Nobody's Goddess (The Never Veil)

by Amy McNulty

  I smiled, although it broke my heart to think of what my words had done. I formed the next few words carefully. “For you, Ailill, lord of the village, for you alone, I have another command.”

  Ailill’s shallow breathing slowed somewhat, and his face grew less terrified. His eyes dared not blink and would not move from mine.

  My words meant for Lord Elric, backed by the ferocity of the abused women among my ancestors, had been too powerful to undo. I couldn’t speak a countermand directly, for I had passed my power to all of the village’s women, and they knew nothing but contempt for their abusers. I had forbidden the lord company in his castle, I knew, but I wondered if Ailill would still get around my words by seeking company elsewhere. Avery, her hands now so soaked in blood, would be unlikely to put much thought into saving Ailill so fresh after her victory. If he ran to someone like Livia, to whom he was not blood related, Ailill could vanish from existence. Long before I could meet him.

  But how could I save him? I felt the hot sting of my foolishness, for even if I had intended the worst for Elric and the rest of the men, even those words rightfully placed would have harmed this poor, dear boy before me. I thought, too, of the men I knew from my time. I thought of Father and the shade he became following Mother’s illness. I thought of Master Tailor and Jaron, stuck loving two women whose hearts would never Return to them—and also, by forcing them each to bear responsibility for a man’s misery, what my words would do to rend Alvilda and Mistress Tailor unhappy. I thought of Mother and all of those who loved where love was not wanted. I thought of Nissa and Luuk and all the rest—children who grew up overnight because of the love I forced upon them. I thought of friends lost to love, and love lost to friends. I thought of Jurij, and all the lost hope of love I would come to know because I myself willed it.

  There was no deep malice in my village’s men. What disdain there was only existed because I had forced them to think of none other than their goddesses. Perhaps my words this day had made that happen, but they had doomed the men of my village, too. They had doomed us all.

  “Ailill, though you may be bound by words already spoken, hide away and banish women and girls from your castle. Do not allow them even to look upon the castle, so that they may forget it and leave you alone. Treat the villagers well, but do not, if you can help it, walk among them—if you do, the earth will tremble, and the skies will rumble to scare the villagers away from you, to protect you from harm. The same will happen if a woman lays her eyes upon your abode. Await your goddess safely within your castle. She will find you.”

  The words came freely to me, but without the force I’d felt before. It was like these were my own words, and those others were someone else’s.

  The tears slowed their descent down Ailill’s trembling cheeks. A snowflake appeared on his dark eyelashes, but the flame within his eyes couldn’t melt it. Snow was falling, despite the previously temperate weather, threatening to blanket us in white.

  “You will feel compelled to love your goddess, but do as your heart tells you. If you are ever to vanish at her direct gaze, you alone shall have the power to return.”

  I bent forward and kissed him atop the forehead. The frigid snow that peppered his scalp chilled my lips.

  The roses beside us were blanketed in snow, hardly a trace of their red petals to be found. Letting go of Ailill’s face, I yanked at a snow-covered blossom, not caring that a thorn poked my finger as I did. I tore out the thorn and placed the newly white rose in Ailill’s open palm, giving his hand a tight squeeze with both of mine.

  “Return back to life in your own time, if you alone will it. Return as if you had merely spent a time sleeping. And free yourself of woman’s power upon your return.” I bit my lip. “I command you to overcome the power of women at last upon your return.”

  I stood and pulled the shawl down over his face. A braver woman, a nobler woman, would stay and help the boy through the fate I had given him, but that woman was not me. There was no place for the kind of woman I was here, a pretender. The violet glow of the cavern was already calling for me.

  Still, as I turned to go, I paused at the fountain, remembering the crying boy who would one day be entombed atop of its cascade of water. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the statue was of Ailill as a boy, now that I knew how he looked then. Had Ailill had that statue carved? Did it remind him of what I’d done to him, of what I’d done to all men, to women, too? What I wanted to do now was selfish, and I had been selfish enough to doom all of our kind. But still, my mouth opened.

  “If, after your own Returning,” I said, my back still to the shivering figure, “you can find it in your heart to forgive me, you, the last of the men whose blood runs with his own power, will free all men bound by my curse.”

  I clamped my mouth shut and marched forward. Through the door, past the torn and bloody piles of clothing, beyond the cheering women. I had played at leader, I had played at queen, and this is what my foolishness got me. I slipped away unnoticed into the secret cavern in the woods. I didn’t look once behind me. My last act was to leave Elgar in the hollow of a tree I passed, waiting for Jaron to find it many, many lifetimes later.

  Even without Elgar to guide me, the pool acted as before, but in reverse, its terrible purpose fulfilled. If the blade wasn’t key to traveling, then I didn’t know what was. I didn’t know where the power came from, and it was just as much a mystery to me as the healing powers of the men. Had the suffering of women called me? Whatever the reason, I had answered pain with pain. I set in motion all of the misery that the men and women of my village suffered for generations. I had saved the women from torment, but the price was the free will of all men and the liar’s choice of women.

  All of that time I’d spent hating the laws of the first goddess—hating the very idea of goddesses—when I had made them all.

  So lost was I in my thoughts that it took me a moment to realize the glowing cavern was lit up in red, not violet. I didn’t test my theory, but I suspected it was a sign I was no longer welcome, that the past was forever closed to me. The beating orb at the bottom of the pool even seemed to cease, the silence seemingly pushing me away. So I left.

  When I exited the woods, I expected to see the altered village on the horizon. I almost wanted to see it, to know that I couldn’t go home, to have no choice but to devote myself to shielding the boy with a heart from the brunt of the pain I had caused him. It was a choice I wanted, a choice I should have had. But my feet carried me back to where I would live among those who suffered for my foolish tongue.

  I headed toward my childhood home, not sure if my feet should instead take me straight back to the commune. But I was eager to at least see their faces. I didn’t deserve comforting, and my heart hardened knowing that I would likely find little comfort awaiting me regardless. Little did they know, though, what real reason they had to hate me.

  I halted a few steps from the front door. A chill brushed the back of my exposed neck and down throughout my soaked body.

  The castle had returned.

  My heart soared, my stomach hardened. But the ground didn’t shake. They had worked, the words forming my final command. I’d given him permission to dispose of my power.

  I pulled on the door in front of me.

  “Noll?”

  Jurij spoke my name. He stood next to the fireplace, his hand in Elfriede’s, a stark scar across his cheek, his left eye wrapped in a bandage. Wounds from my kiss, as though the castle and the lord had never vanished.

  Tears littered Elfriede’s cheeks, her eyes neither on Jurij nor me but on the bed in the corner. Arrow sat alert by her side.

  There sat my father, his arms thrown tightly across my mother.

  My heart stopped. Have I lost her a second—no, a third time?

  But her eyes were wide open, her pale oak face almost glowing.

  “Noll?” she croaked hoarsely. “Come here, darling!”

  I obeyed freely.

  Tears
shed down my cheeks, and I felt the moisture with my fingertips like it was something entirely new. I’d forgotten the feeling. I hadn’t cried fully since the day before my seventeenth birthday.

  We hugged and laughed and cried, my family and I, long into the evening that was already half-gone.

  ***

  “From what Gideon and Elfriede tell me, there’s a strange gap in their memories that lasts about a month.” Mother tilted her head to face me. “All they can agree upon is that there was suddenly a monstrous shake of the earth. Everything that happened since the wedding is in dispute. No one can remember clearly.”

  Including Elfriede’s last words to me that day, I wonder?

  Father slept soundly in the bed beside Mother. A few paces away, Elfriede and Jurij slept in the bed I once shared with my sister, Arrow comfortably nestled at their feet. Elfriede’s breathing filled the air, as light and dainty as her speaking. The bed she shared with her husband, complete with a new headboard from Alvilda, no longer had room for me. There was no place for me in that house. But there I sat, at a chair pulled up next to the bed, my hand clutching Mother’s.

  “A strange thing.” Mother picked up my hand and bounced it against her lap. “But there are stranger. Me sitting here, alive and well, for one. Aren’t you tired?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  “I’ve spent enough time dreaming.” I shifted a loose lock of Mother’s golden and gray hair behind her smooth round ear. “I want to stay here and know that I’m finally truly awake.”

  In the last embers of firelight in the hearth, I could just make out Mother smiling, her head against the pillows stacked in a pile to support her back. “The past year. It all seems a dream to me.”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  Mother tapped the back of my hand with her free palm. “I wish you would tell me what’s bothering you.”

  I did my best to smile and pulled my hand away so I could remove the rose from my hair. The petals crumbled nearly as soon as my fingers touched them. “I can’t explain, not tonight. You’re still weak, and it’s been a long, long day.”

  “I’m feeling much better. Almost like I was never ill, just sleeping, and now I’m still getting used to the waking world.” She stretched her arms above her head. Her face glowed in the dying firelight, and I knew she wasn’t lying. “Do you know who healed me?”

  I didn’t dare to guess, not aloud.

  Mother clasped her hands together over her lap. “It was your man. The lord.”

  I shook my head. “He’s not my man.”

  Mother smiled. “So I hear. But he was unmasked. And quite handsome, I might say. Although rather strangely pale.”

  The corner of my mouth twitched. “Not as pale as his servants.”

  His “servants.” The shades of all of his former lives. I shuddered to think just how many there were and how many years he had spent alone in his castle, only the shadows of his past selves to keep him company. I was surprised he wasn’t driven completely mad. Or maybe he had been.

  “No,” Mother laughed, but then she bit her lip and looked pensive for a moment. “Noll, when I awoke, I found the lord sitting where you are now, his hands held over my head.”

  My instincts had been right; Ailill had finished healing my mother, even after all I’d done to him.

  “There was a strange violet light shining everywhere. And then it was gone. I wasn’t sure if I was still dreaming, so I tried to touch his arm, but he pulled away. I said, ‘You’re our lord, aren’t you? You’re Noll’s man.’”

  I leaned closer to my mother to hear his answer.

  “But all he said was, ‘Rest now. You’re healed—I’ve given you all I had to heal you—but you still need rest.’”

  I’ve given you all I had. His healing power was gone. He’d waited centuries for freedom, and his first act was to give up the last of his power. For me?

  My mother continued. “I called after him as he headed for the door, two of those servants of his waiting to attend him. ‘Wait! Let me thank you!’”

  Don’t go! Don’t …

  “The servants and the lord stopped suddenly, but he wouldn’t face me. ‘No thanks are necessary,’ he said. ‘But I do have one request.’”

  The lord’s words thundered through my mother’s mouth, his distaste as clear as if he were next to me: “‘Leave me be,’ he said. ‘Instruct all the village to leave me be. Send no women, send no men. My servants will come to the village for what is needed.’”

  Stay away. The little boy trembling in the garden, a black shawl around his head. The veil, the veil … always the veil between us.

  Mother shrugged. “And then he was gone. Gideon told me he and his servants jumped into the black carriage that brought them here and were gone into the woods before he could even ask how he had healed me.”

  I’d listened to Mother’s story without comment, mashing my tongue into my teeth when I heard of the lord’s break from me. Those final words were meant for me, I was certain. He said to stay away so I would leave him be. I’d have to. It was the least I could do, after what I put him through.

  Mother wrung her hands in her lap. “What happened between you two?”

  “I … ” I fumbled with the decaying rose petals in my hands. “I don’t even know where to start.” Or if I could ever explain all that happened.

  “Well,” said Mother, as she grabbed my hand in hers again. The petals fell to the ground, disappearing into the darkness at my feet. “May the first goddess watch over you and give you courage. You can tell me when you’re ready.”

  I did my best to smile. “All right.” I didn’t think that day would ever come. Not if I had to rely on “the first goddess” to give me anything.

  My eyes were just beginning to close when a pounding echoed across the house from the door, and I nearly fell out of my chair in fright. I jumped, my feet planted on the ground, my hands reaching desperately to pull it open. Who could it be at this time of night?

  “Noll?” I heard Mother say. Father, Elfriede, Jurij, and Arrow stirred as the noise grew louder and louder, but I paid them all no mind. The door swung open, my hand clutching the handle, although I couldn’t remember opening it so wide.

  Before me stood a man and a boy unmasked, their grins truly as wide as their faces, one of the man’s hands clutching a lantern above him, the other resting on the boy’s shoulders. Beside them was Nissa, her face almost as happy, even though her eyes were puffy and tired.

  “We don’t need masks anymore!” screamed the boy. “The men in the commune started wandering around the village, telling people they didn’t feel so sad anymore. That they didn’t feel rejected by their goddesses. They didn’t feel anything about their goddesses at all! They took off their masks, and no one vanished!”

  “And the castle doesn’t shake when we look at it!” added Nissa.

  Of course. The rules of the village. Gone by the lord’s remaining power.

  The man lifted his hand from the boy’s shoulder and extended it outward. I thought for a moment that he intended to hug me, but then Jurij brushed past me, and I spun to see Father and Elfriede behind me as well. Jurij and the man embraced, and the man sprinkled the top of Jurij’s curls with his kisses while fingering the bandages on Jurij’s face. A bit of the sparkle faded from his eyes. The eyes in which no flames were burning.

  “Luuk!” Jurij picked the boy up and embraced him before setting him back on the ground. He mussed Nissa’s hair. They were laughing, all four of them.

  Elfriede pushed past me and hugged the man as well, kissing both of his cheeks. “Goodfather, it’s a pleasure to finally see you.”

  My heart had been so distracted; I’d taken too long to see what was right before me. I smiled, and the feeling was foreign to me, something from a dream I had long, long ago.

  I stepped backward, wondering if I was still dreaming, if I could fall back asleep and pick a different dream, or if this was the one I’d always wanted. Father and Master T
ailor shook hands. Elfriede scooped up the children in her arms and kissed both Luuk and Nissa on the cheek.

  Jurij’s eyes fluttered from one to the other, and at last they rested on me. Those eyes seemed to understand that I was the one responsible for what they’d seen.

  Eyes without flames. Each man’s eyes had lost the flames that bound them.

  And I felt a strange stirring in my heart over the next few days as I walked the village and saw, one by one, the masked boys and men encounter the laughing, smiling faces of their peers. To see the others so free inspired them to grab a hold of their masks, throw down their coverings, and smash them.

  ***

  “My father and mother are separating,” said Jurij. We lay together among the violet lilies atop my favorite picnic hill.

  We could just make out the cottage at the edge of the woods from where we were sitting. The door opened and Elfriede stepped outside, one hand clutching a bucket and the other tucking a strand of fallen curls into the kerchief she wore on her head. She looked no larger than a mouse from where we were seated. She stared up at us for a moment, and I wondered what she thought, seeing her hated sister sitting on the hill with her husband while she worked, knowing her man wasn’t there to take the task from her. I wondered if he was really her man anymore, even if he still was her husband. Then she walked away, disappearing around the back of the home with her bucket to collect water.

  Jurij didn’t run to her. He barely looked at her. He didn’t even mention her name.

  I ran my fingers over the smooth and silky petals of a bloom. There were no thorns to cut me. “I’m sorry.” For his parents, for his goddess—for everything.

  Jurij shrugged. “I’m not. It’s not as if they hate each other. In fact, I think a different bond has formed between them, now that they’re not bound by a love neither truly wanted. And Mother will still help Father daily with the sewing.”