Tuer bowed his head, and did not look Raiva in the eye.
“All this time, my Lord of the Mountain, I could have saved you. All this time the doors could have been unlocked and Endahr allowed to flourish. All this time, you could have spoken with me, and yet for centuries you let me think you could not hear or see me, consumed with your own wretched sorrow. Look at me now, my lord Tuer. Meet my gaze and speak my name. Tell me why you left me so long to languish in misery.”
Tuer lifted his eyes, and Eda saw his shame. “I could not lose yon,” he told the goddess. “You are all I hold dear upon Endahr, and I could not bear it if you were gone.”
“But you did this toyourself!” Raiva flung her arms at the mirrors. “Youbroke the world, then concocted a mad scheme with your Shadow to mend it because you were too proud and too stubborn and too selfish to admit that you were wrong!”
Eda took a step backward, a bystander in a story that wasn’t hers.
Raiva shook with rage, and Tuer seemed to shrink before her.
“What is my life?” said the goddess. “What is it next to saving the one I love? Next to saving the world that I love? I would have given it to you a thousand times over.”
“That is why I could never tell you,” said Tuer.
“And why were you the one to make that choice? A choice that affects more than you—a choice that should have been mine? You cannot control everything and everyone you wish to. You are not the One who was before us. You are not all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful.”
Tears dripped from Tuer’s face. “I was the first thing the One formed on Endahr. The strongest. The wisest. And I failed him.”
“And so you punish yourself,” Raiva scoffed, “and all the world with you? That is not wisdom, my lord. That is foolishness.”
A horrificboomshuddered through the hall, a crack opening jagged in the empty air above Tuer’s mirrors. Wind came rushing through it, bringing with it the stench of death. There came the sound of leathery wings, the clatter of bone swords, the mingled clacking of thousands upon thousands of broken teeth.
Raiva looked at the crack with resignation. “Endahr tears itself apart. The spirits from the void will come even here, my lord, into your prison of Sorrow. Your Shadow will make sure of that. But I am no longer content to stand by, and do nothing.”
She swept past Tuer, even as the god leapt to his feet. “My lady, no. Raiva—”
But Raiva reached up into the air, grabbing both ends of the rip in the world. Words poured out of her, a great song that filled Eda with despair, and Starlight came rushing from her fingertips, weaving around the crack, pulling it together again.
But the Starlight did not hold. No sooner had Raiva finished pulling one part of the crack together then it unraveled again, light hanging frayed around the edges. The stench of death grew stronger, the crack wider.
“Raiva,” said Tuer, his face heavy with grief.
She stopped her singing, turned to him. “My power wanes. I cannot heal the world this way. So I will take your place. Hang your chains on me, my lord Tuer. Do not deny me.”
But the god shook his head. “Sorrow is powerful. It can extinguish love and life, death and time. It would put out your light. Destroy you.”
“My lord, thereisno time. Give me your chains.”
“You do not understand. You have poured too much of your Starlight into the crack. There is not enough left. If I hung all the sorrow of the world on you now, it would turn you to dust in an instant. The doors would stay locked. The spirits would break free. The world would still die.”
“And so it is down to me,” said Eda bitterly. “As it always has been.”
The god and goddess both turned to her with surprise, as if they’d forgotten she was there.
Eda felt herself collapsing inward, crushed by her insignificance, which somehow had made her so, so important. “My life, for the world’s. It’s not a choice. You haven’t given me one. You never have.”
“And yet you are still here,” said Tuer.
Raiva clasped the god’s hand in her own. She looked frail now, smaller than she had been.
Eda paced in front of the mirrors, the crack in the world shuddering and groaning above her head. Images flickered through the glass: Niren, wandering the Circle of the Dead. Her parents, drowning in a river of shadows, clawing and fighting to reach the shore. The nine Billow Maidens with their flaming swords, guarding the dead of the sea. Morin and Tainir, clinging to each other as the earth cracked beneath their feet, as the sun fell from the sky and winged spirits devoured all the world. Rudion, tearing more cracks in the world with his bone sword, letting his brothers and sisters flood through.
“I wanted more than this.” Eda gestured at the mirrors, at Tuer’s chains. “I deserved more than this.”
Tuer watched her, his piercing eyes ancient and powerful and deep.
She turned to the god, heavy with her own sorrow. For all her anger, there was only one choice she could make, the same choice she had already made when the One had sent her back. She had to try, to save Morin and Tainir, to save her parents and Niren and the world. “Give me your chains, Lord of the Mountain. I accept them for my own.”
