A second flood of water fell upon Nariah’s head, and she sputtered through it and flung out her arms. She was sopping wet from head to toe, her shoes were gone… actually, all of her clothes were gone, only her bracelet remained. Light fell upon her so brightly that she could barely see.
Water sloshed from a fast-running faucet into a bucket somewhere close by. Footsteps ran toward her, likely to douse her with the hot liquid once again.
“Enough!” Nariah bellowed, back-fisting blindly through the steam and wet hair that clung to her face.
Someone yelped behind her, and the bucket dropped to the floor. A second set of footsteps came running, and Nariah whirled on them, fists raised. She may not have been trained to fight, but she’d give it her best shot. She wasn’t going down without a fight, not even naked and blind.
“Please, m’lady, we’re only washing your hair,” a timid young woman said.
A shaking hand came to rest on Nariah’s shoulder. A towel brushed against her face, and Nariah snatched it away as she wrenched herself from the stranger’s grasp. Wiping her face first, she shoved the hair away from her eyes and saw two trembling servants, one on the floor cradling a heavily-bleeding nose, and the other kneeling beside her and stroking her back.
Both wore strange white robes which hung from their necks to their ankles in form-masking sheaths. Well, one still had a white robe. The other had a white robe which was now speckled with blood. Their long sleeves were tied up with blue ribbons around their shoulders, and their hair was wrapped in blue silk scarves.
Nariah must have only imagined being at home. This bathroom was not tiled in the richly colored mosaics that typically covered tiled washing rooms. Instead, plain tan stucco was all there was to see on the walls. The floor was a smooth, polished white granite, but the tub itself was little more than an oversized cast iron soup kettle.
Milky white water overflowed the tub around her, but the faucet was actually no faucet at all. Instead, a bamboo track led water from a square hole in the wall directly into the tub itself. Something smelled delicious…
“You’re in the private quarters of lords Estes and Franco,” the non-bleeding servant said, her voice stronger, almost angry, but her eyes averted to the floor.
“Estes and who?”
“Estes, lord of Dark, and Franco, lord of Light,” the second woman said, wincing as she dabbed at her nose with a handkerchief. “They said you would not know much.”
Nariah cut her a glare. Was that sarcasm?
Mouthwatering aromas of the same herbs from dinner were all around her. She looked around for the food, wondering if more sheir had been brought to the washroom. Maybe someone here had finally realized how little she must have eaten recently…
The bloodied servant got to her feet and made her way slowly out of the room, turning for the slightest of curtseys before sliding a heavy wooden door closed behind her. Narrowed eyes cut to Nariah, despite the curtsey, the servant gritting her teeth for less than a second before disappearing from view. A pang of guilt hit Nariah in the chest.
Before she was exiled, she was a moderate mistress. She could be kind, but she was also strict. That lifestyle left little but bitterness when her own servants dragged her from her room by her hair and tossed her out to the mob like a satchel of rubbish ten years ago. Irony thought she was the pure one, eh? Maybe Raiyer was right… these bad habits should have died long ago.
“I’m sorry for hitting her,” Nariah murmured.
“You should have told her that, m’lady. Not me,” the second servant, a little older than the first, pointed out in a motherly reprimand, but a soft smile graced her lips all the same.
Flames hotter than the burning water she stood in shot through her body. The second servant had been there all along. How had she forgotten?
The servant lowered a small door over the square hole in the wall, cutting off the water.
“I’m sorry for…” Nariah began, but her apology escaped her.
She was sorry for what? Having another vision? Being rude? Not giving them a chance to do their job? There were too many things to apologize for.
Tension hung between them in the air, but the servant broke it first with a forced smile.
“Shrive is a dramatic girl, but she wears her heart on her sleeve. Share your apology with her the next time you meet, and as long as you mean it, all will be well,” the servant said.
Grabbing a bar of lye soap from a stool nearby, the servant motioned for Nariah to sit back down in the tub. Nariah reluctantly obeyed, sucking her breath in sharply when the hot water covered her chest. That’s when it hit her, the scent of the herbs from dinner—they were in the tub.
“What is this?” she muttered, looking around for a spit. Her face paled. Were these people cannibals? Were the lords mortal-eaters? The monks used to warn of fake deities consuming mortal flesh, but surely these lords would not…
“Franco asked the herbalist to send something to relax you, to wake you from your trance. The hot spring’s water brings a magic of its own, amplifying the properties of the herbs, or so Alchemist Reihn would have us believe. The cast-iron will bring iron back to your blood, as well. You were a bit blue in the face when the lord dropped you in here.”
The servant ladled some water into Nariah’s hair and began to scrub, but her thoughts were running together.
“Franco, the lord of Light? That’s who put me in here—” She looked down at her nude body, and her eyes bulged from her face. No man had laid eyes on her unclothed, not even a physician. Much less…
“With your clothes still on, and everything,” the servant’s voice interjected. A smile was tugging at the older woman’s face.
“Shrive and I had to peel them off of you, though we thought of cutting them off and being done with it. Little more than rags, aren’t they?”
The insult burned itself into Nariah’s chest like a brand. If only these people knew how many months it had taken her to earn that barely-passible outfit. The bleeding sores that had gone unwrapped and untreated and nearly turned her hands black with Ground Rot while she waited. The peeling, burning skin atop her head from the sun’s merciless rays so close to the desert before she could scrape up even a simple shawl from a Fieldsman who was too hungry to avoid trading her week’s rations for it.
Nariah realized that the servant was watching her crestfallen face very carefully. The woman’s smirk gave way to a tenderness that the exile never expected to see from another soul.
“Forgive me, m’lady,” she whispered, raising Nariah’s sun-stained, calloused hand to peer at the palm of it. “You may have been noble—we knew as much the moment we saw your purple eyes—but these hands tell another tale. Forgive me.”
Gently tugging her hand from the servant’s grasp, Nariah pulled her knees up to her chin and stared into the milky water. There was nothing to forgive. Not of the servant. Not even of her people. Had she been in their shoes, she would have likely thought and done the exact same.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” she forced the words off her tongue at last. The servant smiled and gently squeezed her shoulder before rising from beside the tub.
“I’m off to check on Shrive a minute, m’lady, and fetch you some nightclothes. Will you be okay?”
A practiced smile from years ago came flying back to Nariah’s face. She may be in despair, but the servants didn’t need to see it. The lords definitely didn’t need to hear about it, either. The time for prayers was gone.
“Of course.”
The servant curtsied, then slid out the door. Nariah blanched as she realized that she didn’t even know this woman’s name. She had to be kinder, be more thoughtful. Her days as the heiress to the king were long gone; her sister Deborah would rule. Kindness was an option for Nariah now. She just had to choose it.
“Wait!” Nariah called, stopping her at the last second. “What is your name?”
The servant smiled. “Pearl, m’lady.”
“Thank you, Pearl,” Nariah said, her smile softening into one far more genuine. “You are the first person to show me kindness in a long, long time.”
“I know, m’lady. Think nothing of it.”
* * *
Soft, cushioned pillows and a literal pile of down blankets did not make for an easy night’s sleep for an exile used to sleeping on packed earth with only a tent made of stitched-together grain sacks between her and the stars. The fluffy mattress swallowed her, shifting every time she moved and waking her from any semblance of sleep. Despite being exhausted from the past few days and an afternoon without answers, she found no solace in the luxurious bed.
After only an hour, Nariah abandoned Franco’s generously offered bed in exchange for the cold wooden floor. While the lord of Light had roomed with Rowan for the night to give her privacy, she couldn’t change who she’d become. Her noble life was behind her, lost to the wind like the tiniest speck of sand.
Sand.
She held her freshly manicured hand up before her, unable to see it in the windowless room without a moon to cast light upon her. There was no more sand beneath her nails. Her hands and feet had all been scrubbed with rough stones until they ached to sand down her callouses. The scent of palm tree still lingered on her hands.
There was no more dirt in her hair, which had been fried and frizzy from years of involuntary neglect. Mattes were cut out, and her curls were painstakingly combed and thoroughly conditioned with coconut oil before being wrapped in a silk head scarf which matched the servants’ light blue headdresses. In the morning they would wash her hair again, but Pearl mused it would take a long time to regain the luster it once held.
Nariah sighed, dropping her arm back across her stomach. She missed her old clothes. The hard ground. The chirping of cicadas that should be out this time of year, and the smell of freshly-tilled earth just beyond where she slept. An eerie sense of surreal comfort washed over her.
Five days—that’s all the time Irony had given her. She had five days to convince the lords to aid her, before the goddesses burned Nariah’s kingdom to the ground.
Staring up at where the exposed rough-hewn wooden rafters would have been visible, had she some sort of light, Nariah wished for a moment that she could see the stars. Unlike the world they watched over, or the unpredictable goddesses they served, the stars offered a constant familiarity that would never dim. Nariah sighed, tracing the outline of her bracelet in the dark.
How badly she needed something familiar in a place as strange as this.
Irony’s words twisted her gut and repeated themselves in her mind over and over again. Her people were doomed. Two visions had plagued her for the past ten years. In both of them, Ellonai burned. But at least in the second, some would survive. They could make a new life somewhere.
Heaviness fell over her, stealing the breath from her lungs.
They could make a new life, but did they deserve to? Were they truly as tainted as Irony said?
Tossing and turning, Nariah squeezed her eyes closed in a vain attempt to hold back the doubts creeping up within her. It wasn’t just Irony who thought her people were corrupted. Death said as much himself.
Closing her eyes offered Nariah no peace, though. Burning people, burning buildings, and the lords trying in vain to save a paltry number of lives haunted her dreams.
Who would do something like this, even as a goddess? Who would benefit from such wanton death?
Death…
Nariah bolted upright where she sat.
If the lords gained power as the goddesses were said to, then Death would grow more powerful with every mortal life he claimed. He was the only lord who seemed to openly hate her, too. But she watched him ride with her to save the kingdom in her visions.
Grasping her head, she tried to quiet the questions that multiplied in her mind. Nothing made sense. Probabilities gave way to doubts, and doubts gave way to fears. Standing, she began to pace, trying to calm herself from the building terror of the unknown.
Tremors ran through her body until her teeth chattered. It was so cold in that room, despite the white fleece night dress she’d been given to wear to bed. Being deep within the mountain sapped the warmth from the air, and there was no fire in the room to warm her.
A knock tapped the door so softly that for a second Nariah thought she was hearing things. Tiptoeing closer to the sliding door, she fumbled for the latch. By the time she managed to open it, she was sure whoever had come would be gone. Sliding the door open, she grimaced at the sound of wooden wheels in the tracks along the floor and ceiling. Dark was sleeping in his own room nearby, Pearl had said.
Nariah’s breath caught in her throat as a pair of black eyes swirling with miniscule ribbons of green met hers from just outside the door.
Speaking of Dark… Irony’s words from earlier came rushing back.
“Estes,” Nariah breathed, greeting the lord of Dark with a clumsy curtsey.
He grimaced in response, but nodded. A faint glow, just enough to bring outlines within the room into view and illuminate his face a bit, radiated from his body. Nariah glanced around desperately for a shawl or some other covering besides her knee-length nightgown, but it was impossible to locate anything, even with Dark’s glow.
“I heard you pacing,” he said. Heat shot through her body. Draped in an ankle-length ebony bathrobe with a thick blue sash around the waist and a neckline that plunged down just below his chest, she’d obviously woken him up.
The thought that she could wake him had, among the deluge of other concerns on her mind, never occurred to her. In the silence that rained over them in that moment, even shifting her weight from one foot to the other brought the faintest of squeaks. Of course he’d heard her pacing.
“I’m so sorry I woke you!”
Dark grinned, a thin, tight-lipped smile that gave the impression he rarely smiled.
“I am the lord of Dark,” he reminded her. “I do not sleep when the sun does. That would be my brother’s department.”
Shuffling in the hall drew Nariah’s attention beyond Dark. A petite woman in a black dressing gown matching Dark’s and disheveled platinum blonde hair scurried past, then exited through the front door. Color drained from Nariah’s face, but Dark didn’t give the woman a passing glance.
“That is precisely why I was chosen to be your suitemate this evening, though,” Estes continued, either not seeing the woman or not caring. “Franco, in all his wisdom, thought you might need a bit of distracting tonight, since it’s your first night here and all.”
Distracting. What manner of distraction could a lord of darkness possibly provide her, aside from… The woman in Dark’s bathrobe a moment ago had left in quite a rush. Surely he didn’t mean that kind of distracting?
“No, no. No distractions are needed,” she assured him.
He shrugged, tightening his robe so that the neckline closed a bit higher up, for which she was thankful. No mortal was worthy of lying with a lord. She was appalled at the brazenness that someone would even try.
“In that case,” he offered, “I’ll just give you a tour. We whisked you back here in a trance, you know. One should know how to get out of a place before laying their head down to sleep.”
Turning on his heel, Dark took his glow and made his way quickly to the door. Afraid of being left behind, she hurried after him, shivering in the drafty hallway that ran between her room and his. At the end of the hall, Franco slid back the main door to the suite and stepped out without holding it for Nariah. Dashing forward, she barely had time to grab it before it slammed closed.
An ocean breeze rushed over her as she stepped outside. Moonlight cast a pale, cold glow upon the rockface to either side of her as she emerged on an open-air balcony that connected to a long, open hallway that ran along the side of the mountain.
Light and Dark’s sleeping chamber, a small suite consisting of two sleeping rooms, the onsen hot spring bath, and a single bamboo-floored tea room, had been carved directly into the side of the mountain. As Nariah hurried after Dark’s quickly-retreating form in the hallway, she passed several other single doors, which she assumed led to other sleeping suites.
As she walked, she noticed that above each door a pair of symbols had been painted in vibrant colors. A tree full of leaves sat beside a tree that was barren over the next door she passed. The one after that brought a constellation of stars in the shape of an eye.
Angry shouts echoed out of the next open door, which sat beneath a balanced set of golden scales. Dark stood just outside the doorway, arms crossed and with his head cocked as he listened in on whatever dispute was taking place.
“Keet and I have slept together for the last fifteen years!” a man shouted, desperation and grief bringing his voice to crack. “He would never just fly off for no reason!”
The voice sounded familiar… maybe War’s? Nariah shook her head. She’d met so many people, so many lords, that they all ran together. Reaching Dark’s side, she paused next to the door with him, relieved to find the sleeping suite’s hallway empty. A flickering light in one of the two sleeping rooms cast the shadows of two people on the paper partition.
“Easy there, I’m sure he just popped out for some fresh air. You should shower more, is all.” Nariah’s skin crawled at the leering cruelty in Karma’s voice as he mocked whoever was in distress.
“He’s all I have left from Mother,” came a whispered reply.
As the voices hushed beyond hearing, Dark tapped her on the shoulder and nodded down the hall. He moved on so quickly that she stumbled to keep up. Cold, polished stone underfoot had her bare feet prickling with numb spots, but she dared not complain.
“Who is it that’s missing? Keet, he said?” she asked Estes.
The lord of Dark nodded. “Truett’s falcon. It was a gift from his mother before we came to your lands. Funny thing, that. Keet rarely leaves Truett’s side.”
That’s odd, Nariah thought. Why would a loyal companion leave War’s side after being with him for fifteen years straight? An icy cold breeze cut through her, bringing a shiver down her spine. Shaking her head, she hurried after Dark. Who was she to worry about things even lords didn’t have the answers to?
Leaving the sleeping suites behind, the hall curved upward slightly, and the moon came into view on the horizon. Nariah’s heart leapt at the sight of so many stars—thousands of them—everywhere she looked. She’d never seen so many. Without thinking, she found herself drawn to the railing, her jaw dropping slightly. Thousands of stars cast their reflection upon the dark ocean waves below. It was as though space had come alive in the ocean’s waters, and was beckoning her to find herself in its depths.
Estes cleared his throat as he came to stand beside her, taking in the beauty of the world around them.
Raising a hand, he pointed at a range of mountains so far in the distance that she could barely make them out in the darkness.
“The Ichtharian mountains border Ellonai’s farthest reaching lands. The Ichtharian range is a good ten leagues from here. I don’t recommend trying to swim home.”
Nariah blanched at the thought of going home. The furious mob and their torches had made perfectly clear what would happen, should she return. No amount of hair changes or disguises could hide the royal purple eyes that betrayed her identity to anyone who glanced her way. She should have realized that before she tried to buy tomatoes the day before.
“Estes!”
Truett slid to a stop in front of them and grabbed Estes’s arms.
“Have you seen Keet?!” the lord of War demanded.
Truett’s eyes were glassy with tears, his brow furrowed and chest heaving from his run despite being in good shape. For a second, Nariah could have sworn that he was trembling, too. Could a falcon, even one from his mother, be worth so much distress?
Estes shook his head.
“He’s gone! I have to find him!” Truett cried, and then the bulky man was off, running pell-mell up the hall to whatever lay ahead.
Dark crossed his arms and clucked his tongue.
“Well,” he mused, more to himself than to Nariah, “I was going to show you the shrines next, but with Truett running around up there, the monks may be a bit predisposed.”
“Can they help him?” Nariah asked.
Estes shrugged again, his lips pressed closed in a grim, thin line. Offering no other answer, he continued on up the hall anyway with Nariah right on his tail.
They passed a large pair of double doors seemingly forged from pure white gold, and Nariah paused for just a moment to examine them closer. Gold and white gold twisted into thin braids ran along the door’s surface in not only a border, but also as raised murals. Different lords, towering twice the size of the humans in the scenes depicted, sat on thrones. Various fields full of crops, vines, or trees, spread beyond the thrones in the depictions.
For the life of her, Nariah couldn’t tell who the lords in each depiction were supposed to be in real life. The closer she looked, the more she realized that she’d never once considered the lords’ nature, or purpose in her world, aside from the salvation of her kingdom in her visions.
Vibrations under her feet drew her attention to the floor. Persistent thrumming pulsed through the ground, accompanied by the muffled songs of many men at once. On and on the songs lingered from the other side of the doors. Deep bass voices sent the most noticeable tremors through the earth, but together the crescendo of their worship shook the very mountain within which they stayed.
The language of the worshipping monks was difficult to understand, almost entirely foreign. She picked up the words Dark, Light, and Healing, but that was the gist of it. Whatever they were singing, though, it seemed to be a desperately fervent prayer.
Dark was a good distance ahead of her again, and she jogged to catch up. They were nearly to the end of the hall now, where it dead-ended into a sheer cliff-face. A pair of tall doors brought clairvoyance on her location at last. The dining hall doors from the day before rose up before her, though no laughter was heard on the other side this time.
“I’m telling you, I haven’t seen your fowl!” Franco said as Estes opened the door. “Keet is not mortal; he will be back and no worse for wear. We, on the other hand—” Franco motioned to Rowan, who sat across the table from him, “—we need sleep. Rest. Strength.”
“Franco is right, Truett,” Rowan sighed, his eyes glistening with tears of their own, and his lower lip trembling. “Keet is special. You and I both know what he meant to Mother. But battles cannot be waged with tears and vexing—you should not know that better than any of us.”
Raw sorrow fell over the room with that pronouncement. Something truly awful had happened; they all knew it. Nariah wasn’t even a lord, but she could feel loss on the wind and in the depth of her bones. Wind rustled her hair as she stood in the doorway, bringing whispered warnings in a woman’s soft voice into the room from very far away.
“The eclipse will purge all with fire and ice. Beware, those who hold the blood of glory.”
Nariah didn’t know this voice. It wasn’t Irony’s, but it was also so faint, she wondered if she’d imagined it. The lords all snapped their heads in her direction at once.
Karma appeared at the table in a cloud of teal fog. He stood, his back rigidly straight, his leering smile nowhere to be seen.
“Destiny…” Karma whispered, a hint of longing seeping into his voice. Staring straight at Nariah, but not at her at the same time, he reached out a hand. It was almost as though he was looking through her to the balcony.
The weight of a soul-piercing gaze on her from behind drew Nariah to turn around as slowly as she dared. There, hovering above the ocean and draped in full moonlight, a woman hovered parallel to them. Her hair shone in ever-changing hues of blue, green, and violet. Smooth, white skin with veins of silver glistened in the moonlight, like a living marble statue.
She was a goddess.