The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,137

A voice is calling my name; footsteps squish toward me in the mud.

A heavy weight drops onto my shoulders, as comforting as an arm around me. I look down and see dusty purple linen. I see my hand clutch at the fabric before I’ve decided to do it.

“Nimh, come back to me now… .” The voice is low and gentle. “Come on back now—there’s a good girl.”

Thoughts snap back into sync with my body, jolting as though waking from a dream. I lock eyes with—Jezara?

Her face is tired and travel-stained. Though her gaze is as frank and self-possessed as ever, there’s a flicker in it as she looks at me, a tiny window into some deeper feeling. Dust caught in her hair and on her skin glows in the moonlight and the last of the embers, giving her an aura of gold.

My breath catches, for suddenly I see the delicate, subtle echoes of divinity in her eyes.

I never knew this Jezara. My priests and my tutors and my surrogate father taught me to revile her so well that I never wondered if she and I might be similar; so well I could not imagine sharing any traits with the villain who had cast our world into such uncertainty.

But Jezara was a goddess for longer than I’ve been alive, and wholly loved by her people, and for the first time in my life I can imagine her as she must have been then.

She reminds me of my mother. Back when I knew her, back when I didn’t know I was divine. When I ate pirrackas with the other children and sat on the floor listening to the Fisher King telling stories.

What it must have been like to love her then, instead of hating her. To grow up worshipping the goddess of healing instead of picking at old wounds. To look back into childhood and remember this shining, golden woman floating by on festival nights while we sang and danced her praise, and knew that we were safe.

What a comfort it must be to live in the protection of a god you believe in.

My eyes fill with tears, and I gasp for a breath. Abruptly, the easy remoteness of Jezara’s expression cracks and falls away, and she drops to her knees at my side.

“Oh, child,” she murmurs, shoulders sagging as she reaches out toward the purple mantle she draped across me. She tugs the ends together, the pressure not unlike an embrace around my shoulders. “I know, love. I know. I remember.”

A sob creaks free as the bands of tension around my rib cage loosen just a fraction. My mind cannot make sense of Jezara’s presence here, not when the last I saw of her was the smoke rising from the ruins of her home. Nor can it make sense of her warmth, her sympathy, when the last words we exchanged were so bitter.

“They do not understand,” Jezara murmurs, her voice gentle. “They cannot know what it is they asked of us. No one knows but you and I.”

There’s no trace of that brusque facade in her demeanor now. Perhaps, seeing me without armor, she is laying down hers.

I shudder, straightening a little, an unspoken signal that she reads immediately; her hands fall away from the mantle she wrapped around me and she sits back on her heels. A shadow now cuts through the moonlight that illuminates her face—the golden aura is gone.

“I thought you died,” I croak, suddenly light-headed.

Jezara’s eyebrows rise a hair, and the smile that quirks the corner of her mouth is the human Jezara again, those divine echoes receding. “Good. I’m hoping that’s what my daughter’s agents will think too.”

She holds out a waterskin by its strap when I cough. After quite a long swallow, I manage, “You destroyed your house on purpose?”

Jezara draws in a long, slow breath, then releases it again. “I wronged you,” she murmurs, gazing at the river beyond me. “You were right to be angry. I railed all my life against my divinity—but casting it off meant it fell to you.”

Her voice is quiet, sincere. And though she doesn’t meet my eyes, I can still see the cost of the admission in the tight set of her shoulders.

When her eyes drift back and meet mine again, her brows lift and her face falls. “Oh, Light forgive me, but I hated you, Nimhara. This perfect, dutiful girl, chosen so young. How proud Daoman must have been. How relieved my people that they could forget