in a rush and turns to face me, an angry—or embarrassed—flush visible despite her sun-browned cheeks. “Divine One, I—”
“It’s all right,” I murmur, forgetting my lessons in diction, too focused on not letting myself think about that gray anklet. “Hiret, when did your mother pass beneath the river?”
“She …” Surprise overtakes her dismay. “It will be ten years, come the Feast of the Dying.”
“May she walk lightly,” I murmur, invoking the brief beginning of my blessing. Grief, I think distantly. Didyet lost her mother, and that is why she turns to the Graycloaks—why she looks for someone to blame.
“How did you … ?” Hiret’s eyes have gone from me to my staff, brow furrowed, as if she half believes my magic might allow me to read her mind—though such a thing is impossible.
“You have been looking after your sister for some time,” I tell her, a smile in my voice if not on my face. “Only mothers know that particular voice.”
And high priests, I think uneasily, imagining Daoman’s reaction to finding me missing and my guards unaware.
Hiret’s lips flicker in an answering smile, then fade. “Come. He is just here.”
She draws aside a curtain on one of the doorways and then steps away, bowing her head, leaving me room to slip inside with no risk of touching her. I nod—and then my breath stops when I see the man lying in the cot before me.
Sores travel up from the edge of the blanket to the crown of his head, the already-thinning hair there reduced to patches. His expression is drawn in pain even while he sleeps, and his breathing is shallow and irregular. A flash of him as I last saw him—round face wreathed by wrinkles and laughter lines—cuts across my eyes, and I have to swallow the bile rising in my throat before my vision clears.
The sores are like nothing I’ve seen before, though I’ve made many pilgrimages and done what I can for the mist-touched as far west as the mountains themselves. The welts don’t come from within, rising with infection and disease from his own body; instead, it is as though some twisted sculptor melted his flesh, reshaped it from the outside, and let it set again around Quenti’s skull.
He cannot help me.
The thought brings with it a wash of guilt, that I could think of my mission while looking upon the ruin of my old friend, someone who cared for me the way family might have done, had I been allowed one after my calling.
But I have no choice other than to think of it—I must put purpose before feeling, or else the mist will be all that’s left of my people. Our gods abandoned us centuries ago to live unburdened in their cloudlands—now, there is only me.
I must have made some sound, for Hiret’s voice comes from behind me, gentle with sympathy and shared grief. “I think sometimes he wishes it were his mind that the mist remade.”
When I look back at her, Quenti’s ruined visage is so burned into my gaze that for a moment I see his wounds superimposed over Hiret’s face, eclipsing that constellation on her cheek. I shiver, and reality returns.
“I will do all I can,” I manage, the words escaping in a hoarse croak.
Hiret nods, gratitude in the curve of her lips. But her eyes carry something else altogether, and I can’t help but think of what her sister said as I climbed those stairs.
It is true that I cannot heal the mist-touched. The divine before me could. Healing was the aspect she manifested soon after she was called. She spent much of her time away from the temple, traveling to the remotest villages, tending the guardian stones that keep the mist at bay, and caring for those unlucky enough to be caught in a storm without protection.
But I … I can only ease their pain for a time, little more than what any decent hedge-witch with a healing spell could do.
I lean my staff against the wall, tell the bindle cat twined about my ankles that I need space now, and lay out the reagents for the magic I can offer. I would have been a powerful magician if the divine had not chosen me for its vessel—now my skill at magic seems paltry to those who need miracles.
Hiret is quiet while I work—at one point I glance over to find her slowly, rhythmically stroking the cat’s back with one hand while gazing into nothing. The cat blinks back