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.
Jealous.
I clutch the scroll like it’s my only tether to sanity.
Jezara gives North a faint smile before releasing his hand. “The answer to your question lies within that text,” she says, leaning back on the bench and nodding her head in my direction. “You must have memorized the lost stanza, gone over the words again and again, haven’t you, child?”
I don’t answer, and to my intense and suddenly visceral horror, I can feel tears pricking my eyes. You will not cry in front of this blasphemer… .
“Nimh, come sit,” North suggests, his voice a safer, stronger tether than the scroll. He crosses in front of Jezara to gesture to one of the benches, placing himself between me and her for the time it takes me to move. It buys me a moment, and I glance at him as I pass, too shaken to broadcast gratitude—but he smiles as if I had, and he’d understood. He winks at me as I sit.
“I did go over it again and again,” I reply finally, my voice a dry croak until I clear my throat. “I spent years searching for the reason I hadn’t manifested. When I saw those words in my vision, I knew. I knew.”
Jezara studies me, inscrutable. Is she comparing my hardships to hers? I never caused hers, though she was always the cause of mine. “Child, I—”
“My name is Nimhara. I am the divine vessel. The leader of our people,” I snap. Then I wince, for I did not project strength, but showed my weakness.
“Nimhara,” Jezara echoes. Her voice is almost gentle now. “I can see why you read those words and thought … but this lost stanza, this prophecy, it isn’t about you.”
My thoughts stumble to a halt. “It is about me—I saw the Last Star; I found the …” I barely manage not to look at North. “I know it’s about me.”
Jezara puts her fingers to her forehead, rubbing a spot between her eyes. “This is the trouble with prophecy,” she murmurs, to no one in particular. “Everyone believes they’re the chosen one.”
North is being awfully silent now.
“The empty one,” Jezara recites. “What could that be but a goddess, stripped of her divinity? This prophecy, Nimh … it speaks of the one who will bring forth the Lightbringer.”
She hesitates.
Then she says quietly, “My daughter. She is the one who now sits where you once