The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski

THE GOD

IN HERRAN, OUR FAITHFUL CELEBRATENinarrith, a day when they pray for our return.

We left for your sake, I would tell them. When did a god ever do a human good? What did my love bring Irenah except brief joy and the baby that came of it? Irenah lived long enough after the birth to love the child, and then she was gone. Gods are not all-powerful, not even Death, and had I gone to him and betrayed my sin of visiting the mortal world, and beseeched him, he would not have intervened. I might have accused him. The Seamstress was once mortal, I could have said. You made her one of us. The pantheon is incomplete, after our loss of the god of discovery. Make Irenah a new god, to complete the hundred.

And what of your child? he would ask sadly. Death is stern but the kindest, perhaps, of us all. He would say, What will you do when her time comes, and that of her child, and of that child’s child? They will all die. To love a mortal is to know loss. It is the nature of mortality: to know that nothing beloved will be yours forever. Every relationship you cherish ends in death.

Irenah slipped away from me. Death claimed her. He took her to his lands, the shadowy realm beyond where we gods live. As I cannot die, so can I never follow her.

After Irenah’s death, I returned home and hid my grief, even from myself. Ethin held nothing for me but suffering. Yet I could not help but watch.

I watched the dark-eyed Sid of the Herrani, released from her prison by Nirrim’s friends, present a red feather to the guards.

The queen has granted me passage from the city, Sid said. You know I am her favorite subject. Look, here is a sign of her favor, the sigil she gave to me to prove her orders: a feather from her Elysium bird.

Perhaps I did a little more than watch that moment. Perhaps I also gave Sid’s lie an extra aura of believability. Sid walked free, and retrieved the map from its hiding place. She took the path from the city that delved into the jungle. In the heat, which made the thick greenery almost slippery with humidity, she passed where I once grew, my roots curling into the ground, my blossom heavy and soft in the sun. Consulting the map, she stepped off the path, using her dagger to hack her way through vines. Boots muddied, skin traced with thin bloody lines acquired by pushing through bushes with sharp-edged leaves, she stumbled into the clearing made thousands of human years ago.

You came, said Morah, whose blood flowed with just enough of a gift inherited from her long-ago ancestor, the god of foresight.

What is this place? Sid, sweaty and bedraggled, stared at the mysterious objects marking the clearing.

It is the way to the realm of the gods, Morah said. Will you go?

Overwhelmed with exhaustion, with the improbability of it all, Sid sank to sit in the mud. Me?

You.

How?

I don’t know, Morah said.

If you don’t know, how would I know? Sid said, desperate, despairing. I’m not god-touched, not like my father. Even if I could—I can’t believe I’m saying this—go to the realm of the gods, they probably would be none too happy to see me. I don’t light candles in their temples as often as I should, my mother is a complete infidel—

Try, Morah said.

Sid covered her eyes and sighed into her palms.

I love Nirrim, too, Morah said. Find the god of thieves. Ask for Nirrim’s heart. Steal it if you must.

Steal from the god of thieves?

Try, Morah said again, and Sid remembered telling her father it was cold in her parents’ shadow, that she longed for a story of her own. Sid looked out at the clearing, its borders hedged by walls of greenery, the sky above a brutal blue. She took the speckled yellow feather that had belonged to her parents from her pocket, and matched it against the red Elysium one. The humble yellow feather’s vane was slender. Sid wondered where the bird that had dropped this feather was now—if it was even alive. This feather was older than she was. The Elysium feather’s opalescent quill shone in the light, its pink afterfeather a soft down. Sid thought—as I have often thought—about how humans invest objects with such meaning.

I think it is because mortals always miss what is not there. They long for what is gone—a moment, a home, a person. In this, mortals and gods are alike.

I miss Nirrim, Sid thought.

In the clearing, one hundred slender silver poles stood tall, each at a distance from the other. How could poles become a path to an immortal realm? she wondered, when a red blur soared out of the jungle and perched on top of one of the poles. It was an Elysium, though not Nirrim’s—this one had strong streaks of green down its back. It opened its mouth to sing, and vanished. It was as if it had evaporated upon the point of that tall, shining pole, like a colorful cloud melted away instantly by the sun.

At that moment, in Ethin, Nirrim’s bird sang, too, distracting Nirrim from her search in the Council library. She was looking for information on Herran. It was a beautiful country, Sid had told her once long ago, its crops abundant. From the city, one could see the northern mountains. They looked like smoky blue glass. People rode horses. What is a horse? Nirrim had asked, and when Sid described them, the animal sounded like a mythical creature.

Such a country, Nirrim thought, would benefit from my rule. It did not matter that Sid had claimed that her parents loved her, and stood by her choices. Sid belonged to Nirrim, not to the king and queen of Herran.

Sid must have been lying to herself, Nirrim decided, just as she once had, inventing a way for a cruel parent to seem less cruel. Yes, it would be for Sid’s own good if Nirrim harnessed the power of her people’s magic and seized Herran. It would be for the good of all Herrani. Her fingers paused on the spine of a book and pulled it from the shelf. In the careful hand of a councilmember was drawn a map of the seas around Herrath, and the lands beyond. The map was accompanied by a few pages of history—too little for Nirrim’s liking, but enough to tell her the brief story of Queen Kestrel and King Arin. It was a tale of hatred, sacrifice. Devotion. It was the kind of mortal tale the gods love.

Nirrim skimmed through the pages, impatient with the details of their relationship, eager for practical information, such as ordnance, defenses, and the number of the standing army. She found notes on the Herrani language, with pages of vocabulary.

She was barely reading, just committing each page to memory, when her Elysium called again and floated out the door.

It was hunting for something.

Nirrim, my daughter, born of mortal blood and divine grace—the only one of her kind, a true demigod—shoved the book under her arm and left the library to follow the god of discovery’s bird. As she quickened her pace through the palace halls, terror and rage churned in her chest. She had already guessed where the bird was going, and dreaded that she might know the reason.

Nirrim followed the bird’s elegant swoop toward her rooms, and flung open the doors.

Her lover was gone.