The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,110

ahead with several doors leading off at intervals.

She glances back at me, an odd look on her face—then she blinks. “Where are your guards, Divine One? Your entourage of priests and acolytes, your barges full of amenities and ease?”

I’m seized by the ridiculous urge to lie—to tell her all is well, that the land is thriving under my tenure as the living divine. That we’re fine without her.

Then the bindle cat bumps his head against my calf, and I gulp a breath.

“The temple is lost,” I whisper. “A false goddess, a dark magician like none I’ve ever seen, has taken it and is willing to kill anyone who opposes her, starting with the high priest. I cannot return, not until I find help.”

Jezara turns, the lamp lowering. “The high priest? Not Daoman?” she whispers, her eyes widening. She reads the truth in my face. Grief flickers across her features before she turns away.

Before he was my father, he was hers.

“Do they know where you are, your personal guard?” Jezara asks brusquely. “If they are about to beat down my door, tell me now. I have reason to mistrust soldiers.” The words are dismissive, and she reaches for a stick leaning next to her stored weapons. Using it to support herself as she walks, she turns to lead the way down the corridor.

She’s far too young a woman to need a cane—and then the truth, the importance of what she said, hits me.

She was thrown out of the temple, out of the city, by her own protectors. Her own guards. Her own Elkisas.

And they hurt her.

The corridor turns and the tiny bits of daylight around the edges of some of the stones vanish. We’re underneath the ruins now, in some substructure tunneled into the mountain.

We reach a door, and Jezara pushes it open. It takes her a while to light the braziers at the corners of the room from her little earthenware lamp, but it gives me time to absorb what I’m seeing.

I expected a dank, unpleasant hole, some meager existence carved out for herself on the edge of the survivable world. I expected rubble-strewn floors and ruins about to collapse at any moment. I expected … darkness.

Instead, the room that comes to life in the lamplight is wide and open, inviting and warm. A fireplace stutters to life as she rakes the coals and tosses a new log onto them. The chairs and tables are nowhere near as grand as those that furnish my rooms in the temple, but they look well made, sturdy. Small touches remind me of where she came from, things she must have taken with her—a strip of gold silk stretching across one tabletop, a tiny golden statuette of the original goddess of healing atop a shelf bolted to the wall, a set of magnifying lenses of increasing magnitude, so like those Matias uses that for a moment, I am back in his archives.

Then I realize why—between the two lamps against the far wall are a set of shelves. At least a dozen books stand there in a neat row, and on another shelf, scroll-cases stacked in a triangle. Forgetting myself, I move past my predecessor, making for the shelf. If she has a copy of the Song of the Destroyer, I could ask if North might read it—perhaps its verse will help him understand this world where my explanations will not.

From behind me, Jezara’s voice drawls an amused observation. “Matias must love her. I don’t think I ever ran toward a bookshelf with such fervor.”

Then North’s voice, a little wry. “My tutors would have preferred her too.”

“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