside of the door—and there, hanging from a hook, is a little chain holding the amber keystone. I let my breath out, fetching it down with trembling fingers, and step up to the controls.
North is watching curiously, no doubt wondering whattechnolog ywill explain away how a riverstrider’s barge responds to its keystone—but I pause before starting up the barge.
“Thank you,” I whisper, unable just yet to lift my gaze.
“For what?”
“For Quenti. For taking his hand when I could not.”
When I finally do look up, North is outlined by the moonlight that streams onto the deck of the barge. My eyes meet his, and he smiles a little, though his face is sad.
“Whether your prophecy is right about me or not,” he says, with just enough of a wry twist to his voice, “we’re in this together now.”
I used to dream of being the one the Lightbringer came to. Having a partner, being understood, sharing the weight of divinity with another. Despite the grief threatening to paralyze me, I can still feel the pull of that dream.
“Hey.” North’s eyebrows rise as he ducks his head a little, catching my gaze. “No time for zoning out. Let’s put some distance between us and the temple, hmm? And maybe then you can tell me a story or two, because if your people think I’m thisdestroyer, I should probably know what that’s all about.”
I fit the keystone into its hollow and start priming the boat’s magic—the motions are all still familiar, for all that I’ve not been riverfolk since childhood.
North’s voice is still ringing in my ears, telling me we’re a team.
I used to dream of not being alone.
