There is always smoke in the Hall of the Gods. It drifts up from the ever-burning hearth, within the circle of thrones where the Miri once presided and gave the hall its name. It wafts between the carved pillars, where intricate runes merge with scenes from history and myth beneath garlands of holly. Sometimes the smoke is dense. Others, it lingers only in the corner of my vision. It does not harm the lungs, but it tricks the eye, here showing a previously unknown door, there concealing a path one has trodden a hundred times. And it rises from the bowls where Aita, the Great Healer, labors.
I stood at her side, watching as she crushed leaves between her hands and dropped them into a shallow iron bowl. Her simple gown was the palest green, bound above each broad hip with a trailing, braided belt. Her loose hair was wrapped in cloth that draped down her spine, and her face was beautiful and ageless, as only a Miri could be. If I’d been born in my mother’s generation, I would have called her a goddess. Instead, I called her mistress—my mentor, my guardian, and my shelter from the blood and death of the Waking World.
The leaves were swallowed by clear, hot oil, and their bitter scent merged with that of the hall—smoke-laden cedar, beeswax, and lavender. It had been years since my mentorship under Aita ended, but I still knew the scent of each leaf, root, oil, and powder. I knew their properties and uses, their dangers and benefits, where they came from and how to prepare them. And I knew that, together, this particular creation could cure the deadliest fever.
Aita watched the leaves dampen and curl, and when a fresh tendril of smoke coiled from the surface of the oil, she lifted the bowl from its small brazier and turned to me. I set out a clay jar, its black glaze smooth and cool against my fingers, and she poured the mixture inside. We moved with thoughtless efficiency, a partnership honed by years. I needed no words to prompt me, just the barest glance, the lightest hum.
That silent competency, rather than satisfy me as it once did, now filled me with an aching nostalgia.
As the last drop fell and the clay warmed beneath my hand, I slipped waxed cloth over the top, wound it tightly with string, and set the little vessel aside as quietly as possible, reluctant to break the stillness. A soft tap of clay on wood. The shush of my sleeve. The brush of my fingers as I laced them over my soft belly.
“It is unwise for the living to linger in the High Halls of the Dead,” a voice reverberated through the pillars, scattering smoke into eddies around a man in layered southern robes—burnt sumac red over earthen brown, embroidered with gold and white. His skin was pale as summer clouds and seemed to shift under my gaze, but his eyes were his most arresting feature: a deep bloody copper that once, my mother told me, had been the gentlest blue. “Go home, Yske.”
As blunt as his command was, he delivered it with distraction rather than ire. He wasn’t wrong. If the priesthood knew I still visited the High Halls as often as I did, they’d have said the same.
“Estavius.” I gave a short bow and reached for my satchel, hanging from a peg on the nearest pillar. It was heavy, already full to bursting with the herbs and salves and tonics I’d come to gather from Aita’s stores. I turned to conceal its weight, hoping the newcomer would not notice.
“What is it?” Aita tipped her head to one side, measuring the man as he approached. They both spoke in the Divine Tongue, the language of the Miri and the High Halls—a tongue no human could master, but which was universally understood.
Estavius, Miri and Emperor to the Arpa Empire in the south, remained quiet. I pulled the strap of the satchel over my head and settled it between my breasts, the hush thickening around me.
When Estavius had ascended to the throne of the Arpa Empire, drinking the blood of a true god and becoming that deity’s vessel, the price had been simple—his heart. Where affection, love, and all the complexities of emotion once occupied his pale blue eyes, now there was only that sharp copper glow.
His eyes followed me now. Whatever had brought him here, he clearly had no intention of discussing it with me present.
I felt a flutter of irritation, but it had no teeth. I’d spent enough time in these Halls to know there was little point in openly resisting when the Miri decided to hide things from me. When I was a child, the secrets told in my hearing had been myriad. But now that I was a woman, keen-eyed and possessed of magics I shouldn’t wield, the Miri were more inclined to guard their words.
I gave Aita and Estavius a lean smile and bowed. “Mistress, Lord.”
The healer ducked her chin in farewell. “Bring me that sweet tear, whenever you may.”
I nodded and, casting Estavius one last appraising glance, slipped off through the carved pillars.
The distance to the main doors was not what it should have been; to my eye, it was well over a dozen paces away, but the Hall brought me to it in little more than five. The Miri wanted me out, and the Hall, intrinsically bound to them, obeyed.
I pulled one of the great rings on the door, opening it just enough to slip into a cool summer night of churring insects and salt-laden breeze.
Before I pushed the door closed, I paused. I might be used to the Miri guarding their words, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t curious. Wood cool against my cheek and skirt brushing the dew-damp grasses, I put an ear to the crack between the doors and listened.
“…beyond the edge of the world, north of the rising sun,” Estavius’s voice confided. His words were quiet, but my senses had always been unexpectedly strong. “Movement, in the Unmade.”
“A shadow in darkness?” Aita laughed and the direction of her voice shifted, as if she’d turned back to her work. “Human eyes are faulty. You place too much trust in your people.”
Beneath my ear, the doors of the Hall of the Gods closed themselves with a soft, chiding tap. I stood back and stared up at them, every inch of the wood laden with knotwork and runes. Above them the steep roof of the hall swept out, the end of each beam carved in the likeness of animals and monsters, both of this world and the Waking one.
One of the creatures, a slit-eyed lynx, seemed to glower down at me for a moment, then returned her gaze to the looming sky. Sporadic stars trailed from horizon to horizon under her cool regard, the divided realms of the broadly termed High Halls united in a rare, uniform night.
I let out a shallow breath. The edge of the world. North of the rising sun. The Unmade. These were terms I’d heard the Miri use before, usually when they thought my child’s mind immersed in bundling plants or grinding seeds in a mortar. In creation there existed the two realms of the Made: the High Halls, where the Miri and the souls of human dead resided, and the Waking World, where humans lived and the Miri meddled.
But there were edges to the Made, and beyond them was the Unmade. I knew no one who had seen that emptiness, nor anyone who had seen the place where the sun was born, each morning, at its edge. Yet it seemed that Estavius’s people, the Arpa, had finally reached the boundary. And it had not been what they expected.
The thought was perturbing in a weightless, disconnected way. If I’d learned anything from my time in the High Halls, it was that the world was vast, and I was both small and irrelevant. I might turn an inquisitive ear to the Miri’s conversations, but the secrets I gathered were pretty stones in a child’s pocket. Novelties. Irrelevancies. What took place beyond the edges of creation was not my concern. What took place beyond the borders of my own village was not my concern.
Nor did I want it to be.
But then I saw the owls fly. They swept out from the slits of the hall’s high windows, carrying messages to the north, south, east, and west, and my curiosity turned to a burning need.
Aita and Estavius were summoning the Miri to counsel.
* * *
I waited silently, in the shadow of the forest at the base of the hill, as time stretched. At last, runes pulsed in the night. Each heralded the arrival of another figure or two, stepping seemingly from nowhere in hazes of runelight. It was too dark to make out the identities of most, but the last one was undoubtedly my mother, small and muscular, striding through the door of the hall in a mist of lingering amber magic. The hall’s double doors closed behind her with finality.
I hid my satchel in a tree and, gathering my skirts, slipped back up the hill.
By the time I convinced a side door to let me back inside—one carved with the face of a suspicious bear, who yielded to my pleading only after I sang him a whispered song—the council was deep in conversation. Voices drifted through the holly-wrapped pillars and the Hall’s usual smoke had lightened, streaming only up from the distant hearth. There, firelight cast a circle of old thrones into varied silhouettes.
I closed the door with the barest breath of wind and brush of fabric, then moved into the shadow of a pillar.
“…myself,” a deep female voice said from one of the thrones. Esach. She was the Miri who wove summer storms and birthed the yearly harvest. I saw her from the side, the slight curve of her pregnant belly visible above the arm of her chair. Her gray hair wound in a twist over one shoulder, stray hairs ignited by firelight. “Fate has said nothing of it.”
“Perhaps whatever these Arpa merchants saw is already gone,” Aita’s calm voice put forward.
“They saw nothing,” a male voice scoffed. I couldn’t see him—he lounged in a throne with its back to me, one booted foot dangling over an arm of the chair. A burly shoulder and elbow protruded from the opposite side. This was undoubtedly Gadr, former god of the Algatt and Esach’s temperamental lover.
I glanced around for their eldest son, but didn’t see him yet.
Gadr went on, “There is nothing and can be nothing in the Unmade. It’s Unmade. Why are you wasting my time?”
“Because what they saw may not be nothing,” another younger man replied, tempering him. He stood beside the fire, clad in a tunic of gray and blue herringbone weave. This was Vistic, one of two physical representations of our true god, Thvynder. He was also my cousin, by bond if not by blood.
“Just because the Arpa are human does not mean they are foolhardy,” Vistic reasoned, his golden eyes calm. His hair, dark and curling, was knotted at the back of his head.
The robed form of Estavius spoke from the other side of the circle, half visible through the rising hearthsmoke. “Agreed. They would not have come to me unless they were convinced what they saw was real.”
An unfamiliar figure shifted, and my heart leapt into my throat. Her hair was white and her skin pale, her body clad in a light kaftan and her feet wrapped in shoes of pale leather. She was a Winterborn, from a half-Miri tribe in the far north, and she looked so like another of my cousins—there were few in this world to whom I could not trace some relation—that my heart ached. But Thray was still in exile.
“I’ve sent Windwalkers to the edge of the world in the far north,” the Winterborn revealed. “They’ve yet to return.”
“Fate has given no sign of a new threat in the mortal world,” Esach put forward again.
Gadr threw in, “Go to her yourselves if you’re unconvinced.”
“I intend to,” Estavius murmured. His patience for the meeting already seemed thin.
“Then that’s good enough for me.” Gadr’s leg and shoulder vanished as he sat up straight. “Also, I feel I should point this out—Hessa’s daughter is skulking over there. Is no one going to do anything about that? Aita, if you’re going to keep your pets in common spaces, you really need to take responsibility for them.”
Every head turned and I pinned my spine to the pillar, biting the inside of my lips.
“Yske?” my mother’s voice called from a shadowed throne.
I felt my cheeks flush. Steeling myself, I stepped out from behind the pillar and strode toward the circle.
No one stopped me as I drew up next to Aita’s throne. Now that I had a clear view, I saw there were five Miri or half-Miri present: Aita, Esach, Gadr, Estavius, and the Winterborn woman. Then there was Vistic, standing by the fire. He couldn’t be rightly called a Miri—he had been born to mortal parents and was mortal himself, though he carried a vestige of our god within him.
Another young man lingered at the edge of the circle, previously hidden from sight by Esach’s throne. Isik, one of her sons by Gadr. He stood quietly at his mother’s left, their resemblance clear in their wide-set eyes and calm posture. He was trying not to laugh at my embarrassment, his eyes crinkling and his chin raised as he suppressed a grin. The corner of my mouth tugged in response, despite my burning cheeks.
The last guest was my mother. She sat in the throne that had once belonged to Eang, her black braid heavy over one shoulder. She wore a simple slate-gray tunic and belt, hung with a hooded axe at one hip and a long knife, horizontal across the opposite thigh. Her face was young for her age, despite a few threads of graying hair—a gift, Aita had confided in me, from the forbidden honey and water of the High Halls. But I could still see every one of her hard years in the depths of her earthen brown eyes, flecked with gold.
She raised her brows at me. The high back of the chair framed her like a crown, its knotwork carved in the memory of blade-sharp feathers and an owl’s watching eyes. “Daughter. Skulking?”
I smiled wanly. At least she didn’t seem angry with me. I might be twenty-one, but my mother’s disapproval still made my stomach curdle. “I was visiting Aita.”
Aita made a faintly amused noise, though it was so soft, I wasn’t sure anyone else heard.
Hessa watched me for another moment, then glanced back at the others. “What have we decided, then?”
“We do nothing, as my mother said,” Isik put forward. The amusement had faded from his eyes. In this meeting, he was not just my friend; he was a Miri, and heir to the powers and responsibilities of his parents.
Isik turned to Vistic. “If Windwalkers have already gone to check the northern borders, I suggest we wait to see what they find. Then we can reconvene and reassess.”
I felt my mother studying me and pulled my eyes from Esach’s son.
Vistic glanced around the circle and caught Estavius’s attention. The other man nodded, though barely, and Vistic concluded, “Very well. We wait.”
After a few more closing pleasantries, the assembly dispersed. Gadr crooked a farewell smile at his son and sauntered off toward the doors. The Winterborn and Vistic departed too, the latter leaving a kiss on my mother’s cheek before he followed Gadr out into the cricket-heavy hush of the night. Esach and Isik, however, fell into discussion and remained among the thrones as Aita and Estavius drifted away, wrapped in their own low conversation.
My mother put a hand on my back and prodded me out of the circle.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” I said as we found a quiet spot among the pillars. “I only thought to visit Aita.”
“There was nothing to intrude on—just Arpa murmurings of strange sights in the east, but I’m sure you gathered that.” We were of a height and when my mother leaned in to speak in my ear, our foreheads brushed. “Have you spoken to your brother recently?”
“No.” I glanced surreptitiously back toward the thrones. Esach and her son had begun to leave, and I suppressed an urge to call to my friend. “Why?”
“You should.” Hessa sighed and followed my gaze, but she didn’t seem to see the other pair. “I’ll let him explain.”
“Only that he’s a grown man and his choices are his own, and I can no longer stop him from doing as he pleases.” My mother paused, then took my arm in a gentle hold. “Speak some sense into him? Though please, tell him nothing of today. Speak of it to no one at all. This is a matter for the council, and there’s no need to stir unrest.”
I stilled, studying her face. “Of course,” I vowed. “Though I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong with Berin.”
“He has one of his schemes, that’s all.” My mother gave me a tight smile and gestured off in the direction Aita had gone. “You came to speak to Aita, I won’t keep you any longer. Goodnight, Yske.”