“Rather than apprehending my pain according to the Love I knew, I apprehended His love according to my pain. Thus misapprehending, my pain threatened to turn His no to anger and thence to rage and thence to rebellion.
“Each of the elohim were tempted thus, according to our station and our weakness. Some weren’t even close to rebelling. I was close, but ultimately did not. I made the right choice, though it has meant sacrifices. I volunteered for you, Kip, but you are so fit for me that I might as well have been assigned. You are . . . so much of what I love about mortals. And my Lord has allowed me to taste as much of human motherhood with you as I can bear. I will be here for parts of today, and I will be there at future moments of great joy for you, and I will be at your end, if it is at all possible.”
“What do you mean, as much as you can bear?” Kip asked. He was tearing up, and he wasn’t sure why.
She stopped as if gut-punched, and her glory dimmed palpably. But when she spoke, it was with a steady, quiet voice. “As human parents do, I got to taste what it means to fail my child.”
“What?” he whispered.
“In that closet . . .” she said, and a grief as potent as all her earlier glory flowed from her, palpably darkening the room.
She didn’t have to say another word. There could be nothing else she was referring to except that lightless, godforsaken closet where Lina had locked him and gone on her binge, blotting out her cares and worries and mind and recollection of her son. The closet where his mother had forgotten him. Abandoned him without food or water to the rats for three days while no one noticed. While no one cared to look for him.
And suddenly, Rea was weeping, too, and he knew that she could see that closet right now. He knew, instantly, that she could see it in the present moment, with an immediacy before her eyes that even he could no longer feel. She was seeing Kip screaming as the rats began biting him, as the blood poured down his back and as he threw himself against the walls, scratching and clawing for an escape that didn’t come. She could see his fear turn to terror, turn to despair, turn to madness. She was watching the pain that would shape and scar his entire life, even now as she spoke.
“I was supposed to be there, Kip.” She could barely breathe the words over her sobs. “I was supposed to save you.”
“What?” he asked as bitter tears spilled down.
“I was elsewhere, fighting, doing good. I knew I could get to you in time. But when I entered your time, Gader’el and Suriel were waiting for me in ambush. For three days I contended with them while you suffered. I want you to know—and I am allowed to say this much—I wasn’t with you. But He was. When I arrived to save you, He was already there.”
“But He did nothing,” Kip said as he wept, the wound opening afresh.
“He spoke to you.”
“No. I was alone.” But Kip could remember it now. A few words only, in the many hours. A few calm words, but they’d kept his sanity.
“Kip. What if, in your darkest moment, He was there, all along, weeping with you?”
“If He saw me, if He cared, He could have saved me. He could have saved me with a word.”
“Indeed. And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“What? ‘Indeed’?” Kip asked. “What does that even mean? I don’t understand Orholam at all.”
“If even we could, I don’t think my friends would have rebelled. What I know is this: A tapestry made of only white threads is perfect, but blank. When He starts letting us add our own colors, things get more interesting.”
Kip scoffed. “Color metaphors are a little bitter for me at the moment,” Kip said, holding up the blank color stick again. Then he shrugged as if he didn’t care. “I prayed that He would help me escape that place.”
“And you did.”
“I didn’t pray that He’d get me out after three fuckin’ days.”
“You asked Him to get you out immediately and He said no. I don’t know why, Kip. But I know that sometimes when He says no to our desires, His no is mercy. I envied mothers, Kip, and now, having loved like one, I see how profoundly I’m not built for that blessing and that burden. For we immortals never forget. You Guiles have a miraculous memory—a gift of a redeemed sin from one of my kind deep in your ancestry—but we immortals carry all our memories before us at all times. I experience it as the present moment, always. My failure and your suffering will never not be before my eyes.”
Her compassion was so genuine and so costly that Kip didn’t shoot back in anger, but he couldn’t keep the bitterness from his tone. “So there’s some greater good that makes it all fine?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I can’t answer every tragedy, but I know my Lord’s character and I know His power. I choose to trust Him, and though I’ve doubted that choice at times, I’ve never regretted it.”
“I suppose I’m the last person who should shake his fist at Orholam,” Kip said. “Sure, I’ve been through some shit, but look at what I have. I should just shut up forever.” On the one hand, he’d saved his friends, his wife, and more thousands than he could know. He had been given his life back, when he should be dead. But on the other hand, he’d lost his best friend and many others, and he’d lost his powers and his claim to being the most important person in history.
Why, in the darkness, in the quiet, did he keep looking at the wrong hand?
Her tone was gentle. “He doesn’t want you to shut up, Kip. I know you’re not thinking just about the closet. You’re scared that you lost your identity when you lost your magic, and even though you chose this, it still hurts. You’re still scared, despite everything.”
Kip scowled. So much for nonchalance. “Stop . . . understanding me and stuff.”
“Kip. It’s okay to be angry.”
“I feel ungrateful,” Kip said. “Greedy. I’m alive! Cruxer’s not. I’ve got it amazingly great, and I did the right thing, and people love me—but sometimes all I can think about is what I’m never going to be.” He must’ve pressed his fingers against that testing stick a hundred times, praying stupidly, blindly.
“I think if your prayer in that closet might have a lesson, it was this: sometimes, Kip, the answer isn’t ‘No.’ It’s ‘Not yet.’ ” She smiled at him and stood. “Now, please excuse me, but you’ve got a wedding to attend, and there’s a young woman in another realm who has a gift for getting in trouble that may rival your own. Not sure if my assignment to her is a reward or a punishment for how I’ve done with you.”
“Bit of both?” Kip said.
She looked up for a moment, and he got the impression again that she was seeking permission for something.
“Don’t blink,” she said, grinning suddenly at him.
Rea Siluz’s figure shimmered, and burst into something other. She didn’t get any bigger, but suddenly the room seemed to strain to contain her essence. To look at her carried a sensation for the eyes like when the ear hears a perfect harmony reverberate with overtones and undertones as the waveforms dance in joy. She was brighter than color, more alive than the sun on green grass. She wore black dragon’s-scale armor etched with designs in fire, and a helm of gleaming gold, and her eyes shone with lavender mischief. Her presence had a physical weight to it, like walking from a cool basement into the anvil of the desert sun. Kip dropped to the floor.