The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,113

sat. I named her one of the old words for hope.”

Hollowly, the word comes to my lips as if from a long, long distance. I whisper: “Insha. Inshara the usurper. She is your daughter.”

“She is the end of all.” Jezara stares straight into my eyes. “She is the Lightbringer.”

TWENTY-SIX

NORTH

Nimh sinks down to sit beside me on the bench. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap, but her breath is ragged as she drags it in and slowly lets it out.

“This isn’t possible,” she whispers, voice tense as she watches her predecessor. I don’t know what to say. Of everyone in this world, I’m the least equipped to know what is and isn’t possible.

Jezara moves slowly around the cozy room, straightening a trinket here, pushing a chair into line with the table. It’s as though she can’t keep still while she continues her story.

“When I first had Insha, I was bitter and alone,” she says. “I had been stripped of my divinity, my purpose, everything I held dear, and driven out of my home.”

“Where did you go?” I find myself asking quietly.

“Where could I go?” Jezara asks. “I gave birth in a village, but less than a day later, one of the men there who had been to the temple and heard the stories realized who I must be. I was driven out almost before I could walk again.”

Whatever disagreement she has with Nimh, and whatever her daughter has done, it’s a difficult image to stomach—the new mother staggering down the road, alone, with her hours-old baby in her arms.

“What happened to her father?” I ask.

Jezara simply shakes her head. “He was long gone. For a time, my daughter and I lived in a floating village at the far western edge of the forest-sea, and I scraped out a living as a hedge-witch, weaving charms and healing those who came to me. And then, one day … I don’t know how, but the people of that village discovered who I was. Who Insha was.”

Nimh’s face is a study in confusion, but she looks up, listening to the rest of Jezara’s explanation.

“For years, I put up with their hatred and their judgment. I could take it—I was a goddess, after all, and they could not hurt me.” Jezara’s eyelashes dip, and she lifts a hand to pass it over her face. “But Insha was just a little girl. By the time I gathered the resources to move to these remote mountains … she had grown up listening to the world call her mother weak, a liar and a traitor. She never had a chance to be anything other than angry.”

Nimh makes a tiny sound—when I look at her, though, she’s no longer watching Jezara. Her hands are tightly knotted in her lap.

Jezara is still moving around the room, picking things up, putting them down, always in motion. I wonder if she’s rehearsed this speech, or imagined giving it—and if so, who she thought she’d be talking to when she did.

“I read the prophecy over and over,” she continues. “And in time, I began to truly understand. I had become the empty one, but I was not empty of purpose. My Insha—Inshara—could save the world. She could bring light. That was what I taught her.”

I snort involuntarily. “When she was murdering people at the temple yesterday, it didn’t seem like she’d taken that lesson to heart.”

Jezara’s gaze drops. “You must understand, it was not always so clear what she was. The power of her conviction was inspiring. She was determined, driven—absolutely confident she could soar to heights unmatched by any before her. And the way she spoke, the way she could wrap her words around your heart and squeeze until you could see nothing but her … She could make you love her. I knew she could change everything, win back the devotion and faith that I had lost. And then … there was the voice.”

“Voice?” I ask.

Jezara’s eyes narrow, troubled and strangely fearful. “She … she began to hear him. The Lightbringer himself. He would visit her in her thoughts and whisper truths to her. Things she couldn’t possibly know otherwise.”

“But …” I glance at Nimh, who’s still sitting motionless, staring at something beyond Jezara, beyond the room itself. Gathering up my own wits, I try again. “I thought far-speech, as Nimh called it, wasn’t a magic you had here.”

Jezara lifts her hands, spreading them in a helpless gesture. “I never heard his voice myself. But what began as something I