The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski
THE GOD
“NOW,” SAYS THE GOD OFgames, “there is the small matter of your punishment.”
It is only us. The pantheon has dissipated. “Mete it out. Decide, and let us be done.”
If she were a human in the mortal realm, the god of games would have stretched out, as satisfied as a cat on a comfortable chair. As it is, her smirk is all too human. Sometimes I forget she used to be human, before she gambled for immortality and won.
“You must tell me a story,” she says. “That is your punishment.”
I search her expression, looking for the trick, the sting in the scorpion’s tail.
“There is no trick,” she says. “It is what I want. Your story is what all this has been for: the winding path that led my godchild, that sly Herrani gamester, to your mortal-born Nirrim. Really, I chose you. Aren’t you flattered? We are family now! Go on, tell me everything that happened from the time I changed you into a rose. Tell me about Nirrim and Sid, and what they will do in their world. Tell me what they are doing right now. Make it good, Liar, or you shall suffer my displeasure.”
And so I tell her about Irenah. I tell her about my grief. I describe the prison where Sid and Nirrim met. I describe how Sid and Nirrim pick their way through a damaged city to meet Arin, who pulls his daughter into his arms. I paint the colors of the Elysium bird diving down from the sky to Nirrim’s shoulder, and of the crimson feather Nirrim offers yet again to her sister, Annin, who accepts it. I explain how Morah, whose gift is knowing the truth, recognizes from Nirrim’s expression that she cannot yet forgive herself, even if Annin forgives her. Morah thinks about how the path home is not always easy. Then when she glances into the crowd, she immediately forgets her thoughts, because she sees someone she knows: the boy Killian, Sid’s young spy. Killian is hers. She sees it in his face. He is the baby who was taken from her, grown into a boy of nearly twelve years. She dives through the crowd to reach him. And although Nirrim will live always with the damage she has done, she will take consolation in this one pure thing: that a mother found her child, and that it would never have happened without her reckless bargain with the god of thieves. She had given her people the truth—of their gifts, their history. The truth is not nothing. Sometimes, it can be everything.
I should know.
“And you?” the god of games says. “Will you see your child one day?”
“No,” I lie, for that is my nature. In the mortal world, night falls. It is Ninarrith, when the Herrani light candles in the hope that we gods will return. Their wish, I feel, is already coming true. A new era is upon us. Gods will mingle among mortals again. We cannot resist one another.
“Start again,” my sister says. “From the beginning.”
I tell her everything. I tell it to her as I have told it to you, omitting nothing. She listens, waiting for more, and I give it to her, for the god of lies is also the god of stories.
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