But you don’t think better than to insult your own daughter in front of her. Not that that was surprising. I took a sip of my tea. It tasted a bit of sawdust.
Father plopped his filthy spit-bottle down on the table. “The lord, he waited a bit for my answer. I suppose he finally figured I had nothing to say to him on the matter, so he bade me to rise. ‘That woman continues to aggravate me,’ he said, which is why I thought you hadn’t visited him. I thought he’d tell me if you had. ‘I can heal your wife. It will take time. Tell no one she is here, not even your daughters, and do not come here yourself. You can see your wife again on the day of Olivière’s Returning.’”
If he could heal her, why wasn’t he certain until he’d sent me away? “He told you not to tell me? How could he—”
Father cut me off, letting go of the bottle in order to wring his hands. “I dared to ask if he was certain he could save her. I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. He gave me a warning. ‘The lord of the village does not make promises he cannot keep.’ I begged his forgiveness. I just didn’t know what to believe, what with the talk of immortality and how it was his lack of a goddess that had made him master of death. But I knew beyond a doubt that the lord had never found a goddess among all of the women in my lifetime, so maybe it was possible. I just worried that having found Noll, he’d have lost whatever it was that made him keep death at bay.”
Of course. Another excuse to blame me.
Alvilda sighed and stretched her arms up over her head. “I hope you didn’t say that part aloud.”
Again, Father tried to drink from the empty bottle. “No, of course not.”
“So you’ve heard it, too,” I interrupted, putting the mug down. “The title the ‘heartless monster.’”
Alvilda let her arms fall gently to the table. “People have never liked to talk much about the ‘always watching’ lord and his servants. A whisper here, a tale there—the things one could piece together are downright laughable.” She sighed. “The ‘heartless monster.’ A strange way to put it, but it means that he’s inhuman, an immortal whose heart never found its goddess and so he lives forever.”
I felt something strange clutching my heart, like I could feel the man watching me. “Mother told me it was just a story.” But if that dream was real, and that was the lord when he was younger, it’d have to be long ago. So you’re actually certain you went into the past. Through a pond. I knew it was crazy, but it felt true. Maybe spending so long alone in the castle had made me lose my sense of reason.
“I have to admit,” said Father, running a nervous finger over his palm, “it seems to be the only explanation. No one can remember when he came to be.”
“Nonsense,” said Alvilda, waving a hand. “All of this talk of immortality in our blood is merely an old wives’ tale.”
I cocked my head to the side. “And what of the men and the masks? And the power of their goddesses?”
Alvilda looked thoughtful for a moment but then shrugged. “That’s just the way things are.”
I mulled that over. What was in front of us was fact. What we couldn’t prove was nonsense. But still I didn’t understand why men and women were so different. Or why men and women were so different in such a very different way in my drowning dream.
“So you really don’t know more about him than the whispers I’ve heard myself.”
“Did you believe those whispers then?” asked Alvilda.
I shrugged. “Maybe. There are far too many things about the man in the castle that set him apart. You have no idea of the lengths to which he goes to offset the power I have over him. I wasn’t exaggerating about his threat to kill Mother. It’s like he can’t stand that he loves me. I’m not even sure he loves me. Not that I want him to love me.”
“Kill? A person? Like the animals we kill for meat?” Alvilda shook her head thoughtfully. “No. I’m sure not. But even so, I can’t picture a man who had found his goddess who would do anything other than agonize and wish to please her. Younger boys can manage to engage themselves in different pursuits from time to time because their hearts haven’t yet given up hope. But once a goddess turns seventeen, a man pretty much knows whether or not he’ll ever have her—in one form or another.”
She sighed. “For a man to actively plot against his own goddess seems something altogether new. I know men can be torn between their own desires and the desires to make their goddesses happy, on the rare occasion that those desires don’t line up. But for one to grab hold of his own wishes while knowingly making his goddess so unhappy goes against everything we know. If that were true, maybe there could be hope for men without the Returning to find happiness in another form. But that simply is not so.” She stared over my father’s head at the art on the wall. It always came back to her brother.
“What if I told you I have reason to believe he’s different? That he has lived a long time. Longer than he ought to have.”