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 it was, 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.
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.”