Chapter Twenty-Three Pantheon of Silent Gods #3
She held her breath, waiting for something—skin tingling, hair rising, something—but nothing happened.
No one had listened—or, worse, someone had listened, and then judged her unworthy.
Instinctively, she knew it was the latter.
Wasn’t that the story of her life? Too foreign for the Imperial Family, too coarse for the Welkish nobility, and now, Poppy was too little for the Virian gods.
It didn’t matter what her sin had been—maybe it was something as simple as the stilted way she’d pronounced the prayer. The answer was still silence.
She exhaled slowly, curling her fingers into fists.
Her throat grew tight, but she clenched her jaw in response.
Deep down, she’d known that the gods wouldn’t heed her plea.
Half of her had even hoped for it, so that she wouldn’t have to use the magic her father so despised.
So why was she still blinking hot, disappointed tears away?
“Okay,” Hasan said, oblivious to the fact that Poppy was clearly forsaken. “Let’s go upstairs. Harithi should be ready—”
“No,” she whispered. She didn’t need the rest of the household to witness this. Having Hasan here was humiliating enough.
“What?” he asked. “Why not?”
“I can’t,” she croaked out, looking somewhere over his shoulder, too ashamed to look at his face. “I can’t—”
Can’t summon daivyakhi.
He misunderstood. “Yes, you can. It’s exactly the same as whatever you did when you burst that pipe—”
“No,” she said, shifting her eyes to meet his. “The gods didn’t answer me.”
She waited for his reaction. Poppy knew enough of Hasan’s body language by now to know that he stilled whenever confronted with the unexpected, muscles tensed as his fight-or-flight instinct warred within him. But he didn’t freeze, didn’t even blink.
“You can’t know that,” he said. “I told you, there’s no physical reaction when the naumya is made.”
“I do know.” She hated the way the tightness in her throat caused the words to come out creaky.
“How?”
She ground her teeth together. “I just do!”
“You can only know if you try—”
Poppy spun on her heel, jabbing her finger at cut flowers sitting in a vase of water left at the foot of the pantheon.
Curling her fingers into a fist, she jerked her hand upward, flowers spilling out as she lifted the water.
The aqueous blob made it three feet in the air before the first wave of nausea hit.
Hasan caught her as she doubled over; water splashed over their feet.
“See?” she gasped as he hauled her back upright. “Nothing. Forsaken.”
His fingers tightened imperceptibly around her forearms. There it was, finally: the stilling of his limbs as the gravity of the situation weighed over him.
“You can’t be forsaken,” he said. “The gods rarely forsook the daivyakt of old, and only for things like patricide, or stealing from the temples. You’ve never done anything so severe—unless there’s something you want to confess? ”
He quirked one eyebrow gently, and Poppy softened involuntarily as she shook her head once, quickly. “But if I’m not forsaken, then w-why—”
“Why wasn’t your prayer heard? Sometimes, individual prayers can be rejected if the gods don’t think it was felt. Remember, they’re divine beings. They can see if your intentions are genuine. Whom did you direct your prayer to?”
“The entire pantheon.”
He frowned. “You didn’t try to invoke one god specifically?”
“I didn’t know whom to ask.” Because I don’t know anything about any of the gods, so how could I know whom to ask?
She pulled her arms out of Hasan’s, hugging them to her chest. “I don’t have a connection to the gods the way you do.
” She trembled, shaking with the depth of this loss.
“I’ve spent the last two decades unaware of their existence, following the teachings of the Founder.
I was raised to shun the stories of the gods and their divine energy, to rebuke them as heresy.
It may not be patricide, but I doubt the gods will ever listen to me. ”
Hasan listened intently, his face impassive. When she finished, he dropped his head down for a second, nodding to himself before he looked up and locked his gaze on hers.
“Tell me one thing, Miss Sutherland,” he said. “How long are you going to let who you are hold you back?”
Poppy flinched at the sudden ice in his tone. “What are you talking about?”
He crossed his arms over his chest, mirroring her stance. “It sounds like you’ve decided—perhaps from the moment I introduced you to the gods and the concept of naumya—that you were too scared to be answered, and so you didn’t even try to make yourself heard.”
“How dare you?” she seethed. She wasn’t sure what stung more: his accusation that she was self-sabotaging, or the fact that he had accurately guessed the depths of her self-doubt.
“You heard me.” He took a step forward. Coolly, he said, “If you’re not even going to try, Miss Sutherland, then I might as well take you back to your fiancé today.”
She stopped shaking. Sorrow and shame gave way to anger. Who is he to threaten me? She straightened up, taking another step forward instead of back. Surprise flared in his eyes.
“You’re one to talk about not making any effort,” she retorted. “You all but dumped these new concepts on me, didn’t bother to tell me a single story about any of these gods, and now you’re surprised that I don’t have any personal connection with them.”
Hasan’s expression shifted, some of the heat leaving his eyes. “Poppy—”
“No.” Something heavy had shaken loose in her chest, and Poppy couldn’t stop talking until she was free of it.
“I’m not like you, Hasan. I didn’t have an heirloom pantheon passed down through generations of my family.
I don’t even know what gods were important to my birth family, because I was adopted by the Sutherlands as a toddler.
All I know of the Virian gods is what the Welkish people taught me: that it’s heresy to follow them, and that their magic is forbidden.
You have no idea what kind of environment I was raised in.
When I learned that I had powers, I vowed I would never use them, for my own safety.
So for me to break that vow means that I am trying.
What else can I do? I’m repeating what you’re saying, copying your actions, and it’s still not enough, because I’m a lifetime behind, and I’ll never catch up. I’ll never have what you have.”
Poppy’s speech drained out of her, chest heaving.
Hasan stared at her, his expression blank, but his body loose and free of tension.
He lifted his thumb to her face. Only when she felt his thumb smearing something wet across her cheek did she realize she was crying.
Her skin went hot under his touch, and she shoved his hand away.
He opened his mouth, but she didn’t want to—couldn’t bear to—hear whatever he was going to say next. She shoved past him and rushed up the steep steps, roughly wiping her eyes with her dupatta, leaving him downstairs with the pantheon of silent gods.