The cloaked woman hesitates, hefting the jar in her hand. If she throws it at the door, she might buy us a few more moments before the shack gives way. But the howling outside now is coming from too many voices to count.
She lifts her head, her eyes falling for the first time on me. They widen, and she gives a little flinch, as if the sight of me looking back at her is a physical blow.
Then she turns and hurls the glass jar straight at Nimh.
My heart slams into my throat, and then time seems to stretch, the jar slowing as my eyes track it toward Nimh.
But no, time isn’t slowing at all; thejaris slowing, slowing, hovering …
“Take a deep breath,” says the cloaked woman, her voice suddenly nothing like the one she was using earlier. Where she was barking orders, now she could be trying to lull us to sleep. “Let your mind relax. Feel the sun on your hair. The breeze on your cheeks. Close your eyes, Nimh.”
She speaks with such familiarity, such easy care and warmth, that she reminds me for a moment of my mothers. Nimh must feel it too, for she does as the woman says, and closes her eyes. Neither of us ask how she knowswhoNimh is.
For a moment, all is silent. I let my eyes go to the cloaked woman and find her watching Nimh with the strangest look on her face, one I can’t quite place.
Then Nimh lifts her head, opens her eyes, and the jar explodes.
I throw my arms up to shield my face, but when nothing strikes, I risk a look.
The shards of glass are all hovering in midair, forming a glittering sphere around the place the jar had been. The water is gone—or, rather, the water iseverywhere. A dense fog fills the air, sliding through the cracks in the building, roiling out over the tops of the walls. It spreads so much farther than it should—farther than the amount in the jar would allow—down through the valley and up the other side.
A long, wailing chorus rises throughout the canyon, echoing on and on and on … until it fades, a last few moans lingering before silence falls.
The cloaked woman lets out a long breath. She speaks, her voice bright with relief. “Good girl.”
Nimh takes a staggering step to one side, leaning heavily on her staff. The glittering sphere, all that remains of the glass jar, drops out of the air to rain down onto the dirt floor. Nimh lifts her head with a shaky smile.
“Are they gone?” I ask, my voice coming out in a raspy croak.
The woman’s head turns toward me. Her hood must have fallen back when she threw the jar, for I can see her eyes now, framed by dark hair. She looks about my bloodmother’s age, with a round face and wide cheekbones. This time when she looks at me, she gives no sign of that strange recognition.
“Gone for now,” she says, straightening with a grimace and rubbing at one of her legs. “We have only a little time before the sun burns away this vapor, and they can return.”
“How did you know water would stop them?”
“The water is infused with fine shavings of sky-steel. Mist-wraiths are creatures made of magic. I hoped.”
“You …hoped?” I echo, turning toward Nimh for support.
But she’s standing utterly still, her eyes wide, face ashen. Has some new horror risen up from the fog and made itself known to her? I whirl around, but she’s staring only at the woman.
It’s when I look back at our rescuer, and see the flicker of answering recognition there, that I understand. Her dark hair isn’tentirelydark—a streak of white runs through it.
Just like the defaced statue we saw on our way in.
The woman bends to put her weight against the chest barring the door. She pushes it aside with a long, loud scrape of wood on packed earth, and then straightens, not quite raising her eyes enough to meet Nimh’s.
“Come,” mutters Jezara, Forty-First Vessel of the Divine. “We must go.Now.”
TWENTY-FIVE
NIMH
The goddess who gave up her divinity leads us to the foot of the western mountains, which stretch along the long, curved edge of this land like the spine of a hunched old man.
Jezara has been a dark specter looming over me, a reminder of the kind of failure I could be if my devotion ever wavered, but never real. More like a small child’s bogeyman. A hated example of wasted divinity. Had I ever thought of her as a person? If I did once, I haven’t in many years. She had ceased to be flesh and blood and had transformed into something larger and smaller all at once—a warning, a cautionary tale.
But she is real.
