The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,19
purpose? Will we return with something to convince the high priest we were right to defy him?
I cannot blame her for wondering. Still, I am surprised when she speaks again. “You won’t tell me what this new prophecy says? You don’t trust me?”
I glance at her from the corner of my eye, aching to do just that. We grew up together, she and I—a goddess and her divine guardian. A wistful part of me misses the time when we were both just children.
Although there is little chance in a life like mine for friendship, there was a time when Elkisa and I were close that way. As an initiate, she’d been slower than the others to embrace tradition. She’d seemed blessed by preternatural agility and strength, although she once confessed to me that it was no lucky blessing at all but hard work, constant and unflinching. But her affinity with blade and bow, her quick adoption of every new combat style she encountered, meant that she was granted far more leeway in other areas than her comrades. She could be a little more outspoken before she was chastised; she could fail now and then to respect the proprieties without being dismissed outright.
She’s older than I am, but one soul singled out—even for possessing a greater skill than her peers—inevitably seeks another, to banish isolation with camaraderie.
But the jealousy of her fellow initiates changed as they did, age bringing perspective and admiration to replace frustration and envy. And the best fighter in the world would still never be chosen as defender of the divine if she could not respect the formality and ritual of the role.
She pulled away, as she had to. Even if the Divine One was still as lonely as she’d ever been.
I dismiss that deep, old ache. “El, I don’t even entirely trust myself.” The relaxation of my speech is the only intimacy I can offer her now, and it makes her smile a little. “How can I trust anyone else?”
She sighs and leans back, bracing her palms against the half-rotted wood of the fallen tree. “There’s nothing in the ruins of the sun lands anymore. Not for centuries.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong.” I turn toward her, leaning my staff against the tree. “The story of a whole people is there. Skeletons of a great metal city, even the least of them stretching taller than the temple itself.”
“You’ve been there?” Elkisa’s eyebrows rise, her surprise tinged with a hint of jealousy.
“Not since I was very young—my first pilgrimage. Before you came to train at the temple.” That seems to soothe her, and I close my eyes, recalling what I can of that whirlwind, terrifying first experience of being an entire land’s only hope. “I think you will like it there. I remember thinking the forest-sea seemed to have slipped its banks and crept up into the hills, as if contesting the ancient city’s control of the sun lands—covering all the stone it could reach in the green fabric of vine and sapling and moss.”
A muffled noise from beside me makes me open my eyes, and I find Elkisa grinning at me.
Seeing me start to frown, she lets out a little laugh. “Forgive me, Nimh. Sometimes you turn a phrase or tell a story to rival the riverstriders’ Fisher King. I was just thinking—maybe your aspect will be poetry, when you manifest.”
My breath huffs, so close to a snort that I’m glad the temple’s Master of Spectacle isn’t here to see me violate his endless lessons in etiquette and deportment. Techeki has no time for children’s tales. “It’s been centuries since fate has allowed us anything so lovely as poetry. I’ll leave that to the riverstriders, it’s their tradition.”
“Before you, the divine chose the form of the goddess of healing. Isn’t that something … I don’t know. Something hopeful?”
Long ago the gods’ aspects heralded times of great literature or discovery or art, sometimes even expansion, exploration, and conquest. Now … now my people have no use for art, for art won’t feed them, or hold back the mist, or keep them safe. Over the centuries, our divinity has declined to simpler aspects—harvest, home.
Jezara, goddess of healing, let my people think for a time that the world might heal too.
“Hope?” My gaze slides from Elkisa’s face as I whisper, “We had hope last time. Look how that worked out.”
Elkisa doesn’t answer, and I tilt my head back to gaze into the depths of the canopy overhead. The lowest branches are painted