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

by Emily Croy Barker

  Aruendiel’s pale, scarred face emerged from the gloom behind her. He gave a crisp laugh. “Me? What sort of god would I make?” Unfolding himself from the space they had just crawled through, he added, more reflectively: “I knew a magician, Jornanit Longnose, who set himself up as an agricultural demigod in Pernia for a few years, but he gave it up. It was arduous to keep track of all the prayers, he said, and he found it lonely.”

  They were now in a gently sloping gallery, where even Aruendiel could stand upright. The walls were streaked with flows of sugary white stone; Nora thought of melting ice cream and wondered how many hours it had been since she’d last eaten. Aruendiel held up his hand for silence, and she heard, very faintly, the rustle and burble of unseen running water somewhere up the passage.

  “I think we’re getting close,” she said.

  Aruendiel did not move. Head cocked, he listened for another minute. Dripping water pattered down somewhere nearby, like footsteps.

  “Show yourself!” he called suddenly.

  A white quiver in the darkness ahead. A clatter of rocks.

  “There you are!” Hirizjahkinis said. Her smile lit the cave like a sliver of daylight as she came forward. “You did not drown, either of you.”

  Nora scrambled forward and looped Hirizjahkinis into a hug. Aruendiel did not move at first; Nora caught the scrape of his indrawn breath. Then he stepped forward with brusque swiftness, his face creased with an uncertain smile. “Hiriz? It is really you?”

  Hirizjahkinis raised her palms in greeting, and he intertwined his long fingers with her finer, darker digits. She winced playfully at his grip, laughing. He frowned slightly as he studied her upturned face.

  “You are solemn, Aruendiel,” she said.

  “Once again, after I’d given up all hope—” Reluctantly he let her hands go. “You are well and whole? I did not believe that I would see you again.”

  “Then you were too gloomy, as usual.” Hirizjahkinis shook her head. “Nora, did you not tell him that I had found you? And that I am quite well, aside from the nasty chill here?”

  “I did.” Nora had a fairly good idea of what Hirizjahkinis was really asking. “I told him you were fine. I was worried after losing you in that flood, though.”

  “So many weeks inside the Kavareen!” Aruendiel said roughly. “I never heard of anyone escaping its maw after so long a time.”

  “All these years that we have known each other, you and I—then one little mishap, and you assume so easily that I am doomed? I am disappointed, Aruendiel. You have so little confidence in me, who was your own pupil?”

  “I did not teach you well enough, evidently, or you would never have trusted that filthy demon.” Aruendiel’s narrowed eyes raked her with fine, frustrated bafflement. “You are still wearing its hide?”

  “Certainly, these caves are freezing,” Hirizjahkinis said calmly. “I will not be truly happy until I see the sun again.”

  “That will not be long. You look more flourishing than I would have thought.”

  “And you also, Aruendiel. You have been fighting and doing strong magic, I can tell, and that always makes you happy. But something else has warmed your blood as well, I think.” Hirizjahkinis’s smile flicked toward Nora. “I am glad of it.”

  “There has been plenty of fighting,” Aruendiel said, his eyebrows snapping upward. “And I—well, by every god it is pleasant to see your face again. How in the name of the sun did you get out of that vile creature’s belly?”

  “I am not so easy to digest,” Hirizjahkinis said. “Even for the Kavareen. And in the end, when we were both lost under this mountain, he was ready enough to let me out again.”

  Nora found that she had tensed; now, this was the moment for Hirizjahkinis to tell Aruendiel the truth of how she and the Kavareen had negotiated a new existence together. But Hirizjahkinis was talking about encountering Nora in the cave; she was even boasting gently about Nora’s skill in coaxing magic and light from the moisture in the caves.

  “You should be proud of this one, Aruendiel,” she said, her hand on Nora’s shoulder. “It is not just the magic she has learned. She has good eyes, and the wit to know what she is seeing.”

  “I have seen evidence of it,” Aruendiel said. “From time to time.” Nora met his eyes with some difficulty. It had just occurred to her that Hirizjahkinis might be laying on the praise a bit thick to keep Nora allied with her, to buy her silence.

  On the other hand, Nora thought again, it’s Hirizjahkinis’s secret, not mine. She decided to hold fast to that thought. It seemed to her that she might be protecting Aruendiel as well as Hirizjahkinis, although that reflection did not make her feel much better.

  The sound of water grew louder as they went farther along. Eventually the gallery they were following crossed a passage whose floor was a shallow stream rushing over round stones.

  Aruendiel knelt at the edge of the water. He let his fingers play in the stream for a moment, then rose and touched his wet finger to Nora’s. “What does it tell you?” he asked.

  Nora rubbed her fingers together and picked up a kind of shimmering excitement that she had not found in the cave water elsewhere. “It’s coming from above ground,” she said.

  “Yes. You hear how many small, light voices there are? How scattered they are? This water was rain not an hour ago.”

  “You said Olenan was trying to flood the caves. To drown us.”

  “Or flush us out,” Aruendiel said.

  “Then she is foolish, she is wasting her time,” Hirizjahkinis said. “As though we would stay here any longer than we have to.”

  They waded upstream, single file. The cave walls here were worn smooth, the little stream curving through grottoes that yawned like enormous shells. Hirizjahkinis took the lead, as though determined to be the first out of the cave. Aruendiel came after her. Somewhat to Nora’s surprise, he and Hirizjahkinis did not speak much. From time to time, Aruendiel glanced back to make sure that Nora was still following, but he said almost nothing to her, either.

  Abruptly, the stream grew noisier, and they came around a bend to see several strands of water pouring straight down from an opening in the cave ceiling. Flowing toward them, the water churned and foamed around their feet. Hirizjahkinis said something under her breath about the dampness of caves and wrapped the Kavareen’s pelt a little tighter around her shoulders.

  Aruendiel’s gaze rested on her for a moment, and then he turned to Nora, who was staring upward. The hole was perhaps two feet in diameter. Small but not impossible.

  “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the way. And then we’re almost out.” She could feel sunlight on water, so close.

  Aruendiel gave a nod. “Very good. And above, is there enough room for us to pass?”

  “I think so,” Nora said. She had a clearer sense now of how flowing water filled the space available to it. It seemed to her that there was air as well as water in the cavity above.

  “Are you not sure?” Aruendiel said, one eyebrow cocked.

  “I’m sure,” Nora said, hearing the challenge in his voice, and she launched herself upward with a levitation spell and a kick. He was definitely smiling, almost grinning, as she rose.

  She made it all the way into the hole before her spell began to falter. There was just enough time to wedge her foot against the side to halt her slide, and then Aruendiel’s more powerful spell tugged her higher. She wriggled up through the gap, sputtering as water splashed over her face, until her head emerged into dry air and she found herself in a new chamber.

  Hauling herself out of the water, she found a perch on a flattish rock beside the hole she had just exited. “I’m up! And there seems to be some space here.” Nora took a deep breath. The air here smelled of river and smoke instead of the dull clay reek of the lower caves.

  “Well done.” Aruendiel’s voice sounded hollowly from bel
ow. “We will follow. Hirizjahkinis? It is your turn.”

  “Yes.” There was a pause. “There is no gentlemanly assistance for me?”

  “Do you need it? It is only a simple levitation spell.”

  “It is not so simple! Your friend the false goddess does not like to share the magic here.”

  “That didn’t stop Nora, and she is only a child in magic compared with you.”

  Child, really? Nora thought. As the water light spell gradually spread its faint illumination over the rock, she glanced around, trying to estimate the dimensions of the new cave. A gleaming streak of water traveled a jagged path across the floor before it plunged into the hole from which she had just emerged. She was trying to see where the streamlet came from when a brighter light flared in the dimness. It showed a face as pale and startled as Nora’s must have been.

  “You!”

  Nora almost didn’t recognize the speaker, her expression was so different from usual. But the arched eyebrows, the fierce cheekbones were unmistakable. “Yaioni?” She doesn’t look bored now, Nora thought.

  “You are alive?” There seemed to be genuine astonishment in Yaioni’s voice.

  Nora was getting tired of the general presumption that she was dead. “Are you disappointed?” she asked.

  Yaioni gave an infinitesimal shrug. “I am surprised. No wonder she is so angry.” She turned to call over her shoulder: “Come, over here!”

  “Wait, who are you calling? Who else is here?” Nora angled herself to look back through the gap she had just passed through. What was keeping Hirizjahkinis and Aruendiel? She caught only a glimpse of his black-clad shoulder, but over the sound of splashing water she heard his voice.

  “—traces of Nora’s magic all through these caves,” he was saying, “and none of yours. You have used no magic at all. It’s curious that you managed to escape the Kavareen and subdue it. Did you simply persuade it to let you go?”

  Hirizjahkinis’s voice: “You know I have a lively tongue, Aruendiel.”

  “I have never known demons to be amenable to persuasion.”

  “Perhaps you are not very persuasive. Even demons do not like to be scowled at. As you are scowling now.”

  Nora crouched to shout through the hole. “Aruendiel!” He had waited until she had gone up the shaft to say these things to Hirizjahkinis. That was ominous.

  “I beg your patience, Nora,” he called back. “One moment.”

  “Who is there?” Yaioni asked, with some alarm. She lowered her torch slightly, peering at the crevice where the water disappeared.

  “My friends,” Nora said warningly.

  From behind Yaioni came another voice, indistinct, hollowed out by the cave echoes. “Over here!” Yaioni flung over her shoulder. “Look, your High Priestess is here.” Catching sight of Nora’s face, she laughed. “Do not look so afraid. It is only Lemoes and Piv.”

  “Lemoes?” Nora said dubiously as another light appeared. “How many people are wandering around these caves?” A man’s arm held the torch; she made out the curve of his shoulder, a dark head. Behind him, a shorter figure with light hair. She recognized one of the ganoi attendants at the hospital.

  From the cave below, Hirizjahkinis’s voice drifted up, musical but guarded. “What are you thinking, old friend?”

  “That you are not really my old friend,” Aruendiel said. “That the Kavareen has managed one last transformation.”

  “Aruendiel, you are never happy unless you can be full of suspicion and mistrust. If you cannot find an enemy that suits you, you will make one. I have said this many, many times.”

  “Hirizjahkinis has said it. I do not entirely agree with her, myself.”

  “I am Hirizjahkinis.” There was the shade of a cool threat in Hirizjahkinis’s voice.

  “No,” Aruendiel said blackly, “I wish it were true.”

  Nora discovered that she was holding her breath. “Aruendiel, listen to me,” she called down. “I know it doesn’t look good. But she’s telling the truth, I really think so.”

  Glancing up, she found Yaioni, Lemoes, and the ganoi called Piv staring at her curiously. Piv carried a spear with a stone point. Lemoes’s face was smudged, tired, but oddly tranquil. She nodded curtly at them.

  “You were right, she is not dead,” Yaioni said to Lemoes, just as Hirizjahkinis said, in a more subdued tone, “It is not untrue.”

  Lemoes cleared his throat. “The goddess told me that I would find you,” he said to Nora. “Priestess.”

  Nora gritted her teeth. Still under the sway of his goddess. Did that mean Olenan–Sisoaneer would appear next? She shook her head warningly. “You haven’t found me,” she said. “You haven’t seen me at all, in fact.” With a wary glance at Piv’s spear, she bent down closer to the gap in the rock, straining to hear what was happening below.

  “—more complicated than you think,” Hirizjahkinis was saying. “The Kavareen could not have done what it did without me, and without the Kavareen’s help, I would not be speaking to you now—”

  Lemoes began to speak again. Nora slashed with her hand for silence. “Quiet,” she hissed. “I don’t want to hear about your crazy fake goddess.”

  “—we live through each other now, he and I,” Hirizjahkinis said. “Yes, I am the Kavareen, but I am also Hirizjahkinis. I know it.”

  Aruendiel said something that she could not hear clearly. He had moved out of Nora’s line of sight. She found that his disappearance increased her agitation.

  “I did not want to tell you these things,” Hirizjahkinis went on. “But there is no sense in lying about any of this, either.”

  “I told Hirizjahkinis, again and again”—Aruendiel had raised his voice—“that the Kavareen was too dangerous to be an ally, let alone a plaything.”

  “And you were right!” Hirizjahkinis said. “That is another thing I would rather not have to say. But I will say it. You were right.”

  Would that be enough to pacify Aruendiel? Vaguely Nora was aware that, nearby, Lemoes had stooped to try to catch her eye.

  “My goddess is not crazy, not fake,” Lemoes said, smiling, determined.

  Nora shook her head. “She’s not a real goddess, your Sisoaneer. You should know that. She’s a woman named Olenan. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Now quiet, I’m listening.” She frowned downward into the hole in the floor.

  “—jakinis is gone.” Aruendiel’s voice was scathing. “Her mind and memory stolen by a vicious demon whose only interest is to feed and destroy.”

  “I don’t mean her,” Lemoes said. “I mean my goddess.”

  “I said, be qui—!” Nora looked up. “Wait. Your goddess?”

  “And yours,” Lemoes said.

  Nora felt herself flinch involuntarily. She sat back on her haunches and stared at him. “No!”

  Lemoes nodded, his eyes meeting hers gently, almost regretfully. “You know her now, too.”

  “But—” Nora shook her head. This new realization felt inexplicably like a wound. “It was—it was that one who came to you? All this time?” she demanded. She mouthed the name: “Sisoaneer?”

  He nodded again, and she shivered.

  “—at my side all those years,” Hirizjahkinis was saying. “I had no secrets from him. And you know, he is not without love. He is not as destructive as you wish to believe. He grows more like me every day.”

  “Not a week ago, the Kavareen attacked me savagely—and Nora, and a dozen other innocents,” Aruendiel said. “If you are truly Hirizjahkinis, where were you then?”

  Yaioni, her head cocked, was also trying to follow the exchange below. She gave Nora a suspicious look. “The Kavareen? Does he mean the monster leopard? That tried to eat me?”

  With some reluctance, Nora nodded.

  “What does he mean? Is the monster leopard down there?” Yaioni demanded.

 
“Not exactly—”

  “He was in pain then, and angry,” Hirizjahkinis said. “I will be honest with you, Aruendiel, he does not always heed me perfectly, not yet. There is much for me to learn.”

  “Yes, you will grow more like him every day,” Aruendiel said.

  Their conversation was growing too painful to overhear. Nora swung her legs into the hole in the floor. The water draining through it slapped her with a fresh chill and reminded her of how cold she was. “I have to go,” she said to Lemoes and Yaioni.

  “The monster leopard will eat you,” Yaioni said, almost sorrowfully.

  “I hope not,” Nora said, lowering herself carefully, triceps burning. She used a levitation spell to slow her descent, then dropped the last few feet and stuck a wet, wobbly landing under the sluicing water.

  Wiping her eyes, she found the other two facing each other, Aruendiel holding himself with wary economical tension, Hirizjahkinis standing with her head high, one arm akimbo, looking almost relaxed until you noticed how tightly her hands were clenched. Both sent sidelong glances at Nora; she could not help sensing some impatience at her interruption.

  “Are you two going to fight, or get out of this cave?” Nora said. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing—”

  “That Aruendiel has decided I am a wicked, dangerous monstrosity who must be destroyed,” Hirizjahkinis said.

  “That’s wrong, that’s not true,” Nora said, but Aruendiel’s glare was like the north wind scouring a frozen lake.

  “Oh, he is not wrong. I am a dangerous monstrosity.” Hirizjahkinis smiled.

  “Nora, you shouldn’t be here. This matter is between this creature”—Aruendiel nodded at Hirizjahkinis—“and myself.”

  “You mean between Hirizjahkinis and yourself,” Nora said. “But that’s not correct, either, because she’s my friend, too, and no matter what, she has been nothing but good and kind. And nonviolent,” she added. “She is still Hirizjahkinis. And when she was the Kavareen—not for very long—it saved my life, it rescued me from a giant snake. She—the Kavareen could have eaten me then, but it didn’t.”