The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,108

hoped?” I echo, turning toward Nimh for support.

But she’s standing utterly still, her eyes wide, face ashen. Has some new horror risen up from the fog and made itself known to her? I whirl around, but she’s staring only at the woman.

It’s when I look back at our rescuer, and see the flicker of answering recognition there, that I understand. Her dark hair isn’t entirely dark—a streak of white runs through it.

Just like the defaced statue we saw on our way in.

The woman bends to put her weight against the chest barring the door. She pushes it aside with a long, loud scrape of wood on packed earth, and then straightens, not quite raising her eyes enough to meet Nimh’s.

“Come,” mutters Jezara, Forty-First Vessel of the Divine. “We must go. Now.”

TWENTY-FIVE

NIMH

The goddess who gave up her divinity leads us to the foot of the western mountains, which stretch along the long, curved edge of this land like the spine of a hunched old man.

Jezara has been a dark specter looming over me, a reminder of the kind of failure I could be if my devotion ever wavered, but never real. More like a small child’s bogeyman. A hated example of wasted divinity. Had I ever thought of her as a person? If I did once, I haven’t in many years. She had ceased to be flesh and blood and had transformed into something larger and smaller all at once—a warning, a cautionary tale.

But she is real.

She lives in a sprawling house built into ancient ruins where the mountains take root. I see the roof first: long rows of branches, wet with mist, stretching up the side of one of the fallen buildings strung out along the base of the mountain range. Only by following that trail of wet wood can I see where the rest of the house wanders, connecting various parts of the ruins. The ancients built this place into the side of the mountains, and so the woman’s home was built upward, each addition a little higher up the nearly sheer slope. The branch-covered rooftops curl up and around the paler stone of the ancients, a spider’s legs cocooning its prey.

As we get closer, I see that what I thought were wooden struts shoring up some of the house’s structure are actually thick beams of metal.

Sky-steel, I realize, with a jolt of horrified fascination. The ancients’ method of smelting trace amounts of sky-steel along with regular iron is a magic we lost after the gods abandoned us, but the skeletons of their spires and towers are all that’s left in many places. To see relics from the last time the gods lived among us used for such ignoble purpose fits with razor-edged perfection my image of someone with so little respect for the gods, and for our faith.

I cannot help but think of the beggars we passed on the road, the child North gave his food to, the countless souls lost in the mist-ruined village.

And here she sat, surrounded by sky-steel, while those poor souls suffered.

North is just behind me, a careful step and a half back. What he thinks of this place, I cannot say. But I can feel him there, and I’m aware of his every breath.

He was nearly lost to me—to the people that love him in his world in the sky—forever.

Unbidden, his words come back to me from last night, when we fled the temple on the riverstrider’s barge, and lay out on deck looking up at the Lovers.

I wish I could show you.

I thought I’d been prepared for it, for the inevitable moment when my heart and my woman’s body spoke louder than the divinity in me. I’ve looked—of course I have looked—at boys I’d glimpse during divine services, or the acolytes who kneel before me when I pass them, at one particular craftsman from town, whose hands were strong and dexterous and gentle, and so compelling I could not stop imagining what it would feel like to slip mine into them.

But none of them, not one, has ever looked back at me. Not as North does.

I wish I could show you what it is to be kissed.

I thought I had been prepared, that the strength of my forebears and the divinity I share with them would be far stronger than any fleeting, mortal attraction.

That I should come to this crossroads now is rich with irony. Now, as I prepare to face the woman but for whose failure I would be an ordinary