The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
THE GOD
“KEEP YOUR PROMISE, THIEVERY,”I say to the god. “Give this meddling mortal Nirrim’s heart so that she may give it to me, and then wander with the human dead.” I see that Sid silently struggles, as if trying to free herself, though there is nothing but what she imagines. Since whatever traps her is a lie she believes, I can undo it easily. I touch her shoulder. She screams as if burned, but whatever she believed bound her falls away. She claps a hand to her shoulder and stares at me.
In Nirrim’s palace, where Sid’s body lies in the queen’s bed, freshly bathed and dressed in clothes fit for a king, her dagger belted at her hip, the cloth at her shoulder smokes and forms a hole, revealing a welt. Nirrim, her expression uncertain, touches the burn, but Sid’s body sleeps on, undisturbed. Her eyelashes do not even flicker.
In my realm, from which I may very well soon be banished, Sid cannot look away from me. “You are Nirrim’s parent?” she says.
“Yes.”
“But you can’t be.”
“Why?”
“You are a woman.”
Members of the pantheon laugh. Wearily, I say, “I am a god. What you understand of men or women and children or no children has nothing to do with me.”
Thievery pours the rosy smoke into Sid’s uplifted palm. “Well?” he asks Death. “Is my punishment ended? May I reclaim my home? Have I proven the truth?”
“Yes,” Death says, and then everyone’s gaze falls upon me.
In Herran, Death’s godchild, Arin the Plain King, looks up from his lawn in surprise. It has begun to snow, after a week of clear cold, but that is not what surprises him. It is a crimson bird, diving toward him with urgency. It lands before him on the sparse snow and sings.
“This is very sad,” the god of games says. “Very grim. Were I a human, I might cry. The last time we invested ourselves in the mortal world, there was blood and suffering and I, personally, could use a little more variety this time.”
Arin reaches for the roll of paper tied to the Elysium bird’s leg. As he unrolls it, snow flickers down upon his bowed head, disappearing into the silver of his hair. As he reads the badly phrased threat, he remembers what his daughter told him of the island, how she had marked its location on the map, how she had warned him to pay attention to the invasion in the Cayn Saratu.
“I propose some amusement,” the god of games says. “Sid of the Herrani was born in my year, and has been touched by the god of lies. Her family honors Death. She is no ordinary mortal. She has found her way to us with barely any assistance. She has risked everything for her lover. Is her story to end now? So unsatisfying. Let us see if she can find her way home. I wager that she can, and if I win, I shall decide the punishment for the god of lies.”
All attention falls on me and Death. “No,” I say. I know too well the god of games’s cruelty. Better that Death decide my fate.
“Yes,” Death says. “Should the mortal fail, and I claim her, and send her to the mortal shadow realm, then you, god of games, will cease to gamble and play for an entire human century.”
The pantheon murmurs its approval. Even I am not displeased with the stakes. The god of games has wrought untold havoc. She loves to disrupt the pantheon with her giddy wiles. I am not her only victim. The god of night still has not forgiven her for winning his favorite cat.
“You are a bore,” says the god of games, “but I agree.”
Arin crumples the letter in his fist.
Surrender his country? No one will threaten his child and live. He heads to the stables to saddle his horse, then rides to the harbor, where he tells his harbormaster to alert his vessels and make certain they are loaded with cannon, for he is going to war.