Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The God Who Killed for Flowers
Lyssena
The first bite was tender.
Lyssena chewed slowly while Erevos watched her from across the table, though his posture remained as it always did.
The meat was perfectly cooked, warm and rich with spices she had never tried, and yet she found herself focusing not on the taste but on the fact that the deer’s head still rested at the center of the table, its empty eyes turned slightly toward her plate.
“This is very good,” she said, smoothing her shadowy gown over her lap. “You are a great cook.”
Erevos inclined his head just slightly. “You are unhappy. Why?”
Right. Erevos was not human, and Lyssena shouldn’t have to run around the bush. It was difficult for her since she was always soft-spoken and never wanted to say something—anything—wrong.
She cut another piece of the soft meat, and it nearly crumbled off her knife.
“You said you have known me for twenty years,” she continued, keeping her voice even, as though the question was merely a passing curiosity and not something that had followed her into sleep. “Did you watch everyone in the village . . . or only me?”
Her fingers tightened around the knife, and she kept her wrist steady.
“Only you.”
The answer came without hesitation.
She lifted the cup of orange juice and took a slow sip, buying herself time, letting the silence stretch between them, because she was sweating everywhere and her heart was pounding very, very fast.
“And why me?” she asked lightly, though she did not look up from her orange juice. “There are so many people.”
She placed another bite into her mouth. Across from her, Erevos still stayed unmoving.
She could see him only from his chest and up, though she was still surprised she was able to see him at all, considering the giant deer across the table.
But he was a tall god, or demon, or whatever he was, and he could probably see her well.
“You prayed to me.”
Lyssena dabbed at the corner of her lips, though there was nothing there, and decided to play with fire.
“I was three,” she said. “I also once prayed for a wooden horse to come alive.”
Her gaze lifted to meet his then. “Did you plan it?” she asked. “Everything that happened after?” She did not specify what everything meant.
Her marriage, the betrayal, the timing of his appearance.
Her heartbeat had grown louder in her ears, though she kept her shoulders relaxed and her expression composed.
If he had orchestrated her suffering . . .
She cut into the meat again, though she did not immediately eat it.
Erevos’s voice, when it came, was calm. “No.”
Lyssena held his gaze for several seconds longer, as though weighing the word, measuring it for cracks. She finally took the bite.
The food tasted the same as before, but her throat felt tighter.
“You could have shown yourself sooner,” she said after a moment, her tone softer now, less sharp but no less intentional. “If you were watching.”
There it was. Not an accusation, just the shape of it.
She set her knife down and folded her hands neatly together on the table, the posture almost prayer-like without meaning to be.
“I need to know,” she added, “whether you are someone who waits . . . or someone who intervenes.”
Her eyes did not leave his.
And for the first time since sitting down, she allowed the silence to become heavy on purpose.
“I intervene, and I wait, Lyssena.”
At the sound of her name in his voice, Lyssena felt her eyes sting as though something sharp had slipped beneath her lashes, and her skin began to crawl in a slow wave that spread from the back of her shoulders to the tips of her fingers.
She could not hold her composure any longer.
Lyssena rose abruptly from her chair and planted her trembling fists against the edge of the table, her knuckles paling as her fingers curled into the dark, shadowy wood.
“What does that even mean?”
It was the first time she had ever raised her voice. She had never—not once in her life—spoken above a measured tone to anyone, not to her parents, not to her friends, not even to those who had wronged her.
It was not a scream, nor a true shout, but the force of it vibrated through her chest and left her shaking, because the sound of her own defiance felt foreign in her mouth, and because Erevos was, after all, something far greater than a man.
“When I first began watching you,” Erevos said, “it was curiosity. I wanted to understand why you delighted in honey, and what compelled you to offer it to me.”
Lyssena’s gaze flickered between the twin violet lights that marked his eyes, searching desperately for anything that would resemble emotion. She wished she could see his expression fully, read the language of muscle and breath.
But Erevos rarely moved at all.
He did not lean. He did not sigh. He did not click his tongue in disapproval, nor shake his head, nor let impatience show in the set of his shoulders. He simply was, immense and composed and impossible to decipher.
“When have I ever offered you honey?” she demanded, though her voice had dropped again.
She could not remember a single time she had offered honey to anyone. It had always been her favorite—thick and golden and clinging sweet—ever since she first tasted it when—
Oh.
On her third birthday, her mother had let her dip a small wooden spoon into a clay jar of honey, and though Lyssena could not recall the moment itself, she remembered the story repeated at family dinners, her father laughing as he told how little Lyssena had asked if they could set aside a bit of honey for the god with no name.
She had felt sorry for him.
While the other gods received prayers and offerings and praise, he received nothing at all, and in her small, earnest mind, that had seemed unbearably unfair. She had wanted to share something she loved, to make him less alone.
She remembered, too, the way the laughter had stopped. The way her mother’s hand had tightened around hers. That was the day she learned it was forbidden to speak of the god with no name.
Forbidden even to wonder.
And so she had stopped.
She had stopped asking. Stopped thinking. Stopped whispering little offerings into the dark.
Not until the day her family betrayed her, until the day she stood abandoned and humiliated and alone, and there had been no one left to pray to.
No one but him.
Lyssena did not sit back down. Her fingers slowly uncurled from the edge of the table, though they still trembled, and she swallowed past the tightness in her throat before forcing the question out.
“How,” she asked, her voice no longer sharp but fragile now, stretched thin with too many realizations hitting her all at once, “did you intervene?”
“In small ways,” Erevos replied. “Ways that would not frighten you. Ways that allowed you to believe the world was merely . . . kind.”
A chill moved across her skin at that.
“When your father opened his drawer during the winter you turned seven,” he continued, “and found silver coins he did not remember earning.”
Lyssena’s breath caught.
That winter had been bitterly cold, the kind that crept beneath doors and through cracks in the walls, settling into bones and refusing to leave. She remembered the way her father’s voice had filled the house one evening, calling her mother to the bedroom.
Coins. Several of them.
Small, dull silver pieces resting at the back of his wooden drawer, beneath folded cloth, where no one had placed them.
She remembered standing in the doorway, small and barefoot, watching her father turn the coins over and over in his rough hands, frowning as though trying to recall a memory that would not come. He had insisted he would never forget earning silver, not when money was so scarce.
But that week, they had eaten warm bread every night.
Her mother had bought thicker wool for lining their cloaks. Lyssena had been given a pale blue ribbon, which she had worn in her hair until it frayed.
She had thought it a miracle. She had thought perhaps the gods had finally answered.
“I placed them there,” Erevos said simply.
Her stomach twisted.
“There were other times,” he continued, “When your grains were eaten before harvest. When your flowers were trampled.”
Lyssena’s lips parted slightly. She remembered that, too.
The small patch of land behind their house had been her mother’s pride—rows of modest vegetables, delicate flowers lining the fence—and there had been seasons when animals broke through.
Chickens from neighboring yards scratching through their grains.
Pigs nosing beneath the fence and crushing blossoms beneath blunt hooves.
And yet . . .
There had been evenings when her father would return home carrying meat.
Not the thin broth they were used to, but proper meat. Roasted chicken, crisped at the edges, the skin blistered and fragrant. Pork slow-cooked with herbs, the scent filled the entire house and made Lyssena dizzy with hunger before she even sat down.
She remembered how her mother would murmur that it was fortunate, so fortunate, that one of the neighbor’s animals had fallen ill, that it would have gone to waste otherwise.
Lyssena had eaten with sticky fingers and shining eyes.
“I killed them,” Erevos said, his words were not boastful or cruel. Simply factual. “Every chicken that devoured what you planted. Every pig that uprooted what you tended.”
Her breath came slower now.
“You were fond of the yellow flowers by the fence,” he added. “You cried when they were crushed.”
She had, and she had forgotten that. But now she could see herself kneeling in the dirt, small fingers trying to press broken stems back into the soil, her vision blurred with tears while her mother told her that some things did not grow back once ruined.
A strange warmth began to spread through her chest, confusing and overwhelming. All those moments she had believed to be chance. All those tiny mercies.
“You . . . did that for me?” she whispered.
“For you,” he answered.
Not for her family, for her. And he never asked for a single prayer or a gift.
Lyssena’s anger, which had burned so fiercely only moments before, began to soften, melting into something tender and aching and impossibly intimate.
He had watched her delight in honey.
He had noticed her tears over flowers.
He had known the rhythm of her household well enough to slip coins into a drawer without being seen.
He had been there.
Through winters and harvests and small birthdays and disappointments.
Always there.
“You were . . . kind,” she said at last, the words trembling as they left her mouth.
She did not know whether she meant to accuse him or thank him. What kind of being memorized the things that made her smile? What kind of being killed for her flowers?
And yet . . . What kind of being did all that and never asked for anything in return?
Lyssena lowered herself back into her chair without breaking eye contact, her pulse no longer racing in fear but in something softer.
“You were taking care of me,” she murmured.
And for the first time since the conversation began, her voice held no edge at all.