“You have no copy of the Song of the Destroyer?” I ask, scanning the texts with some consternation.
“Why would I?” Her voice is sharp. “What do you want with it, anyway? Surely you know it so well you could recite it in your sleep.”
“I thought perhaps North could read it. He’s—less familiar with our faith than most.”
Jezara tilts her head. Her eyes slide toward North, who straightens and begins conspicuously inspecting the golden statuette. She goes still as she stares, as if beholding something or someone lost long ago.
“It is true … ,” she whispers. “I thought, when I saw you at the village … but then I thought I must be imagining things. You are a cloudlander.”
North goes rigid, gaze swinging toward me in alarm. “No! I’m … from a far-off country. I’m—”
Jezara reaches down to grab his wrist. She holds it aloft. “You’re wearing a chronometer,” she says flatly.
North’s mouth falls open. “You know what a chrono is?”
Jezara’s lips twitch to the faintest of smiles, one of her eyebrows rising. “Are you so arrogant as to think that you’re the only cloudlander ever to have come to our world?” She turns back to me. “How did you come to be traveling together?”
This time, I don’t hesitate. “I had a vision that led me to him. I reached the place in time to see his glider fall in flames from the sky.”
“Saw his glider fall … ,” Jezara murmurs, her gaze distant for a few seconds before focusing on me again, with all the pinpoint precision of a beam of light through a magnifier. “You believe he is the Last Star.”
Astonishment makes me take a step back, my eyes finding North’s with some confusion. How could she know? How could this solitary exile know as much about my mission as I do myself?
He looks between us, and then asks slowly, “What makes you say that?”
“‘The empty one will keep the star as a brand against the darkness,’” Jezara says.
I clutch at the back of a chair, my knees suddenly weak. The lost stanza. She has seen it.
How many times had I repeated those words to Daoman? Insisted that my vision was real, that the lost stanza was real?
Jezara knows it.
“I suppose she believes she is the empty one because she hasn’t manifested.” Jezara is still addressing North, though she glances at me while she speaks.
“How—how—” My mind stutters, still trying to unravel the layers of significance beneath her words.
North clears his throat, and the sound seems to unstick me.
“How do you know the lost stanza?” I blurt. “I only ever saw the words in a dream. It showed me a scroll, but even if you saw that scroll while you were still the divine, you couldn’t have seen the words—they were only there in the dream. The real scroll was blank where the lost stanza was written. How … how?”
“Of course the version you found didn’t have the lost stanza. I stole the real scroll when I was driven out of the temple. And I covered my tracks.”
North exhales slowly, his eyes round. “So it did have the stanza written on it? But you left a copy that didn’t.”
Jezara nods, studying my face. “Are you all right, child?”
“They thought I was mad,” I whisper, the blood rushing in my ears, my skin tingling. “The priests, the Congress of Elders … they all thought I had gone crazy. They made me think it of myself. You are the reason why.”
“Would you like to keep berating me?” Jezara’s eyebrows lift, one corner of her mouth still curved. “Or would you like to see the lost stanza yourself?”
While I stand helplessly, my heart leaping and mind racing, Jezara locates a particular stone under the corner of an undyed wool rug. With the use of an iron poker from the fire, and North’s assistance, she levers up the stone and then reaches down into the cavity. Her arm goes in up to the shoulder, suggesting part of the floor beneath the stone was dug out farther. After a long, dreadful moment in which I’m certain she’ll say it’s not there after all, she straightens up and withdraws a dusty scroll-case littered with cobwebs.
She trails her fingers gently across its surface, clearing away the years of detritus, then sets the scroll down on the small table with the gold silk.
With trembling fingers, I reach for it.
“Why hide it like this?” North is asking while I stare down at the case, too overwhelmed to open it. “Who are you keeping it from?”
“My daughter,” Jezara replies. She adds quietly, “She’s gone now.”
Into the silence comes a voice—my voice. “You—you had a child?”
Jezara raises an eyebrow as she turns, the hair loose down to her waist swirling gently in time with the robe around her ankles. “How else did you think they knew to cast me out? One can hide the condition for a time, longer than you might think, but not forever. Even in loose robes, it became clear.”
I keep one hand curled around the scroll, my mind spinning. “Hide the … that means …” It takes longer than it should for the pieces to come together. “You were with your—with a lover for months, long enough to show you were with child, and no one knew? You … you pretended to still be divine?”
Jezara, for a moment, looks almost comically surprised. And then she laughs again, moving around until she can drop onto one of the cushioned benches before the fire.
“Child,” she says with a sigh, “not a thing changed the first time the man I loved took my hand. I lost nothing. I served as goddess exactly as I had done before, and not a single person knew the difference. I didn’t stop being their god when we touched—I stopped being their god when they found out.”
Horror, confusion, doubt, and anger jumble for dominance in my mind as I stare at her, the woman who’d once lived where I live, walked where I alone now walk.
She’s lying.
Why would she lie?
To hurt me, for she must hate anything that reminds her of her old life.
But then why let me in at all?
To toy with me? Or to give me the rope with which to hang myself? Perhaps she wants me to destroy myself the way she did. Because she wants them to see that anyone can stumble. Because she wants to prove she’s not the only one without a faith strong enough to …
What if she isn’t lying?
“Why hide this scroll from your daughter?” North asks her, seemingly oblivious to the storm buffeting my mind like a leaf in a gale.
Jezara’s still watching me—she, at least, is perfectly aware of the effect her words have had. “That … is a complicated question, cloudlander.”
“North,” he says. “I apologize—I forgot to introduce myself in all the …” He waves a hand vaguely. “You know.”
“North,” Jezara repeats, and holds out her hand for him to take. “Well met.”
My head and North’s lift at the same time, his eyes going from her outstretched hand to meet my stricken gaze. But he’s too well trained, too much the polite royal grandson—he takes her hand and bows over it in an elegant, if unfamiliar, gesture of respect.
My eyes don’t move from where her hand rests in his. My own palm tingles. My heart feels like it’s tearing in two. It has been so long since I’ve touched someone that I can’t even feel it as the ghost of a touch. All I feel is—wretched. Hollow.