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 are not what they say you are.”
Her face, so close to mine, makes my chest ache. I have not been touched—not a brush of the fingertips, much less a kiss or hug—since I was five years old, but the wish is as strong as it ever was—and right now I wish I could let my friend hold me.
“But I’m not what Daoman says I am either,” I whisper, my pulse thudding as I hear that fear aloud for the first time. “Where is my aspect, El? The Feast of the Dying is nearly upon us, and then it will have been ten years from the time I was called. The Graycloaks will not wait another year—what if they—”
Elkisa’s hand drops to the soil between us, half an inch from the edge of my boot. The nearness of it stops my voice mid-word. Her eyes search mine.
“Daoman is not the only one who can see the divine light in you, Nimhara.”
There is a strange wistfulness to her voice that I’ve never heard before. Her eyes are almost sad, despite the warm words.
Too moved to speak, I sit silently until that pensive look is gone again, and she rocks back on one heel.
“We will go to Intisuyu,” she declares. “You will decipher this new prophecy and come home knowing your purpose, maybe even with your aspect manifested. Let them claim you are less than what they are—they will only feel more ashamed when they realize they were wrong. Tomorrow, Lady. As for tonight—will you eat?”
I swallow hard and look past her, toward the campfires. Bryn and Maita sit at one of them, not quite together, but near enough. Capac is moving off through the trees with a bowl in hand, no doubt in search of Rheesi so he can deliver the guard’s dinner.
“You go,” I tell her, lifting my chin, letting the mantle of divinity settle back over me. Elkisa may see me falter, but she needs to see me strong too. I owe that much to someone who would put her body between me and danger without a second thought for her own life. “I want to walk along the river a while and clear my head.”
“I’ll come with you.” The response is instantaneous.
“Please, El. A moment to myself is all I ask. I would see someone approaching by river, and to reach the barges an intruder would have to come through here and contend with you, and four others besides. I am perfectly safe.”
Elkisa’s eyes narrow, but she wastes no time in debating with herself. She nods, a quick and decisive gesture. “I’ll come to check on you if you’re not back within half an hour.”
I cannot argue, so I nod my thanks and slip away into the dark.
Elkisa seems content to believe in this “new prophecy,” though bits of undiscovered text crop up all the time, buried in ancient tomes or in the scribblings of the mist-touched, and most often foretell nothing of greater importance than the shifting of a stream or the birth of twins.