The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,20
with warmth by the firelight, each successive layer fading into the night like afterimages echoing in the dark. Somewhere in the shadows, the leaves quake with the passage of a colony of lying monkeys traveling to their nighttime berths.
Elkisa sighs and rises to her feet, and when I tip my head back down, I see that the riverstriders have finished making camp and are busying themselves at one of the fires. Bryn and Rheesi are nowhere to be seen, patrolling in the darkness beyond the firelight while Elkisa stays close to me.
I’m about to suggest she go see about something to eat when she speaks. “I know you heard the ravings of that Graycloak this morning. We all pretended not to, but I know you heard him.”
My gut clenches with the memory I’ve been trying not to think about all day.
The Graycloak had been there at dawn as if he’d been waiting for us, though no one but my guards and the riverstriders knew of my plans to slip from the temple city unseen. Perched on top of a crate of fruit, he called out to the few people moving through the floating streets, inviting them to pause a while and listen. Voice cracking, body gangly, he could not be more than fifteen years old.
Seeing us, he spun around to follow us with eyes and voice, though I wore plain robes and no crown, and my guards had left the official black-and-gold tunics of the divine guard behind. He didn’t know who I was—only that until Capac’s barge cleared the market, his audience was captive.
They dress her in crimson, they paint her eyes, they let her speak the sacred rituals and touch the guardian stones. The high priest, in his desperation, calls her meager magic divine, as if that word, and not the truth of what she is, will keep us enslaved to a faith we should have abandoned a thousand years ago.
Our barge slid past him, the pace of the riverstriders quickening in response, but the Graycloak’s words followed me long after he himself had vanished from sight.
What aspect is she but nothingness? What power does she have but what her priests claim for themselves? The last of the gods has gone, and all that is left is nothingness in the form of an empty girl called Nimh… .
His words still follow me, though he and his crate, and the market, and the city and the temple that overlooks it all have vanished down the lazy curves of the river behind us. I think they will follow me until I die.
“Nimh.” Elkisa’s gentle voice summons me back. That childhood name, which had cut so deeply coming from a stranger in the market streets, is a balm coming from my friend.
“It doesn’t matter, El.”
“It does to me,” says my oldest friend, her normally easy gaze carrying an odd intensity. “And it matters to you. They claim that when J—when the blasphemer allowed herself to be touched, she destroyed the spirit of the divine altogether. That she consigned this world to darkness.”
Elkisa must see something in my face when I look up, for she drops down before me, one knee bracing her against the ground. “You are not empty. You are not a puppet for High Priest Daoman to use—your very presence here, against his wishes, makes that clear enough. You are not what they say you are.”
Her face, so close to mine, makes my chest ache. I have not been touched—not a brush of the fingertips, much less a kiss or hug—since I was five years old, but the wish is as strong as it ever was—and right now I wish I could let my friend hold me.
“But I’m not what Daoman says I am either,” I whisper, my pulse thudding as I hear that fear aloud for the first time. “Where is my aspect, El? The Feast of the Dying is nearly upon us, and then it will have been ten years from the time I was called. The Graycloaks will not wait another year—what if they—”
Elkisa’s hand drops to the soil between us, half an inch from the edge of my boot. The nearness of it stops my voice mid-word. Her eyes search mine.
“Daoman is not the only one who can see the divine light in you, Nimhara.”
There is a strange wistfulness to her voice that I’ve never heard before. Her eyes are almost sad, despite the warm words.
Too moved to speak, I sit silently until that pensive