Chapter 2
Five months later
When the maiden-priests taught me to sing, all our great epics started in the middle. When we sang the story of how Wesha, the Maiden, trapped her husband Death in the mortal world, we didn’t open with the Great War between Death and the other gods, with battles and fire and lightning.
To most people, that was the important point: a long time ago, all our gods lived among us, but after Wesha shut the Gates between the mortal realm and the divine Summerlands across the sea, only Death remained to demand worship here.
But no. That part had to wait.
We sang first about Wesha walking alone down the Mountain in her white silk wedding gown. Innocent. Doomed. We described the tears on her flawless cheeks. The sharp knives on her golden belt.
We sang about the lonely tower where our goddess was to be imprisoned for eternity, and we made the audience understand the weight of Wesha’s sacrifice when she married the greedy monster whose war had nearly reduced the world to ashes.
Eventually, the listener would hear the full tale: how Death broke the ancient laws of the Allmother when he started the Great War, and how Genna, Peace-Queen, broke her youngest daughter’s heart when she gave Wesha to Death as the price of peace.
How Wesha then locked away Death’s power over the Underworld and exiled him from the Summerlands for his crimes.
How Death schemed and fumed for centuries, seeking to return. All of it out of order.
When stories have a beginning, people expect an ending, and the maiden-priests wanted listeners to understand that they were part of a story still being told.
I was now the only one left to compose and place the verses about how my rebellion ended the three hundred years of Death’s tyranny in the mortal world, but I hadn’t sung since Taran died. I knew the story wasn’t over, but I wanted my part in it to be.
“Does she have worms?”
I’d forgotten where I was and what I was supposed to be doing when a young woman deposited her baby in my lap, and I jolted in confusion.
Multiple times a day I was painfully yanked from the gray fog of my own memories into a world where Taran was dead, but there was still work that I was required to do.
I’d come to the new royal residence to speak with the queen on behalf of the surviving acolytes, but this was the third time I’d come, and we’d been left to cool our heels out in the courtyard with the common petitioners for hours.
Nobody had dared approach me before this girl in a homespun smock, even though my white dress and ten-stringed kithara used to be as good as a request to be handed strangers’ babies.
Hiwa had dressed me like a doll this morning, as she did every morning.
Iona, you must eat something. Iona, you must change your clothes. Iona, you must tell us what we are all to do now.
I was scared by how angry those demands could make me, even when delivered by sweet little Hiwa ter Genna.
But if I was dressed like a maiden-priest, I couldn’t be angry at this young mother for expecting me to act like one and treat her child.
She couldn’t know that engaging with the present felt like rubbing raw wool across a fresh burn.
After a sidelong glance to check that the single royal guardsman was out of earshot, I quietly chanted one of Wesha’s blessings. The Maiden’s power flowed obligingly through me, revealing that the baby was a little anemic but blessedly parasite-free.
“No worms,” I told her mother, who didn’t look reassured by the news.
“But she sleeps all the time. And when she’s awake, she’s tired. Should she be so tired?”
The infant had screwed up her pearly pink lips when dumped on my lap as though contemplating a good scream, but she only turned her head and frowned at her mother instead. She should have yelled at being handed to a stranger, and she should also have a lot more plump on her bowed little legs.
I took a closer look at her mother. My age, so this was probably her first baby. Very thin too.
“What’s she eating?”
“Pap, porridge. She weaned herself a couple weeks ago.”
The baby must have weaned when her mother’s milk failed. The whole country was doing poorly, but women often ate last. A simple case to diagnose, but a difficult problem to solve.
“She’s malnourished. Needs milk. Donkey or goat is best, cow or sheep if that’s all you can get.”
The young mother nodded stoically, but her shoulders slumped. Death’s greed for sacrifices had thinned all the herds, and the drought had kept them from rebuilding. I might as well tell her to sail across the Sea of Dreams and feed the baby the sweet wine of the gods in the Summerlands.
“Thank you, maiden-priest,” she muttered without much gratitude.
I bit the inside of my cheek and quickly dug into the purse at my hip. Before the acolyte seated to my left could object—we’d come to beg money from the queen, not to give it away—I pressed some coins into the young woman’s hand.
“Buy a nanny goat. Keep it with a neighbor, so your family doesn’t know you have it.”
The girl immediately brightened.
“I will, thank you, maiden-priest,” she said again, this time with real feeling. “Can you bless me too?”
I automatically opened my mouth to sing the benediction for new mothers, but I stopped before the first note.
Not because I was being dramatic about not singing after Taran died.
I would have done it for the girl’s sake.
But the guard had noticed the three of us, and his stare was hard and unfriendly.
No god’s blessing would be tolerated at the queen’s residence.
I still tried to conjure the appropriate look of maidenly serenity before passing the baby back.
“She’s beautiful,” I said in lieu of the blessing, and the girl seemed satisfied when she bowed and walked to the other side of the petitioners’ courtyard.
Tell me, nightingale, do you actually believe all babies are beautiful, or is that just something you say?
No, I’m being polite. I actually think that baby who peed on me needs to focus on his personality.
Good thing our children won’t have to worry about that.
I’d promised to bear Taran ten humorless redheaded brats if he tempted fate in that way, but he’d only laughed and said he wanted eleven.
Lost in that memory, I didn’t realize I was staring after the sleepy baby and her mother until I felt Hiwa’s hand curling into mine to squeeze it hard. My sinuses burned as I tried to keep myself in this time and place.
I could be terribly angry at the little acolyte of Genna sometimes, but she was the only person whose presence I could always tolerate.
She never seemed surprised when I cried or didn’t cry, ate or didn’t eat, argued with the queen or looked out at the sea for hours.
She would have been a good peace-priest, if she’d ever finished her training.
Maiden-priests trained to treat the dying as well as the young, and a month after Taran died, I woke Hiwa up in the middle of the night, convinced that I had a growth in my lungs from all the smoke I’d inhaled.
I couldn’t breathe correctly. Couldn’t get enough air.
I felt the tumor jabbing into my spine and leeching into my bones, and I knew it would kill me if I didn’t teach someone how to cut it out, because everyone else who knew how was dead now.
Hiwa didn’t even bother with the blessing that would have disproved it. She just put a hand on my chest and matter-of-factly said, no, that’s grief.
I might sometimes be furious that Hiwa was forcing me to be here, but at least she never expected me to be anything but sad about it. We sat in understanding silence until a second royal guardsman came out and said that the queen would see us now.
I knew as soon as the guard announced me that the queen would say no.
Just Iona, not Iona ter Wesha or even Iona Night-Singer, which the queen had been the first one to call me.
The mood at her court had an ugly undercurrent tonight, sullen and hungry, and they looked at me when I limped in like they hoped I’d provide them some amusement, musical or otherwise.
I’d declined several invitations to perform on the kithara here, and I sensed another would not be forthcoming.
Not that I’d be missing the hospitality.
Cheap pitch torches were already accumulating soot on the beams of the high ceiling and fouling the indoor air, because the queen spent every spare coin on imported grain for her people, and oil for lamps was not in the budget.
I’d been in here before, when the royal residence was still a temple of Genna, Peace-Queen, Taran and Hiwa’s patron goddess.
The queen had plastered over the erotic frescoes and cut down the sacred fruit trees, and her wooden throne sat where a statue of Genna had once loomed over the sacrificial firepit, but she’d made no other improvements.
From the queen’s sour expression, she knew she ruled a country in decline, and her residence was only a symbol of it.
This wasn’t a temple of Genna when it was constructed—from the high peaked ceiling, I knew it had once been a temple of the Allmother, probably constructed before the Great War three hundred years ago.
But hardly anyone worshipped the Allmother even before my rebellion; other temples had offered more tangible blessings, and it was hard to maintain gratitude to the Allmother for giving birth to the gods we no longer saw or for building a paradise across the sea that only a few mortal priests would ever visit.
We stopped building new temples at all once Death came to rule us. We never had enough time or money left after making the sacrifices he demanded. But now that he was gone, there was still nothing to spare, even for the queen.