The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,116

None of this has happened before, not in this cycle of the world. It took the priests years to find me after Jezara was banished. What if that was because, somehow, her divinity was passed to her daughter, and I am just a …” Her voice gives out. The word she hasn’t said rings through my mind.

Mistake.

Her face is so stricken that I can’t help but try to fix it, even though I have no idea what I believe.

“Nimh, stop it.” The sharpness of my tone earns me a startled look—but startled is better than devastated. “You are their goddess. You prove it every day.”

“Except I haven’t manifested,” Nimh whispers. “Every other deity in our history did so a year or two after their calling. It has been ten years for me. What if the priests couldn’t find the spark of the divine because it lived in Jezara’s child, and they settled for an ordinary, if powerful, magician instead?”

“Nimh …” I struggle to find words. “You are the one meant to lead your people. Inshara is insane, you saw her back at the temple. She’s a murderer. Whatever the laws of your magic and your divinity may be, you’re the one your people need. All she’ll do is destroy them.”

Nimh’s eyes are fixed on the path now. “Inshara is more powerful than I.”

“No,” I counter. “She knows how to do things you don’t. That’s not the same thing.”

She turns to me, her eyes suddenly lit with such intensity that I take a step back. “The scroll,” she blurts. “You must read it—find out your role in this.”

I set my pack down and slowly pull out the scroll, my mind racing for some way to stall her. In this moment, I can read her heart in her eyes. Everything she believes is pinned on me being able to read this scroll of hers—to read it and experience some sort of awakening to my destiny.

“We really should keep moving,” I murmur, holding the scroll in both hands, glancing back at the bushes growing around the mouth of the tunnel, still visible in the distance. “If they get past Jezara and find that tunnel …”

“Then we had better be sure they face two gods when they find us,” Nimh retorts. “Please, North.”

It’s that plea that stops me. The window into the desperate girl under the goddess. I let out my breath and, with shaking hands, unroll the crumbling parchment.

Back home, something this ancient would be preserved beneath duraglass and under special lighting, and only scholars with gloves and face masks would be allowed near it. I’m strangely aware of my sweaty palms and my quick breath as I keep my touch as gentle as I can.

The text of their ancient verse spills down across the page. It does include Nimh’s extra verse, the one she dreamed about and believes is referring to me.

The empty one

will keep the star

as a brand against the darkness,

and only in that glow

will the Lightbringer look upon this page

and know himself… .

But no matter how many times I read the words, nothing changes. The scroll doesn’t light up, no sense of purpose settles in my chest, no new stanzas or instructions appear. I realize I’m holding my breath only after the page begins to waver before my eyes—when I let it out, a wave of relief and disappointment together sweep over me.

Did I think something was going to happen?

But when I look up, that relief turns to dread. Nimh’s watching me, her eyes hollow. I don’t have to speak—she can tell from looking at me that nothing has changed. Her face is like that of someone bleeding to death, like the tiniest nudge will send her crumpling to the ground.

“Nimh …”

“It’s all gone.” Her voice is thin as her gaze dims, staring through me, past me. “Everything I believed in, everything I gave for it … my whole life. And I don’t know if any of it was real.”

My chest aches. I can’t imagine being in her place. I try to think what it would be like to discover I wasn’t a prince after all, but I never had to believe in my royalty. The proof was there every time I pressed my hand to a DNA lock or looked at my bloodmother to see my own features reflected there. And though I would have said a few weeks ago that my life as a prince demanded sacrifice all the time, having my freedom curtailed here and there for