Suddenly it was too much. I could only shake my head, the tears hot in my eyes, before pushing open the heavy cedar door and stepping out into the night’s chill, leaving behind the warm light of the twin candles for that other, older, colder light of the innumerable stars scattered overhead. All around me, the pale sandstone halls and houses of Rassambur glowed in the moonlight. Women and men moved between them alone, in pairs, or in small groups, chatting, laughing, silent. Shards of far-off song etched the darkness. I ignored it all, walking away until there was no more walking to be done, to the very edge of the mesa, where the only choice was between stopping and falling.
From the cliff’s brink, I stared down into the great gulf that surrounded all of Rassambur. I’d been beyond that gulf, of course. I was born beyond it, raised to the age of ten beyond it, and in the fifteen years since, I had crossed dozens of times over the delicate sandstone span linking Rassambur to the mountains, to the rest of the world. For all the remoteness of our fortress, our devotion is evangelical, ecumenical, not monastic. Where there are people, there is our god, pacing silently in the marble corridors of power and the rankest alley alike, visiting the solitary cabin in its forest clearing, the bustling harbor, the camp aswarm with soldiers. His justice is equal and absolute, and so, as ministers of his justice, we must go out into the world. For every year in Rassambur, I had spent one year abroad, sometimes to the west of the Ancaz, sometimes to the east, always living among people, learning their ways, their hopes and fears, their needs. I had lived in Sia and Freeport, in the sprawling maze of Uvashi-Rama and a tiny town on the east bank of the Green Cataract. I had friends, acquaintances, and fondly remembered lovers scattered across two continents, and yet …
I didn’t hear Ela approach, she moved too quietly for that, but I could smell her scent—jasmine and smoke—on the cool desert breeze. She stood half a pace behind me. When she spoke, her voice seemed to hang in the air all around.
“You’d think I would be used to it by now,” she murmured. Her voice was warm with some humor I didn’t understand.
“Used to what?”
“My own obtuseness.”
I shook my head but didn’t turn around. “I don’t understand.”
“No,” Ela replied. “You understand just fine, about your own interesting … predicament, at least. I didn’t see it.” She chuckled. “Our lives blind us, and I’ve always fallen in love so easily.”
I blew out a long, uneven breath, stared down into the abyss. It was steadying, somehow, to know the drop was there just a step away, to look down into it. It was like seeing the marvelous, million-fingered hand of my god, patient and waiting.
“How is it possible,” I asked, half to Ela, who stepped up quietly to my side, half to myself, “after all these years, that I haven’t … that I don’t…?”
“Love anyone?”
I nodded, dumb.
“Perhaps you are more discriminating. Discrimination isn’t a bad thing, Pyrre—take it from me. I fell in love with a farmer from just outside Chubolo, once. He reeked of rutabaga. Had short, rough little fingers, like crusty sausages. If he ever said more than five words in a row, I never heard it.”
I turned to stare at her, trying to imagine the lithe, smooth, deadly woman at my side with a rutabaga farmer. It was like trying to picture a lioness sliding her golden flank along an old pig’s bristly hide.
“Why?” I asked.
Ela laughed again. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Eira’s a goddess, and that makes her a tyrant, no matter what anyone tells you. Lady Love doesn’t explain her ways to me.”
“But there must have been something.…”
“I suppose. Maybe it was watching him move that stone.”
I shook my head, baffled.
“I was on the road,” she went on, her voice slipping into the rhythm of memory, “and he was clearing a field. There was a stone. Must have weighed ten times what he did, maybe twenty—I don’t know, I’ve never made a study of field clearing. The point is, it was huge, impossible to move. Or so I thought. He worked at it all day, digging it out with those stubby fingers of his, laying down the logs to roll it, shifting the weight a little at a time. I never saw anyone so slow, so patient, and I thought to myself, ‘He might not look like much, but a man who can move a stone like that is a man I need to get to know.’ I needed to see what he could do with all that slow, undeniable, relentless patience. I wanted to be that stone.”
We both stared into the darkness. The sky overhead was clear, the stars excruciatingly sharp, but off to the north, a hundred miles distant, the spring winds had pinned a thunderstorm up against the higher peaks. Every few heartbeats, blue-white lightning shattered the cool bowl of the night, though we were too far away to hear the thunder.
“So what did you do?” I asked, glancing over at Ela just as the next bolt hit, watching her face go from blackness to brilliance, then back again.
“Spent six months with him. At his farm.”
“Six months?” I tried to imagine it—noticing a strange man working his field, then deciding that very day, on no better information than his stone-shoving capacity, to pass half the year in his home. The whole story seemed like just that, a story, the kind of thing you might read in a book or hear over a campfire, the fabric of the tale spun half out of lies and half for laughs. Only, Ela wasn’t laughing, and I couldn’t think of a reason she might lie. I felt dizzy, suddenly, as though the flat top of the mesa were lifting by imperceptible degrees to tumble me into the abyss. Ela put a steadying hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.
“How?” I asked, when I regained my balance.
She shrugged. “It was easy enough to keep my eyes off his fingers, to breathe only through my mouth.”
“Averted glances and mouth-breathing don’t seem like a sound foundation for love.”
The older woman chuckled. “And just what do you think love is, Pyrre?”
I shook my head stupidly.
“As I said,” Ela continued after a pause, “it comes easier to some of us than others. The goddess makes us in endlessly different ways. Our struggles are no more the same than our faces.”
It was impossible, when I replied, to scrub the bitterness from my voice. “And yet, Ananshael sets the same Trial for all of us.”
“Anything less would be unjust.”
I bit my lip so hard I could taste blood. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? All these years … I can kill a woman thirteen different ways with a wooden bowl. I’ve memorized poisons that no one has seen since the Csestriim wars, poisons as old as the Nevariim, if the Nevariim ever even really existed. I can hang upside down from a rafter for hours, or pop the glass pane from a window without making a sound. All the time I thought I was getting ready, and now … none of it matters.”
Ela squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, it matters. You’ve got six other people to give to the god, all questions of love aside.”
“But the questions of love aren’t aside. Even if I offer up everyone else on the first day, I’ll still fail.”