Nobody's Goddess (34 page)

Even without Elgar to guide me, the pool acted as before, but in reverse, its terrible purpose fulfilled. If the blade wasn’t key to traveling, then I didn’t know what was. I didn’t know where the power came from, and it was just as much a mystery to me as the healing powers of the men. Had the suffering of women called me? Whatever the reason, I had answered pain with pain. I set in motion all of the misery that the men and women of my village suffered for generations. I had saved the women from torment, but the price was the free will of all men and the liar’s choice of women.

All of that time I’d spent hating the laws of the first goddess—hating the very idea of goddesses—when I had made them all.

So lost was I in my thoughts that it took me a moment to realize the glowing cavern was lit up in red, not violet. I didn’t test my theory, but I suspected it was a sign I was no longer welcome, that the past was forever closed to me. The beating orb at the bottom of the pool even seemed to cease, the silence seemingly pushing me away. So I left.

When I exited the woods, I expected to see the altered village on the horizon. I almost wanted to see it, to know that I couldn’t go home, to have no choice but to devote myself to shielding the boy with a heart from the brunt of the pain I had caused him. It was a choice I wanted, a choice I should have had. But my feet carried me back to where I would live among those who suffered for my foolish tongue.

I headed toward my childhood home, not sure if my feet should instead take me straight back to the commune. But I was eager to at least see their faces. I didn’t deserve comforting, and my heart hardened knowing that I would likely find little comfort awaiting me regardless. Little did they know, though, what real reason they had to hate me.

I halted a few steps from the front door. A chill brushed the back of my exposed neck and down throughout my soaked body.

The castle had returned.

My heart soared, my stomach hardened. But the ground didn’t shake. They had worked, the words forming my final command. I’d given him permission to dispose of my power.

I pulled on the door in front of me.

“Noll?”

Jurij spoke my name. He stood next to the fireplace, his hand in Elfriede’s, a stark scar across his cheek, his left eye wrapped in a bandage. Wounds from my kiss, as though the castle and the lord had never vanished.

Tears littered Elfriede’s cheeks, her eyes neither on Jurij nor me but on the bed in the corner. Arrow sat alert by her side.

There sat my father, his arms thrown tightly across my mother.

My heart stopped.
Have I lost her a second—no, a third time?

But her eyes were wide open, her pale oak face almost glowing.

“Noll?” she croaked hoarsely. “Come here, darling!”

I obeyed freely.

Tears shed down my cheeks, and I felt the moisture with my fingertips like it was something entirely new. I’d forgotten the feeling. I hadn’t cried fully since the day before my seventeenth birthday.

We hugged and laughed and cried, my family and I, long into the evening that was already half-gone.

***

“From what Gideon and Elfriede tell me, there’s a strange gap in their memories that lasts about a month.” Mother tilted her head to face me. “All they can agree upon is that there was suddenly a monstrous shake of the earth. Everything that happened since the wedding is in dispute. No one can remember clearly.”

Including Elfriede’s last words to me that day, I wonder?

Father slept soundly in the bed beside Mother. A few paces away, Elfriede and Jurij slept in the bed I once shared with my sister, Arrow comfortably nestled at their feet. Elfriede’s breathing filled the air, as light and dainty as her speaking. The bed she shared with her husband, complete with a new headboard from Alvilda, no longer had room for me. There was no place for me in that house. But there I sat, at a chair pulled up next to the bed, my hand clutching Mother’s.

“A strange thing.” Mother picked up my hand and bounced it against her lap. “But there are stranger. Me sitting here, alive and well, for one. Aren’t you tired?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“I’ve spent enough time dreaming.” I shifted a loose lock of Mother’s golden and gray hair behind her smooth round ear. “I want to stay here and know that I’m finally truly awake.”

In the last embers of firelight in the hearth, I could just make out Mother smiling, her head against the pillows stacked in a pile to support her back. “The past year. It all seems a dream to me.”

You don’t know the half of it.

Mother tapped the back of my hand with her free palm. “I wish you would tell me what’s bothering you.”

I did my best to smile and pulled my hand away so I could remove the rose from my hair. The petals crumbled nearly as soon as my fingers touched them. “I can’t explain, not tonight. You’re still weak, and it’s been a long, long day.”

“I’m feeling much better. Almost like I was never ill, just sleeping, and now I’m still getting used to the waking world.” She stretched her arms above her head. Her face glowed in the dying firelight, and I knew she wasn’t lying. “Do you know who healed me?”

I didn’t dare to guess, not aloud.

Mother clasped her hands together over her lap. “It was your man. The lord.”

I shook my head. “He’s not my man.”

Mother smiled. “So I hear. But he was unmasked. And quite handsome, I might say. Although rather strangely pale.”

The corner of my mouth twitched. “Not as pale as his servants.”

His “servants.” The shades of all of his former lives. I shuddered to think just how many there were and how many years he had spent alone in his castle, only the shadows of his past selves to keep him company. I was surprised he wasn’t driven completely mad. Or maybe he had been.

“No,” Mother laughed, but then she bit her lip and looked pensive for a moment. “Noll, when I awoke, I found the lord sitting where you are now, his hands held over my head.”

My instincts had been right; Ailill had finished healing my mother, even after all I’d done to him.

“There was a strange violet light shining everywhere. And then it was gone. I wasn’t sure if I was still dreaming, so I tried to touch his arm, but he pulled away. I said, ‘You’re our lord, aren’t you? You’re Noll’s man.’”

I leaned closer to my mother to hear his answer.

“But all he said was, ‘Rest now. You’re healed—I’ve given you all I had to heal you—but you still need rest.’”

I’ve given you all I had.
His healing power was gone. He’d waited centuries for freedom, and his first act was to give up the last of his power.
For me?

My mother continued. “I called after him as he headed for the door, two of those servants of his waiting to attend him. ‘Wait! Let me thank you!’”

Don’t go! Don’t
…

“The servants and the lord stopped suddenly, but he wouldn’t face me. ‘No thanks are necessary,’ he said. ‘But I do have one request.’”

The lord’s words thundered through my mother’s mouth, his distaste as clear as if he were next to me: “‘Leave me be,’ he said. ‘Instruct all the village to leave me be. Send no women, send no men. My servants will come to the village for what is needed.’”

Stay away.
The little boy trembling in the garden, a black shawl around his head. The veil, the veil … always the veil between us.

Mother shrugged. “And then he was gone. Gideon told me he and his servants jumped into the black carriage that brought them here and were gone into the woods before he could even ask how he had healed me.”

I’d listened to Mother’s story without comment, mashing my tongue into my teeth when I heard of the lord’s break from me. Those final words were meant for me, I was certain. He said to stay away so I would leave him be. I’d have to. It was the least I could do, after what I put him through.

Mother wrung her hands in her lap. “What happened between you two?”

“I … ” I fumbled with the decaying rose petals in my hands. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Or if I could ever explain all that happened.

“Well,” said Mother, as she grabbed my hand in hers again. The petals fell to the ground, disappearing into the darkness at my feet. “May the first goddess watch over you and give you courage. You can tell me when you’re ready.”

I did my best to smile. “All right.” I didn’t think that day would ever come. Not if I had to rely on “the first goddess” to give me anything.

My eyes were just beginning to close when a pounding echoed across the house from the door, and I nearly fell out of my chair in fright. I jumped, my feet planted on the ground, my hands reaching desperately to pull it open. Who could it be at this time of night?

“Noll?” I heard Mother say. Father, Elfriede, Jurij, and Arrow stirred as the noise grew louder and louder, but I paid them all no mind. The door swung open, my hand clutching the handle, although I couldn’t remember opening it so wide.

Before me stood a man and a boy unmasked, their grins truly as wide as their faces, one of the man’s hands clutching a lantern above him, the other resting on the boy’s shoulders. Beside them was Nissa, her face almost as happy, even though her eyes were puffy and tired.

“We don’t need masks anymore!” screamed the boy. “The men in the commune started wandering around the village, telling people they didn’t feel so sad anymore. That they didn’t feel rejected by their goddesses. They didn’t feel anything about their goddesses at all! They took off their masks, and no one vanished!”

“And the castle doesn’t shake when we look at it!” added Nissa.

Of course. The rules of the village. Gone by the lord’s remaining power.

The man lifted his hand from the boy’s shoulder and extended it outward. I thought for a moment that he intended to hug me, but then Jurij brushed past me, and I spun to see Father and Elfriede behind me as well. Jurij and the man embraced, and the man sprinkled the top of Jurij’s curls with his kisses while fingering the bandages on Jurij’s face. A bit of the sparkle faded from his eyes. The eyes in which no flames were burning.

“Luuk!” Jurij picked the boy up and embraced him before setting him back on the ground. He mussed Nissa’s hair. They were laughing, all four of them.

Elfriede pushed past me and hugged the man as well, kissing both of his cheeks. “Goodfather, it’s a pleasure to finally see you.”

My heart had been so distracted; I’d taken too long to see what was right before me. I smiled, and the feeling was foreign to me, something from a dream I had long, long ago.

I stepped backward, wondering if I was still dreaming, if I could fall back asleep and pick a different dream, or if this was the one I’d always wanted. Father and Master Tailor shook hands. Elfriede scooped up the children in her arms and kissed both Luuk and Nissa on the cheek.

Jurij’s eyes fluttered from one to the other, and at last they rested on me. Those eyes seemed to understand that I was the one responsible for what they’d seen.

Eyes without flames. Each man’s eyes had lost the flames that bound them.

And I felt a strange stirring in my heart over the next few days as I walked the village and saw, one by one, the masked boys and men encounter the laughing, smiling faces of their peers. To see the others so free inspired them to grab a hold of their masks, throw down their coverings, and smash them.

***

“My father and mother are separating,” said Jurij. We lay together among the violet lilies atop my favorite picnic hill.

We could just make out the cottage at the edge of the woods from where we were sitting. The door opened and Elfriede stepped outside, one hand clutching a bucket and the other tucking a strand of fallen curls into the kerchief she wore on her head. She looked no larger than a mouse from where we were seated. She stared up at us for a moment, and I wondered what she thought, seeing her hated sister sitting on the hill with her husband while she worked, knowing her man wasn’t there to take the task from her. I wondered if he was really her man anymore, even if he still was her husband. Then she walked away, disappearing around the back of the home with her bucket to collect water.

Jurij didn’t run to her. He barely looked at her. He didn’t even mention her name.

I ran my fingers over the smooth and silky petals of a bloom. There were no thorns to cut me. “I’m sorry.” For his parents, for his goddess—for everything.

Jurij shrugged. “I’m not. It’s not as if they hate each other. In fact, I think a different bond has formed between them, now that they’re not bound by a love neither truly wanted. And Mother will still help Father daily with the sewing.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Mistress Tailor not one for woodcarving?” I asked, now knowing full well where Mistress Tailor intended to live.

Jurij laughed. “No. Auntie may love her, but she’s not blind with her passion. She knows her craft would suffer if Mother encroached upon it. Auntie likes to put too many ‘wild and useless’ details into her carvings, after all.”

I was not shaken when Alvilda made her confession; she was a woman in love with another woman, and Mistress Tailor had loved her all of this time, too. Women had always had a choice to love, after all—since I gave them that freedom. Still, even if a part of her always dreamed of the day in which Mistress Tailor would be hers to love freely, surely Alvilda regretted the loss of her lonely life just a little. Mistress Tailor seemed to irritate her almost as much as she made her happy. I was sure Mistress Tailor would also find a hardheaded partner just as vexing as the eager-to-please one she left behind.

“What about the kids?” I tried to imagine Alvilda as a mother, and I wasn’t sure the role suited her. Still, she made a rather fun aunt, and I could see her discouraging the kids from working.

Jurij was oblivious to the mischievous slant of my inner thoughts. “They’ll live with both of them, spending their nights at one’s home and then the other’s as they wish.”

“And Jaron?” I asked, thinking of Mother.

Jurij stroked a blade of grass. “He’s not a bad looker, that Jaron, without his mask. I think he’s having a hard time adjusting to a heart that’s free.” He leaned in to whisper. “They say he’s been seen in the village with a
number
of women these past few nights already.”