How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  “Oh,” Nora said. She walked across a small strip of brown sand to the water’s edge, stuck a finger into the water, and licked it. Fresh, not salt. And cold, very cold.

  A lake. A big lake. Nora estimated that the opposite shore was a couple of miles away. Experimentally, she tried a simple piece of water magic, willing the waves to carry a piece of driftwood toward her, but the water sidled slyly away from her command.

  Evidently, the goddess reigned here as well.

  Nora walked along the edge of the lake. The ground grew wetter and marshier, until she was sinking in rank brown mud that seemed to have no bottom. With some difficulty she pulled herself onto a grassy tussock, then cautiously retraced her steps. In the other direction, she encountered a steep-sided hill, where an indistinct path led her into a maze of thornbushes and then disappeared. She spent some time trying to pick viciously invisible barbs out of her hands and forearms before returning to the quay.

  The sky was reddening in the west. Far away, she saw the small, distant silhouette of a boat, its oars crawling slowly over the water. It grew tinier as it receded.

  “Pilgrims come to Erchkaii all the time, they said so last night. There’s bound to be a boat landing soon.” Saying it aloud made the logic sound more compelling, as though she had a real plan.

  “Maybe tomorrow or the next day. They don’t go out at night.”

  Nora whirled around. A man had followed her onto the dock. “Hello,” she said sharply, “what are you doing here?”

  It was Lemoes, the beautiful acolyte. He looked at her solemnly, not speaking, his lovely boy’s face giving nothing away. He looked bigger than she recalled, round young muscles filling out the shoulders of his kimono. Nora stared back at him, trying to look fierce. “Did you follow me?”

  He slid backward half a step. “I have a message for you. From the goddess.”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Sorry.” Nora kept her tone brisk. “How come there’s no boat here? What if you need to get across the lake?”

  Under his thick brows, the boy’s gaze shifted in a way that might have indicated either mild surprise or complete disinterest. “We don’t leave the island,” Lemoes said.

  “You never—wait, this is an island?” He nodded, and Nora sighed. “No one mentioned that,” she said. “But all the more reason to have a boat.” She gave him an accusatory look.

  “The ferry comes on Fourth Day, usually. Sometimes the fishermen come. The pilgrims hire their own boats.”

  “And you never go across yourself?” Nora asked. He was a teenage boy; surely he wanted to leave Erchkaii, see the world, meet girls—or boys—his own age. But he shook his head. “I would think you’d find it boring here,” she said. “I’m leaving, and I’ve spent less than two days at the temple.”

  So he could smile, but you had to be quick to catch it. Nora pursued: “If you were going to leave here, how would you do it?”

  “Same as you, I guess. A boat.”

  “You wouldn’t try to swim?” It might be a last, desperate option, if only the water weren’t so damn cold.

  Lemoes looked at her with a trace of pity, she thought. “The lake’s full of screwteeth.” To her blank look, he clarified: “Screwteeth eels.”

  “Are those really so bad?” From Lemoes’s expression, the answer was apparently obvious. “And you think there might be a ferry tomorrow,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  Nora reflected on the one remaining piece of flatbread that was wrapped in a fold of her maran. “I should have brought more food.”

  Lemoes had the grace not to respond. Instead, he said, “There will be lots of boats once the festival starts next week.”

  “I’d like to leave sooner.” She looked at him narrowly. “You aren’t going to try to stop me, I hope.”

  He shook his head. “The goddess didn’t send me to stop you. She just had a message for you.”

  “And she couldn’t deliver it herself?” Nora asked. “All right. Just so you can tell her you did your job. What’s the message?”

  “There’s someone at Erchkaii who needs your help.” He spoke as though Nora would know what to do.

  She waited, but he did not continue. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “That’s all she said.” Lemoes dropped his gaze, as though looking for an answer on the worn, stained stone of the pier. His lashes were like birds alighting. He sighed. “I think I know who it is, though. The sick woman who came yesterday. On the litter, with her mother.”

  Nora gave a baffled shrug. “I have no idea who that is. And how do you know she’s the one?”

  “I just think it’s her. She’s very sick.” A furrow had appeared in his smooth brow; he seemed to be contemplating the sheer impossibility of explaining himself to someone as uncomprehending as Nora. She was familiar with this expression, having taught undergraduates who were Lemoes’s age. “I know what she likes—the goddess, I mean,” he said.

  “How am I supposed to help the poor woman?” Nora asked, raising her voice. She was speaking for the goddess’s ears as much as Lemoes’s. “I don’t know anything about medicine. Magical or otherwise. I told your goddess that already.

  “And she may not have sent you to stop me from leaving, but it comes to the same thing—trying to get me to go back to help this sick person. Sisoaneer can cure this woman herself. She doesn’t need me to do it. I won’t do it. She’d do a better job. And I’m—I’m done with magic, anyway.”

  She stared challengingly at Lemoes. He squinted against the sunset’s reddening light. “I don’t understand, Blessed Lady,” he said.

  “Don’t call me that. I can’t help her, because—because I’m not sure I want to be a magician anymore.” Stating this aloud felt worse than being called Blessed Lady. “I mean, I don’t want—I shouldn’t do any more magic.”

  In her mind, Nora could hear Aruendiel beginning a long and furious tirade, asking what insanity had seized her, why would she disown the study of magic, there was no truer way of understanding the world, and involuntarily she hunched her shoulders, as though she could shake off his imagined words like drops of water.

  “It’s too dangerous. I’m too dangerous. You know what happened to Yaioni, don’t you?”

  He nodded. For the first time, she thought she saw a gleam of respect in his eyes. “She shouldn’t have challenged you.”

  “Well, I didn’t even mean to hurt her, I did the magic without thinking about it. I almost killed her. And that’s not the first—”

  She broke off. Better not let it get around that she’d chopped her husband’s head off. People were quick to judge. “Aruendiel—my teacher—used to lecture me about control, how dangerous magic could be. Now I see what he meant. And now the goddess wants to give me even more power. I don’t want it.” More for her own benefit than Lemoes’s, she repeated sternly: “I don’t want to be a magician.”

  Nora had been thinking this all day without wanting to, trying to distract herself with flight and fatigue. Yaioni was healed, but that didn’t make it right, what Nora had done to her. I set her on fire, she thought. I would never have done that deliberately, never.

  The magic made it too easy. You could destroy someone in the blink of an eye. And there was no way to prevent it, unless you could repress every stray hostile, antisocial thought for the rest of your life. For the first time, Aruendiel began to look like a model of restraint, bad temper and all. At least he only killed people when he meant to. No wonder he was always going on about control.

  She had learned enough magic to be dangerous. Not enough not to be dangerous. As far as she could see, not being a magician was only one sure way to avoid killing people on the merest impulse. Maybe it was a good thing that she had landed in a place where someone else controlled all the magic.

  “Why don’t you do it—take care of this poor woman?” Nora demanded. “Yo
u’re Sisoaneer’s priest, or you’re training to be one, however that works.”

  The furrow in Lemoes’s brow deepened. “I’d do it if I could. I don’t know the arts of power. I’ve tried, but the goddess hasn’t blessed me that way.”

  “What about Yaioni or Uliverat?”

  Lemoes looked unimpressed by the suggestion. “They do a little. Yaioni more than Uliverat. But the people she treats—” He frowned. “A lot of them die.”

  “Oasme?” Nora suggested. The boy shook his head.

  “Why doesn’t the goddess of magic have any decent magicians working for her?” Nora thought it was a reasonable question, and a good zinger, but it seemed to be wasted on Lemoes. “So this sick woman came all the way here—for what?”

  Lemoes tilted his head gracefully to indicate that the matter was out of his hands.

  “She needs help,” he said. “You wouldn’t kill her. You don’t have to help her if you don’t want to.”

  He sounded older suddenly, and Nora saw that the kind of delicious male beauty that he possessed could instantly freeze into something sterner, more judgmental. He turned and walked noiselessly down the pier, toward the shadows of the forest.

  Nora clenched her hands and uttered a small yelp of frustration. “How do you know I wouldn’t kill her?” she called.

  “I just know.”

  She started after him, quickening her pace as though by overtaking him she could have the last word. “You know, it took me all day to get here, walking along the river,” she said. “If it weren’t so far—”

  “It’s not that far, the road’s shorter.” Lemoes sounded like a boy again, childishly gruff. “You go over the ridge instead of around it.”

  Nora cast a glance back at the lake’s vast crystalline bowl of sky and water, darkening to indigo as dusk fell. The faraway boat had disappeared. The wind whipped her hair over her eyes. She shivered. “Well, how much shorter?”

  Nora remembered that she hated hospitals. They were all the same, whether dark and primitive like this one, or clean and bright with kind nurses in rubber clogs and purposeful, blinking machines like the ones that kept your brother alive until you and your parents decided to turn them off.

  She moved further into the ward. The thick, flickering light of oil lamps showed her bundled forms on low mattresses. Someone breathed with a sound like feet scuffling through dry leaves. One of the rooms to the left, Lemoes had said.

  Shyly she knocked at the first door. A female voice spoke up sharply in a language she did not understand. Nora pushed the door open.

  One of the women inside was as brilliant as a parrot in the murky light, her quilted gown shimmering with blue and crimson as she rose and came toward Nora, gesticulating. With her wrinkled, powdered face and her red-painted mouth, she was small, furious, and voluble in her unknown tongue. The other woman crouched in the background, wrapped in dark, dull robes that might have been cut from an old blanket, and her arms were crossed protectively in front of her body. She could not have been more than twenty-five at most, but the blank, defeated expression on her face belonged to someone much older.

  Nora’s smile felt dry and stiff, like paper glued to her face. This poor woman obviously needed some kind of help; Nora had no idea what kind. Certainly she wasn’t qualified to give it. They were burning incense inside the room, perhaps in honor of the goddess, and the smoky air made Nora’s eyes sting. She thought, I’ll just pretend I went into the wrong room, and leave.

  “They have come all the way from Wenhu Nirst.”

  Nora turned with a start. The priest Oasme was just behind her. “You surprised me,” she said.

  “My apologies,” he said smoothly. The older woman was addressing him, her voice rising interrogatively. He spoke to her in the same language; she frowned at him and said something brusque. To Nora, he said: “This is the Dowager Duchess of Greater Solas, and this”—he nodded at the woman in the dark robes—“is her daughter, the Princess Loku Baniseikinu, the wife of Crown Prince Baniseiki. They have been married three years; she has borne him one son. Now he has taken her son from her and wants to divorce her, because she is unclean. Her mother has brought her here to see if she can be cured.”

  “Unclean,” Nora repeated. “And that would mean—?”

  “She bleeds,” Oasme said, dropping his voice. “Almost without ceasing.”

  An open wound? Nora discerned that he meant something else. “Her period won’t stop?”

  Oasme nodded, a faint expression of distaste flitting across his face.

  Nora made a sympathetic noise deep in her throat. “That’s no fun,” she said, “but I wouldn’t call her unclean. Her husband took her son away for that?”

  “The Lady Healer once cured the river-goddess Selt of the same affliction,” Oasme said. “We have had many pilgrims seeking Sisoaneer’s help for such bleeding.”

  “Well, can you cure the woman?”

  “The goddess has sent you.” He smiled with an irritating assurance.

  “I don’t have the faintest idea how to help her. I don’t know anything about healing spells.”

  “There is the temple library. I can help you consult the books.”

  “But I know nothing about medicine. Nothing. I really, really shouldn’t even try this.” There were so many ways that even the simplest spell could be miscalculated or muddled. People choked on the jewels that fell magically out of their mouths, or their houses burned down because they couldn’t extinguish a magical fire, or they had to spend the rest of their lives in seclusion because of an indiscriminately applied love spell.

  “Then no one will help this woman.”

  Nora looked around the dark, smoky chamber. It seemed to have grown smaller since she entered it. The mother stared sternly at Nora. The patient was staring at the floor as though she had already accepted Nora’s refusal. She looked so frozen with hopelessness that Nora felt an impulse to put an arm around the woman’s slumped shoulders and give her a hug.

  Then she would have to explain: I’m sorry, I can’t do anything for you.

  “I’ll try,” Nora said.

  The temple library was a small octagonal tower near the hospital, its limestone walls dimpled with ancient, illegible inscriptions. Over the generations, the feet of the priests of Sisoaneer had worn grooves in the steps that rose to the door, but when Nora entered, the library was full of a chilly, static silence.

  The books were in cages. In the center of the building was a series of alcoves barred with iron, codices and scrolls visible on the shelves within. Small reading tables lined the outside walls of the library, under narrow windows filled with thick glass that blurred all glimpses of the outside world. Oasme went immediately to one of the alcoves, produced a key to unlock the door, and returned with a scroll made of brittle, rather grubby-looking parchment.

  “I’d like to make one thing clear,” Nora said. “Even if I somehow cure this woman, that’s it. I’m not staying around here. I’m not going to be anyone’s High Priestess.”

  With a somewhat reproachful look, Oasme put a finger to his lips. “She hears—not everything, but many things,” he said, so softly that Nora could hardly hear him.

  “She knows how I feel,” Nora said, lowering her voice anyway. “I told her I didn’t want to be her priestess.”

  “That makes it even stranger that you would be chosen. But we mortals can’t hope to understand the will of the goddess. Even those who have spent their lives as her priests.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Why don’t you put in for the job yourself?”

  Oasme allowed himself a faint smile, as though amused at her naivete. “I was not chosen by the goddess. My role is to serve the one she chooses. That’s part of the vow I made when I came here, obedience to the High Priest—or Priestess. And you will need help in your new office.”

  “I told you, I’
m not—”

  Oasme put the scroll down on the table and began to untie the faded red cord that girdled it. “You tried to run away,” he murmured. “That is not how you will please the goddess.”

  “I don’t care,” Nora said.

  “But the goddess’s pleasure matters very much. To you, and to everyone at Erchkaii.”

  There was an odd emphasis in his voice. Nora looked at him closely, but he had the kind of face whose features fit together as tightly as bricks, giving nothing away. “Do you mean that if I left, she would take it out on the rest of you?” she asked.

  “The goddess does as she wills,” Oasme said. “All praise to Her Holiness.”

  Nora frowned. “I still don’t believe—I can’t believe she’s a goddess. She seems a little, well, strange, but human.”

  Oasme pursed his lips. “There’s an old tradition that as a punishment for helping Queen Ysto murder her father, the sun god sentenced the goddess, his daughter, to live a dozen lives incarnated as a mortal woman.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “And in the last of those lives, the old scrolls say, she will hold sway at Erchkaii. I’m an archivist, not a theologian. But Erchkaii is the cradle of Her Holiness’s power, and only the true goddess could possibly reign here.”

  His reasoning seemed a bit circular. “What happened to the old High Priest?” Nora asked. “Uliverat said he wasn’t worthy. He didn’t believe in her?”

  “There were other reasons, many of them. The goddess made it known that she’d choose her own High Priestess.” He nodded meaningfully at Nora.

  “But what happened to him?”

  “He made atonement,” Oasme said dryly. “Like my other brethren.” To Nora’s questioning look, he said: “There were more than thirty priests here three years ago.”

  “Thirty!” Nora thought of all the empty seats in the refectory. “They were all—unworthy?”

  The priest cleared his throat. “You see, at first Uliverat and Yaioni came here, on foot, dressed like—” He made a dismissive gesture. “They said they’d come to preach the coming of the goddess. That she would purify her temple and punish the unbelievers.