The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
SID
THE GOD OF GAMES STEPSclose to me, her long red hair slipping over her shoulder in waves, her narrow black eyes gleaming like the shell of a beetle. Her eyes resemble those of the people of the tundra to the north of Herran. At her throat glows an emerald on a chain, but aside from this jewel she is dressed simply, in trousers and boots.
I glance behind me, in the direction I came, but there is nothing but a void into which I could fall.
The god pats my cheek. I think from her smile that she means to be gentle—or gentle enough—but my skin stings as if slapped. “Make me proud,” she says. “Go home, little one.”
“I don’t know how,” I say helplessly.
“Forget how. Remember why.”
I am about to explode in frustration—what nonsense advice is this?—when I check myself by recalling that one does not yell at a god, let alone this god, who is my god, if any of them are. And as I pause for a moment, I think of how my mother sometimes, when I was little, waved her hand impatiently when I pestered her about why she had been able to beat me so easily at Bite and Sting. What was her strategy? How had she done it?
Tadpole, she said, sometimes the best way to win is not to think too hard about how you will do it, but why. What is the outcome you wish to see? Which tiles do you want to hold in your hand at the end of the game? Why do you want those tiles? If you know why, you will know how.
I hear again my grandfather, giving me much the same advice when I confronted him about Kestrel’s assassin, and he warned me not to think of who could do this, but why.
He said, The answer begins with you.
And in my mind, now, he says, The god gives you good advice.
“Thank you,” I tell her.
She grins broadly, black eyes sparkling. Her laughter is terrifying. “See how quickly you learn!” Then she closes my left palm around the rosy smoke that is Nirrim’s heart, claps her many-fingered hand on the shoulder the god of lies did not burn, spins me around one, twice, three times, and pushes me into the void.