When we reach the temple, we’re escorted into a huge reception hall, lined with yet more guards. Nimh turns to their leader, inclining her head. “I must see the high priest,” she says quietly. “Please see that my honored guest is accommodated.”
I have time to meet her dark eyes, to try to silently communicate how much I don’t want to leave her—how badly I need her to explain what’s happening, to tell me I can trust her—and then she’s stepping back.
As the guards escort me away, I can’t help but remember what she said to me in the forest, after finding her people slaughtered in that clearing: You may be safer if you do not come with me, cloudlander.
ELEVEN
NIMH
I sense something is wrong before I’ve even reached the temple. Even before North is bustled away, glancing back at me to meet my eyes for one tense moment, I know.
My people love me. Or, at least, they worship me—it’s only been in the last year or two that I’ve thought to ask myself whether that is the same thing. But despite the devotion they feel to their faith and to their goddess, it’s unusual for those in the city to have quite the same reaction as those who only see me when I travel on pilgrimage.
But as my escort and I reach the first terrace, the public gathering place where anyone may come to be near their goddess, I find it’s teeming with people. One man, from one of the more distant riverstrider clans based on his black-and-yellow attire, gives an audible sob while dropping to his knees when I pass. I can’t help but watch as he stares hungrily after me, tears streaming down his lined cheeks.
I knew that by now I would have been missed, but I am surprised that word of my absence has reached the city in general. I am even more surprised my unauthorized journey was not covered with some cloak of legitimacy, so my priests were not forced to admit I had struck out on my own. There is no reason my people should have feared I would not return.
And yet the cries that follow us as my escort clears a path for me to ascend to the next terrace of the temple … There is a pitch to them I don’t recognize. They sound full of tension. They feel … desperate.
Once inside the temple proper, the city guard gives way to a quartet of handservants—weapons are not allowed, except to my own personal guard, within the sanctity of these walls. I recognize only two of the servants. One is a lad of thirteen named Pecho, quick and eager at his studies and obviously hoping to find his way into the priesthood. The other, a moon-faced girl my own age, joined my service around the time of last harvest. She still finds herself so overcome by her proximity to me that she can hardly bring herself to speak, and more often than not spills or drops whatever she’d been charged to bring me.
The other two must be Daoman’s.
Technically, all the handservants in the temple are mine, but traditionally I ask them to serve my high priest as well, to thank him for his devotion. In truth, that structure is a formality—his servants are his own, trained by him and his people, and rarely in attendance upon me.
Unless, that is, High Priest Daoman wants something from me.
I wish that I could bypass this part altogether. I wish I could skip the disappointment and the anger of my high priest and go retrieve the scroll I found in the archives. I want so badly to bring it to North—to see if it triggers the manifestation of the Lightbringer in his heart—that my whole body aches. I could be moments away from understanding my destiny, if only I didn’t have to answer to Daoman.
Quickening my steps, with the bindle cat matching them at a double-time trot, I stride toward the grand atrium. The stones are smooth and familiar, polished by centuries of feet traveling this way. Some say that this temple is so ancient it dates to a time before the Exodus, when the gods still lived among us, though there are no records that go so far back.
Still, every day that I’ve lived here, I’ve felt the weight of those centuries, the momentum of generations—I find it easy to believe those stories could be true.
I’m expecting the atrium to be empty, but when Pecho and one of Daoman’s servants scramble to open the door ahead of me, I find it’s full of people, their heads turning to stare at me as if connected to one long string.
Daoman is in his throne-like chair near the center of the dais, resplendent as always, speaking to a middle-aged woman in fine robes. His gaze flies up to land on me, and he rises to his feet and spreads his arms in a gesture of thanks and greeting. “Divine One!” he calls in ringing tones. “Thank the prophecies, you have returned to us. We feared the worst.”
The woman he’s speaking to turns, and I have only a moment to notice the strips of gray silk tied like armbands just below her shoulders. Her eyes meet mine briefly before she’s turning away, melting back into the crowd.
In front of so many onlookers, I can’t demand an explanation. I can’t reveal any insecurity or fear, or alert the spectators if there’s any chance they didn’t notice what I did: that my high priest was speaking to a Graycloak.
The heads follow me as I stride up the corridor lined with flowers and braziers thickening the air with incense. The chamber is filled with saffron-robed priests, with visiting dignitaries and their retinues bearing the colors and heraldry of their regions, with the members of the Congress of Elders glittering with gold and jewels.
Daoman leans over in an elaborate bow as I approach. His eyes leave my face only for the barest second, however, before he’s watching me again.
In the past, as a child, I was more than content for the high priest to run this temple and see to the needs of my people. I never knew a father, except for this man before me, and the older and lonelier I became, the more he would remind me that if I could not play with the other children, could not laugh and talk with my handservants as if they were my friends, it was because I was special.
Special. Chosen. Divine, he would say, a light in his dark blue eyes that sparked some light in me, brought it out from beneath the layers of sadness and isolation.
But with each year that passes, with each step I try to take beyond the walls of this temple and each word I voice in opposition to his decrees, I see a little more. I see that there is a tension between us—that there always has been. That as long as I never manifest my aspect, never rise to my full divinity and command the absolute loyalty of my priests and my people, he is the one who has the power.
Now, as I give him no flicker of reaction to read, I sense it all the more. For a man like Daoman, power is absolute, or it is nothing. This chamber, his greeting, the audience packed into its walls like fish in a salting barrel—it’s all staged.
I give him a gracious nod as he straightens from his bow. “Of course I have returned to you,” I reply, echoing his words. “Did you doubt that I would?”
Daoman’s brow furrows, and the glint in his eye softens. “Then … you do not know?” My face must give something away, some glimmer of the sudden fear that seizes me—has something happened here too?—because the high priest is uncharacteristically quick to add, “One of your guards arrived just this morning, Divine One, and brought word of what happened. Elkisa believed she was the only survivor.”
Now my face gives everything away. I have to grip my spearstaff, its end planted firmly on the stone, to keep my knees from buckling, earning me an inquisitive chirp from the cat beside me. “Elkisa—she’s alive?” The words are a whisper, relief building behind some dam of disbelief, of fearing to hope.