“The Three gave you back.”
I considered telling him that his gods were not gods, but the remnants of a near-forgotten race, then decided against it. People worship as they will. It was not my place to take the faith of another.
“Now there are Two,” I replied.
He blinked. “The gods…”
“… Wanted a hunt worthy of them. They found it.”
I pointed to the skull. It was larger than a human skull. Thicker, too.
The Witness crossed to it, lifted it to the sky, stared into those dirt-packed eyes for a long time, then laid it reverently back on the pile. When he turned to me, his eyes were full of tears.
“Where would you have us take you?”
I smiled. “Home.”
I didn’t mean Dombang. Rassambur was my home, my true home. It had been my home even before I knew its name. I stayed in Dombang a little more than a year, however. I knew, shortly after I’d returned to the city, while I was still healing, that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one to have survived the island after all.
Love sang inside my heart—Ela’s last gift—and you were growing inside me, tiny but getting larger every day. You are a child of the delta, son, conceived in a hut of the Vuo Ton. Your father was a scion of your city, and you are the last of that line, the last of Goc My’s lineage. What you’ll do with that fact, I don’t know. This story might not matter to you, but it is your story as much as mine, and you deserve to know it.
I stayed in the city long enough to see you born, then to nurse you. You were a wide-eyed, laughing child from the first. No one would have guessed at the violence of the first days of your gestation. You rarely cried, and your laughter sounded like song. It was hard to let you go, but I owed a debt for a prayer I had made, a prayer answered finally on that island in the delta. One night in autumn, just after you were weaned, just before the Annurians arrived with their legions and their blockade, I laid you on the altar of the temple of Eira, trusting to her priestesses and priests, to the goddess herself, to raise and watch over you, my only child. I imagine you in that temple now, surrounded by white light and the smell of jasmine. The thought makes me smile.
I used to loathe your goddess. She seemed to me a player of favorites, a fickle, capricious creature, the opposite in every way of the god I serve. I was wrong. Our gods, of course, are beyond all human understanding, but I imagine Eira as the daughter of Ananshael. I imagine the two of them holding hands, her smooth fingers laced through his old, gnarled joints. The Nevariim do not die—not natural deaths—and they do not love.
We do both. We must do both.
Perhaps I will come back to the delta one day and hold you in my arms again. Perhaps not. In either case, I hope this finds you well, my son, child of my doubt and my delight, your heart full of life, and your mouth still brimming with song.