The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,18

every other living god has done in the thousand years since the Exodus. When Jezara forfeited her divinity by committing the one unforgivable, unthinkable act for our kind—touching another—she tore my people’s faith apart and left only tatters for the little girl fate called to replace her.

I was five when the high priest saw that the divinity had settled upon me, and brought me to live in the temple. By the time I was six, I understood that the long chain of gods who had guided my people for a thousand years had been irrevocably broken. While Jezara, with her unthinkable actions, had been the one to shatter that link, I would always be the one left clinging to the other half of that broken piece, trying to pull the dead weight of our wounded faith back from the edge with my bare hands.

Capac begins to sing again, and the boat slides up the shore. I wait quietly with the bindle cat upon my lap and stretch muscles tired from the weight of the rope.

Night settles over the forest-sea before anywhere else, as if gathering its strength before venturing out to envelop the rest of the land. The canopy overhead is dense enough to win out against the weakening sun, and the muted browns and grays of tree and vine and earth absorb what little light makes it through the leaves overhead. The night insects are singing by the time the others finish with the barge and begin transporting supplies to set up the camp some distance from me.

When I was younger, I was scolded often for getting involved when I ought to stay removed from my people. Though I am revered by—most of—my people, I cannot ever truly walk among them.

Matias, the Master of Archives at the temple, was the unlikely source of that particular revelation.

“They want to serve, Lady,” he’d said, bespectacled eyes fixed on the text before him. He hadn’t put it down despite the fact that I’d burst in, upset to have been shooed away from the solstice preparations. “They’ve trained for it all their lives. You can be kind to them, you can show them respect and even affection, but you cannot take from them the acts that give them purpose.”

Purpose.

The word had struck me so deeply I had no answer for him. From the time I was five years old, my purpose had been made clear—and yet, until I manifest with some aspect, be it healing or harvest or anything at all, I have none.

“Are you hungry, Lady?” A familiar voice at my elbow startles the bindle cat, triggering a burble of irritation and the warning press of his back claws against my thighs as he jumps off my lap and stalks off into the dark.

I tilt my head up at Elkisa, who stands by my fallen tree and watches the cat go with a faint frown. “He means no insult,” I tell her. “He is a cat—he only knows rudeness as a quality others possess.”

“I wish I knew why that thing has never liked me,” she mutters, a bit of her formality dropping away. She leans forward, holding out my spearstaff across her palms, having fetched it from the barge.

“He is jealous,” I suggest, taking the spearstaff with a smile. “He knows you are almost as old a friend as he.”

That melts Elkisa’s frown, and with a twitch of her lips, she ducks her head. Her humor is short-lived, though—when she looks back up at me, her eyes are grave. “I’m sorry about what happened during the mooring.”

I swallow, my throat suddenly tight. “It was my fault. I know better than to try to help.”

Elkisa makes a noncommittal sound, then moves to sit beside me, just beyond arm’s reach—distant, to most people. Nearly an embrace, to me. “I think maybe it’s your desire to help that will save us all.”

I give a quick laugh, uncomfortable with the weight of what she’s said, though my heart beats a little faster. “I do not know what awaits me in Intisuyu. I only know I am meant to travel this way.”

I think. But that last part, I don’t say.

“Do you think we’ll be long in the sun lands?” she asks. “The Feast of the Dying is tomorrow night.”

“It will be faster on the way home,” I say. “We will be traveling with the current.” Our return will be a close-cut thing, but I know that her real questions are these: Are you truly sure of your