I have to wait a moment before I answer, letting the cooler air restore some of my equilibrium. “He is mist-touched,” I say finally, as I turn toward the row of riverstrider barges, looking for Orrun’s boat.
“The mist did that to him?” North gestures at his own face, his gaze creeping back toward the single lighted window above us.
“It can damage the mind and the body. Make people see things, bestow power or take it away. Sometimes it even grants the gift of prophecy.”
“Prophecy,” North echoes, voice equal parts confusion and skepticism.
Orrun’s boat is not far from Quenti’s. It’s one of the newer barges, smaller than the others, though that suits our purposes fine. I move down the little woven reed pathway and step up onto the edge of the boat.
North follows me, though his mind is still up in Quenti’s room. “So you’re saying he somehow knew who I was and that you’d brought me here? And he’s trying to warn me not to …” He halts, and when I glance over at him, his eyes meet mine and then dart away.
“That was not prophecy,” I tell him. “He did not even know I was the goddess—he thought I was still a little girl.”
“Still. Unnerving,” North mumbles, following me as I move toward the steps up to the captain’s perch.
Orrun is no “idiot boy,” as Quenti said—he is a man well into his thirties. But if Quenti’s mind was stuck in a time ten years past, Orrun would have been younger too.
Please, I pray, reaching for the latch on the door, let him be as foolish now as he was then.
I step back, inspecting the inside of the door—and there, hanging from a hook, is a little chain holding the amber keystone. I let my breath out, fetching it down with trembling fingers, and step up to the controls.
North is watching curiously, no doubt wondering what technolog y will explain away how a riverstrider’s barge responds to its keystone—but I pause before starting up the barge.
“Thank you,” I whisper, unable just yet to lift my gaze.
“For what?”
“For Quenti. For taking his hand when I could not.”
When I finally do look up, North is outlined by the moonlight that streams onto the deck of the barge. My eyes meet his, and he smiles a little, though his face is sad.
“Whether your prophecy is right about me or not,” he says, with just enough of a wry twist to his voice, “we’re in this together now.”
I used to dream of being the one the Lightbringer came to. Having a partner, being understood, sharing the weight of divinity with another. Despite the grief threatening to paralyze me, I can still feel the pull of that dream.
“Hey.” North’s eyebrows rise as he ducks his head a little, catching my gaze. “No time for zoning out. Let’s put some distance between us and the temple, hmm? And maybe then you can tell me a story or two, because if your people think I’m this destroyer, I should probably know what that’s all about.”
I fit the keystone into its hollow and start priming the boat’s magic—the motions are all still familiar, for all that I’ve not been riverfolk since childhood.
North’s voice is still ringing in my ears, telling me we’re a team.
I used to dream of not being alone.
And now, here is someone to stand beside me.
TWENTY-TWO
NORTH
“There is a story among my people,” Nimh says, her eyes on the dark river ahead of us, hands resting on the boat’s wheel. “It is said that a thousand years ago, when the gods still walked among us, the world was ready to come to an end—that existence had grown weary, and it was time for life to begin anew.”
Another time, I might have asked her to skip ahead and get to the part where I’m some prophesied savior of her people. But we still have distance to put between us and her pursuers, and nothing but time.
And, if I’m being honest, I like the way she tells stories.
“To that end,” she goes on, “a new god was born. He was called Lightbringer, and he was to remake the world. But he was young and untested, and when the time came, he was afraid to do what must be done.
“When the other gods decided to abandon humanity and take to the sky, he fled with them instead of fulfilling his destiny. One god stayed behind—the first living divine—and she gave us words of prophecy. They eventually became the Song of the Destroyer—the Lightbringer’s story.”
“This is the prophecy about me?” I interject.
She nods. “It tells us a new Lightbringer will come, and finish what the first one could not. Restore balance to this world, remake it into one where its people can thrive.”
I sigh. “And you believe this prophecy is coming true now.”
She echoes my sigh, unaware of how closely the sound matches—I hide my smile in the dark. “I have faith, yes.” She’s standing there like a statue, the cat motionless at her side, guiding the riverstrider’s boat down the slow, lazy river.
The only real noise is the lapping of the engine’s blades as they slice through the water at the stern—because that’s what’s driving this thing. An engine. It’s soundless, and Nimh says it’s running on magic—because what doesn’t in this place—but something is turning the blades on the propeller. It could be a circuit that the insertion of the keystone completes. Or a reaction between the keystone and one of the materials the boat is made of.
Or the power could be magnetic—the harnessing of some kind of attraction or repulsion.
Funny thing is, after the initial rush of excitement that I might have found a power source that can help lift my own ship, I stopped really thinking about it. Glider repairs don’t feel like my top priority. Ensuring Nimh’s safety does.
I don’t know when that happened.
“I know your people believe mine are gods—,” I begin.
“Descended from gods,” Nimh corrects me, voice lightening a little. “I have revised my opinion about your people’s actual divinity since meeting you.”
It’s a dig, but I feel a rather foolish smile spread over my features. “Oh, very nice. To be fair, we didn’t know we were meant to be anyone’s gods.”
I catch a glitter in her eyes as they shift momentarily away from the river to catch mine. “Did your people never simply look down?”
I lean back, this time watching the river myself. “I’ve wondered that once or twice since discovering you existed,” I admit. “But the clouds below Alciel are pretty thick. No one’s gotten a good look through them in centuries. And I suppose …”
“You suppose?” Nimh asks curiously.
“I suppose my people stopped wondering what else might be out there.”
She’s quiet for a little while, and then says very softly, “I think that would be a very hopeless sort of life.”
A part of me wants to object to that, because my people are happy, for the most part, and fed and secure. But I know security isn’t exactly the same as hope, and the more time I spend here, the more I wonder what we gave up when we forgot about gods and magic and the power of prophecy.
I clear my throat, hoping to change the subject. “So what is it, exactly, that I’m meant to do? Shouldn’t I be prepared in some way?”