In spite of myself, I laugh. “Fine, don’t tell me.”
Nimh gives a graceful little shrug. “Years of practice. I have spent a long, long time watching.” She steps toward me and sits, hesitating a moment before asking, “Would you mind assisting me with my robe? I would call another handservant, but then I would have to explain your presence here, and how you arrived via my own private passageway.” She nods toward the panel that the cat led me through.
“I … sure. What do I …” But I trail off as she turns, showing me the back of her robe, which gapes open down to the waist. Crimson ties dangle in a crisscrossed pattern, waiting to be drawn up and tied off.
Nimh reaches up, gathering her hair in her hands and pulling it forward over her shoulder. As she does, it sends a waft of some kind of spicy scent in my direction. Her skin is flawless, and for a long moment I can’t move. It’s as if my brain simply shuts itself down.
Beeeeeeep. No activity detected. Please restart.
“You should only have to draw the strings together and then tie them,” Nimh is saying from far away.
There are dimples in her lower back, just above where the fabric clings to her hips.
“North?”
I blink and glance up to find her looking over her shoulder at me. A flare of panic makes me wonder what I missed while staring at her—and then I see that her cheeks are dark and her large brown eyes are fixed on my face.
“I—forgive me, Nimh.” The words come tumbling out. “It isn’t every day a person is asked to help dress a goddess.”
Her smile flashes at me, but I can see her head duck and the curve of her cheek shift as her smile widens farther.
Carefully, keeping a tight rein on the irrational—and unhelpful—desire to let my fingers slip a little, I pull on the ends of those laces and then knot them in a neat bow just below the nape of her neck.
I’m about the let the laces fall when my eyes focus past them, to the skin of her shoulders, where the light catches against a scattering of goose bumps rising to follow the movement of my hand. Distracted, I draw my fingertips along the ties, just lightly enough to stay on this side of untying them again.
The little shiver of her skin follows my fingers all the way down. I hear her breath catch, then release, quaking. I can feel her warmth below my fingertips.
“How is it that you can live your life without touching anyone?” I find myself asking softly. “Never being touched?”
Skies, North! What are you saying? Good work with the incredibly personal questions. Truly, I have lost it.
Her fingers are still wound around her thick wealth of hair—they shift a little as I speak, as if stroking someone else’s hair, a comfort. “It is all I have ever known. All I will ever know.”
Her head turns, and I see her face in three-quarter profile. In this moment, hidden from the rest of the world by the carved screen at the other end of the chamber, she looks … lonely.
“Nimh, I—”
A chime by the ornate entrance makes us both jump, and Nimh is moving before I’ve even registered what I’ve heard. She slips away from me with startling quickness, taking a moment by the door to smooth down her hair and press a hand to her cheek.
I’ve seen Miri do that once or twice, slipping out of an alcove to be followed a second later by Saelis. I’ve caused it myself once or twice, and it always made my heart skip, seeing her test how flushed her face was, and knowing I caused it. Now, I’m awash in something else, a mishmash of emotions I can barely catalog.
Except for one that stands out among the others—longing.
She believes she’s a goddess and you’re not allowed to touch her. Seriously, North, you’ve got to stop.
She may have saved my life, but she didn’t exactly tell me what she was getting me into. This is trouble—I should get out while my skin, and my heart, are still intact.
I stay out of sight once more, and Nimh exchanges a brief, quiet greeting with the handservant, who has delivered a stack of woven boxes, tiered like the temple itself. She bids the servant farewell and turns, padding barefoot past me to sit on the stone between the steaming water and the carved screen that overlooks the party.
“North?” she asks when she looks up to find me still standing where she left me. “Food?”
She lifts off one of the tiers, and a mouthwateringly good smell spirals out toward me on a puff of steam.
Forget protecting my heart—those are dumplings.
Everything else can wait.
FIFTEEN
NIMH
I can’t stop watching North eat. On the road, his appetite was fairly well squashed— by fear, by the pain of his injuries, by his experience with the povvy. Out at the feast, while I watched him from behind my screen, he didn’t eat at all. Now, though, faced with a selection of my favorites from the temple kitchens—and a promise that nothing he’s eating is meat—he’s not holding back.
He catches me watching him as he’s licking cheese from the fingers of one hand and trying to keep his flatbread from falling apart with the other. “What? Are my table manners not up to specifications?”
Every time I start to think he’s just like any young man from this world, he goes and says something like that. He doesn’t speak the way we do, though I can usually understand the idea behind what he’s saying. And while I’m no longer worried he might forget himself and accidentally touch me, and he never treats me with anything but respect—he also doesn’t look at me the way the people of my faith do.
His easy grin falters a little, and I realize I’ve been staring at him rather than answering him.
“You have lovely table manners,” I tell him, which for some reason makes him laugh. I had been trying to compliment him.
North raises an eyebrow at me. “So why is my eating so amusing?”
“Not amusing,” I protest. “You must understand, food is an important symbol among the people here. Food is often scarce, and so feeding a person is a gesture of …” I hesitate, for I’d been about to say “love.” I brush past that in my mind and say instead, “To watch someone enjoying a meal so much is … pleasing.”
North leans over to snag a spiced pastry as though he’s sneaking something past me. “I’m so glad I can treat you, then.”
I take advantage of his preoccupation with the pastry to try to gather my wits.
My mind has been ensnared by a particular preoccupation in the last few hours: if North is the Lightbringer, then he is divine as well.
There have never been two divine beings in the world at the same time, not since before the Exodus when the gods left us. There are no rules for it.
That the living divine cannot be touched by mortals without losing her divinity is a law that has been handed down through the centuries.
But what happens if she’s touched by someone carrying his own divinity?
My skin still tingles at the memory of his expression when he found me in the pool. His nearness when he was handing me my robe. I must fight to keep from visibly shivering whenever my thoughts go back to it.
“Are you cold?”
I blink and find North looking at me, eyebrows drawn together in faint concern. “What?”
“You’re shivering. Do you want my jacket?” He brushes the crumbs from his fingertips and curls his hands around the lapels of the borrowed jacket of black silk he wore to the feast.