“You’re still trying to pass the Trial?” she asked, cocking her head to the side. Then she smiled, a warm, luscious smile. “That’s my girl.”
Behind me, Sinn growled deep in his throat. I turned to find him watching me with those inhuman eyes. His chin was soaked with blood—he’d been licking the rent in his shoulder—and red stained his sharpened teeth. He bared them wide, spat onto the ground, then spread his arms in invitation. The right arm, I noticed, didn’t go as high as the left. His shoulder still worked, but Chua’s spear had sliced something deep inside, something important.
“I think he still wants to play,” Ela said.
Ruc nodded grimly, slid off to the far flank. His bronze sword flashed sunlight, as though it were made of flame. He was trying, I realized, to blind the Nevariim. Sinn blinked as the light slid across his eyes, Kossal pounced, and the fight was on once more.
The old priest hammered implacably away with his twin hatchets—he’d reclaimed the second one from where Sinn had tossed it contemptuously in the dirt—his lined face intent on his last devotion. Ela seemed to dance, hurling her sickles in great, whirling arcs that kept the Nevariim from getting close enough to strike at her. Ruc worked like a man at an unpleasant job, mouth hanging open as he feinted, thrusted, searched for an opening.
I did nothing. I wanted to kill the creature as much as the rest of them; even if I couldn’t pass my Trial, I could give my god that one final offering. There was a realization blooming inside me, however, a hot, horrifying feeling that I didn’t recognize or fully understand. Not fear, exactly, though it felt like fear. Not amazement, though that was there, too. I stared at Ela as I grappled with this tremor in my chest—she was smiling, laughing as she fought, every lineament of her body bright with her delight.
I wanted to be like that, like her. I was tired of doubting the heft of my own heart, of parsing my emotions as though they were weights on some merchant’s scale. I wanted to be full, and furious, and free. I ached with that need, and the ache kept me pinned in place as the priestess whirled through the ecstatic stations of her devotion. It kept me pinned in place when I could have helped.
The attack happened in the moment between heartbeats, as that indefatigable muscle gathered itself in my chest, ready to crush the blood through my veins for the millionth time, or the billionth. Even now I don’t know exactly what occurred. Kossal was surging forward, driving his foe back. Sinn seemed to be collapsing. Ruc was harrying him from one side, and Ela from the other. It seemed that they had him, and then … faster than a bowstring’s snap, the Nevariim lunged forward, twisting through the faintest lapse in the old priest’s guard.
Kossal’s throat exploded, blood’s red spraying out across the dirt.
He stood a moment longer, holding vigil, eyes distant, as though watching the approach of his god over the waters, through the rushes and reeds. In my mind, he was still alive, still struggling, but our minds are inadequate. Ananshael came while we stared, unmade his priest without anyone seeing, then slipped away. Kossal never fell. By the time his body hit the earth, he was gone.
Ela exhaled all at once, as though someone had buried a fist in her gut. Then she straightened herself, opened her mouth wide, and poured forth the final agonizing, ecstatic bars of Antreem’s Mass. It was watching the priestess in that moment, seeing her for what she was—stunning but bloody, gorgeous but mortal, bereft but joyful—that I understood, finally, about love.
She had been telling me, but I couldn’t see it, couldn’t believe it until I saw her staring at the body of the man she’d loved, standing and singing, utterly undiminished by his absence. This was the lesson I couldn’t learn even from a lifetime gazing into my own heart, from a million nights fighting Ruc or feeling him move inside me: love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both.
The world was still beautiful—Ela felt that, and as she sang, I felt the music rising inside me finally, in my flesh and mind—the music of joy in all the wonder that cannot last, of joy, not in the having, but the in the passage—and I opened my mouth to sing alongside her, to pour into the world that corporeal trembling without which our lives mean nothing, nor our deaths.
My breath failed me first. When the priestess finally fell silent, she closed her eyes, nodded in response to something I would never know, then glanced back to us and raised an eyebrow. “Just because Kossal got tired is no reason for the two of you to begin loitering. He really should have set a better example.”
Sinn studied Kossal’s crumpled body, hissed his satisfaction, then turned to face the three of us. We had wounded him, slowed him, but two of us were gone. Over his shoulder, Kem Anh and Hang Loc looked on, beautiful as gods, eager as beasts, their bared teeth gleaming with the sun. For millennia they had trained the people of the delta to be their prey, but they could not have faced prey like us before. Even in Rassambur, there had been no one else quite like Kossal or Ela.
Ela had turned away from me, toward the Nevariim. I couldn’t see her face any longer, but I could read the readiness in the set of her shoulders, in the way she flipped those sickles—one after the other—caught them, twirled them happily in her hands. Her brown skin, soaked with the light of the noonday sun, seemed to shine. She was singing again, one of the children’s songs from Rassambur this time, a lilting melody that the few kids who grow up on the mesa learn to sing as they chase each other in wild summer circles. She had become a statue of bliss.
Sinn hissed and stepped forward, ready to destroy her.
A sound like a howl exploded from my chest: “No.”
A flock of winebeaks burst from the rushes, whirled in a clamor above us, then wheeled out of sight to the south.
The world went still. I imagined it all—me, Ruc, Ela, the Three, the delta, everything beyond, the whole spherical world—hanging in a great emptiness, suspended by nothing in a great void, waiting to fall.
I said it again, screamed it this time—“No!”—as though that single syllable could hold at bay all the strength coiled in the flesh of that immortal creature. Sinn turned his head, twisted it toward me like a snake, held me in the coils of his gaze, then looked back at Ela, slid a step forward. At that same moment, the priestess glanced over her shoulder toward me, brow furrowed. That was when the creature struck, lashing across the empty space like a whip uncoiling to knock the sickles from her nerveless hands and seize her by the throat. Ela’s face twisted. She kicked out at him as he lifted her from the ground, but his flesh didn’t yield, and as he choked her, the kicks weakened. Her face purpled, lips swelled. When she tried to speak, her tongue lolled from her mouth.
Without thinking, I started in.