“I know it’s the Bronze God’s holiday and all,” says Saga, “but you could have told a cheerier tale.”
Vil shrugs, and I carefully don’t look at him. He’ll wait for me, he said. Does he mean like the Bronze God waited for the Prism Goddess?
Saga doesn’t ask him to finish his story. None of us do. Instead we bid each other good night and crawl into our bedrolls, which we’ve laid out under the stars because the weather is clear.
The rest of the Bronze God’s story has always haunted me, and sleep stays far away as it blooms unbidden in my mind, tangled up with the echoing sensation of Vil’s kiss.
The Bronze God sought to win the Prism Goddess’s love, though she told him many times it was not to be. He moved mountains for her. He sent her whole villages of people who plucked out their own hearts to display his true feelings. Thousands of people died for his love, and finally the Prism Goddess had had enough.
She called to her the Gray Goddess, goddess of death, and the Ghost God, god of nothing. Gray and Ghost held Bronze between them, while the Prism Goddess maimed him: She put out his eyes and cut out his tongue and cut off his ears. She cut off his feet and his hands. She healed his wounds so he would not die. And then she returned him to his island and sent it back into the sea.
If the Bronze God still lives, he has never shown his ruined body to anyone, ever again.
And yet every autumn there is feasting in his name, incense burned on his altars.
Vil’s words whisper through my mind.I’ll wait for you.I am drawn to him, to the strength and companionship he offers. With Vil I would have a true home, the belonging I never quite found with my own family. I want that, Iyearnfor it. But there is far too much ahead and behind to make that choice just yet.
I sleep at last. My dreams are not kind.
Nine Years Ago
Year4191, Month of the Yellow God
Daeros—Tenebris
Gods’ Fall is over. The sun returns, and the year begins anew. I don’t welcome it. At least the days are still short, the light brief. I watch the hours climb up the Iljaria time-glass in the wall and shrink down again. I keep myself limber in my cage. I scrape the stolen knife against my scalp. I pick the lock every evening when the palace has gone to sleep. I stand a long while at the door, listening to the guards on the other side, angry that I am still trapped in a cage, even though I can get free of the iron one.
Most nights I step up to the great glass wall opposite those doors, and stare out into the Sea of Bones, watched over by the stars. Sometimes I stand with my hands splayed out on the glass, pressing against it until I can no longer bear the coldness. Sometimes I just sit and stare, feeling lost, alone, afraid.
Forgotten.
I am here at the glass wall one night, slumped on the floor, when someone touches my shoulder and I nearly jump out of my skin. I wheel to see Gulla, the king’s Iljaria wife. She looks silvery in the starlight, her white hair almost seeming to shine.
I blink at her, heart slamming against my rib cage. She gives me a gentle smile and holds something out to me.
It’s a slab of soap, a clean rag. She points at my head, mimes shaving it with a knife, then folds the soap and rag into my hand.
My heart pricks. I don’t know howsheknows how uncomfortable it is without soap, how I have cuts everywhere along my scalp.
“Thank you,” I tell her softly.
Her smile deepens. She lifts her fingers, moves them slowly so I can see, and repeats the same motion several times. Then she points at me. I mimic the gesture with my own fingers, as best as I can.
“Does that mean ‘thank you’?” I ask her.
She nods.
That warm feeling in my heart expands. “Teach me more,” I say.
And she does. She teaches me how to shape the alphabet with my hands. She teaches me the words forstarandiceanddark. And then she smiles yet again, squeezes my arm, and slips soundlessly away.
I watch her weave among the cages of the king’s Collection and see that she has taught most of the children her finger speech already. They all have a kind word for her, and she’s brought most of them trinkets she pulls from her pockets: bone charms or bits of ribbon, scraps of paper, stubby pencils. The children hoard her gifts and thank her sincerely.
Then she slides away across the hall, knocking at the doors to be let out.
She comes like this, every few nights, and I realize she cares for all of us in the king’s Collection because she was once part of it, too. The only one, it seems, who has ever left the Collection and not ended in the Sea of Bones.
She brings me more slabs of soap, when she senses I have run out, and little treats: candies or nuts or, once, half a slice of cake, with frosting so sweet it nearly made me sick. And she continues to teach me her finger speech until her nimble hands have trained my clumsy ones, and I begin to understand her.
