“But she made a bargain with him, too. He acts on her behalf. Taking land from Acaeja in the name of his heretic goddess. Surely, the Weaver would appreciate that gift.”
The Sightmother considered this.
I bowed my head, hands open before me in a show of piety and obedience.
“Forgive me, Sightmother. I—I acted too rashly. As you’ve warned me against many times. And if the punishment for that is death, I—”
“Enough.”
In two long steps, she crossed the dais, and then her hands were on my face. My body’s reaction to her touch was visceral—part of me wanting so desperately to lean into it, as I had for the last fifteen years, and another part wanting just as fiercely to pull away.
“I have raised you, Sylina,” she murmured, a slight crack in her voice. “I am well aware of your flaws. I spent two decades trying to protect you from them. You always had such potential—” She cut herself off, her palm sliding to my cheek, and for a long moment she stood there, unmoving.
It was hard for me to gather my own courage enough, stifle my own anger, to peer through the gap in the door that had opened before me.
“I want to give Acaeja this,” I murmured. And because I knew that the Sightmother could feel my threads, I made sure the words were as close to the truth as possible. How sickeningly easy it was—to let her see how much I still loved my goddess and my Sisterhood, even as I reeled from their betrayal. “Let me redeem myself, Sightmother. Please.”
The plea rolled so convincingly from my lips. Maybe that made me every bit the hypocrite I accused the Sightmother of being.
I could feel Atrius’s eyes burning into my back like the heat of the sun. I could not let myself feel it. Could not acknowledge his presence.
The Sightmother regarded me for a long, long time. I could have sworn I felt something so foreign in her presence—uncertainty. Conflict. Until this moment, it had never occurred to me that the Sightmother could experience such things. I’d always thought that once you reached a certain level of power, a certain level of faith, it was like Acaeja wiped all those thoughts away. Why would an acolyte of the unknown feel any uncertainty? Doubt any decision?
Funny, the clarity that comes in the most terrible moments. I never realized before that this was why I had chosen Acaeja as my fixation, out of all the gods of the White Pantheon.
She was the only one who promised comfort in the unknown.
But even that had been a lie, because now I saw that the Sightmother felt just as uncertain in this moment as any other fallible human.
She leaned her head close to me, our foreheads nearly touching.
“Fine. You have earned your second chance, Sylina,” she said, each word weighted, like a heavy gift.
My relief flooded me. I smiled with a shaky breath. “Thank you—”
I didn’t even feel her magic—her sedation—until it was too late, and the ground was rising up to meet me.
The last thing I sensed wasn’t her loving stare, grateful as I was for it.
No, it was Atrius’s—cold and unblinking, seeping with the blood of my betrayal.
44
I dreamed of Naro. We were children. I was nine years old, him thirteen. We were out in the deserts past the borders of Vasai, sitting on a rock that was hot with the remnants of the sun. It was late in the day. I had a chipped cup of pineapple juice in my hands, which Naro had stolen for me on our way out of town. Our lives were hard and sad, but in these moments, we were content.
I giggled at some over-exuberant story he was telling me, his gangly limbs flailing and freckled face contorted. He finished his imitation of the shopkeeper who’d run after us, a grand finale featuring a stumbling caricature of the man’s clumsy run, which had me rolling with laughter.
“Careful!”
Naro snatched the cup from my hands.
“We suffered for that, Vi. Don’t spill it.”
My laughter faded. Naro sipped the juice, staring off into the sunset. He was starting to look a bit like a man, in the right light, his jaw harsher and dotted with the beginnings of stubble.
“One day,” he said, “It won’t matter. Everything will be different.”
I knew that he was talking about a future in which we didn’t have to worry about spilled juice or what we would eat tonight, or where we would sleep, or whether tomorrow might finally be the day that one of Tarkan’s guards got us. But for some reason, the truth of that statement made a nauseous feeling coil in my stomach.
I shivered, suddenly cold.
“Yes,” I said. “That’ll be good. I can’t wait.”