“It happened three hundred years ago.”
No wonder she can speak of it so calmly.
We sit in silence for a time. I let her hold my hand again. “You came back to tell me this? So it might... help Valien?”
“And perhaps help yourself,” she says softly. “It is a place of life, not like Rhiel’s.... Yes, that is why I came here. But I wanted to return to Ekandria, anyway. It’s very different from the eastern lands, so much more crowded, fuller.... After a time, you begin to enjoy differences so much.”
I look at Faya, feeling reverence and envy. Her tale is perhaps the strangest of all of ours—yet not unhappy. She seems to have escaped the pall of Rhiel’s ghost. And of course, if she tells the truth—I don’t doubt for a moment that she does—it is far from over yet.
“But neither Valien nor I are innocent as children.”
“Perhaps it won’t be necessary to enter the Garden. Only to be near it.”
“What do you think will happen there?”
“It is a God’s place. Who can say? But I have heard of things—healings, revelations. Miracles.”
One final question flies from my tongue. “If Rhiel wanted you for your immortality—” yes, there is an attraction there for an unliving, undying Goddess—”why did She want me?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think She was teaching me things.”
Faya rises. “She taught me things, too.”
“What things?”
“How glad I ought to be to be immortal,” she says softly. “As to what you might have learned—shouldn’t you yourself know that best?”
I learned of the madness that lurks beneath the world, waiting always to seize us. I learned that even good deeds might deserve punishment. I learned it is a mercy that even gods can die. None of this Rhiel meant to teach me. I have suppressed her words, as much as possible; forgotten her lessons. They surface only in nightmares.
At this, Faya and I part. Somehow I am sure it will be forever. She has left me with a miracle, or at least the hope of one.
* * *
Perhaps ironically, Gods have no souls. Upon death, they vanish into nothingness; Rhiel is now no more than the corpse-dust She was birthed from. Valien did not only kill Her, he unmade Her.
She should have no more power over us.
Yet still, after four years, Valien cries out in nightmares—and in the day—and sometimes, quietly, I weep, giving into a grief I fear as much as I am ashamed of.
No longer, I pray. And now my prayer is granted, and I must do more than whisper the psalms I learned on my mother’s worn beads. I must act. We must.
* * *
Valien is slender for a man but broad-shouldered, and though I have never been a willow, his spare leathers fit me well enough. I am nowhere near the dashing figure he is as we ride out of the keep, leaving Datheiren behind, heading east. A wind, cool for summer, ruffles my newly shorn hair, cut with Valien’s dagger. The waist-long tangle I’d borne since I was a child would never do on a journey like this.
He watches me strangely. I don’t know if I look so different with my golden-red hair only chin length or if it’s the leather armor. Or the fact that after four years, he is on a quest again—one taken at his wife’s proposal, at that.
I have slept in feather beds for four years, on floor pallets for seventeen, and on piles of rotted-soft bones for one hundred nights, but this is only the third time I have ever slept outside. We curl in Valien’s cloak, his arms around me.
“What do you think awaits us?” he asks the sky.
“I don’t know,” I say, when it makes no reply. “You’re the one who’s done this most often.”
He laughs huskily. I’ve never heard him laugh before. His hands rest beneath my breasts and over my abdomen, close but not touching my most sensitive places. His breath tickles the back of my neck, and his hair, almost as long as mine now, tickles too. I force myself to only notice minutiae.
“What do you think awaits us?” I ask.
I feel the laughter leave his chest, pressed against my back. “Not immortality, whatever you’ve heard about this Garden.”
Of course. Immortality would bring no healing—would only prolong the nights of nightmare, the days of pain that grows until it cannot be held back, and must be let out in screams. But I force myself to smile, defying dark thoughts like the hero Finger-Tall attacking the monster cat with a needle for a sword. “How can you be sure?”
My parry, it seems, is very poor. A shudder runs his length, and Valien whispers, “She told me how we will die.”
My blood turns to ice. “Rhiel.”
“Yes.”
Well, I think pragmatically, being a Goddess of Corpse-Dust, She would know. “How?”
“Do you really want to hear it?”
In answer, I kick him gently, as if we were only lovers caught in playful teasing. “How could I not?”
“She said you would die in childbirth.”
I go very still in his arms. I think of my mother as she delivered my brother, his shrieks and her groans and cries, weakening. Her face in death, unmarred, beautiful. And I think, no wonder Valien makes love to me so softly, so reluctantly. Or is the reluctance on my part? Am I perhaps unconsciously aware of my fate?
Is that one of the things I didn’t realize Rhiel taught me?
“What about you?” I ask.
“Poison.” The word said flatly, without emotion. But his arms tighten around me as if to lend comfort. Comforting me. It is exactly the way a hero should speak about his death.
* * *
How does a man repent of slaying a God?
How does his wife help him? How does anyone?
What did Faya think we would find in the Garden? Is its God still there, grateful for the death of a rival, willing to work a miracle?
Or will poison be Valien’s best cure? I remember how he walked so close to the edge of the northwest tower—he knew he wouldn’t jump, knew no fall would kill him. Or did he think of leaping, of so boldly challenging fate?
Is that not the sort of thing heroes do?
As we travel east, the landscape grows strange. We leave Ekandria’s emerald forests and golden fields and enter sheer mountains of dark stone and darker pines, more black than green. Past them, the land is flat and dry, as if no God ever bothered to shape this part of the world. The sky is cloudless overheard but not blue, as if it has taken up the gray of the earth, the gray of dust.
It rains once, clouds rushing overhead like charging armies, though there is nowhere to shelter and we are soaked to the skin. More often we are tormented by wind that draws the moisture from our lips as we lick them, sometimes driving grit before it. We begin to travel at night, a trick Valien remembers from his earlier life.
He tells me bits of it. He was indeed a soldier. Leaving home as a youth of sixteen, he dreamed of being a hero. He became one nine years later. In between, he learned how to keep a sword sharp, how to calm an angry drunk, how to cross any terrain, how to detect an ambush, how to find edible mushrooms and cook over an open fire. He uses every one of these skills during our journey.
I share some of my own life: mothering my younger brothers after our mother’s death, mothering my father sometimes, too. At a young age I learned to mend, how to soothe a tearful drunken man, how to start hearth fires despite drafts, how to wash in any possible way and how to live with grime when washing isn’t possible, how to carve up a roast, and how to calm a child—or a man—just awakened from a nightmare. And I too find a use for every one of these skills during our journey.
I ask him once why he did it.
“Set out to slay a Goddess? Well, someone had to, didn’t they? She couldn’t be left to steal young women and desecrate graves. All the others who tried to kill Her had failed....”
“Yes.” I had seen some of them die—if they were permitted to die.
“One of them was a friend of mine. Ojiv Knallisen. We were friends in the army. He’d se
rved twice as long as I had, taught me things.... We both wanted to be heroes. He tried, and in failing, at least he had a hero’s death. I envied him.”
“You killed Rhiel for envy,” I say.
“Not entirely.” He doesn’t sound offended. “I still wanted to be a hero for its own sake.... And I wanted to avenge Ojiv as much as I wanted to surpass him.”
The sweetness of his tone, a sweetness I know he is unaware of, prompts me to say, “You loved him.”
He starts, and I wonder what exactly I have hit upon. But I will not be jealous of a dead man.
I wonder sometimes how closely the relationship of Ojiv and Valien mirrors that of Valien and me. Ojiv taught Valien swordcraft, and at my prompting, he shows me how to thrust and parry, and how to handle a broadsword without cutting myself. My winning argument is that, since by a Goddess’ word I will die in childbed, I have nothing to fear from swords.
* * *
What answers for a death? A birth.
The connection comes to me in a dream, a nightmare prompted by Rhiel’s prophecy. A birth. I tell Valien, but I’m not certain he hears me. Now it is his turn to soothe away a nightmare.
His singing is very pleasant. I realize it is a lullaby he learned from me. A lullaby I in turn learned long ago, from Faya.
* * *
Rhiel taught me nothing She did not teach the other members of Her court, back when they were alive—before they turned to perfect, gray, unliving tricksters and stewards and other servants of Dust’s Goddess. I was of no significance to Her. She foretold my death, but also Valien’s. We were the only ones in that tomb-hall who had deaths to foretell.
I was stolen at random, as other girls were stolen when they wandered too far in the forest or dark alleys, or stayed too long in graveyards at dusk. It meant nothing.
Did this revelation come from a dream, or arise naturally over long days of traveling and thinking? Does it matter? At least, unlike the other, it causes me no nightmares.
Rhiel knew my death. Did She also know what would come before it? Did She see my future as Valien’s bride? What else might She have seen?
Did She steal me out of vengeance for it? Or was that, the captivity that led to my meeting Valien and Faya, to marrying him and learning from her of a Garden, to walking across the eastern deserts in search of redemption for a Godslayer, only an inevitable part of my fate?
* * *
A dust storm blows up, golden sand driven by a greater wind than I have ever seen—if Rhiel still had any existence, any power in the world, I would say She sent it as revenge. Though the storm is not made of powdered corpses—so I hope.
Valien and I shelter behind a great rock, a bone of the earth sticking up like a vast splinter. In its shade he steps on something. A dark, slender something that writhes beneath his boot, lashes out, strikes. It slithers away as he slumps against the stone with a cry more of surprise than pain. Our gazes meet through the blowing dust and his is wide with fear.
Poison.
Along with mother, I was also physician to my family. I am at his side in instants, drawing my knife, cutting a cross over the dark pinprick of the serpent’s bite. I put my lips to the wound and suck. Blood fills my mouth, but the taste doesn’t bother me. More troublesome is the bitter aftertang when I spit it out. I suck again, spit again. Over and over.
The venom is drawn out. As the storm continues, he sleeps curled beside me.
He is more surprised than I am when he awakens. Alive.
* * *
We come upon the Garden suddenly. It rises from the yellow dust, an emerald forest with jewel-bright fruits on its highest branches. A river flows out of it, scented like flowers and whispering as it runs over sand—a sound I have never heard before, almost like words. As we drink the sweet water, I look around for a village. There is none in sight—but then, Faya did leave it three hundred years ago.
Just being around the place, drinking its water, breathing the spicy living scent the wind draws off it, seems good for Valien, still recovering from the snake’s bite. And it aids me as well. For the first time I can remember, we both sleep without nightmares.
* * *
What answers to death? Life.
The Garden is life, that much is clear. Its fruit can grant life eternally. Even its waters summon life forth from a desert. Its God is a God of Life.
The answer is near. I can feel it close.
What answers for a death? A birth.
But how are Gods made?
* * *
I ask Valien. He doesn’t know. But then, does any mortal?
“Is the answer important?” he asks. I cannot see his face. We haven’t lit a fire, since there is no wood to use—we wouldn’t take it from the Garden even if we could. But the night is warm enough.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I think....”
I hear him leaning forward. As a girl I would never have imagined this, a hero leaning close to hear my words. But then, Valien is more than a hero. He is my husband and my companion on this quest.
“To be free of Rhiel’s death we must atone for it. And atonement... well, what is the opposite of a death?”
“Saving a life,” he says. A hero’s answer, as valid as mine, perhaps. But not, I feel, the right one.
“A birth,” I say. “And the opposite of a Goddess of Corpse-Dust, of Death, is....”
“A God of Life?” He looks to the Garden. “I tried to enter... the branches are too thick. And then I called, but with no answer. No one came.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I say.
My eyes are growing used to the dark; I see him turn back to me and shake his head. “You want to create a God.”
“To give birth to one.”
He shakes his head again. Now mixed with incredulity is horror. “Where would we even begin? And that’s not even the most important....”
I nod, knowing his thoughts. “I imagine birthing a God could be hard on the mother.”
“You would do it?”
“Of course.” I do not tell him why. Perhaps he already knows. After all, after Ojiv Knallisen’s death Valien killed Rhiel Ghoulsmother, and not just for revenge.
He pays me the greatest compliment one like him can, that of not questioning me further.
* * *
The Garden works miracles. Cures. Revelations.
The answer to a killing is a birth. The answer to death is life. Gods are created, I come to believe, the same way they die: much like mortals.
What is the key difference, the catalyst? How can we be sure it will be present? Perhaps that will be another of the Garden’s miracles. But first, I must convince Valien to try.
He fears for me, and I can’t blame him. I don’t know why I don’t fear for myself.
But—another revelation—what is to death as the truth is to life? Lies. Does fate even exist? Not even the Gods have been able to prove that. And a lie would serve Rhiel’s purpose just as well.
What purpose? Revenge, for the blade in her breast. She foretold for Valien a death that might come from any source—a feast given by an enemy, a cup of wine from a false friend, a pricked fingertip, a rotting wound, the shadow of a rock. A fact that could only lead to constant fear. For a hero, an ignoble destiny.
And by claiming I would die in childbed, what did She do but seek to prevent my ever having a child? It would hurt me, of course, and harm my marriage with Valien, mar our most tender moments and place a wall between us, that his love might be the source of my death. It is a risk run by any woman, but to know that it is more than a risk....
Also, there is the fact that She was a Goddess of Dust, of Death. Does it not make sense She would strike out at birth, at life? Perhaps at this birth particularly, at the Life I am contemplating?
Or perhaps She wasn’t lying. Valien will die by poison, and I by giving birth.
But Valien has survived poison once. He might again, many times, before the end. Likewise, there is no certainty that thi
s will be the birth that kills me.
Perhaps fate does not exist, but it will kill me anyway.
* * *
I try to explain all this to Valien, and he does listen, striving to understand.
“This is your choice?” he says at last.
“Valien.” I sit beside him, lean close. “There’s something more you aren’t considering.”
“What?”
“If you believe a child conceived between us will kill me, how can we ever bear to touch again?” Voice straining, urging, I demand, “Do you mean for us to stay forever celibate? An ignoble fate for heroes!”
I am rewarded with his second-ever burst of laughter. Then in the dark his callused fingers reach out, comb through my hair. It is shoulder length now; I am debating cutting it again. I decide I will wait a little longer.
“I remember when I saw you,” he said. “It was your hair first. Flame-bright in that gray place. And all of you—so vibrant, so alive. I knew then that if you let me, I’d never part from you.”
“You married me....”
“For your hair, yes.” He doesn’t quite sound embarrassed. “Though I’ve come to be glad of my choice, for... other reasons.”
“You married me to remember. To remember that first sight....”
“Of life, yes. Of life in that place—or perhaps anywhere. Until I faced a Goddess of Death I never thought so much about living.”
To remember. He knew that living at my side would remind me of everything, and he chose to anyway—no, because of it.
“We’ve been strangers for four years,” I say.
“I know. I’m sorry for that, truly....”
“As am I.” I can barely form the words. It is far easier to let my lips work in another way, as I bring them to his.
We are still gentle with one another, but no longer so cautious and generous. We dare to be selfish. Kindling something between us, something we can only guess at, we cry out our triumph across the sweet river, over the Garden, to every corner of the desert.
* * *
I am bearing a child. I didn’t bleed for the two months of our return journey, or the two months since we arrived home. My stomach is starting to grow. I haven’t been ill. A blessing—or perhaps something more than that. In fact, I feel curiously healthy.
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